The diversification of the labor processes in the post-industrial era has broadened the labor division. The work field is geographically deterritorialized and operationally fragmented. The factory – the time/space unity that enabled the labor force to organize politically – is destructured. The intellectual labor, and more precisely the cultural labor has gone through similar transformations. The humanist ideal, that held together the emancipatory practices with their origins in the Enlightenment, has broken into pieces.The landscape unfolding before us after the post-structuralist turn looks like a hyperspecialized juggernaut. The place of the homo universalis was taken by the machine, the cyborg, the planet. These are global tendencies now. But what kind of power enables the intellectual labor division at the local level? What social effects does the operationalization of such labor bring about in a city like Bucharest in comparison, say, to London or Ploiești? Drawing on which criterias does the day to day cultural practice claim its sustainability from the centers of symbolic consecration? And if one crosses the fields, working intersectionally, what is gained and what is lost?
Together we will try to find out, if the hyperspecialization in the work space has emancipatory effects or if, on the contrary, it plays into the hands of the petite-bourgeoisie. Or if it does both.
Please email info@oddweb.org to register for this session.
Biography
Ovid Pop
Ovid Pop lives and works in Vienna and Bucharest. He is a transnational writer and theorist. He is the co-founder (together with Radostina Patulova) of the kollektiv sprachwechsel: Literatur in the Zweitsprache, a literary group of writers based in Vienna who publish literature in German as a second language. Ovid Pop is the author of a concept literary book The Estate of the Living (Romanian, English, German, Tranzit.ro/Iași, 2018), the novel Trickster (Romanian, Polirom, 2009); he co-wrote the novel Rubik (Romanian, Polriom 2008). He has published several short stories and poetry in German, among others (Edition Exil, Vienna, 2015), Politisch Schreiben (Dresden, 2018), Triëdere (upcoming). His texts are translated into BCS, French, English, German, Hungarian. He gives lectures on literary topics, art theory and decolonial thinking. He organises public readings and debates on writing in secondary languages in Vienna. His articles are published in magazines in Romania, Austria, Hungary and Germany.