Abstract:
This thesis complements a visual art project that uses materialised language within a multi-disciplinary practice in order to muse on possibilities for political and social change. An analytical neologism–feminist para-modernism–is used as a critical and artistic strategy in order to engage in reflection on the state of affairs of late capitalism. Refusing to draw utopianism to a close it explores unrealised potential lying within everyday working life and suggests a political imagination beyond the notion that ‘there is no alternative’. Para-modernism takes a viewpoint from the side in order to call up unfulfilled futures relegated to the ‘past’. Feminism is situated as an inclusive form of analysis that combines an ethical response with a critique of power relations. Feminist para-modernism proposes that the structures of market capitalism with its attendant notions of progress need not remain the dominant paradigm. Within this critical framework a hauntological lens is applied, acting as an artistic mode through which the past is called into creative practices as a critique of the present, and a lament for the failure of a future once promised. The hauntological framework borrowed from Jacques Derrida is dovetailed with critical thinking from Walter Benjamin to Chantal Mouffe, Keti Chukhrov and Rosi Braidotti, calling on the concepts of good sense, excess and the state of emergency in order to investigate the play of power in late capitalism. Subjectivity is explored within this thesis, alongside a discussion of the ways in which the mythologies of neoliberalism play out in the field of labour. The thesis concludes in a discussion of emergent agency and subjectivity with a particular focus on the politics of work. It purports that temporality is an important dimension of the contemporary political subject, suggesting that the subject is not anchored in time any more that it is anchored to an individual autonomous ‘self’. It proposes that an unsettling of historicity and ontology might foster an active disorientation that builds generative and multiple subjectivities whilst inviting a questioning of things as they are.