was a center for contemporary art in Southeast Portland, Oregon. It was led by a desire to support artists, propose new modes of production, and stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art. This website serves as an archive of Yale Union’s programming from 2011 through 2021.

Yale Union acknowledges that it occupies the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Chinook, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Indigenous peoples.

Marina Vishmidt

EV

Saturday, April 18
12pm PDT
3pm EST
20:00 GMT

Livestream Here:

https://www.twitch.tv/yaleunion

Marina Vishmidt will give a talk focusing on her recent book Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Haymarket Books, 2019). For this event, she will also discuss some of her more recent research, of which she writes:

“For the past few decades, it’s been clear that the ascent of finance in capitalist societies has been accompanied by a devaluation and indebtedness of labour. The grip of finance over social reproduction has generated self-optimization or the ‘hustle’ as the mark of this devaluation on a structural as well as subjective level. That’s the broad territory of my work on ‘speculation as a mode of production’. More recently, I’ve been looking into the relationship between this general devaluation of labour, the rise of labour politics in different parts of the art field (what artistic labour looks like once you start to put a price on it) and various discourses of automation. Given ongoing developments, the pandemic presents us with an economic model which, in the absence of capital or labour, has to directly subsidize itself, which is equivalent to cannibalising itself. Picking up on the concluding section of my book on ‘socially speculative’ practices, I will revisit the dialectic between artistic labour and abstract labour under these conditions.”

A summary of Vishmidt’s book Speculation as a Mode of Production can be found HERE.

Marina Vishmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Ephemera, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, Australian Feminist Studies, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital(Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is one of the organizers of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic).