Twenty-First International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper focuses on deploying the arts as a praxis of resistance and hope from hyper-capitalist popularist globalist movements. In resisting the epistemic and ontological creases of objectification, abstraction and withdrawal from the material world produced by Virtual and Augmented Reality software we draw on our social, cultural and political positioning’s as combative agents to grapple with the disciplining constraints and violences, symbolic and otherwise, of the erosion of a humanist democracy. Drawing on the methodological subterfuge of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, we take a post-foundational approach, we refute the mythology of being neutral scholars to explore the Arts as a disobedient disruption to the protocols, technologies and figurative machinery of exclusion. In this paper we embrace the troublesome implications of embodying anti-oppressive and activist inquiries to ameliorate the traumas reproduced in environments, actions and privileges of racism, classism, sexism, ablism and heterosexism. Situating Debord’s concept of the Spectacle as a lens through which to observe the transformative role of the Arts in responding to social, political, and cultural control, we advance how the Arts, as a critically engaged praxis for resistance, can disseminate affirmative procedural and relational justice(s) to combat the meaninglessness produced by the materialised ideology of neoliberal corporatism.