It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet?

Many of us know the line that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, but if that is the case, maybe we should try going for the easier option? It’s not like living through COVID, the specter of AI uprising, the upsurge of fascism, rampant capitalist extraction and the resulting unfolding ecological crisis make it a difficult thing to do.

But how do we imagine the end of the world while not becoming self-serious pessimists (nor, for some of us, self-pitying white folks upset that now things are getting real) while staying with the trouble of living in it and wanting a different world?

This time in WTFIGO, we are going to talk about what makes a world, what makes them fall apart, what makes us want to be in a world and what makes us want to change it. Working with ideas from the composer, Sun Ra (“It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet?”), and the theorists, Martin Savransky, Lauren Berlant and Fred Moten, we are going to see how capitalist modernity has tried to make its world the only game in town by attaching us to wants we don’t want. And talk about how we might move with the “trembling of togetherness” at the end of this world, and what it means to “believe in another world in the world” that we want to be in.

Bring your own worries along, and a pen and pad, and together we’ll take a little step closer to figuring out what the fuck is going on?

The workshop will be facilitated by Macon Holt, a cultural theorist and writer and the founder of Aesthetic Theory.