2018 ~ Sunday February 18: ROAMING ASSEMBLY #19 ~ SEX, POETRY AND NOTHING: ABOLITION SALON: ‘Bottoming Autonomy' ~ by Bill Dietz

Media responses to the impassioned audiences of recent neo-fascist assemblies have more often than not called for a return to norms of mass bodily comportment, to behaviors proper to a particular conception of public participation and discourse. That those specific public bodily comportments and regulations - remaining silent and applauding at the end, say - belong to a historical, political regime of subjectification that has always called for the disciplining of the body along rationalist, hetero-masculinist lines suggests an uncomfortable alignment between that which is to be nominally rejected and the mode of rejection. In tracing the policing of early nineteenth century European audiences as well as high modernist audience silencings, a fundamental tension between autonomy and reception becomes audible. Instead of yet another conciliatory attempt to reform classical publicness, how might autonomy and receptivity be brought to a point of legible crisis?