2020-2021 Faculty Fellow Lecture:
Beate Geissler, Department of Art
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
4:00–6:00pm
Zoom
Hopium Economy examines substance dependency and/or addiction not only as a metaphor, but as the very engine constituting our societies’ failure to respond to the demands for changes in our time. Climate change is not simply an unintended byproduct of colonial history, but an ongoing act of imperial violence*. A violence set off by the rabid desire of Western societies for goods, things, objects, and substances. Therefore I consider the history of substance dependencies from iron, coal, tea, opium and sugar to gas, I-Phones, methadone, nitrates and opioids as the core motor of the western expansion trajectory. Addiction here seems to be the existential condition sine qua non of violence and pain - cataclysmic and eruptive as much as slow and covert. I believe that such a conception is offering a valuable opportunity to re-think addiction, both as a paradigm and as an object of knowledge. * Sarah Nelson, The Slow Violence of Climate Change
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