Abstraction Today 

Sven Lütticken (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University)

Lethal Abstraction and Alter-Abstractions

The ongoing violence of colonialism has been characterized as a "lethal abstraction" (Denise Ferreira da Silva). Indeed, capitalism has always fed on more or less violent abstractions from existing forms of life through disruptions, expulsions and extractions. The skylines of the world's financial districts, those monuments to the flows of deterritorialized capital, are built on enslavement, genocide and ecocide—from Potosí to the Atacama, from Congo to Palestine. Yet the association of abstraction with the violence of extractivism and the forced clearing of land raises fundamental questions. What are the alternatives to identifying indigenous and precapitalist societies with pure concretion, and turning abstraction as such into a mere handmaiden of imperialism? Discussing a number of artistic, theoretical and activist practices, this lecture seeks to sound out alter-abstractions: ways of abstracting otherwise.