Marxist Morphologies: A Critique of Flat Infrastructures, Fuzzy Property and Complexified Cities
Dr Michał Murawski
UCL Department of Anthropology:
Material and Visual Culture Seminar
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/news-and-events/seminar-series/material-visual-digital-culture-research-seminar-series <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/news-and-events/seminar-series/material-visual-digital-culture-research-seminar-series>
Monday 12th October, 5-6.30pm. Darryl Forde Seminar Room (2nd Floor), 14 Taviton Street. Followed by refreshments.
Abstract
Drawing on examples from socialist-era and post-1989 Warsaw, this talk critiques some assumptions often made by urban anthropologists and other scholars of cities, with a focus on currently fashionable theories of ‘infrastructure’. It problematizes some of the ways in which scholarship informed by ANT, assemblage theory and other varieties of (post)-postmodernism makes use of morphological optics to represent social life as necessarily ‘flat’, complex’, ‘fuzzy’ and ‘partial’. As a corrective, it posits a ‘vertical’ Marxist notion of infrastructure – founded on a dynamic understanding of the relationship between determining economic base and determined superstructure – as a way of providing a glimpse into another world. A world in which heretic morphologies – vertical planes, totalities, reductions of complexity – continue to thrive.
Biography
Dr Michał Murawski is Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London. He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge in 2014. With a focus on Warsaw and Moscow, his work examines how cities in Eastern Europe grapple with socialist-era legacies in their built environments.
Dr Michal Murawski
UCL Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow
School of Slavonic & East European Studies
University College London
16 Taviton Street London WC1H 0BW
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+44 (0) 20 7679 8759
www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees
michalmurawski.net
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