Sami Khatib at Summer School as School 2022
August 11, 2022
Venue: Boxing Club

Why Theory?

In 1981, British post-punk band “Gang of Four” stated: “People got their opinions / Where do they come from? / Each day seems like a natural fact / And what we think changes how we act.” In the history of Critical Theory, the relation of opinions, facts and acts has long been discussed, pondering on the question of ideology critique: is “false” action based on “false consciousness” or, rather, is the latter the effect of the former? How do theory and praxis, “false” and “correct” consciousness intervene in the ever-shifting ground of reality? Relying on less known texts by Brecht, Benjamin, Baudrillard and Althusser, the talk aims at giving these questions a further dialectical twist by relating them to the function “theory” has in contemporary art discourses. With the growing interest in and overproduction of theory within the art world, theory and contemporary art seem to converge in the attempt to show, display and exhibit a commodified attitude of critique, sometimes also called “criticality.” How then can theory be enacted as a concrete praxis of transforming critique, rather than a speculative commodity of cultural capital?

Biography
Sami Khatib is a cultural theorist and philosopher based in Berlin. He is a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He taught and engaged in research at Freie Universität Berlin, Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht, American University of Beirut and Academy of Fine Art Vienna. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. His main interests are in critical theory and aesthetic theory. For recent publications see: https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/SamiKhatib