Reason Without Freedom?

Tia Trafford and Amanda Beech will discuss the ways that a commitment to freedom as both practice and norm has been key to formulating possibilities for difference, agency, and self-determination in laboring against or through the dominant hegemonies of capitalism. As we know, a Modern politics of emancipation founds its own crisis, compounding the infinite force of the object that is critiqued by means of freedom’s compulsion to aggress against it. Further, we know that postmodern critique in rejecting reason in the name of genealogy mutates this crisis to violence. In response, the question of whether reason can be extrapolated from critiques of freedom and what this reason is – when we have no premises, vectors or images for it – becomes urgent.

Tia Trafford is Associate Professor at University for the Creative Arts in London. She is author of Everything Is Police (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) and The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the End of Britain (Pluto Press, 2020), and co editor of Alien Vectors: Accelerationism, Xenofeminism, Inhumanism (Routledge, 2019) and Speculative Aesthetics (Urbanomic/MIT, 2014).

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. In video, painting, print and sculpture her work proposesart as a form of intelligence and power beyond the ideals of capitalism and the limits that art has set for itself by means of its critiques of it. Exhibiting internationally her shows include Delphic Future, Twelve Ten Gallery, Chicago, RIB Gallery, Rotterdam, 2024, and the Havana Biennale 2021. Forthcoming work includes a book of philosophy, The Intolerable Image, from MIT.