Abstracts and short biographies

Radical thinking in the Anthropocene means criticism of the Anthropocene: the geochronological epoch, which is supposed to be largely determined by the influence of humans on natural developments and changes, also marks the epoch in which billions of people live and die in misery at the highest level of civilization. Real humanism is at the same time real inhumanity, the destruction of the first nature is coupled with the destructiveness of the second nature. Radical thinking as critique aims at practice, namely emancipatory practice as a revolutionary appropriation of the world and the self. This practice has failed, critique is paralyzed. In contrast, critical theory must reassert itself as practice; the emergence of the human being remains enlightenment, which means the restitution of radical thinking - as practice.

Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher and journalist who was jointly responsible for the Modern Art Week in São Paulo in 1922, which introduced the renewed artistic language of the European avant-garde to Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century. He also became known for his two manifestos: the first, "Manifesto of Pau-Brazilian Poetry" (1924), called for Brazil to abandon its centuries-long role as an importer of European cultural goods. Instead, according to the manifesto, the country's culture could also be an export. De Andrade's collaboration with European writers, such as the Swiss Blaise Cendrars, paved the way for the anthropophagic phase of his intellectual activities. The "Anthropophagic Manifesto" (1928), inspired by the cannibalistic ritual practices of the Brazilian natives, stated that Brazilian cultural producers should devour the contents of foreign cultures and fuse the best of them with themes of autochthonous production. This was to result in brand new cultural goods that would fulfill both the avant-garde demand for innovation and the need to establish a genuinely Brazilian contemporary culture. After Oswald de Andrade joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1931, the idea of cultural anthropophagy became increasingly political. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he tried to establish it as a broader worldview that included not only artistic aspects, but also political, ideological and philosophical ones. From then on, he pursued the project of becoming the founder of an anthropophagic philosophy based not only on Marxist, Nietzschean and Freudian points of view, but also on the inspiration of the practices and cosmovision of the Brazilian indigenous peoples. According to experts on Brazilian modernism such as Benedito Nunes, the viewpoints expressed in his works in the early 1950s - particularly This Crisis of Messianic Philosophy and The March of Utopias - anticipated ideas set out in Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, first published in 1955.

How did we get stuck?" ask David Graeber and David Wengrow with disarming candor in their new history of humanity, The Dawn of Everything. How did we end up in a single mode [of social existence]? Indeed, "How did we come to regard eminence and servility not as temporary expedients ... but as inescapable elements of human existence?" Drawing on the concept of "sociopolitics", the first part of this paper explores how we fell into the trap. Although the term "sociopolitics" is not widely used, it has appeared in various linguistic and academic contexts since the 1960s, while the concept from which it derives goes back to the 17th century theodicy motif. Broadly speaking, "sociodicy" has been used to show how social systems have been legitimized and maintained despite their inherent injustices and horrors.
I have modified the term to emphasize the central role that belief plays in the efficacy of social imaginaries. In this reading, sociodiceps do not so much justify the existence or modus operandi of a particular social order in the face of injustice and suffering as they defend our belief in its appropriateness, necessity, and highest virtue. They defend the plausibility of this belief as a practical stance, a way of being and a way of salvation that speaks to us with a thousand voices and from all political camps. The second part of my contribution deals with the lure of sociodics, recognizing its deep libidinal attraction and political gravity. It does not provide a "utopia for realists", nor can it point to a happy ending for the age of raging de-civilization and capitalist extinction management. If the term "sociodiscipline" attempts to capture a particular kind of legitimizing discourse, then the "new utopian realism" stands for new collective efforts to break free from its circular causality and narrow sense of the real.

While "classical" critical theory, in opposition to orthodox Marxism, upholds the subject's ability to intervene, the Mexican-Ecuadorian social philosopher Bolívar Echeverría (Riobamba 1941 - México, D.F. 2010) doubts the unlimited changeability of the given and also whether it is desirable to subject everything to human practice. He is not so much inspired by ecological debates, which also draw attention to the fatal consequences of unrestrained human practice, but rather doubts whether human societies themselves can be changed so easily from one day to the next.
He assumes that there are deep-seated complex forms of organization in the respective societies, which encompass much more than just the fact that they are capitalist or not, for example. Even within the capitalist mode of production,he sees highly diverse forms of everyday organization, which are strongly based on the respective mode of production and consumption of use values and which he describes with the new term "historical ethos". Based on this productive-critical concept of use value, which does not conceal civilizational differences in an abstract-universalist manner - but without essentializing them - it is necessary in the increasingly violent 21st century to develop a concept of concrete universalism as the basis of an imperatively necessary critical theory from the Americas, which takes up Horkheimer et al.'s approaches, but without benevolently waving through the Eurocentrism that also clings to them.

In the critical theory of Horkheimer and, above all, Adorno, great importance was attached to the linguistic-aesthetic design. They understood theory dialectically as a "form of practice". In the later generations of authors of critical theory, the linguistic-aesthetic complexity recedes into the background. In the lecture, some practice-relevant dimensions of the linguistic form of Horkheimer's and Adorno's Critical Theory will first be explicated. Subsequently, the polemical component of Adorno's writings will be examined - in connection with the question of whether we are moving towards a social situation in which a "trigger warning" will soon be required for their reading.

The lecture contrasts three forms of analysis that emerged around 1900 and dominated analytic philosophy, music analysis and psychoanalysis for a long time afterwards. Each form thematizes the pursuit of meaning as a breaking open or a breaking down, as a working through in order to either produce or abolish a particular structure or assertion of meaning. Each form starts from the question of what it means to make a mistake, to be in error, or to have (or even encourage) an accident. The lecture assesses the relevance of analysis today: is analysis still relevant, and if so, under what contemporary conditions?

Negative thinking and radical criticism are currently not very popular in educational science. Although critical, even radical approaches were taken up and discussed in the 1960s and 1970s, they were quickly relativized and weakened, as in many other disciplines. One of the main reasons for this rejection is the fact that educational science positions itself primarily as a science of action. The focus is on practical possibilities and positive future orientations. Negative thinking and radical socially critical positions are rejected as "impractical" and irrelevant. In recent years, however, an increase in radical analyses can be observed, which, among other things, highlight the potential of critical theoretical thinking for pedagogical theory and practice.
In this lecture, I will first briefly trace some historical lines of critical educational science. I will then outline some currently discussed critical approaches, especially those that refer to older critical theory or attempt an epistemological synergy of older and newer approaches. Based on my research on a critical theory of resistance to further education, I will then outline some reflections on negative dialectical thinking as a method of theory building and argue for resistance to further education as a possible radical social critique.

This article examines the extent to which Adorno's critical thinking about art offers perspectives for a materialist aesthetics today and in the future. Based on the definition of art as a mode of behavior and thus as an existential dimension of human and social life, as found in Adorno's Musical Writings, his Notes on a Theory of Musical Reproduction and in his Aesthetic Theory, among others, recent compositions by female composers are examined for characteristic features with regard to the artistic material used and innovative modes of action and interaction. Other aspects include the artists' views on nature, the human body, technology and innovation.

The lecture is dedicated to the artistic research of the formation New Welsh Art - Aufbauorganisation (NWK-AO), which I co-founded in North Wales in 2020. NWK-AO playfully experiments with aesthetics and practices of the avant-gardes, whereby the chosen plural of avant-gardes sets the term as useful for its diverse and non-uniform manifestations in their respective historical situations.
In its beginnings, the NWK-AO explicitly acknowledges Dadaism and Fluxus, and its name echoes the retrogarde of New Slovenian Art. Their visual appearance also borrows from Soviet Constructivism, their happenings, actions and media art from Arte Povera, the DIY of punk and an institution-critical dilettantism, and overly clear references to Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Alexander Kluge, Jonathan Meese, Heiner Müller and Christoph Schlingensief can be found at all levels.
The lecture will use process-oriented reflection to examine whether and how the techniques of the cheap copy and the already-made present critical forms of practice that evoke an epistemic state of non-understanding. In a further step, the lecture will explore whether the utopian breaking open of (non-)identity also affects our understanding of the avant-garde. This, so perhaps the hypothesis of the lecture, appears as the new in the non-new of cheap imitation and already-made.

I will argue for a paradigm shift in critical theory that emphasizes a critical social ontology over the current post-metaphysical turn to language, recognition, and other pragmatist-inspired themes. Phronetic critique emphasizes the ways in which our social relations and practices as social beings form the basis for an ontology of value: the idea that values are realizable in the world as forms of life actually lived. By going back to thinkers like Hegel, Marx and Fromm, I think we can begin to develop a more radical and politically relevant form of social critique. Ethics now becomes not a question of communication, recognition or justification, but a question of how our relational and practical lives are shaped in accordance with social reason - that is, towards goods that seek to fulfill a rational, free form of life.