Macklin Kowal: It Has Always Been Coming to This: A Lecture, A Magic Act

17 September

The post-truth era signals an apparent banishing of empiricism from the procedures of justification respective to politics. It hosts the ascendancy of sensationalist appeals to feeling, often conjuring and constituting the very sentiments which are taken to require given policies or procedures. It represents, in other words, a shift from an ethics of the verifiable towards a poetics of demagoguery. No longer does proof temper the justifications of the political process, scandalizing those acclimated to previous standards of accountability. Artist Macklin Kowal proposes a performative lecture that seeks to debunk understandings of the present era as an aberration or radical rupture, arguing to the contrary that politics has always entailed a relationship to truth that anticipates the possibility of its outright rejection. What we witness now, as Kowal explains in his lecture—It Has Always Been Coming to This: A Lecture, A Magic Act—is what has always been coming: a revelation of truth as an appendage to politics, its appendix, its discursivity as an exquisite excess that, as such, can always be suppressed or dismissed in times of apparent need.

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Macklin Kowal is an artist, writer, and curator. A PhD candidate in Political Theory at Aristoteleio University of Thessaloniki, he is additionally Founding Director of Sub Rosa Space—a venue for performance art in central Athens.