Charles Mudede: Consuming Revolutions

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 3 at 7pm for Consuming Revolutions, a lecture by cultural critic, filmmaker, and writer Charles Mudede. 

Fredric Jameson is famous for writing, in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), that “someone has observed [it’s] easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This might be the case with science-fiction literature but certainly not with Hollywood movies. From Star Wars (1977–present) to the recent space opera Rebel Moon (2023-2024), social forms that approximate or directly picture capitalism are repeatedly destroyed by revolutionaries. And so it is: Hollywood rarely sides with Empire but with the rebels. Capital doesn’t sell, for a pretty penny, the rope of its own undoing but the fantasy of it. What it can’t produce and promote, however, is what happens after the revolution, as the late Mark Fisher explained in Capitalist Realism (2009). What is to account for this limitation? And why are revolutions more popular than disasters? No movie has made more money than Avatar (2009), a film whose heroes are aligned with the passions of the radical left and Third World freedom fighters rather than the key repressive institution, the military, of over-developed economies. Indeed, it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what follows its demise.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility                  
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.       
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.