Time to Shut Up and Wait? Seminar with Ivana Rumanová, 8 Dec 2025 10:00

Time to Shut Up and Wait? On Productive-or-Not Withdrawals in Art, Strikes, Mournful Militancy, and Resisting Left Melancholia
Seminar with Ivana Rumanová, 8 December 2025, 10:00, U1/312

One of the greatest challenges for the critical, progressive, emancipated, Western European subject (…) is knowing when to shut up and wait. Not in the name of cultural relativism or political passivity, but in the hope of an everyday ethics of listening. Countless situations where any attempt at outspoken critical dialogue have – or would have – amounted to a waste of time, energy, sweat, and tears for everyone involved.
– Tirdad Zolghadr: Traction (2017)

Being part of a resistance movement involves a wide range of psychological and emotional states, from dopamine & adrenaline boosts, collectivity experienced, exhaustion, doubt, boredom, burnout, bitterness and some more that slightly variate this rather spiral development. But these are not merely individual psychological responses nor personal failures. The fact that we usually engage from a radically disproportionate power position in relation to those whom we oppose turns burnout into a systemic, shared, deeply political issue and an expected response to the perpetual power disparity. How can we continue to struggle, not despite but with the full acknowledgement of the burnout experience? Is there a resistance potential in the moment of doubtful withdrawal “saving sweat and tears” of everyone involved?

Using the methodology of “participant objectivation” (Pierre Bourdieu, 2003), I will draw from my direct involvement in the movements Open Culture, Culture Strike, and Cultural Unions in Slovakia, trying to relate them to the theoretical concepts that prevent from getting stuck in “left melancholia” (Wendy Brown, 1999), such as “mournful militancy” (Hannah Proctor, 2018), or strike as a “form of being-in-the-world” (Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 2019).

Ivana Rumanová will speak briefly about the sin of Sloth (acedia) in the medieval monastic system and present few historical examples of strikes in art and elsewhere.

The event is held in English and organised as part of the Feminist Seminar.

Author doc. MgA. Filip Cenek
Published
Short URL https://www.favu.vut.cz/en//f26745/d311327

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