Culture, Politics and Governing

Culture, Politics, and Governing: The Contemporary Ascetics of Knowledge Production investigates how the practices that govern the production of knowledge and culture have material consequences for how we experience everyday life. In a critical and interdisciplinary approach to governing, Patricia Mooney Nickel looks to artists and intellectuals including Gustav Klimt, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Tino Sehgal, and Kenneth Goldsmith, to explore the themes of institutionalization, ontology, and valorization, as they relate to ascetics. These portraits demonstrate not only how contemporary rituals of knowledge production potentially inhibit the emergence of critical subjectivities, but also how such rituals have been resisted.