Dr Rebecca Carson

Tutor (Research)
Art & Design Graduate Diploma

Rebecca is a theorist working in Marxism and philosophy and the author of Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital.

Rebecca is a Tutor (research) in the Graduate Diploma in Art and Design. She completed a PhD in Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston School of Art, supervised by Étienne Balibar.

Rebecca previously taught at the RCA in Critical & Historical Studies from 2017. There she supported the production of MA dissertations and delivered creative writing modules. Rebecca has also taught in the Art Department at Goldsmiths University, London and at the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University.

Expertise

Critical practice

More information

Research interests

Rebecca’s research interprets Marx’s Capital from the perspective of reproduction. In doing so she develops a framework to think the logical coproduction of three arenas of exploitation and domination today: social reproduction, ecological degradation and the expansion of finance capital.

The incompatibility between the abstract life, or growth, of capital and human life and nature is presupposed by recent theories of social reproduction – a contemporary strand of feminism which intersects gender and race-based domination with capital accumulation. Consequently, these accounts have made the contradiction between capital’s reproduction and the possibility of the reproduction of human life and nature apparent. Accordingly, her research asks how concrete life can be reproduced in independence from capital.

Rebecca looks at the production of art as a formal and relational practice that can best be examined from a perspective that integrates the place of art within the social whole. With focus on historical development her research enables analysis and practice to critically engage with contemporary art’s social, economic, and political intersections.

Research areas include:

Current and recent projects

Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital
2023
This book philosophically reconstructs Marx’s critique of political economy from the perspective of reproduction

Class in the Era of Rentier Capitalism
2023
This project is a forthcoming article written for the journal Crisis and Critique. The text will look at class from the perspective of the reproduction of capital. In doing so, this article discusses the role of expropriation in class constitution in the present.

Immanent externalities and abstraction in artistic form
2023
This research project explores the way artistic and poetic practices engage contradictions between the reproduction of life (human and ecological) and capital. This is developed by examining works of artists such as Hanne Darboven, Cameron Rowland, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rebecca Belmore and Beau Dick, and the poetics of Hannah Weiner, Bruce Andrews and Anne Boyer.

Publications, exhibitions and other outcomes

Carson, R. (2023). Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital. Leiden: Brill.

Carson, R. (2022). The Uses of Marx’s Value-Theoretical Concept of Reproduction for Social Reproduction Theory. Book Chapter in Critical Theory in (a Time of) Crisis. Tom Bunyard and Denis C. Bosseau ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Carson, R. (2021). The Marxism of Post-Marxism: Political Subjectivity and the Monetary Link between Italian Operaismo and Capital Logic. Book Chapter in Politics of The Many: Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency. Rebecca Carson, Alexei Penzin, Stephano Pippa, and Ben Halligan ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Carson, R. (2020). Capital: Automatic Subject- Animate Object. Animate Assembly Archive, Goldsmiths Department of Art, London. [Available Online at] https://www.animateassembly.org/capital/

Carson, R. (2020). “PRINT” Annotating, Institutions as a way of life: A Reader. Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures. Academy of Art and Design, Basel. [Available Online at] http://annotating.institutions.life/

Carson, R. (2019). Money as Money: Suzanne de Brunhoff’s Marxist Monetary Theory. Book Chapter in Marx Inattuale. Consecutio Rerum. Rome: Edizioni Efesto.

Carson, R. and Gfader, V. et al. (2019). The Contemporary Condition: The Last Resident. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Carson, R. (2017). Worlding in Flight in Verina Gfader: Cloud Chamber. Geneve: Antipyrine, Motto Books.

Carson, R. (2017). Fictitious Capital and the Re-emergence of Personal Forms of Domination. 150 Years of Capital. Continental Thought & Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom. Vol 1, Issue 4, 566-586.

Carson, R. (2017). Money: A latent Form of Contemporaneity. The Contemporary Condition Research Project: Representation and Experience of Contemporaneity in and through Contemporary Arts Practice. ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. [Available Online at] http://contemporaneity.au.dk/conference/

External collaborations

(2018 – current) Member, Marx and Philosophy Society
(2021 – current) Visiting Lecturer, Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Malmö.