Vienna Mosse Lecture
mosselectures.wisc.edu/vienna
Thursday, 8 October 2026, 20:00 CET
Rote Bar Volkstheater Wien Arthur-Schnitzler-Platz 1 1070 Vienna, Austria
Welcome: Burkhardt Wolf (Universität Wien) Moderator: Roland Innerhofer (Universität Wien)
Sponsored by: Global Mosse Lecture Series Volkstheater Wien City of Vienna University of Vienna
Lecture Series Theme: Capitalism in Ruins
Lecture Series Description: Capitalism has never been afraid of ruins. It develops them: as real estate, as a backdrop, as an investment opportunity. In the logic of “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein), the ruin is no limit at all but a supplement, a margin that keeps replenishing itself. Hence there are at least three readings of the phrase “Capitalism in Ruins”: the utopian hope that the system might finally ruin itself; the daily evidence of its ruinous effects; and the awkward fact that it feeds on them. The Vienna Mosse Lectures 2026/27 ask how “ruination” (Ann Laura Stoler) prepares the ground for enclosure, privatization and deregulation — by shock therapy, by slow decomposition, by the quiet dismantling of social reproduction. Detroit and Gaza mark the range: on the one hand the photogenic “deindustrial sublime”, whose aesthetic surplus value may as readily expose the accounting behind it as conceal it; on the other the ruin as calculated result, legible only through forensic reconstruction of “de-development” (Sara Roy) and “organized abandonment” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore). And what if ruins are neither empty nor ownerless, but shelter, play, art, “latent commons” (Anna Tsing)? Then rebuilding would mean reparative justice, not another round of project management. 
