Social Dissonance: Listening to the Catastrophic Reaction

Talk by Mattin

00:00

Free entry

The emergence of social dissonance marks a structural form of cognitive dissonance in which the ideal of the autonomous individual collides with a world that is actively disintegrating subjectivity from within and without. Under conditions of real subsumption, mind and body are treated not only as factories to be exploited but as sites of new forms of extraction: our miseries, depressions, illnesses, and states of desperation are mined, processed, and sold back to us.

Social dissonance, however, is not generalised, nor does exploitation operate equally on everyone. On the contrary, material exploitation has always been highly specific, structured through racialised, gendered, and ableist determinations, even as liberal democracies have promoted ideals of equality at the ideological level.

In recent years, Germany, where many of these liberal ideas like universalism, formal equality, autonomy of the subject, and legal equality before the law were historically articulated, is reaching a breaking point triggering the catastrophic reaction. Polarisation has intensified, and the gap between proclaimed values and material realities has become increasingly untenable.

What, then, is to be done with all this social noise?

My book Social Dissonance has a score that proposes improvisation as a way to engage with and play through infrastructural forms of determination and their effects on us. By listening to this social noise, to the catastrophic reaction and developing collective ways of improvising with it, we attempt to estrange ourselves from capitalist estrangement.

Over the past year, together with the Kunstverein Langenhagen, we have worked on an experimental German translation of Social Dissonance, situating its concepts in the concrete context of Langenhagen and Germany in 2025 and exploring their effects. This process involved an experimental reading group and a festival of social noise, including discussions with different social groups, a social dissonance Karaoke, and ongoing interpretations of the score. Through this talk, I will present some of the findings that emerged from this collective process.

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