Artpolitik

Aesthetics

ARTPOLITIK

Inspired by the Institute for the Future of the Book, Minor Compositions is launching a digital form for the forthcoming book Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation by Neala Schleuning.

Over the next month the entirety of the draft manuscript will be posted here: http://artpolitik.digress.it.

Comments and discussions will be integrated into revisions of the book before it is printed later this year (which will, as with all other Minor Compositions titles, be available for free download).

Cheers, Stevphen Shukaitis

More Information

Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation
Neala Schleuning

Artpolitik examines the relationship between art and politics, focusing on radical political aesthetics in western culture since the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing from Surrealism, Socialist Realism, the Situationist International, capitalist consumer aesthetics, and critical theory, Neala Schleuning elaborates a social anarchist approach to aesthetics.

Artpolitik is not a history of radical art production but an exploration of the core ideas inspiring radical art. This provocative book is guaranteed to both challenge and inform, reframing radical aesthetics for the challenges of the present. It features an exploration of ideas and techniques employed by artists for more effective communication of radical political ideas. Art has played a central role in revolutionary change throughout history, and our own times call for a revitalization of art in the service of liberatory politics. This book is an effort to understand how new ideas seeking to position themselves vis a vis the aesthetic tradition while simultaneously reflecting the transformation of political and social movement cultures in new directions.

Bio: Neala Schleuning is a writer and educator. She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1978 with an emphasis in political philosophy and intellectual history. Fulbright Scholar to the Russian Federation, she is the author of many articles, higher education policy papers, films and radio productions, and several books, including America: Song We Sang Without Knowing (1983); Idle Hands and Empty Hearts: Work and Freedom in the United States (1990); Women, Community, and the Hormel Strike of 1985-86 (1994); and To Have and to Hold: the Meaning of Ownership in the United States (1997).

Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Requisite fb page: http://www.facebook.com/artpolitikthebook

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia: http://www.minorcompositions.info

— Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info

“Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference… Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule.” – subRosa Collective

 

**END**

 

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

 

‘Maximum levels of boredom

Disguised as maximum fun’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales)  

 

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

‘Stagnant’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

‘The Lamb’ by William Blake – set to music by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw3VloKBvZc

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Glenn Rikowski’s MySpace Blog: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski/blog

 

 

Punkademics

Punk

PUNKADEMICS

New edited collection on Punk & the Academy

Punkademics
Edited by Zack Furness

The basement show in the ivory tower…

In the thirty years since Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the seemingly antithetical worlds of punk rock and academia have converged in some rather interesting, if not peculiar, ways. A once marginal subculture documented in homemade ‘zines’ and three chord songs has become fodder for dozens of scholarly articles, books, PhD dissertations, and conversations amongst well-mannered conference panelists. At the same time, the academic ranks have been increasingly infiltrated by professors and graduate students whose educations began not in the classroom, but in the lyric sheets of 7” records and the cramped confines of all-ages shows.

Punkademics explores these varied intersections by giving voice to some of the people who arguably best understand the odd bedfellows of punk and academia. In addition to being one of the first edited collections of scholarly work on punk, it is a timely book that features original essays, interviews, and select reprints from notable writers, musicians, visual artists, and emerging talents who actively cut & paste the boundaries between punk culture, politics, and higher education.

Contributors: Milo J. Aukerman, Maria Elena Buszek, Zack Furness, Alastair Gordon, Ross Haenfler, Curry Malott, Dylan AT Miner, Ryan Moore, Tavia Nyong’o, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Alan O’Connor, Waleed Rashidi, Helen L. Reddington, Stevphen Shukaitis, Michael Siciliano, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Estrella Torrez, Daniel S. Traber, and Brian Tucker.

“The worlds of punk and academia are deliberately dichotomous: the ‘cred’ of the former become ‘certified credentials’ when you enter the latter. This important exploration of the space between the two is weird, uncomfortable, and fraught with mistakes. And we don’t give a fuck if you don’t like it.” – Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity and former editor, Punk Planet

“Zack Furness and his nerdy bunch impressively reveal how the alternative tentacles of youthful rebellion are infiltrating and disrupting the predictable routines of the academy.” – Craig O’Hara, author of The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise

PDF available freely online (http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=436).

UK release event June 7th in Brighton: http://www.facebook.com/events/387680207937772/

Book information site: http://www.punkademics.com/

Released by Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia
http://www.minorcompositions.info |minorcompositions@gmail.com

 

**END**

 

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

 

‘Maximum levels of boredom

Disguised as maximum fun’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales)  

 

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

‘Stagnant’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

‘The Lamb’ by William Blake – set to music by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw3VloKBvZc

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Autonomedia – New Titles

Autonomia

AUTONOMEDIA – NEW TITLES

New Titles

 

Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination

David Graeber

Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Yet faced with this prospect, the knee-jerk reaction is often to cling to what exists because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even more oppressive and destructive. The political imagination seems to have reached an impasse. Or has it?

In this collection of essays David Graeber explores a wide-ranging set of topics including political strategy, global trade, debt, imagination, violence, aesthetics, alienation, and creativity. Written in the wake of the anti-globalization movement and the rise of the war on terror, these essays survey the political landscape for signs of hope in unexpected places.

At a moment when the old assumption about politics and power have been irrefutably broken the only real choice is to begin again: to create a new language, a new common sense, about what people basically are and what it is reasonable for them to expect from the world, and from each other. In this volume Graeber draws from the realms of politics, art, and the imagination to start this conversation and to suggest that that the task might not be nearly so daunting as we’d be given to imagine.

More information

Buy the book here

++

Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles

Edited by Benjamin Noys

Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present? ‘Communization’ is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe,Northern Californiaand wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the ‘human strike’, autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure.

Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontents treats communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorizations of communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle.

More information

Buy the book here

++

19 & 20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism

Colectivo Situaciones, with introductions by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

New book from Colectivo Situaciones… an 18th Brumaire for the 21st Century: militant research on the December 19th and 20th, 2001 uprisings inArgentina… In the heat of an economic and political crisis, people inArgentinatook to the streets on December 19th, 2001, shouting “¡Qué se vayan todos!” These words – “All of them out!” – hurled by thousands banging pots and pans, struck at every politician, economist, and journalist. These events opened a period of intense social unrest and political creativity that led to the collapse of government after government. Neighborhoods organized themselves into hundreds of popular assemblies across the country, the unemployed workers movement acquired a new visibility, workers took over factories and businesses. These events marked a sea change, a before and an after forArgentinathat resonated around the world.

Colectivo Situaciones wrote this book in the heat of that December’s aftermath. As radicals immersed within the long process of reflection and experimentation with forms of counterpower that Argentines practiced in shadow of neoliberal rule, Colectivo Situaciones knew that the novelty of the events of December 19th and 20th demanded new forms of thinking and research. This book attempts to read those struggles from within. Ten years have passed, yet the book remains as relevant and as fresh as the day it came out. Multitudes of citizens from different countries have learned their own ways to chant ¡Qué se vayan todos!, fromIcelandtoTunisia, fromSpaintoGreece, fromTahrir SquaretoZuccottiPark. Colectivo Situactiones’ practice of engaging with movements’ own thought processes resonates with everyone seeking to think current events and movements, and through that to build a new world in the shell of the old.

More information

Buy the book here

++

Undressing the Academy, or The Student Handjob

University of Strategic Optimism

The weary student handbook genre is in need of a belligerent mauling. This is our crack at the job. We don’t want to talk down to anyone, but neither do we want to chat them up, so this is an attempt at thinking out the university from our own perspective, that of students. Here we air our dirty snapshot of the academy, at least semi-naked, just as we come across it. This potted guide is our pot shot at undressing and dressing down this place, the university, and understanding our place within it: its problems and potential, its power-relations and its possibilities for politicization. This is our attempt to share some of the knowledge to be gleaned in the university, but a knowledge that is rarely measured on any certificate come graduation day.

Written collectively by the University for Strategic Optimism, in the queasy come-down afterglow of the recent wave of student activism in the UK (but looking forward to cracking-off another round), this guide attempts to contextualize our struggle and to bring it closer to home. Just what is the university that we are fighting for anyway? And what perhaps could it be?

More information

Buy the book here

 

**END**

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Subjectivity – Volume 5 Issue 1 (April 2012)

Critique

SUBJECTIVITY – VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 (April 2012)

Special Issue: Collective Becomings
Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis & Joanna Figiel
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/journal/v5/n1/index.html

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a contemporary writer, autonomist theorist and media activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981), and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). His work analyzes the role of media and information technology in post-industrial capitalism, in particular drawing from schizoanalysis and aesthetics to investigate processes of subjectification within precarious labor.

This issue of Subjectivity, which is the first major engagement with Bifo’s work in English, focuses on the themes of collective becomings, whether manifest in the eruption of new political movements, within the workings of the economy, or in the artistic sphere. It is not just a collection of essays that take Bifo’s ideas as their starting point, but rather a collection of essays that all start from the conjuncture of Bifo’s ideas, the issues and conditions raised by them, with forms of collective becomings in the present.

The purpose then is not to consider Bifo’s work in isolation, but rather to develop it as a tool, one that is explored through continued usage and application. This conjunctive approach is the most productive and valuable feature of Bifo’s writing, and autonomist analysis more generally: its ability to act as a kind of crossroads for bringing together different forms of political analysis and social theory, to act as a bridge between them.

Issue Contents:

Introduction
Stevphen Shukaitis & Joanna Figiel

Angels of love in the unhappiness factory
Dave Eden

Labor of recombination
Abe Walker

Creative labor in Shanghai: Questions on politics, composition and ambivalence
Anja Kanngieser

Cinematic and aesthetic cartographies of subjective mutation
Michael Goddard

The Novel Form in Italian Postmodernity: Genna’s Day of Judgment
Giuseppina Mecchia

Reassessing recomposition: 40 years after the publication of Anti-Oedipus
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

— 
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info

“Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference… Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule.” – subRosa Collective

**END**

 

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

 

‘Maximum levels of boredom

Disguised as maximum fun’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales)  

 

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

‘Stagnant’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Seminar on Political Organization

Turbulence

SEMINAR ON POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

University of Essex March 12th

Essex Centre for Work, Organization and Society Seminar

Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Political Organization
Rodrigo Nunes, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do Sul
March 12th, 4PM-6PM @ University of Essex Room 5N.7.23

With the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, Occupy and so much more, 2011 is likely to go down in history as a very special year – perhaps even the beginning of something. But what would that something be? This presentation attempts to draw some conclusions about the present state and future of politics and organization by examining the practices of the movements that erupted in the last year. Thinking beyond their usual representation by the media, trying to avoid either describing them as something entirely new and unheard of or as manifestations of an ultimately non-political culture, what can be the lessons of 2011?

Bio: Rodrigo Nunes is a post-doctoral fellow at (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil), with a PNPD/CAPES grant. He has a PhD in philosophy from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is a member of the editorial collective of Turbulence (http://www.turbulence.org.uk). His writing, on philosophy, art and politics, has appeared in such publications as Radical Philosophy, Deleuze Studies, Transform, Mute, ephemera, The Guardian, Z and others.

Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info

“Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference… Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule.” – subRosa Collective

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Anarchism and Autonomism – Call for Interventions

Autonomia

ANARCHISM AND AUTONOMISM – CALL FOR INTERVENTIONS

Call for Interventions: Anarchism & Autonomism, for the ASN 2.0 Conference ‘Making Connections’ at Loughborough University September 3rd – 5th, 2012
Coordinator: Stevphen Shukaitis (Autonomedia / University of Essex)

Over recent years anarchist and autonomist traditions of politics and analysis have proliferated in multiple and overlapping forms. While these currents are often conflated they emerge from distinct political trajectories, at times diverging over key questions.

This workshop is designed to tease out and compare the convergences, divergences, and productive tensions between these approaches. The goal is not to endlessly rehash debates between anarchism and marxism that seek to establish the superiority of one to the other, or to create a conceptual division of labor where anarchism handles ethics & tactics while marxism takes care of economics & strategy, but rather to create a space for transversal encounters ideas and practices.

Possible topics for consideration include, but are not limited to:
– The meaning and practice of autonomy today
– Communization & the commons
– Class composition & workers’ inquiry
– The refusal of work & the work of refusal
– Escape & the imperceptible politics of the undercommons
– The multitude & its dark side
– Affective labor & social reproduction
– Convergences / divergences between anarchism and autonomism
– Dialectics versus immanence
– Precarity & the autonomy of migration
– Schizoanalysis & class formation
– Anarchist and autonomist approaches to aesthetics

Send proposals of 200-500 words (along with bio and affiliation if applicable) to Stevphen Shukaitis (stevphen@autonomedia.org) by March 24th. Proposals for forms of intervention other than the reading of papers are highly encouraged.

Anarchist Studies Network: http://anarchist-studies-network.org.uk
Minor Compositions: http://www.minorcompositions.info

Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.

**END**

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

‘Stagnant’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

‘The Lamb’ by William Blake – set to music by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw3VloKBvZc

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Spectacular Capitalism

Guy Debord

SPECTACULAR CAPITALISM

Spectacular Capitalism Release Party and Presentation 
Saturday June 25th @ 7PM @ X Marks the Bökship (http://bokship.org)
210/ Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road London E2 9NQ

Over the past forty years the ideas and practices of Guy Debord and the Situationist International have become a constant reference point for those involved in radical politics, the arts, and cultural theory. Despite this ubiquity Debord’s work has been reduced to a palatable cliché rather than being used as a tool for crafting an ongoing practice of critique and engagement. Come on join us to celebrate the release of Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s new book, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy, as we excavate this potential from the historical wreckage. 

Drawing on the work of Guy Debord, Gilman-Opalsky argues that the theory of practice and practice of theory are superseded by upheavals that do the work of philosophy. Spectacular Capitalism makes the case not only for a new philosophy of praxis, but for praxis itself as the delivery mechanism for philosophy – for the field of human action, of contestation and conflict, to raise directly the most irresistible questions about the truth and morality of the existing state of affairs.

Commentary and response from Gavin Grindon:

“Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s Spectacular Capitalism rescues Situationist theory and praxis from merely antiquarian and art-historical commentary and puts it in dialogue with the project of a radical philosophy for leaving the 21st century.” – McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory

Organized by Minor Compositions (http://www.minorcompositions.info) and the Centre for Ethics and Politics @ Queen Mary, University of London (http://cfep.org.uk)

—

Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy
Richard Gilman-Opalsky
http://www.minorcompositions.info/spectacularcapitalism.html
To be released June 2011
ISBN 978-1-57027-228-8

Bio: Richard Gilman-Opalsky is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of Unbounded Publics: Transgressive Public Spheres, Zapatismo, and Political Theory (Lexington Books, 2008), as well as numerous articles.

Released by Minor Compositions, London / New York / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.
Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia
www.minorcompositions.info |info@minorcompositions.info

*****

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty

Antonio Negri

NEW LINES OF ALLIANCE, NEW SPACES OF LIBERTY

New Book Out Now!

By Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri
Mayfly Books: http://www.mayflybooks.org

Available online for free and in print: http://mayflybooks.org/?page_id=65

New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty, by Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri

“The project: to rescue ‘communism’ from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the liberation of work through mankind’s collective creation, communism has instead stifled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation of both collective and individual possibilities must reverse that regimentation of thought and desire which terminates the individual….”

Thus begins the extraordinary collaboration between Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, written at the dawn of the 1980s, in the wake of the crushing of the autonomous movements of the previous decade. Setting out Guattari and Negri diagnose with incisive prescience transformations of the global economy and theorize new forms of alliance and organization: mutant machines of subjectivation and social movement.

Prefiguring his collaboration with Michael Hardt, Negri and Guattari enact a singular hybridization of political and philosophical traditions, brining together psychiatry, political analysis, semiotics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Against the workings of an increasingly integrated world capitalism, they raise the banners of singularity, autonomy, and freedom to search out new routes for subversion.

This newly expanded edition includes previously untranslated materials and a new introduction by Matteo Mandarini.

“After the highpoint of the subversive decade 1968-1977, Italian autonomist Marxism and French theory of desire meet at the intersection of two different methodologies of subjectivation. Social recomposition of the working class and molecular proliferation of desire merge, and together open a new space for theory and for social action. While the ideologies of the twentieth century are falling, Toni Negri and Félix Guattari trace the lines of a new vision of autonomy.” –– Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Published in collaboration with Autonomedia and Minor Compositions

See also ‘New Lines of Alliance: Release Event’ for more details: https://rikowski.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/new-lines-of-alliance-new-spaces-of-liberty-release-event/

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Midnight Notes Last Jubilee! Midnight Notes at Thirty Years

Midnight

TOWARD THE LAST JUBILEE! MINNIGHT NOTES AT THIRTY YEARS

New Pamphlet: Toward the Last Jubilee! Midnight Notes at Thirty Years

(Edited by Craig Hughes. Published by Autonomedia & Perry Editions)

In November 2009, the Midnight Notes Collective marked thirty years of work with MN30, a day-long conference held at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan that was attended by more than seventy comrades. This pamphlet, which includes essays by writers involved in or inspired by the work of Midnight Notes, developed from that gathering.

The short pieces in this pamphlet are characteristic of the crises – of capitalism, of the working class, of movements – that MN30 occurred in. The authors don’t mince words—not in their celebration and admiration of Midnight Notes, nor in their presentation of the very real difficulties of the period; not in their critiques of where the project has been and gone, and certainly not in their raising of the real pressing political issues we all need to grapple with.

Available for sale from Autonomedia (http://www.autonomedia.org) and AK Press (http://www.akpress.org).

Table of Contents:

Craig Hughes: Introduction

p.m: From Midnight to Dawn: Permutations of a Crisis and the Comedy of the Commons

Steven Colatrella: Comments on Midnight Notes 30 Years

George Caffentzis: Two Themes of Midnight Notes: Work/Refusal of Work and Enclosure/Commons

Chris Vance: A Short Reflection on Midnight Notes

Team Colors Collective: High Entropy Workers Unite!

Sabu Kohso: An East Asian Mediator’s View of Midnight Notes Collective

Jenna Loyd: Beyond Walls and Cages: State Violence, Racism, and the Possibility of Abolition Economies

Manuel Yang: Elegy for Midnight Notes?

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Beneath the University, The Commons

Commons

BENEATH THE UNIVERSITY, THE COMMONS

 

Beneath the University, the Commons
A conference at the University of Minnesota
April 8-11, 2010

// Antioch 05.08 // Rome 10.08 // Athens 12.08 // New York City 12.08 // Helsinki 03.09 // Zagreb 05.09 // Heidelberg 06.09 // London 06.09 //Santa Cruz 09.09//

Seemingly discrete struggles over the conditions of university life have erupted around the world within the past year. These struggles share certain commonalities: outrage over precarious and exploitative conditions, the occupation of university spaces, and goals of reclaiming education from state and corporate interests.  It is becoming increasingly apparent that recent struggles over the university are not merely discrete events. They express a wider collective desire for direct control over the means of production and forms of life; a desire to create relationships of learning,  
collaboration, and innovation beyond the university’s attempts to quantify and discipline them.

Although the modern university has served the interests of the state and capital since its inception, the past thirty years have witnessed tightened ties with corporate, financial, and geopolitical interests. The subsumption of higher education under capital-driven business models has intensified the expropriation of the products of cooperative labor.  With the proliferation of student-consumer and scholar-manager subjectivities, we increasingly find ourselves uncomfortably and often unwittingly occupying the role of active participants in these trends.  As the global struggles over the past year have illustrated, however, opposition to these mechanisms of capture is mounting, as are creative strategies for alternatives and exodus.  Struggles against the corporate university are linking up across borders; the slogan of the International Student Movement, “One World – One Struggle : Education is Not for Sale,” and the slogan of the Anomalous Wave, “We Won’t Pay for Your Crisis,” appear in actions across Europe, the Americas, and South Asia.

“Beneath the University, the Commons” builds on the work accomplished by activists, organizers, artists, and academics at the “Re-thinking” and “Re-working” the University Conferences of 2008 and 2009 (http://www.reworkingtheu.org), while expanding the scope of our discussions and bringing together more international scholars in order to address an increasingly volatile global situation.  Our goal is to aggregate and accelerate our knowledge of university conditions and our collective acts of resistance to them, including alternative forms of engaging with each other and with the world.  To this end, the 2010 conference will draw together a diverse set of people committed to exploring how we can understand, create, and experiment with the commons beneath the 
university.  Our questions include but are not limited to:
//How do we enact and sustain occupations of the university in the exceptional times and spaces of the everyday?

//How do we generate an international “undercommons,” maintaining – as Stefano Harney and Stevphen Shukaitis have suggested – subversive  positions as actors within, rather than of, the spaces of the university?

//How can unionization projects and occupation struggles learn from and collaborate with one another?

//How do we negotiate the line between stability and revolutionary effectiveness?

//How do we open up sustainable and liveable spaces for radical research, education, and scholarship, without being subsumed by the publish-or-perish disciplinary apparatus?

//How can we collaboratively map and share research, information, tactics, and cultures?

//In recognition that our conditions are a part of a larger set of global occupations and injustices, how do we link with social movements outside of and across the university?

This four-day event will consist of two days of conference sessions bracketed by two days of workshops, writing collaborations, skill shares, and plenty of time for sustained conversations among participants.  We are accepting proposals both for formal papers and for non-conventional forms of participation.

– If you would like to present a paper, please submit an abstract and a CV or brief biographical statement.
– If you would like to participate in another way (by leading a workshop, facilitating a roundtable, presenting media, etc), please submit a brief (1-2 pages) description of the proposed activity and include what kind of resources we would need to provide, along with a CV or brief biographical statement.

All proposals should be addressed to conference@beneaththeu.org, and must be received by January 1, 2010.
—
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://info.interactivist.net

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Autonomia, Operaismo and Class Composition

Autonomia

AUTONMIA, OPERAISMO AND CLASS COMPOSITION

 

Call for Papers

Autonomism, Class Composition, and Cultural Studies

2010 Cultural Studies Association Conference – Berkeley, CA – March 18th – 20th, 2010

Coordinators: Stevphen Shukaitis (Autonomedia / University of Essex) & Jack Z. Bratich (Rutgers University)

The publication of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) brought new attention to a previously ignored current of revolutionary theory and practice, namely that of autonomist Marxism, or more broadly, autonomism. While the work of Hardt and Negri have receive quite a deal of attention within cultural studies research and writing since then, this have tended to neglect the vast wealth of engaged theoretical reflection contained within the history of autonomist thought and organizing, reducing it to the work of a few recent works by particular authors. For instance, the concept of class composition, or the ways in which class formations emerge from contestation and the primacy and determining role of social resistance, shares much in common with various strains of thought in cultural studies. Similarly, workers’ inquiry as a method of inquiring into the conditions of working class life to rethinking its ongoing subversive political potentiality, functions in similar ways to how early cultural studies shifted to an analysis of the everyday based on renewing and deepening radical politics.

Autonomist political analysis involves something very much like a form of cultural studies, exploring how the grounds for radical politics are constantly shifting in response to how capital and the state utilize social insurgencies and movements against themselves. How do cultural studies and autonomism converge and diverge over matters of power, the state, and subjectivity? The panel will explore the future behind our backs, focusing on how autonomist politics and analysis can inform cultural analysis and vice versa. Possible topics for consideration could include:

– Autonomy through and against enclosures

– Class composition and the creative class

– Immaterial labor and cultural production

– Libidinal parasites and desiring production

– Escape and the imperceptible politics of the undercommons

– The multitude and its dark side

– Affective labor and social reproduction

– Work drawing from/on particular autonomist theorists (Tronti, Virno, Fortunati, etc.)

– Precarity and the autonomy of migration

– Post-hegemonic & post-dialectical interventions

– Schizoanalysis & class formation

– Autonomism and the political

 

Send proposals of 500 words to Stevphen Shukaitis (stevphen@autonomedia.org).

The deadline for submissions is September 7th, 2009.

Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor. For more on his work and writing, see http://stevphen.mahost.org.

Jack Z. Bratich is assistant professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) and co-editor of Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality (2003), and has written articles that apply autonomist thought to such topics as audience studies, reality TV, secession, and popular secrecy.

Stevphen Shukaitis: Autonomedia Editorial Collective, http://www.autonomedia.org, http://info.interactivist.net

“Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference… Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule.”  – subRosa Collective

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