Hypothesis 891. Beyond the Roadblocks
Now available for ordering and/or free download… Hypothesis 891. Beyond the Roadblocks Colectivo Situaciones & MTD Solano Translated by Dina Khorasanee & Liz Mason-Deese Important collective theorization on the meaning of the 2001 Argentinean uprising In 2001 a mass popular uprising overthrew the neoliberal government in Argentina: thousands upon thousands of people, both in organizations and on their own, took to the streets, defying the government’s curfew, shouting “they all must go” until the president was forced to flee by helicopter. The uprising, a response to years of economic and political crisis, cannot be understood without understanding the broader ecology of movements and what Colectivo Situaciones defined as “new social protagonists”: the unemployed blockading highways, neighborhood residents coming together in assemblies, vast segments of the country surviving through alternative currencies and barter networks. This work, translated into English for the first time, brings together the conversations and theorizations of two key participants in that environment: militant research collective Colectivo Situaciones and the Movement of Unemployed Workers of Solano. The encounter and writing in common constituted a formidable experience for all those who participated, bringing to life a novel form of relation between thinking and doing, subject and object of research and political action. Bio: Colectivo Situaciones is a collective of militant researchers based in Buenos Aires. They have participated in numerous grassroots co-research activities with unemployed workers, peasant movements, neighborhood assemblies, and alternative education experiments. PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1172 Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site. Release to the book trade May 1st, 2023. Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Release to the commercial book trade May 1st, 2023 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Out of the Clear
Now available for ordering and/or free download… Out of the Clear Erin Manning Out of the Clear begins with the question of the clearing: What operations are at work when land is cleared, or thought is cleared, of all that grows wild? Clearing, the settler-colonial act of defining a territory and producing a border, clears the world of the thickets of all that is already at work. Get rid of the muddle. Privilege productivity. This devaluing operation is taken for granted as the necessary operation for all beginnings. Clear the movement-tendencies before you start dancing. Clear the thought-wanderings before you start writing. Clearing’s best accomplice is method. A clear site is one that can be overseen, that can be managed. The resounding image of the clearing in Out of the Clear is the residential school for the forced internment of first nations peoples, the sites always barren, empty of any tangle. The motif of the clearing weaves through Out of the Clear, a book written in the first year of the 3Ecologies project’s land-based site. In the mode of speculative pragmatism, the book explores what modalities of perspective emerge in the uneasy middling of non-dogmatic approaches to the speculative gardens of our affective surrounds. The impersonal leads in this exploration of what kind of minor sociality might emerge at the interstices of more-than human inclinations. “To write about the clearing – this sprawling field crowded with the haunting absences of felled trees, genocide, and bodies flattened by the worlding ritual of whiteness – Erin Manning approaches an old growth maple forest with an unpretentious shack and cabin. Fittingly this scene is the site of many troubles and spillages: black geographies lush with noise, loss, and the exquisite potential of new life that exceeds the colonial. A sanctuary heralded by the gaping maw of the monster, this book is a majestically unruly series of dramaturgical dispatches from the cracks. A cartography of loss and surprise. Buttery breadcrumbs on a trail of endarkenment. A geophilosophy on the alchemy of the sweet and exquisite. A decolonial force majeure. Join these awkward rehearsals at the liminal edges of monoculture. But be warned: there is no stage left here. We are coming down to earth, and we will not arrive intact.” – Báyò Akómoláfé, author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home “A capaciously delightful composite of practical and intellectual commitments to the proposition that an event is always an encounter with already entangled beings striving to find new conditions of livability. From wrangling with the effort of moving sap to syrup to moving philosophies of abstraction to speculative pragmatics, Manning fosters not merely new ways of thinking but inspires alternate ways of being together differently.” – Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University “The 3Ecologies project Manning muses on here consists of motley practitioners generating transversal philosophical concepts from within the collective attempt to live an anticapitalist life on land three hours from Montreal. Unlike many previous off-the-grid “returns” to “nature,” 3E engages blackness, indigeneity, decolonization, neurodiversity, telecommunications, and internationality as intrinsic dimensions of its communal work. The Anthropocene might chain us towards the bleak assumption mere survival of the century will already be a feat. Manning demonstrates there is always more to life than that – provided new vocabularies continue to be spun in the midst of what goes on.” – Arun Saldanha, author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race Bio: Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (2016) and For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020). 3e is the direction her current artistic research takes – an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making. PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1165 Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site. Release to the book trade March 2023 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets
Paths to Autonomy
Now available for ordering and/or free download… Paths to Autonomy Edited by Noah Bremer & Vaida Stepanovaite Collection exploring the history and development of autonomous politics in Lithuania and Eastern Europe A path is created when a direction is taken, its production marks the imbrication of personal choice, communal action and subhuman (structural, historical, ecological) conditionings. We are at the same time the makers of our paths and subject to the inheritance of paths we have made with others and which have arrived before our own makings. And just as class is not a static, abstract, transhistorical form, neither are the paths of its articulation as autonomous revolts of selves against capital – there are many paths to, for, and of autonomy. The autonomist tradition, that politically experimental effort to build autonomy within and against capitalism, has been intensely variegated from its inception in the 1970s. From an initial focus upon the question of proletarian autonomy, its paths have multiplied, bifurcated, and diffused. Following the legacies of decolonial and feminist autonomism, we would argue for an embrace of autonomy’s differences and bifurcations. We see not one path but many. A diffusion that not only amounts to the proliferation of oppositional subjects – i.e. a proliferation of the modes by which we refuse to be subjects for capital – but also of the geographies, ecologies, and temporalities that mediate the articulation of selves. Paths to Autonomy began in 2020 as our effort to think these manifold paths through assemblies, talks and readings situated in the post-state socialist, Eastern European, context of Lithuania. For we, ourselves, begin in the East. It is the circumstance within and against which our path to autonomy is necessarily mediated. We, the present inheritors of state socialism’s experiments, catastrophes, and subterranean potentialities step into a future conditioned not only by its highways, nuclear plants, wars, and imperialist historiographies, but also by the manifold paths of autonomy, resistance, and rebellion that arose both within and against its territories. In Paths to Autonomy you will find excavations of this parallel history of Eastern autonomism; the opening of dialogues between militants in the East and the global autonomist movement; and some critical interventions in contemporary autonomist theory. Threaded throughout the book is a lexicon of concepts formed by contributors, which can be approached on one hand as a red thread – suggesting connections and affinities amidst notable differences – and on the other as a toolkit for the journeys and struggles that await us in the cultivation of paths to come. Contributions by Katja Praznik, Stevphen Shukaitis, Marina Vishmidt, Roberto Mozzachiodi, Paweł Nowożycki, Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė, Emilija Švobaitė, and Vaida Stepanovaitė, Edward Abramowski and Bartłomiej Błesznowski, Airi Triisberg and Tomas Marcinkevičius, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Arnoldas Stramskas, and Noah Brehmer. Bio: Noah Brehmer is a militant researcher, editor, and union member who migrated from NYC to Lithuania in 2013. Currently based in Vilnius, Noah organizes a range of activities through the movement space Luna6 and is a co-coordinator of Solidarity Network Y?! (an emerging support network for comradely organizations in the region). In 2022, Brehmer cofounded Lost Property Press, with Vaida Stepanovaitė. Brehmer has published articles and essays in Blind Field Journal, LeftEast, Mute Magazine, Metropolis M, Artnews.lt, and OpenDemocracy. PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1148 Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site. Release to the book trade December 2022. Released by Minor Compositions in Collaboration with Lost Property Press Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. 266 pages, paperback, 5.5 x 8.5 UK: £18 / US: $23 ISBN 978-1-57027-404-6 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Dissemblage. Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution
Now available for ordering and/or free download… Dissemblage. Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution Gerald Raunig Following Dividuum (2015), Gerald Raunig presents the second volume of “Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution.” Dissemblage unfolds a wild abundance of material of unruliness, from the multilingual translation machines of Al-Andalus to the queer mysticism of the High Middle Ages, from the small voices of the falsetto in 20th century jazz and soul to today’s disjointures and subjunctures against the smooth city in machinic capitalism. In this volume Raunig not only develops a conceptual ecology of concepts of joining and jointing, but also undertakes an experiment in theoretical form. Semi-fictional interweaves with meticulously researched historical sources, mystical writings with letters from friends, philosophical fragments with poetic ritornellos. More than a narrative about dissemblages from social surrounds, thing-worlds, and ghost-worlds, the book itself is a dividual multiplicity in form and content, out of joint, in the joints, dissemblage. Bio: Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theorist. He works at the Zürich University of the Arts, Zürich and the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), Vienna. He is coeditor of the multilingual publishing platform Transversal Texts and the Austrian journal Kamion. He is the author of Art and Revolution and A Thousand Machines. PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1136 Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site. Release to the book trade December 2022. Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Kicks, Spits, and Headers. The Autobiographical Reflections of an Accidental Footballer
Kicks, Spits, and Headers. The Autobiographical Reflections of an Accidental Footballer Now available for ordering and/or free download… Kicks, Spits, and Headers. The Autobiographical Reflections of an Accidental Footballer Paolo Sollier Preface by Sandro Mezzadra Kicks, Spits, and Headers documents two years of football by a self-proclaimed accidental footballer. Coming of age during the student and worker revolt of the 1960s-1970s, the Italian ‘hot autumn,’ Paolo Sollier brought these countercultural energies and Marxist politics on to the football pitch, inadvertently becoming an icon along the way. Here he describes, in lucid and humorous prose, the challenges of trying make sense of and balance the tensions and contradictions between being a professional footballer and a political militant. “A classic of radical football literature, finally available in English. This is a real treat that must not be missed. – Gabriel Kuhn, author of Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics “Reading Kicks, Spits, and Headers today allows readers to explore from a specific viewpoint the landscape of politics and football in the turbulent 1970s in Italy. It also delivers us the fragmentary contours of a project that deserves to be translated onto the conditions of our present.” – Sandro Mezzadra, from the Preface Bio: Paolo Sollier was a professional footballer in the 1970s, then manager in the amateur leagues. He is author of the bestseller Calci, Sputi e Colpi di Testa, first published in 1976 and here translated into English for the first time. PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1093 Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site. Sollier’s book is discussed in episode 2 of the Minor Compositions podcast, which is a conversation with Gabriel Kuhn (author of Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics) about the relationship between radical politics and sport: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/minor-compositions Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
All Incomplete
Now available for ordering and/or free download… All Incomplete Stefano Harney and Fred Moten Building on the ideas Harney and Moten developed in The Undercommons, All Incomplete extends the critical investigation of logistics, individuation and sovereignty. It reflects their chances to travel, listen and deepen their commitment to and claim upon partiality. All Incomplete studies the history of a preference for the force and ground and underground of social existence. Engaging a vibrant constellation of thought that includes the work of Amilcar Cabral, Erica Edwards, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Hortense Spillers and many others, Harney and Moten seek to share and understand that preference. In so doing, Moten and Harney hope to have forged what Manolo Callahan, echoing Ivan Illich, calls a convivial tool that – despite the temptation to improve and demand, develop and govern, separate and grasp – helps us renew our habits of assembly. All Incomplete features the work of award winning photographer Zun Lee, exploring and celebrating the everyday spaces of Black sociality, intimacy, belonging, and insurgency, and a preface by Denise Ferreira da Silva. Bio: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten are authors of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. They are students of the black radical tradition and members of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective. Zun Lee carves out communal spaces where Black storytelling can thrive. He often makes photographs to remind him how to be grateful. He tends to forget often. Denise Ferreira da Silva teaches at the University of British Columbia and is a member of Coletiva (EhChO.org). Release to the book trade Juneteenth 2021 PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1032 Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site. Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Exploring the Anarchist Lexicon
To celebrate the publication of the English language translation of Daniel Colson’s A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze, Anarchist Studies is bringing you a series of articles that respond to this ‘provocative exploration of hidden affinities and genealogies in anarchist thought’. The first is by Teresa Xavier Fernandes, who, in response to Colson’s identification of anarchism as a ‘radical critique of representation’, unpacks Nietzsche’s conception of representation as a ‘lie’. In her Nietzschean typology of ‘liars’ Fernandes identifies the anarchist as a ‘faker’ who reminds us that representation is a trap. The Concept of Representation: Is This a Trap? https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-the-concept-of-representation-is-this-a-trap/ The second in the series is by Iwona Janicka, who picks up on Colson’s reference to Gabriel Tarde to discuss the role of imitation in shaping behavior. She points to the inherently mimetic aspects of anarchism, as exemplified in anarchist housing co-operatives and other intentional communities. Gabriel Tarde and the Anarchist Contgion https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-gabriel-tarde-and-the-anarchist-contagion/ Nathan Jun discusses Colson’s consideration of the term ‘anarchism’ itself. Colson argues that the contemporary drive to taxonomically classify ‘anarchism’ negates the ‘infinity of manners’ which the anarchist project ought to encompass. Jun, however, points to the potential for meaninglessness in leaving the term completely open. A Few Thoughts on Colson’s Lexicon https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-a-few-thoughts-on-colsons-lexicon/ Finally, Roger Farr offers ‘affinity’ as a path to follow between the Lexicon’s terms, and ruminates on Colson’s own use of the term ‘affinity’ as a potential first step. The Affinity for Affinity, or How to Read the Lexicon https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-the-affinity-for-affinity-or-how-to-read-the-petite-lexicon/ [A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze is translated by Jesse Cohn, and published by Minor Compositions (on release to the book trade in April 2019). PDF available freely online: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=902] # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Class Composition & Its Discontents: Interview with Stevphen
Class Composition & Its Discontents: Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis on Art, Politics, and Strategy Jens Kastner English: http://transversal.at/blog/Class-Composition-And-Its-Discontents German: http://transversal.at/blog/Class-Composition-And-Its-Discontents?lid=Das-Unbehagen-an-der-Klassenzusammensetzung Jens Kastner: You are author of a book on autonomy and self-Organization, and you recently organized an exhibition and a book on Gee Vaucher, who’s best known as the main visual artist for the anarchist punk-Band Crass. Then we can assume you are also familiar with history and theory of anarchism. In your latest book The Composition of Movements to Come, you are re-reading some artistic avant-gardes from an autonomist standpoint. A central notion of this re-reading is “strategy”. If I should characterize an anarchist perspective on any subject, I would choose “strategy” as one of the last. It seems contradictory to the anarchist radical moralism of acting here & now. So what does strategy mean for you? Stevphen Shukaitis: When there is an area of political discussion or a concept that seemingly cannot be discussed it is often useful to start from there, or at the very least to investigate why this is the case. That would seem to be an important way step out of any ‘radical moralism’ – even if holding on to a sense of ethics at the same time. This particular book started coming out of experiences of the anti-globalization or global justice movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. In particular it starts from ideas around employing a diversity of tactics, which was quite useful in terms of bringing together quite different often disparate approaches for common protests and projects. But for me that also raised the question of how one would even go about thinking or working through strategic directions for movement organizing. I’m not so sure that there are not always already discussions of strategy occurring in anarchist and autonomous politics. It’s just that they often times don’t present themselves that way – in large part because of the negative connotations often associated with strategic thought as being a top down, hierarchical orientation to politics. And that is often the case. But my approach was to look at different ways that avant-garde and experimental arts, including the Situationists, the Art Strike, and Neue Slowenische Kunst function to create collective spaces that functioned as forms of collective strategizing. You might call it exploring strategy by other means, aesthetic in this case. JK: For example, you’re arguing that the practices and ideas of Guy Debord and the Situationist Internationale should not be understood “only as artistic-political interventions, but also as methods of articulating strategies of collective subjectification through these practices” (26). Would that be valid for every avant-garde movement or even for all of these you have investigated? SS: I would hesitate at arguing that this would be the case for every avant-garde movement or practice. But it would certainly seem the case that avant-garde artistic practice, as it embraces the idea that it is attempting to radically change the nature of art, politics, and social life in general, would contain some notion of reorienting collective subjectification. The Situationists, for example, claimed that they did not want lead or act in a vanguardist manner but rather to ‘organize the detonation,’ which for them became finding practices and creating situations in which new social subjects could emerge from and act collectively. Indeed, this might not always be clearly expressed, and remain implicit. And in those cases there is more work needed to tease out what notions and practices of subjectification are contained within. It’s like Gee Vaucher says that all art is political, all aesthetics is political – the question is how you draw the line. I would suggest that artistic avant-gardes need to have some approach to where and how that line is drawn. And this will be less readily apparent for movement that are more or perhaps even exclusively contained within the institutional ‘art world’ – such as was argued by Peter Burger (amongst others) about the so-called ‘neo-avant-gardes’ of the 1960s. But even there you could find approaches to subjectification, just less explicit and not as developed. JK: One of your thesis is that the avant-garde “has not died” (72). Does that does mean that all of their strategies could be practiced today in the same way as during the 1960s? There still seems to be an emancipatory potential in art practices. On the other hand you are also stating that the utopian potential of being an artist has collapsed because in contemporary societies it “has been realized perversely in existing forms of diffuse cultural production. ‘Everyone is an artist’ as a utopian possibility is realized just as ‘everyone is
nettime Upcoming Essex Seminars on Capitalism the Social
Here’s information on two upcoming seminars at the University of Essex Centre for Work, Organization, and Society. Cheers, Stevphen 18/6 Seminar on Revaluing the Social in Contemporary Capitalism Monday June 18th, 2012 @ 3PM University of Essex Room 4SB.5.3 Centre for Work, Organization and Society (http://www.essex.ac.uk/ebs/research/emc) Seminar presentations by: Jason Read (University of Southern Maine) / George Tsogas (Cass, City University) / Stevphen Shukaitis (University of Essex) Abstracts General Relations: Transindividuality from Ontology to a Non-Economic Critique of Political Economy Jason Read (University of Southern Maine) In the Grundrisse Marx writes “Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society,’ do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto must developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations.” The contradiction Marx grasped between the increased interconnectedness of economic production and social isolation has only deepened into the twenty-first century: it is the era of commons, of digital connections, but also the era of neoliberal individuation, isolation, and precarious fragmentation. How then to make sense of an era of connection and isolation. I argue that the concept, or rather the problem, of transindividuation, makes possible a conflictual understanding of the genesis of both individuals and social relations. I say problem, or problematic, rather than concept, because transindividuality needs to be grasped in its broadest sense as an ontology of relations (Simondon, Spinoza); a critique of political economy (Marx, Virno, Stiegler); and a constitution of political subjectivity (Balibar, Negri). It is by thinking the interrelation of the ontology, economy, and political that we can think the constitution and transformation of the present. Cognitive capitalism, organization, and the labour theory of value George Tsogas (Cass) Stevphen Shukaitis (Essex) We address the reasons and methods for renewing a transfusion of ideas between Marxism and organisation and management theorising. We put forward a dialectical approach to the search for OM theories, by stepping outside disciplinary confines. The Marxian labour theory of value is put forward as the territory for such synthetical exchange to commence. For that task, we make the most of the autonomist Marxist tradition, inasmuch as it offers us a coherent explanation of the social foundations of post-Fordist, contemporary (cognitive) capitalism. We question the contemporary significance and relevance of the Marxian labour theory of value, in an era of deep capitalist crisis, and reach the assertion of the negation of value creation in cognitive capitalism: consumption precedes production and creates – rather than destroys – value. Our aim is to bring to the forefront of OM theoretical enquiry fundamental questions on the nature of labour, exchange relations and forces of production in contemporary, cognitive capitalism. -- 26/6 Seminar: Rise of the Flashpublics Tuesday June 26th, 2012 @ 4PM University of Essex Room LTB4 Centre for Work, Organization and Society (http://www.essex.ac.uk/ebs/research/emc) Rise of the Flashpublics: State-friended Social Media, User-Generated Discontent, and the Affective Transfer This presentation examines recent entanglements of social media and political dissent to explore mutations in network sovereignty. Using a number of recent examples (including the US State Department organized Alliance of Youth Movements, the uprisings in Iran and Egypt, KONY 2012, Occupy Wall Street, and the US police networks), it argues that we are witnessing a convergence of sovereign and network powers, one that expresses new modes of control while setting the conditions for new forms of evaluation and antagonism. Network alliances and coalitions have become key actors in constructing a public (now as “State-friended” movements) and dissuading dissent movements (“State-enemied” ones). More specifically, counter-radicalization can take place via creating what I call flashpublics (quickly mobilized networked alliances that distract and prevent other emergent networks). At the same time, these coalitions depend on social media spectators/participants, which are affective transfer points that exceed network capture. Bio: Jack Z. Bratich is associate professor and department chair of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) and coeditor, along with Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy, Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (2003). His work applies autonomist social theory to such topics as audience studies, social media
nettime Punkademics, Up the nerds!
Back Patches and Elbow Patches Zack Furness From the introduction to Punkademics: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=436 The position being taken is not to be mistaken for attempted education or righteous accusation. -Operation Ivy, “Room Without a Window” I think the moment at which I realized I was actually turning into a college professor was not on the first day I taught a class in 1999, but when I was listening to an old Operation Ivy tape about a year later and found myself wanting to sit the band’s singer, Jesse Michaels, down to have a frank discussion. Specifically, I wanted to ask him why, in a song written to both illuminate the politics of ideology (“walls made of opinions through which we speak and never listen”) and express the need for open-mindedness and self-reflexivity, would he choose to intentionally denounce the educational function of his lyrics from the outset? Not being a complete idiot nor unfamiliar with the band, I obviously realized that the song “Room Without a Window” (quoted above) was penned by Michaels when he was in his late teens, which is around the time when years of schooling and top-down authority have unfortunately succeeded at the task of turning education – or at least the compulsory, state-sanctioned version – into something from which young people want to run; I imagine all the more so for the sizeable number of kids in the late ‘80s East Bay (California) punk scene whose parents, like Michaels’ dad, were college professors. But whether the lyric intentionally gestures in this direction or is self-consciously ironic is hardly the issue. Indeed, even if the first line just sounded cool when he wrote it, the point here is that I wasn’t singing along, tapping out the beat (as ex-drummers are annoyingly prone to do), or even just engaging in the kind of run-of-the-mill lyrical analysis that has been the bread and butter for both punk fanzine writers and music journalists for over three decades. Rather, it’s that I was busy concocting some bizarre scenario in my head that, if allowed to play out in real life, would have undoubtedly translated into the world’s most boring and pedantic conversation with one of my punk heroes. As if it didn’t feel weird enough to catch myself pursuing this rather strange line of hypothetical inquiry at the breakfast table one morning, the sensation was heightened when I also realized, perhaps for the first time, that my own internal monologue was now being structured around concepts and jargon from my graduate seminars. Since when, I thought to myself, did I start to throw around – let alone think with – phrases like “illuminate the politics of ideology”? Was I becoming the kind of person who ends up nonchalantly remarking upon the “narrative tensions” in a Jawbreaker song? Or using the word oeuvre to describe Bad Brains’ discography? Was I heading down a path where I would eventually not even be able to go for a bike ride without theorizing it? Just then, as if the universe wanted to accent the point in as cartoonish a manner as possible, I narrowly avoided stumbling over my cat while rising from the table, and I managed to spill half a mug of coffee onto the stack of student papers I had been grading. Muttering to one’s self? Check. Coffee stained papers? Check. Analyzing one’s music collection through the lenses of critical pedagogy and rhetorical theory? Check. Shabby outfit? Certainly. Disheveled hair and off kilter eyeglasses? Indeed. Exhibiting behaviors that one might objectively identify as ‘wacky’ or ‘nutty’? Check. It was official. All I needed now, I thought to myself, was the kind of jacket where the patches are sewn nicely onto the elbows instead of silk screened and stitched across the back with dental floss. Elbow Patches and Back Patches Twelve years later I still don’t have one of those professorial tweed jackets, though I did manage to attain the job, the eccentricities, and the shock of salt-and-pepper hair that would compliment one quite nicely. And despite my initial anxieties over the prospects of compromising my then-entrenched punk ethics by turning into a stuffy academic, I actually ended up spending more time playing in bands and participating in various aspects of DIY punk culture as a graduate student and eventual professor than I did when I was younger. While far from seamless, I’ve often seen the relationship between these two ‘worlds’ as dialectical, though at first this mainly consisted of scrutinizing every new set of readings and concepts I learned in school through my own increasingly politicized worldview: a punk subjectivity that I fancied as something of a “bullshit detector.” But fairly quickly, though, my immersion in critical theory, cultural studies, feminism and political theory started to help me hold up a mirror to sub-/countercultural politics and to generally unpack some of the bullshit that is often embedded
nettime CFP Workers, Despite Themselves
Call for papers for an ephemera issue on: Workers, Despite Themselves Issue Editors: Stevphen Shukaitis and Abe Walker Deadline for submissions: November 30th, 2012. Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and intensify social and political antagonisms. The autonomist political theorist Mario Tronti argues that weapons for working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal (1966: 18). But, has not it often been suggested, to use feminist writer Audre Lorde’s phrasing (1984), that it is not possible to take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools? While not forgetting Lorde’s question, it is clear that Tronti said this with good reason, for he was writing from a context where this is precisely what was taking place. Italian autonomous politics greatly benefited from borrowing from sociology and industrial relations – and by using these tools proceeded to build massive cycles of struggle transforming the grounds of politics (Wright, 2003; Berardi, 2009). Of these adaptations the most important for autonomist politics and class composition analysis is workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry developed in a context marked by rapid industrialization, mass migration, and the use industrial sociology to discipline the working class. Workers’ inquiry was formulated within autonomist movements as a sort of parallel sociology, one based on a radical re-reading of Marx (and Weber) against the politics of the communist party and the unions (Farris, 2011). While the practitioners of workers’ inquiry were often professionally-trained academics – especially sociologists – its proponents argued their research differs in important ways from ‘engaged’ social science, and all varieties of industrial sociology, even if it there are similarities. If bourgeois sociology sought to smooth over conflicts, and ‘critical’ sociology to expose these same conflicts, workers’ inquiry takes the contradictions of the labor process as a starting point and seeks to draw out these antagonisms into the formation of new radical subjectivities. This is not to say that workers’ inquiry is an unproblematic endeavor. We remain skeptical that the weapons of managerial control can be cleanly re-appropriated without reproducing the very social world they were designed to take apart. For as Steve Wright argues, “the uncritical use of such tools has frequently produced a register of subjective perceptions which do no more than mirror the surface of capitalist social relations” (2003: 24). As the legacy of analytical Marxism reveals, imitation is never far removed from flattery, and at its worst moments, workers’ inquiry risks becoming its object of critique. To be fair there are disagreements among the proponents of workers’ inquiry over the limitations of drawing from the social sciences. But to continue the metaphor, like any potentially dangerous ‘weapon’, sociological techniques must be carefully examined, and when necessary, disabled. Today we find ourselves at a moment when co-research, participatory action research, and other heterodox methods have been adopted by the academic mainstream, while managerial styles like TQM carry a faint echo of workers’ inquiry. In the contemporary firm workers are already engaged in self-monitoring, peer interviews, and the creation of quasi-autonomous ‘research’ units, all sanctioned by management (Boltankski and Chiapello, 2005). Workers’ inquiry is now part of the accepted social science repertoire: its techniques no longer seem dangerous, but familiar, at least at the methodological level. The bosses’ arsenal now includes weapons mimicking the style, if not the substance, of workers’ inquiry. And as George Steinmetz (2005) has suggested, while blatantly positivistic research styles have fallen out of favor, this obscures the ‘positivist unconscious’ that continues to interpellate even apparently anti-positivist methodologies. The pioneers of workers’ inquiry argued researchers must work through/against the ambivalent relations of (social) science; now, there may be no other option. Wherever there are movements organizing and addressing the horrors of capitalist exploitation and oppression, the specter of recuperation is never far behind. The point is not to deny these risks, but to the degree such dynamics confront all social movements achieving any measure of success. It is by working against and through them that recomposing radical politics becomes possible (Shukaitis, 2009). Today workers’ inquiry remains, as Raniero Panzieri
nettime Seminar on Political Organization Essex March 12th
Seminar on Political Organization 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 (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 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime ephemera cfp: communism of capital?
.) The idea of communism. London: Verso. Read, J. (2008) 'The age of cynicism: Deleuze and Guattari on the production of subjectivity in capitalism', in I. Buchanan and N. Thoburn (eds.) Deleuze and politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Virno, P. (2004) A grammar of the multitude: For an analysis of contemporary forms of life. New York: Semiotext(e). Z(iz(ek, S. (2008a) Violence. London: Profile Books. Z(iz(ek, S. (2008b) In defense of lost causes. London: Verso. -- 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 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime We Demand The Impossible: An Interview with John Jordan and Gavin Grindon
Council, that the Tory party's vacuous advertising slogan the big society become a core research area, replacing the less ideologically narrow area of 'communities and civic values;' and the Department for Business and Innovation's concomitant rewriting of the 1918 Haldane principle, that research directions are best decided by researchers through peer review. The optimistic take on this is not that it's an inevitable recuperation of resistance, which was the position Debord tended towards in the end, but that capital is always on the back foot - that its own developments are driven by and a response to social movements. That it's an open dialectic (or if you prefer, not a dialectic at all). There's a kind of neurosis to it, although rather than excluding the other to maintain its ego, the state is including everything to stave off other possibilities - you can see this in the language. The whole discourse of 'participation' and networks in business (and since the 1990s, also in art), is as Boltanski and Chiapello observed in their book the New Spirit of Capitalism, a recuperation of the language and terms of 1960s social movements - movements which first properly gave birth on a mass scale to the kinds of self-consciously autonomous and creative politics, or art-activism, which we talk about in the guide. Likewise, the big society is focused on mutuality, and there's a strange recuperation of libertarian and radical thought by the thinkers behind it like Phillip Blonde. In this case, you're left with a stunted vision of the anarchist idea of mutual aid, without any institutional aid, and structurally limited mutuality. But rather than simply critique this, I'm interested to look at how we might otherwise structurally and materially embody other kinds of social relation. Obviously this starts on a much smaller scale, and is often more directly materially embodied. University departments' attempts to support radical philosophy within existing institutions and setting up new autonomous radical art institutions are two possible, but not mutually exclusive, directions here. As, of course, at the most local, accessible level, are the art-activist practices and objects we discuss in the guide. Our new book-film is out Les Sentiers de L'utopie Free online (in french) : http://www.editions-zones.fr Our blog: http://lessentiersdelutopie.wordpress.com/ our twitter: @nowtopia Some info for A Users Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible. 3 different links to download the publication: http://www.minorcompositions.info/usersguide.html http://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/a-users-guide-to-demanding-the-impossible http://www.brokencitylab.org/notes/required-reading-a-users-guide-to-demanding-the-impossible The Font used was Calvert is by Margaret Calvert, designer of UK road signs. Words: Gavin Grindon John Jordan Design: FLF Illustration: Richard Houguez Original Cover: The Drawing Shed Produced by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, London, December 2010. www.labofii.net Anti-copyright, share and disseminate freely. More about Minor Compositions - a series of interventions provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. http://www.minorcompositions.info/ Other Info: Crude awakening: BP and the Tate. The Tate is under fire for taking BP sponsorship money. Does corporate cash damage the arts — or is it a necessary compromise? We asked leading cultural figures their view. Interviews by Emine Saner and Homa Khaleeli. guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 June 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/30/bp-tate-protests -- 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 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
