Connective Mutations: Autonomy & Subjectivation in the Coming Century
A Seminar with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
September 3-6, 2009 - New York City
Organized by 16Beaver & Minor Compositions

The concept of the subject is crucial for radical philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century. Arguments and debates over the nature of the subject, the location and nature of the revolutionary subject have vastly shaped radical politics and organizing. The work of Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze changes the frame of this discussion, proposing the concept of subjectivation, or becoming-subject, as a framework to understand the multiple becomings and states of social encounters. This concept of subjectivation overlaps significantly with the concept of class recomposition developed in the 1960s and 70s by autonomist thinkers such as Sergio Bologna, Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. Both strains of thought focus on how forms of social antagonism and resistance give rise to new social positions and possibilities for collective becomings.

Today we find ourselves in a transformed condition, one created by techno-anthropological and connective mutations, marked by overwhelming flows of immaterial labor and information flows that threaten to exceed the limits of the body. Cyberspace may be infinite, but cybertime is not. This intensification and expansion of technological dynamics and automatisms makes problematic the very possibility of collective subjectivation. Have we reached a stated where the immersive flows of information, affect, and desire act to dampen or even preempt the emergence of new collective subjects?

This seminar builds upon the format of the “Continental Drift” seminars that Brian Holmes and 16 Beaver have conducted during the past several years. It will thus mix together presentations and discussions with Bifo along with interventions and dialogues with other invited contributors and collectives.

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Critical Strategies in Art and Media: Perspectives of New Cultural Practices
A roundtable conference of digital theorists and practitioners on the future of cultural intelligence and freedoms.

September 10, 2009 - 1:30 - 9:00 pm
Austrian Cultural Forum (ACF)
11 East 52nd Street New York, NY 10022

With: Ted Byfield, Steve Kurtz, Amanda McDonald-Crowley, Claire Pentecost, Peter Lamborn Wilson
Moderators: Konrad Becker, Jim Fleming

Beyond the obsolete models of artist or author as genius and their fetish objects, what collective and collaborative practices are inventing new terrains and flows?

As information and communication technologies saturate our world, how is art giving way to new forms of cultural symbolic manipulation?

Can we identify new models to replace the auteur and the artwork? If so, where do they come from and what might that say about the future of critical practices?

What new kinds of “virtual” spaces are opening up for cultural practice in electronic media? As “old media” begin to collapse under the pressures of the virtual, what new media can we find?

How are didactic illustration and channeled dissidence giving way to new forms of surprise and intensity?

What strategies elude the creative industries' seemingly infinite appetite for things radical? Are there any strategies that can elude being reduced to styles in the service of sales, or are critical practices doomed to play cat and mouse with the forces of consumerism?

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Paint Your Lane! DIY Bike Lanes
Dan Koeppel
From Bicycling

The bridge is calm as Sunday morning dawns. At either end of the span, the freeway ramps are idle. Below, a few shorebirds peck at the marshy floor of the river. This is an out-of-character moment: During the week, thousands of cars pass through here, coming from the north, south and east, pinching into four lanes as they make their way toward the commercial centers of downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood and the city beyond.

But at first light on this July 19th, the only vehicles here on Fletcher Drive are three bikes, and those have been stashed in the brush. The cyclists who left them there are setting out traffic cones on the road. When the right-hand lane has been blocked off, the cyclists walk back to the shoulder to retrieve the object that, over the past few weeks, they have come to refer to as The Machine.

The $99 Rust-Oleum 2395000 looks like a tiny, four-wheeled wagon with low ground clearance and a handle that angles backward and up from the bed. The cargo area, so low it sits between the wheels rather than above them, is equipped with a mount for spray-paint cans; in the unused space, you can store five or six extra cans upright, ready to swap in when one runs dry. The 2395000 is most commonly used to create parking-lot stripes.

Starting at the southern end of the roadway, the three cyclists form a work crew. One holds the handle and pushes while another guides from the front, trying to make sure they walk a straight line. The third keeps watch for oncoming cars. (He's also pushing a broom.) The cyclist holding the handle squeezes the bicycle brake lever mounted there—an unplanned talisman of righteousness?—and the attached cable actuates a nozzle on the bottom of The Machine. A blast of paint settles onto the asphalt below. From practice, the crew knows they have to be careful not to leave footprints in the wet band of color that feeds out behind them as they walk down the road.

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Could the great recession lead to a great revolution?
Immanuel Ness
From the Christian Science Monitor

For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order – the system that dominates the globe today – is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.

As a result, we live at an important historical juncture – one where alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.

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We are pleased to announce the beginning of the North American Anarchist Studies Network (NAASN). We see this as a space to develop theoretical and empirical work that pays critical attention to anarchism and items of interest to the anarchist milieu. Likewise, we see the creation of this network as a way for North American anarchists who do scholarly work to be able to support each other in our endeavors and create a space for critical dialogue and reflection. This conference, then, is not only a place for us to discuss our research, dialogue with one another in panels, and educate ourselves through presentations. It is also a place for discussing the development and future course of the NAASN–so if you would like to be involved, please do so! As well, this provides us with a venue for discussing the role of the theoretician and the researcher in the larger project of dismantling capitalism, the state, and domination in all of its forms.

We are calling for papers, panels, and presentations to be given at the founding conference. Creativity in format and presentation is encouraged, as are submissions from people who may not currently have a university affiliation. As anarchists, we want to disrupt rather than perpetuate the lines drawn between the official academy and the production of knowledge. Papers, panels, and presentations should focus on work on anarchism or topics of interest to the anarchist milieu. Importantly, we see this as an occasion for dialoguing with one another to learn and grow, and would like to avoid sectarianism, personal attacks, and debating-to-win.

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During the weekend of October 9th-12th, the Anti-Racist Action Network will be holding its 15th annual conference in Pittsburgh, PA. We are inviting all members of Anti-Racist Action as well as all anti-fascists who agree with our 4 Points of Unity (see the end). The conference, taking place over 4 days, will include ARA's annual plenary, caucuses and discussion on current issues facing antifascists. Various workshops and several social events are also planned. Organizations will be tabling all weekend as well.

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The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics
Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano (eds.)

Download book as PDF (Open Access)

This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’.

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Classwargames Communique Number 6

In the legend of the founding of the Order of the Garter, medieval England’s most prestigious military order, Edward the Third plays Chess with the Countess of Salisbury. Queens, bishops, rooks, knights and pawns would decide this battle of the sexes. Edward Plantaganet staked a King’s ransom, in the form of a ruby, for the Countess’ virtue. Checkmate – the domination of one sex over another. How different is Debord’s game from its illustrious predecessor! This time around, the two players are loving comrades not rival aristocrats. In their book of The Game of War, Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho take on the roles of South and North. This illustrative contest is a marital affair: the tabletop becomes an erogenous zone where the inventor and his wife face each other in libidinous combat. Foreplay begins with North’s fond caress of South’s western arsenal, which soon succumbs to oblivion. Responding to this advance, South runs his cavalry up North’s left flank, and then North invitingly shifts her balance eastwards. Seizing the initiative, South fondles the tip of North’s mountain range before engaging in a penetrative action which comes tantalisingly close to entering North’s central arsenal. But, in a sudden forward thrust, North counter-attacks, her forces enveloping South who – with one flank now fully exposed - lingers in a fort before retreating back into his own territory. Finally, experiencing the ‘little death’ of surrender, South’s army becomes flaccid and resigns – totally exhausted - from combat.

The King and the Situationist had one thing in common: they were both beaten in a wargame by a woman. Yet, for the Countess of Salisbury, her victory was as much her undoing as a defeat would have been: the jewel in her possession being taken as proof of the yielding of her honour. Edward’s game of Chess was one of aristocratic domination, and led to the gesture of donning the Countess’ garter: the patriarchal symbol of the inner circle of the English elite to this day. In contrast, Alice’s victory over her husband was a cause for mutual celebration. In their Situationist wargame, competitive play stimulated psychological intimacy between the sexes. Winning or losing were equally pleasurable experiences. In both stories, the woman defeats the man in a simulation of military combat. But it is only in the account of The Game of War that the vanquished gladly shows his respect for the vanquisher. When Guy and Alice moved their pieces across the board, playing at war was making love by other means.

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Why Richard Florida's honeymoon is over
Richard Lautens
From The Toronto Star

Uzma Shakir scanned the crowd, tapping her pen on the table. It was her turn. It was hot – too hot, an early-summer evening scorcher. All the chairs were filled. Latecomers spilled out the back and on to the gritty sidewalks on Bloor St. W. near Lansdowne.

She stood. "I am the creative city," she said. Laughter. "That's what Richard Florida says. I make it really exotic."

But the laughing stopped quickly. "Richard Florida's exotic city, his creative city, depends on ghost people, working behind the scenes. Immigrants, people of colour. You want to know what his version of creative is? He's the relocation agent for the global bourgeoisie. And the rest of us don't matter."

Honeymoons, typically, are short. For Florida, who arrived in Toronto just over two years ago to head the Martin Prosperity Institute, a University of Toronto think-tank created just for him, it's officially over.

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Bristol Anarchist Bookfair September 12th
The Island, Bridewell St, Bristol BS1 2PY
10.30am to 6pm.

The 2009 Bristol Anarchist Bookfair takes place amidst the worst worldwide economic recession, and crisis of capitalism, for 80 years. It is no surprise then that this years bookfair is loosely themed around the ideas of Resistance and Alternatives to Recession. We live in dark and worrying times, but they are also times of hope as people question the viciousness, stupidity, inherent greed and unsustainability of a socio-economic model based on exploitation, profit and control...

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‘You Secretly Believe…’
Cultural Work, Internships and Precarity
Monday June 2nd 2009
7-9pm
LARC
62 Fieldgate St., Whitechapel, E1 1ES London

This session, hosted by members of the Carrot Workers Collective will begin with some fables and anecdotes from the world of interning in Europe’s Cultural sector. In bringing together these accounts, we aim to begin an analysis of the circuits of anger, resignation and moral compensation that often characterise the experience of free labour. The session aims to not only find ways of understanding these predicaments, but also to identify the ways in which these circuits can be interrupted, and might operate otherwise.

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Global University Labour, Struggles and the Common within the Crisis
Giovedì, 11 Giugno 2009 - Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Facoltà di Lettere
Edu-Factory

As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists, so now the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake.” A few years ago in its manifesto, the edu-factory collective underlined the productive and conflictive dimension of the contemporary university.

But in fact the university does not at all function like a factory, and we are not nostalgic for the struggles of the past. This statement was rather the indication of a political problem. If we begin with the incommensurable spatio-temporal differences between the actual functions of the university and those of the factory, what are the political stakes of their comparison? In other words: how can the problem of organization be rethought in the aftermath of the demise of its traditional forms such as the union and the political party?

Today the economic crisis has opened new spaces to rethink the function of the university and the production of knowledge itself on a global scale. In other words, we have the chance to rethink the rise of the global university, as well as its crisis. Within edu-factory, we refer to this as the double crisis. On the one hand it is an acceleration of the crisis specific to the university that marks its end, the inevitable result of its eroded epistemological status; on the other hand it is also the crisis of postfordist conditions of labor and value, many of which circulate through the university.

“We won’t pay for your crisis”: this was the slogan of Italian “Anomalous Wave”, that is, the refusal to pay the cost of economic crisis and the crisis of university itself. The slogan was translated in other struggles, in different forms but with a common goal. Starting from this point, we want to outline this double crisis from a global perspective. From India toBrazil, from US to Europe, we want to focus on different experiences to think about the production of a transnational common space of debate and action.

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The University of Trash

a project by Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman
Exhibition: May 10 – August 3, 2009

The University of Trash is an experiment in alternative architecture, urbanism, and pedagogy produced through Sculpture Center’s artist-in-residence program. Drawing from utopian ideals and radical urban projects undertaken since the 1960s, the artists will create an installation that functions as a temporary, makeshift University - hosting courses, lectures, presentations, and workshops. A Free Skool program will operate within the University, offering the public the opportunity to propose their own courses - open and free for all sign up and attend throughout the duration of the exhibition. To see all events or to make a proposal for an event, please visit www.universityoftrash.org.

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The Anti-G20 Protests Lacked Politics
Mario Tronti interviewed by Tonini Bucci

Even if it is ritualistic, even if it is yet again the hope that there will be movement within social conflicts, there is no circumventing the question, what kind of movement it was that we experienced against the G20 summit in London and against NATO in Strasbourg. Much has already been written and said. Newspapers and televisions have described it as a protest that emerged in response to the effects of the global economic crisis. Its composition is not that of the classical organized subject of the workers’ movement. The question is thus: Is a movement that acts outside of the traditional representational spheres (without any ties to trade unions or parties), automatically a movement outside of politics, or does it just conduct a different kind of politics? In short: Is the criticism against those who accuse this movement of not being able to transcend the symbolic gesture of anger and frustration too narrow-minded? We asked Mario Tronti.

Tonini Bucci: What kind of movement is the one that we saw against the G20 in London?

Mario Tronti: Maybe it makes sense to compare it to today’s major rally of the CGIL in Rome. Here we see a horizontally expanded world of work currently mobilized and organized by a large trade union. That’s the tradition, right? Even if there are many new features, not least the presence of migrants and a youthful kind of publicity, the world of work exists and is a protagonist, or at least has the will to continue to be a protagonist in Italian history. And then there are the effects of the crisis. Conflict has again emerged with the G20 off the back of the more or less effective measures that the European countries, the USA and others are deciding upon. To me that is a consolation. The demonstrations we have seen in other countries in the last few days are different from today’s. Here there is an organized force that makes an intervention and there are forces of movement. Given that the Anglo-Saxon countries are more exposed to the crisis, there is a different type of movement. I also don’t get the impression that this is still the antiglobalization movement. This is something else.

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Argentina Copyright Case Brings Access To Education Into The Spotlight
From IP Watch
Catherine Saez

An Argentinean philosophy professor is being sued for alleged copyright infringement for posting translated versions of French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s works on a website, according to the Copy South Research Group. The case is bringing international attention to the limitations on access to education brought about by copyright.

In an attempt to make foreign philosophers’ work available to Spanish language readers and students, Prof. Horacio Potel said he created an open source website named “Nietzsche in Spanish” in December 1999, one named “Heidegger in Spanish” in June 2000 and one entitled “Derrida in Spanish” in June 2001.
On 19 February he was advised that a criminal case was opened against him. In December 2008, French publishing company “les Editions de Minuit” lodged a complaint which was passed on to the French Embassy in Argentina and it became the basis of the Argentina Book Chamber’s legal action against Potel, according to CopySouth.

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The Perfect Wave
Edu-factory

The Anomalous Wave has invaded the streets, and blocked the cities again, and again has conflicted on the link education-work, starting from the protests against the unsustainable and illegitimate G8 University Summit. In Turin, ten thousands students, moving from the Block G8 Building,decided to march across the centre, sanctioning banks and temporary employment agency, crying again that "We won't pay for your crisis". The whole Wave decided to break into the red zone, not to accept prohibitions to the freedom of movement, and to try to reach the venue of the illegitimate summit of the chancellors' baronial lobby: we protected the demonstration from the charges and we denounce the massive and excessive use of tear gas thrown at eye level against students. Yet another Wave that subverts the G8 University Summit, once again we demonstrate our dissent, day after day in every faculty we build up the autonomous university by the "self reform", we build up the reappropriation of income and the autonomous production of knowledge!

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C.R.A.S.H – A Postcapitalist A to Z

Between the 1st -21st of June C.R.A.S.H will be experimenting with radical sustainable alternatives to the ecological and economic crises across the City of London. Dozens of free events, debates, interventions and performances will take place in various locations around London’s financial centre. For the full programme see the “2 Degrees Festival” www.artsadmin.co.uk/twodegrees.

Working with artists, activists and permaculturists, C.R.A.S.H merges popular education, live art and direct action. At the heart of the project is the C.R.A.S.H Course, building skills of resilience and resistance with precarious and unemployed workers who will then co-create C.R.A.S.H Contingency, a mystery night time journey to utopia and back. C.R.A.S.H Culture, a series of interventions in the city, and three public C.R.A.S.H Conversations round off the postcapitalist experiment.

Infamous for touring the country recruiting a clown army, throwing snowballs at bankers, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station and falling in love with utopias, the Lab of ii is a network of artists and activists whose work falls in between resistance and creativity, culture and politics, art and life.

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Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem
Hans Ulrich Obrist

Translated from the French by Eric Anglès

HUO: In his book Utopistics, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that our world system is undergoing a structural crisis. He predicts it will take another twenty to fifty years for a more democratic and egalitarian system to replace it. He believes that the future belongs to “demarketized,” free-of-charge institutions (on the model, say, of public libraries). So we must oppose the marketization of water and air.1 What is your view?

RV: I do not know how long the current transformation will take (hopefully not too long, as I would like to witness it). But I have no doubt that this new alliance with the forces of life and nature will disseminate equality and freeness. We must go beyond our natural indignation at profit’s appropriation of our water, air, soil, environment, plants, animals. We must establish collectives that are capable of managing natural resources for the benefit of human interests, not market interests. This process of reappropriation that I foresee has a name: self-management, an experience attempted many times in hostile historical contexts. At this point, given the implosion of consumer society, it appears to be the only solution from both an individual and social point of view.

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Issue #7 Submission Call
Journal of Aesthetics and Protest

Go Post-Money!!!

For the 7th issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, we are looking for articles and compendiums in the form of manifestos, alphabets, radical critiques, how-tos, guides or ideas with expository or theoretical or curatorial text about (but not limited to) the following subjects:

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World-Information City – Paris 2009
May 30-31
Urban In/Visibility, Access and Zoning

Space is a social practice. Over the last decades, mobility – of people, goods, and information – across distances large and small has become an ever more salient aspect of a wide range of social practices. New technological regimes have been created to enable and control this movement and new practices are remaking urban spaces. As an effect, one and the same space might have vastly different characteristics depending on how people interface with the technical grid. This ranges from new ways of coordinating one's movements through space with the help of new mobile technology, to electronic tagging technologies to monitor and restrict the movement of people as a form of criminal punishment, to the construction of special access zones (where certain people can either not enter, or not leave) which create new areas of invisibility. Yet, there is also the promise of using the civic and participatory potential of the new technologies to re-connect people with the local places they live-in. The sociologist Manuel Castells speaks in this context of the re-ordering of the space of places through the space of flows. The analog logic of geography encounters the digital logic of communication networks as lived space turns into a mosaic of practices, sometimes intersecting, sometimes conflicting and often bypassing each other.

For the first time in world history a majority lives in cities but the cities' form itself is challenged and stratified into a grid of distinct sectors. Virtual and physical space increasingly fragments into fully global zones along intensely local spaces in a single geographic domain. Urban development is defined by the vectors of knowledge and power. Information in its social expressions manifests in physical environments, and in the shaping of urban spaces. Metropolitan architecture has to accommodate locations of the virtual and the new laboratories of the mind where humans and machines shape each other in the production of meaning.

World-Information City Paris 2009 is a two day conference that will focus on four major themes within the wide field of new urban geographies: First, it will focus on new theories to reframe the essential role played by mobilities of all kinds. They pose a major challenge to social and urban theories, which often remain implicitly static. Secondly, it will look at how global flows and local dynamics intersect and shape cities in particularly dynamic cases, such as Bangalore, India. Thirdly, it will investigate remaking of urban spaces through new forms of conflict and strategies of security. And in the final panel World-Information City will look at emerging patterns of distributed action in space and new approaches to map them. Each of these themes will be addressed by two or more of the most outstanding thinkers followed by an open audience debate. A range of additional of workshops provides the opportunity to discuss some of these issues more in depth. High-level presentations and discussions will offer thoughts on urban transformations in a digitally networked world as a valuable resource to be consulted for a long time in the future.

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