Minor Compositions

This is Forever: A Exploration of Contemporary Autonomist Politics
An evening with Minor Compositions and the Team Colors Collective.
Thursday, 25 March, 7pm
Red & Black Cafe – 400 SE 12th avenue (at Oak) Portland, OR

Join us for an evening with two autonomist authors and organizers from Portland and London in exploring contemporary politics, the continued imposition of work, current struggles in the University and elsewhere, militant and co-research, and in celebrating the release of their recent books.  In the U.S. and across the planet struggles against enclosures, the dismantling of the University, for public and community space, against “the endless imposition of work,” and against a form of life that is increasingly precarious – are currently taking place.  By “reading” these and neighboring struggles we seek to create a world in which many worlds fit. A discussion on these issues and other topics will follow short talks. Continue reading →

Autonomism, Class Composition, and Cultural Studies
Berkeley, CA – March 18th (as part of the Cultural Studies Association conference)
Organized by Stevphen Shukaitis & Jack Z. Bratich

How do cultural studies and autonomism converge and diverge over matters of power, the state, and subjectivity? Come join us for a series of  panels (organized by Stevphen Shukaitis and Jack Bratich)  planned as part of the annual Cultural Studies Association conference. They will explore the future behind our backs, focusing on how autonomist politics and analysis can inform cultural analysis and vice versa.

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. For instance, the concept of class composition, or the ways in which class formations emerge from social 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 investigating 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. Continue reading →

Provo, Autonomy, and Ludic Politics
:: December 10th :: The Foundry, 7pm ::
:: Foundry, London :: 86 Great Eastern Street ::

The legendary Dutch anarchist movement Provo staged political and cultural interventions into the symbolic and everyday spaces of Holland from 1965 – 1967. The rise and fall of Provo stretches from early Dutch “happenings” staged in 1962 to the “Death of Provo” in 1967. Although a small group they cast a disproportionately large shadow on the events of the time due to their skillful analysis of social unrest among Dutch youth. By tying their political program to the rich magical heritage of Amsterdam’s bohemian subculture they created political street theater that captured the pulse of Amsterdam’s population.

Come join us to celebrate the release of Provo: Amsterdm’s Anarchist Revolt by Richard Kempton, the first book length English history and analysis of Provo. We will be joined by several of the members of Provo including Hans Plomp, Auke Boersma, Luud Schimmelpennink and Nico van Apeldoorn. The evening will include appearances by members of Radio Joy as well as recently recovered and translated video footage from the period. We will explore the history and activities of Provo, tracing out their legacies and continuing influence in the realm of autonomist politics and ludic interventions in public space. Continue reading →

The Atrocity Organization: JG Ballard & the Technologies of Psychopathology Management
:: Tuesday November 10th :: 5PM
:: Foundry, London :: 86 Great Eastern Street ::

A kind of waiting madness, like a state of undeclared war, haunted the office buildings of the business park. – J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

As a novelist and fiction SF writer, JG Ballard developed one of the most dynamic (and disturbing) exploration of collective psychopathology, excesses in organizational life, and the collapsing of the Western imaginary. From the fetish of the car crash to obscene hidden violence of the business park, internment camps to masochist fantasies directed through the mediated form of Ronald Reagan’s body, Ballard’s work ventures into territories that are disconcerting to explore, but from which one can learn a great deal. Rather than assuming that disorder and excess is a condition that management and organization must respond to, this event will explore the proposition that what might really be psychopathological is the desire to impose order upon an inherently ungovernable and excessive condition. Continue reading →

Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life
by Stevphen Shukaitis

All power to the imagination? Over the past forty years to invoke the imagination as a basis for radical politics has become a cliché: a rhetorical utilization of ideas already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process. But what exactly is radical imagination? Drawing from autonomist politics, class composition analysis, and avant-garde arts, Imaginal Machines explores the emergence, functioning, and constant breakdown of the embodied forms of radical imagination.

What does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized power through the power of the spectacle? Does any subversive potentiality remain? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally-bounded subversive power. It might be that imaginal machines only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is only possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. By reopening the question of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the power of social insurgency back into the working of capital and the state, we create possibilities for a politics continually reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation: to keep open an antagonism without closure.

“Imaginal Machines explores with humor and wit the condition of art and politics in contemporary capitalism. It reviews the potentials and limits of liberatory art (from surrealism to Tom Waits) while charting the always-resurgent creations of the collective imagination. Shukaitis exhibits a remarkable theoretical breadth, bringing together the work of Castoriadis, the Situationists, and autonomous Marxism to define a new task for militant research: constructing imaginal machines that escape capitalism. Imaginal Machines is truly a book that makes a path by walking.” – Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation

“If you have ever had someone say to you, ‘okay it’s fine to criticize but what would you do?’ this is the book for you. Shukaitis takes us on a raucous ride through actually existing alternative organizations that are anarchic, loving, fun, and best of all they work.  We meet people and organizations who imagine a completely different way of being together in the world.  And we are never far from a sophisticated theoretical travelogue as we walk these roads with the author.  What would you do?  Try this, and this, and this!” – Stefano Harney, Chair in Strategy, Culture, and Organization, University of London Continue reading →

Imperceptible Strategies, Unidentified Autonomous Organizations
:: A Drifting Seminar :: London, October 23rd,2009 ::

Anarchist and autonomous politics are often associated, in a kneejerk way, with a celebration of chaos and disorder: a rejection of all forms of organization. The reduction of radical politics to a cheap joke (‘anarchist organization, what’s that?’) comes to substitute for an actual understanding of autonomous organizational practices. Far from rejecting organization all together, the history of autonomous politics contains a wealth of different modes of organizing, from the formation of temporary autonomous zones to affinity group models, maroon communities to networks and collectives.

These are forms of organizing that not always acknowledged as being organizations because they do not conform to what it is assumed organizations necessarily are: durable, static, and hierarchical. This understanding of organization obscures and makes difficult an actual engagement with the merits and weaknesses of different forms of organizing. But what would be found if rather than working from a fixed and unchanging concept of organization, one that excludes temporary forms of organization from consideration, it was attempted to tease out the organizational dynamics from all the temporary alliances and alliances that appear and disappear?
Continue reading →

Affective Politics & the Imagination of Everyday Resistance

Recently, “affect” has been a key concept for research in politics, aesthetics, marketing, neuroscience, and sociology. This course seeks to draw together some of the more innovative work within this “affective turn,” focusing on the political composition of subjectivities, especially via cultural practices.  After a survey of some conceptual foundations of affectivity, we explore its relation to group-formation, labor, technology, value, passions (fear, panic, trauma, joy, love), actions, and creativity. The course will feature guest speakers engaged in affective politics and involve group discussions on the affective nature of practices participants are involved in.

Bluestockings • 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington, NYC •
$35 – 55 – 75 sliding scale
Wednesdays 4– 6 PM from July 15th – August 26th, 2009
Instructors: Jack Z. Bratich & Stevphen Shukaitis Continue reading →