Minor Compositions

Curating Resistance :: Aesthetics & Ethics in Social Movement
:: October 25th, 2010:: University of Essex ::
:: Ivor Crewe Lecture Hall Seminar Room :: 1PM – 5PM ::

Participants: Paul Halliday (Goldsmiths) // Antigoni Memou (University of East London) // Matthew Poole (Essex) // Stefanie Tan (Glasgow)

Abstracts for the seminar are available here.

Avant-garde and social movement art production has long had a troubled and conflictual relationship with the museum and the archive. The call to abandon the gallery as a space for art separated from everyday life, one that all too often neutralizes the antagonistic energies of radical art, reverberates from Dada through Fluxus, the Surrealists to Reclaim the Streets. But in today’s post-Fordist creativity-fueled economy, the call to end this division rings hollow precisely because it has already been accomplished: the energies of insurgent creativity are rendered into forms of dispersed production for the net economy. The surrealist invocation of the marvelous is today’s advertising copy. Joseph Beuys’ proclamation that “everyone is an artist” has been realized in perverse form as “everyone is a worker,” where relationality is ‘socially sculpted’ through the circuits of an always present network culture as opportunities for capitalist valorization: all YouWork and MyProfit.

What might there be that could avoid these tensions and contradictions, or at least begin to suggest ways to work through and against them? Where does one go when life itself is both a direct producer of value and the substance of artistic production? To a gallery of the streets? Or maybe a university of trash? Is the archive of the undercommons a pile of zines sitting at the back of the infoshop? A pile of fleshy tissue inscribed on by a Kafka-esque writing machine? Perhaps it is all and none of these things. Thus we return to the question of the archive and history not to catalog social movement artistic production for a gallery-morgue or the productivity of the metropolitan factory, but rather to consider what an ethics and aesthetics of developing a living archive of experience and knowledges that can feed back into and through the fabric of everyday life might be. Continue reading →

Metropolitan Strategies, Psychogeographic Investigations
:: A Drifting Seminar :: Brighton, October 26th, 2010 ::
Starting @ the Cowley Club, 2PM

The notion of psychogeography (as well as many other ideas of the Situationists) appears frequently within political and artistic discussions. Indeed, they circulate to the point of cliché, in the process becoming almost completely emptied of content. The derive is reduced to a leisurely stroll, perhaps accompanied with some secondary musings about the nature of the spectacle, a dash of literary activity, or perhaps some local history. This is a hollowing out of the concept. Psychogeography for the Situationists was primarily not an aesthetic activity, but more than anything a strategic approach to understanding the forces shaping the city and from those finding points of intervention in it. At times it verged on a nearly military framework, working to gain an intuitive understanding of the territory and its layering of images, affects, and circuits of capitalist valorization.

Today we find ourselves in a condition of ever intensified spectacular sociability: all of life put to work in webs of biopolitical production, overwhelming communicative and media flows, and the reshaping of the metropolis through culture led gentrification. More than ever well-developed psychogeographic investigations are needed to comprehend the shaping of the metropolis and the possibilities this offers for political action. But this is not a task for the carefree wanderings of the flaneur, but perhaps better suited for what Ian Sinclair has described as the superseding figure of the stalker, the one who knows where he is going, but not why or how. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →