Micropolitics Autumn 08

The Sensible At Work Micropolitics Mondays Beginning 13 October 6:30 PMHousman's Bookshop, 2nd floor

5 Caledonian Road Kings Cross London N1 9DX http://micropolitics.wordpress.com

Building on lessons learned from past visitors, Suely Rolnik, Brian Holmes and Franco Berardi, this year, the Micropolitics group will take it slowly. Departing from our drifts, narratives and fables of our experience of Post-Fordist life and labour, we will elaborate concepts from what Suely Rolnik calls the ‘sensible mutations’ found within our current regimes of value production. How do provoke frictions and counter-conducts, structures of support, and other forms of value, for ourselves and with others? How might we intervene into the formats and processes that manage expectations, relationships, the production of knowledge and social care?

Part seminar, part analytic support group, micropolitics will meet on the second Monday of each month.

Our first Monday session: Monday, 13 of October 6:30 PM at Housman's Bookshop, 2nd floor

5 Caledonian Road Kings Cross London N1 9DX (Directions at: http://www.housmans.com/contact/index.htm)

This first session will include an introduction to group processes led by Brazilian Occupational Therapist Elizabeth Maria Freire de Araújo Lima.

Beth teaches at the Medicine Faculty of Universidade de São Paulo (FMUSP); is coordinator of the Study and Research Laboratory "Art and Body in Occupational Therapy" at the Physiotherapy, Speech Therapy and Occupational Therapy Department, FMUSP, São Paulo.

Beth has asked us to read the following short text: Gilles Deleuze. ‘Three Group Related Problems’ from Desert Islands and Other Texts, Semiotexte, 2004, pp.193-203 Link: http://micropolitics.wordpress.com/temp-text-links/

Beth has written on the resonances between art and clinical practice, for background reading see: http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1414... http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1414...

At this meeting, we will also plot the schedule for the Mondays of the next few months. The group is open to anyone. Please RSVP to: micropolitics-group@4warding.org

http://micropolitics.wordpress.com

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The Micropolitics Research Group investigates the forces and procedures that entangle artistic production and the flexible subjectivities of its producers into the fabric of late capitalism. The prefix micro does not indicate ‘small’ or ‘mere’. Nor does it assume a belief in the revolutionary potential of everyday life, or indicate a retreat into the inner life of the subject. Rather, it is invoked to access the registers of desire, vulnerability, affect and subjective implication that generate both artistic practices and the collective engines of cognitive capitalism. If current regimes of cultural and cognitive capitalism are predicated on subjective forces, on the collective production of knowledge and surplus creativity, how can artists begin to distinguish, let alone imagine a practice that does not merely feed and replicate the machine itself? How can art practices that in Suely Rolnik’s words bring ‘mutations of the sensible’ into the realm of the visible or speakable, refuse or exit the limited field of possibility inscribed by late capitalism? Finally, if it is the very regimes of cognitive capitalism that not only capture but also produce flexible, creative subjectivities, how could we imagine a micropolitics of subjectivation? The research of the group will evolve from these core questions and will aim to investigate them through theoretical analysis, the analysis of concrete situations of existing practice, the production of events and exhibitions.