Communism is Back and We Should Call It Singularity

a book launch and discussion with Franco “Bifo” Berardi :: Friday February 27th, 2009 Octagon Room, People’s Palace, 5PM University of London, Queen Mary Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

“One hundred years ago Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism. It inaugurated a century that believed in the future – initiating a process where the collective organism became machine-like. This becoming-machine has reached its finale with the concatenations of the global web and is now being overturned by the collapse of a financial system founded on the futurisation of the economy, debt and economic promise. That promise is over. The era of post-future has begun.” – From the Manifesto of Post-Futurism

Franco Berardi will be discussing communism as singularity and presenting his books. The event marks the first and long awaited publication of his work in English: Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (2008) and Precarious Rhapsody: Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (forthcoming).  

The launch will be followed by a social evening at the Freedom Bookshop, Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX. All welcome.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi is a writer, critic, and pioneer media theorist. Like others involved in the Italian political movement of Autonomia, during the 1970s he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. He is the co-founder of rekombinant.org and the free pirate television network Telestreet. He is also Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan. For more information and writings by the author, including his recent Post-Futurist Manifesto, visit http://www.generation-online.org/p/pbifo.htm.

“Gilles Deleuze was welcomed into the reception room of university respectability, while Félix Guattari was left out. He was not an academic and he mixed with the wrong crowd. Guattari without Deleuze built a philosophical style out of his psychiatric practice, his work as a political militant, and his training in biology and pharmacology. To the rhizomatic machine Guattari brought the concrete micro-material of his inquiry, the molecular method of 'cut-up', montage, decomposition and recomposition, and combinatory creation. The crystalline acuity of the Deleuzian philosophical razor combined with the Guattarian material swarm of bio-informational principles form the rhizomatic machine.” – from Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography.