Culture

Artpolitik Site Launch

Inspired by the Institute for the Future of the Book, Minor Compositions is launching a digital form for the forthcoming book Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation by Neala Schleuning.

Over the next month the entirety of the draft manuscript will be posted here: http://artpolitik.digress.it.

Comments and discussions will be integrated into revisions of the book before it is printed later this year (which will, as with all other Minor Compositions titles, be available for free download).

Peter Lamborn Wilson, "Back to 1911"

April 27, 2012 - 2:55am -- jim

Back to 1911
Temporal Autonomous Zones
Peter Lamborn Wilson

Reversion to 1911 would constitute a perfect first step for a 21st century neo-Luddite movement. Living in 1911 means using technology and culture only up to that point and no further, or as little as possible.

For example, you can have a player-piano and phonograph, but no radio or TV; an ice-box, but not a refrigerator; an ocean liner, but not an aeroplane, electric fans, but no air conditioner.

You dress 1911. You can have a telephone. You can even have a car, ideally an electric. Someday, someone will make replicas of the 1911 “Grandma Duck” Detroit Electric, one of the most beautiful cars ever designed.

1911 was a great year for Modernism, Expressionism, Symbolism, Rosicrucianism, anarcho- syndicalism and Individualism, vegetarian lebensreform, and Nietzschean cosmic consciousness, but it was also the last great Edwardian year, the twilight of British Empire and last decadent gilded moments of Manchu, Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, French and Ottoman monarchy; last “old days” before the hideous 20th century really got going.

Ann Larson and Malav Kanuga, "April 25 is 1T Day: Occupy Student Debt"

April 25, 2012 - 5:05pm -- stevphen

News

April 25th is “1T Day”: Occupy Student Debt
Ann Larson and Malav Kanuga

“We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we
work toward are the jobs we already have. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.”

— Communiqué from an Absent Future
(from the UCSC occupation barricades September 2009)

In the United States, two-thirds of college graduates leave school with student loan debt, an average of $25,000 each. Debt rates have increased 500 percent since 1999, and there are more and more of us across the country facing six-figure loans who will make monthly payments for the rest of our lives. Those of us who are low-income and working-class students often incur debts for degrees we will never complete because it is especially difficult balancing school and employment in this precarious economy. Student debt will burden us and our families for years to come. It will be the breath down our neck at every life choice and the clock that disciplines our present and future labor time. Debt is profoundly alienating and individuating. It separates us from each other and the commonwealth of our education gained from generations of social movements.

Leap Second Festival 2012

March 26, 2012 - 5:11am -- jim

Leap Second Festival 2012

Call for entries: Works lasting one second or less. The festival is also
interested in texts and essays.

The festival takes place on the leap second which occurs 30th June
2012 23:59:60 UTC.

Submission at festival website
http://noemata.net/leapsec/

See full announcement below.

Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, "Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus"

March 12, 2012 - 7:56am -- stevphen

Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

1. Post-Oedipal
The process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have dramatically changed in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that book was a defining moment in my intellectual and political experience, in the first years of the 19070s, when students and workers were fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book the landscape has changed so deeply that very concept of desire has to be re-thought, as it is marking the field of subjectivation in a very different way.

The proliferation of sources of enunciation in this age of the networks, the globalization of the economy and the media, was predicted and in a sense pre-conceptualized Deleuze and Guattari, but they could not know in advance the effects that global capitalism has produced on the unconscious and the dynamics of desire. As production, media and daily life have been subsumed into the sphere of semiocapital we need to reconsider the unconscious from this transformed position.

My starting question is thus: what is capitalism and what is schizophrenia after the psychosocial landscape has been reshaped by the tendencies described by Deleuze and Guattari?

Squatting Europe Collective, New York City, February 23-27, 2012

February 8, 2012 - 6:52am -- jim

Squatting Europe Collective
New York City, February 23-27, 2012

Squatting Europe Kollective Convenes in New York City

For the first time ever, a group of activist researchers from the European squatting movement are gathering in New York City. They will make public appearances to speak about the decades-old movement of squatting and building occupations in their respective countries.
The tradition of political squatting is moving from the shadows into the light. With the world-wide rise of the Occupy movement, the deep reservoir of experience within the movements of political squatting have become suddenly significant.

Generations of activists have participated in occupations of vacant buildings in Europe, beginning in the 1970s. The best known early success was the famous “free city” of Christiania in Copenhagen. But every major city in Europe has experienced some version of politicized squatting, most recently in the form of social centers.

The members of SQEK – Squatting Europe Collective – have gathered for special sessions at the Association of Amerian Geographers' annual convention February 24. A public discussion, meetings, film and graphic arts exhibition are among the other activities planned for the meeting.

John Michael Greer, "Waking Up, Walking Away"

February 1, 2012 - 11:06am -- jim

"Waking Up, Walking Away"
John Michael Greer

Last week’s Archdruid Report post, despite its wry comparison of
industrial civilization’s current predicament with the plots and
settings of pulp fantasy fiction, had a serious point. Say what you will
about the failings of cheap fantasy novels – and there’s plenty to be
said on that subject, no question – they consistently have something
that most of the allegedly more serious attempts to make sense of our
world usually lack: the capacity to envision truly profound change.

That may seem like an odd claim, given the extent to which contemporary
industrial society preens itself on its openness to change and novelty.
Still, it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of that
very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty to which it
applies amount to, basically, more of the same thing we’ve already got.
A consumer in a modern industrial society is free to choose any of a
dizzying range of variations on a suffocatingly narrow range of basic
options – and that’s equally true whether we are talking about products,
politics, or lifestyles.

Noam Chomsky, "Remembering Howard Zinn"

February 1, 2012 - 10:58am -- jim

Remembering Howard Zinn
Noam Chomsky

[Editor's note: January 27, 2012 was the second anniversary
of the death of Howard Zinn. An active participant in the
Civil Rights movement, he was dismissed in 1963 from his
position as a tenured professor at Spelman College in Atlanta
after siding with black women students in the struggle
against segregation. In 1967, he wrote one of the first, and
most influential, books calling for an end to the war in
Vietnam. A veteran of the US Army Air Force, he edited The
Pentagon Papers, leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and
was later designated a "high security risk" by the FBI.
His best-selling A People's History of the United States
spawned a new field of historical study: People's Histories.
This approach countered the traditional triumphalist
examination of "history as written by the victors", instead
concentrating on the poor and seemingly powerless; those who
resisted imperial, cultural and corporate hegemony. Zinn was
an award-winning social activist, writer and historian - and
so who better to share his memory than his close friend and
fellow intellectual giant, Noam Chomsky?]

It is not easy for me to write a few words about Howard Zinn,
the great American activist and historian. He was a very
close friend for 45 years. The families were very close too.
His wife Roz, who died of cancer not long before, was also a
marvellous person and close friend. Also sombre is the
realisation that a whole generation seems to be disappearing,
including several other old friends: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed
and others, who were not only astute and productive scholars,
but also dedicated and courageous militants, always on call
when needed - which was constant. A combination that is
essential if there is to be hope of decent survival.

Ira Cohen Memorial, New York City, Feb. 5, 2012

January 23, 2012 - 9:10am -- jim