The Beach Beneath the Street Release Party NYC June 8
June 8 at 8PM @ Spoonbill & Sugartown 218 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn 11211

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporaryvoice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.

McKenzie Wark presents his new book The Beach Beneath the Street A Fresh Historyof the Situationist International(Verso, 2011) on Wednesday night, Admission is Free but Seating is Limited. For info please call or email sugar@spoonbillbooks.com!

The Anarchist Turn
May 5th-6th, 2011

Philosophy Department, The New School for Social Research
The Hannah Arendt and Reiner Schürmann Symposium in Political Philosophy
Theresa Lang Center | 55 W. 13th St. | Mezzanine Level

For a long time, the word “anarchist” has been used as an insult. This is because, at least since Thomas Hobbes, the concept of anarchy has been extended from its etymological meaning (absence of centralized government) to that of pure disorder - the idea being that, without a sovereign state, the life of individuals can only be brutish, miserable, and chaotic. This move was certainly functional to the ideological justification of modern sovereign states, but not to an understanding of what anarchy might be.

In the last decade, this caricature of anarchy has begun to crack. Globalization and the social movements it spawned seem to have proved what anarchists have long been advocating: an anarchical order is not just desirable, but also feasible. This has led to a revitalized interest in the subterranean anarchist tradition and its understanding of anarchy as collective self-organization without centralized authority. But the ban on “anarchism” has not yet been lifted.