[p2p-research] Fwd: Fw: [Autonogram] October 2009 Autonogram, interesting books for review

[Michel Bauwens]

----- Forwarded Message ----
*From:* Stevphen Shukaitis <stevphen at autonomedia.org>
*To:* autonogram at lists.interactivist.net
*Sent:* Tue, October 27, 2009 9:13:28 AM
*Subject:* [Autonogram] October 2009 Autonogram

Greetings Autonogram-subscribers,

Hot on the heels of a series of occupations (California! Vienna!), and just
in time for celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Great Stock Market Crash
of October 29th, 1929, we have several new books and a number of events and
things to announce. Capitalism: did it jump or was it pushed? You decide.
But now, for the announcements:

1. Toward A Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of
Knowledge and Exodus From The Education Factory, edited by the Edu-factory
Collective, released

2. Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of
Everyday Life by Stevphen Shukaitis released

3. Ideology of Design Reader, and Exhibition, Novi Sad, October 23rd –
November 23rd

4. Upcoming bookfairs and events

+++

1. Toward A Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of
Knowledge and Exodus From The Education Factory
Edited by the Edu-factory Collective

What was once the factory is now the university. We started off with this
apparently straightforward affirmation, not in order to assume it but to
question it; to open it, radically rethinking it, towards theoretical and
political research. The Edu-factory project took off from here… Edu-factory
is, above all, a partisan standpoint on the crisis of the university… The
state university is in ruins, the mass university is in ruins, and the
university as a privileged place of national culture – just like the concept
of national culture itself – is in ruins. We’re not suffering from
nostalgia. Quite the contrary, we vindicate the university’s destruction. In
fact, the crisis of the university was determined by social movements in the
first place.

This is what makes us not merely immune to tears for the past but enemies of
such a nostalgic disposition. University corporatization and the rise of a
global university… are not unilateral impositions or developments completely
contained by capitalist rationality. Rather they are the result – absolutely
temporary and thus reversible – of a formidable cycle of struggles. The
problem is to transform the field of tension delineated by the processes
analyzed in this book into specific forms of resistance and the organization
of escape routes. This is Edu-factory’s starting point and objective, its
style and its method.

Contributors include Toni Negri and Judith Revel, Andrew Ross, Stefano
Harney and Fred Moten, George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, Naoki Sakai
and Jon Solomon, Eileen Schell, Amit Basole, Carlo Vercellone, the Counter
Cartographies Collective, Jason Read, Randy Martin, Xiang Biao, James
Arvanitakis, Marc Bosquet, Vidya Ashram, Aihwa Ong, and many more.

http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&products_id=635

+++

2. Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of
Everyday Life
Stevphen Shukaitis

All power to the imagination? Over the past forty years to invoke the
imagination as a basis for radical politics has become a cliché: a
rhetorical utilization of ideas already in circulation, invoking the mythic
unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process. But what exactly is
radical imagination? Drawing from autonomist politics, class composition
analysis, and avant-garde arts, Imaginal Machines explores the emergence,
functioning, and constant breakdown of the embodied forms of radical
imagination.

What does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that
the imagination has already seized power through the power of the spectacle?
Does any subversive potentiality remain? Perhaps it is only honest to think
in terms of a temporally-bounded subversive power. It might be that imaginal
machines only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is only
possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. By reopening the question
of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the power of social
insurgency back into the working of capital and the state, we create
possibilities for a politics continually reconstituted against and through
the dynamics of recuperation: to keep open an antagonism without closure.

“Imaginal Machines explores with humor and wit the condition of art and
politics in contemporary capitalism. It reviews the potentials and limits of
liberatory art (from surrealism to Tom Waits) while charting the
always-resurgent creations of the collective imagination. Shukaitis exhibits
a remarkable theoretical breadth, bringing together the work of Castoriadis,
the Situationists, and autonomous Marxism to define a new task for militant
research: constructing imaginal machines that escape capitalism. Imaginal
Machines is truly a book that makes a path by walking.” – Silvia Federici,
author of Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation

“If you have ever had someone say to you, ‘okay it’s fine to criticize but
what would you do?’ this is the book for you. Shukaitis takes us on a
raucous ride through actually existing alternative organizations that are
anarchic, loving, fun, and best of all they work.  We meet people and
organizations who imagine a completely different way of being together in
the world.  And we are never far from a sophisticated theoretical travelogue
as we walk these roads with the author.  What would you do?  Try this, and
this, and this!” – Stefano Harney, Chair in Strategy, Culture, and
Organization, University of London

Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the
University of Essex. He is the editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber)
of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective
Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of
collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of
cultural and artistic labor.

http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=71&products_id=636

A series of events are planned for release of Imaginal Machines including in
Edinburgh (November 1st), Vienna (November 26th) and other to be announced
shortly. For more information check at http://www.minorcompositions.info.

+++

3. ID: Ideology of Design October 23rd – November 23rd, 2009
Kuda, Novi Sad & Autonomedia, New York Announce “ID: Ideology of Design”

ID: IDEOLOGY OF DESIGN
by New Media Center_kuda.org
October  23rd –November 23rd, 2009
Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina
Dunavska St. 37, Novi Sad
Opening of the exhibition: Friday, October 23rd

In what way are design practices perceived and understood today and in what
way can one follow their crucial development during the last decades of the
20th century and their connections with artistic practices and critical
discourses?

Planning for mass production, graphic design, industrial design, design of
environment, advertising, interior design, fashion design etc. are but some
of the determinants of this complex discipline of culture.

Whether we examine its development in socialism or capitalism, design is
always in close and dynamic connection with the economic and productive
bases of society, building different and/or specific relationships of man
with material culture. The object of researching and Ideology of Design
exhibition are theories and practices (of industrial and graphic) design
that were taking place during almost half a century of the socialist
Yugoslavia, and their wider social and ideological context.

Design is a pregnant and highly interdisciplinary field which includes
achievements from culture, science, architecture, technology and artistic
practice, and thus represents a fertile soil for sociological and
philosophical discussions on technology and market, about the social and
political-economical dynamics and the labor process. A special aspect of the
project was set on discussions and practices led at the time of socialist
Yugoslavia which tried to define the role of design in a (non-)market
socialist economy, its functionalism and its being conditioned by the
market, or its social engagement, and the role of design in forming a new
relationship of man with material objects, a new way of life towards
establishing a classless human community.

Developing progressive, critical and contradictory positions, design was
simultaneously presented a symbol of a post-war reconstruction of a country
under the wing of industrialization and liberation of man from material
privation, but as decades went by it played more and more one of the main
roles in building a socialist market society.

Research work, exhibition and publications of the Ideology of Design deal
with contextualization of contradictory processes refracted through theory
and practices of design and, parallel to this, the way by which different
ideologies of design and visual identities were created in the first
post-war period of forming Yugoslavia, then during the tempestuous 1960s and
1970s until the very end when this community ceased to exist. Also, this
project re-examines the chance to create a relationship between critical and
historical practices of design and contemporary design, which is more and
more seen as something belonging to the exclusively commercial aspect of
creative industries, which, refracted through an ideological prism of
neoliberal capitalism preserve the exploiting relationship regarding
creativity and the creative person. In this sense, a question arises: Is it
possible today to observe and practice design outside of the dominant
functionalist principles and the market-dictated production and consumption,
and to develop their engaged dimension in creating more humane social
relations, i.e., is it possible to conduct politicization of design
practices during “transition” times?

Ideology of Design is comprised of a couple of entireties, and of those
didactic exhibition stands out, with the represented:

– Video recordings – interviews – with some of the most important
protagonists of the Yugoslav theory and practice of design and history and
art criticism, and among them are Jerko Denegri and Branko Vučičević from
Belgrade, Matko Meštrović and Fedor Kritovac from Zagreb, Stane Bernik from
Ljubljana and Branislav Dobanovački from Novi Sad. The series of interviews
realised for the Ideology of Design project will be joined with an interview
with Ivan Picelj, a graphic designer from Zagreb, on the occasion of the
anniversary of Helvetica type, which was realised by Dragan Mileusnić
and Željko
Serdarević, a designer couple from Zagreb.

– In a joint production, Zagreb designer Dejan Kršić and Center_kuda.org
within the exhibition present a subjective timeline to the practices of
industrial and graphic design, and institutional and alternative frameworks
of design practices related to the paradigmatic social political and
economical events in the socialist Yugoslavia.

– Spatial intervention of two art and designers’ collectives, Metahaven from
Holland and Société Réaliste from France.

– “Total design” of the exhibition is completed by the mobile and modular
furniture “Z” blocks made after the design of NAO – Normal Architecture
Office and Srđan Jovanović Weiss from Philadelphia, USA.

– Workshops and educational-collaborative programmes will be organised and
realised by two Novi Sad initiatives of young generation designers - Open
Design Studio and A3.Format project.

– Public discussions and presentations will be organized during the one
month of the exhibition, with some of the protagonists from contemporary
scene of design theory and practice, such is design theorist Feđa Vukić from
Zagreb, designer and writer Dejan Kršić from Zagreb and Borut Vild –
designer from Belgrade. Precise program of the public discussions will be
announced in the following days.

– Reader –
Apart from the spoken program that takes place during the exhibition, the
discursive platform of the project is completed by the bilingual reader
containing 13 collected essays that provide a theoretical insight into the
project theme published by Autonomedia from New York. Among the authors of
the essays you will find the works of: Jean Baudrillard, Igor Chubarov, an
interview with Jerko Denegri, Branislav Dimitrijević, Hal Foster, Dejan Krši
ć, Nenad Malešević, Metahaven, Borislav Mikulić, Barbara Predan, Jacques
Rancière, Feđa Vukić and WHW collective, editor: Branka Ćurčić, ISBN
978-1-57027-209-7, design of the reader: Peter Gregson Studio, Novi Sad

ID: Ideology of Design is an integral part of a long-term research project
called Art Always Has Its Consequences, and four organizations are
cooperating in this project: WHW from Croatia, tranzit.hu from Hungary,
Museum Sztuki from Poland and Centar_kuda.org from Serbia in the period
between 2008 and 2010. The project is dedicated to creating and distributing
new discoveries and knowledge about paradigmatic socially engaged practices
in art and design in the region and in the Eastern Europe, including their
relationship with the wider European context in the past and now. Also, the
exhibition is a part of the Individual Utopias Now and Before project which
is realized in cooperation with SCCA/pro.ba from Bosnia and Herzegovina and
T.I.C.A. from Albania.

http://www.kuda.org/en/id
http://www.artalways.org
http://www.pro.ba/bs/utopije

+++

4. Upcoming Bookfairs & Events
Autonomedia will be tabling at a number of events and bookfairs in the
coming months. Here are some of the upcoming events:

– Edinburgh Independent Radical Book Fair 2009 (UK), October 28th – November
1st (http://www.word-power.co.uk)
– The Internet as Playground and Factory, November 12th – 14th, New School,
NYC (http://digitallabor.org)
– Deleuze & Activism conference (UK), November 12th – 13th (
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/newsandevents/events/conferences/deleuze/index.html
)
– Historical Materialism (UK), November 27th – 28th (
http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/conference2009.htm)

That is all for now, me thinks. More to follow shortly. Wishing you all a
lovely Halloween and a delightful day of the dead.

Cheers + solidarity,
Stevphen

--
:: Autonomedia:: Seditious & Delicious ::
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://info.interactivist.net
http://www.myspace.com/autonomedia


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