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EventsAutonomy, Composition, and the Radical Imagination Thursday October 9th, in gallery “Kaire-Desine” (Left-Right), Latako Street 3, Vilnius. 6pm. What is the nature of the radical imagination? Drawing from autonomist and anarchist politics, class composition analysis, and avant-garde arts, this seminar will explore the emergence, functioning, and constant break down of the resistant social imaginary: the continual cycles of composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the potentiality of struggles composed by capacities created within social movement. It is these cycles of composition, the circulation of struggle, which compose the revolutions of everyday life. To invoke the imagination as underlying and supporting radical politics, over the past forty years, has become a cliché. A rhetorical utilization of ideas that are already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process of circulation. But what exactly is radical imagination? And more specifically, what are the compositional capacities created by the emergence, transformation, mutation, and decomposition of collective imagination within social movements? Imagination is not something that is ahistorical, derived from nothing, but an ongoing relationship and material capacity constituted by social interactions between bodies. While liberatory impulses might point to a utopian (no)where that is separate from the present, it is necessary to point from somewhere, from a particular situated imagining. The task of a radical politics is one of understanding and renewal of forms of self-organization and the imagination. These are questions fruitfully approached through a renewal of militant research, workers inquiry, and class composition analysis, which will be explored. This seminar will investigate the construction of imaginal machines, that is, the socially, historically embedded and embodied manifestations of the radical imagination. Imagination, not as something possessed by individuals, but rather the composition of capacities to affect and be affected by the world developed movements toward creating forms of autonomous sociality and collective self-determination. What does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized power (through media flows and the power of the spectacle)? Does any subversive potentiality remain, or are we left with simply more avenues for the rejuvenation of questionable fields of power and rearticulating regimes of accumulation? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally bounded subversive power, one that like the mayfly has its day in the sun. It might be that imaginal machines, like all desiring 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 exploring a politics continually reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation, to keep open an antagonism without closure that is continually recomposed. To develop tools necessary in resisting the continual subdivision and suburbanization of the radical imagination. The Art of Rent / A series of open seminars * GOVERNANCE AND THE INSTITUTION OF THE COMMON Thursday 5 June, 4 to 7pm STEFANO HARNEY - Queen Mary University of London JUDITH REVEL - Sorbonne University, Paris ALBERTO DE NICOLA - ESC atelier occupato, Roma (www.escatelier.net) RAUL SANCHEZ - UniNomada, Madrid (www.universidadnomada.net) Solidarity is a Weapon! Benefit for Marie Mason NYC June 7 Acclaimed environmental writer, author of ‘Culture of Make Believe’, ‘A Language Older Than Words’, ‘Endgame’, and other works. Jensen discusses the recent state repression of activist groups (the “Green Scare”), the state of the environmental defense movement, and the fate of our planet. All proceeds will benefit the legal fund for Marie Mason and other recently arrested environmental activists. This is part of the June 7th National Day of Resistance Against the Green Scare. If you cannot make this event but would like to donate to the legal fund, you can do so at http://freemarie.org. JUNE 7, 7PM FUSIONARTS, 57 Stanton Street, Lower East Side NYC Common Cause will be hosting Hamilton's first ever Anarchist Bookfair. Free lunch. Childcare available. This is a transgender friendly space. Fellow underdogs unite in underdog city for a day of workshops, discussion, networking and of course literature! June 14th marks the day that the Common Cause Hamilton local will be hosting our first Anarchist Book Fair. In a city with a vibrant history of working class struggle such as Hamilton, the Book Fair presents a unique opportunity for people coming together to network,learn and build community. ABC No Rio Zine Library Party, New York City Friday May 30 Comics Artists and Illustrators, Music and Beer! SABRINA JONES: Contributor and editor, World War 3 Illustrated (Most KEVIN PYLE: Creator, Lab U.S.A. - illuminated documents Art in the Age of Terrorism: A panel organized by Eyebeam and the 2008 World Science Festival Steven Kurtz--the artist accused of bioterrorism in federal court--will make his first public appearance following the dismissal of his case. New York City, May 23, 2008-In collaboration with the 2008 World Science Festival, Eyebeam announces a very special panel on the ethics of scientific and creative research featuring Critical Art Ensemble's Steven Kurtz alongside science writer Carl Zimmer, bioethicist George Annas and author Eugene Thacker at 7PM on May 29 at Eyebeam. The panel discussion--Kurtz's first public appearance since the US government's controversial case against him was dropped on April 21, 2008, four years after he was first detained--is co-organized with the 2008 World Science Festival and the Berkeley Center for New Media. In May of 2004, Steven Kurtz was detained by the FBI on suspicion of "bioterrorism" for his possession of scientific materials used in his award-winning art practice. Kurtz, a University at Buffalo professor and founding member of the internationally acclaimed collective Critical Art Ensemble, uses biological materials in educational exhibits and performances designed to inspire debate about political and social issues surrounding the new biotechnologies. Robert Kocik & Joel Kuszai Robert Kocik, poet, essayist, artist, architect, eleemosynary entrepreneur, lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he directs the Bureau of Material Behaviors. As a builder, his niche is the realization of unknown architectural functions and missing civic services. He is currently developing a building based on 'prosody' and poets' imagined relevance to our society. His essays comprise a nascent field known as the Sore, Oversensitive Sciences (SOS). His publications include: Overcoming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2001), and Rhrurbarb (Field Books, 2007). May 8, 2008 Please join the United Nations Department of Public Information, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the Natural World Museum for a groundbreaking international seminar. The Art Changing Attitudes Toward the Environment seminar will focus on a top priority for the United Nations: climate change and the environment. The seminar will contribute to keeping the spotlight on the issue from a different perspective and will be an important contribution and forum to reach out to the general public. Admission is free to the public. To RSVP email unchronicle@un.org or call 917.367.9326 London, March 15: Brian Holmes Book Release, "Unleashing the Collective Phantoms" Saturday March 15th, 6:30 PM book launch Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays In Reverse Imagineering by Brian Holmes Come join us to celebrate the release of Brian Holmes’ new book Unleashing the Collective Phantoms. These insurgent essays describe, prolong and critique some of the cultural and artistic projects that arose with the worldwide wave of protests around the turn of the millennium, against what the global South calls neoliberalism. Dissent and the refusal of a programmed existence continually return to the streets; but they also unfold in the imagination. Hosted by Autonomedia (www.autonomedia.org) and Mute Magazine (www.metamute.org) Housmans Bookshop 'The New Spirit of Capitalism, Value and the End of Critique' An ephemera workshop (www.ephemeraweb.org), 29-30 May 2008 Co-organised by the School of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, and the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. Call for contributions and participation Novelty has, for a long while, been a source of value for capitalism. Writers on management churn out 'new' organisational structures and control systems at a rate that would put a Parisian fashion house to shame: MBO, JIT, BPR, TQM, CoP, Culture, Quality, Flexibility, Outsourcing, virtual, virtuous networks of CSR, PR and RM. Like Klee's Angelus Novus, the shock of the 'new' drives us irresistibly back to the future as the debris of progress pile up in front of us as an indistinguishable mass of failed experiments and outmoded ideas. Indeed, with such a rate of continuous change, one cannot help but wonder whether, like the 'idiot's tale' in MacBeth, the whole discourse of change is 'full of sound and fury' but 'signifying nothing'. In such a context it takes a certain bravado to offer up the grand claim that Capitalism has undergone a fundamental restructuring, and yet this is precisely the argument made by Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. According to Boltanski and Chiapello, Capitalism found itself in complete crisis in the late 1960s. With students rejecting careers in management and workers no longer satisfied by the prospect of higher wages for higher productivity, the entire capitalist system was on the verge of collapse. From within this critique, however, came the seeds of its rebirth. Demands for autonomy, empowerment and creativity at work were met with a new idea of capitalism, far removed from the fusty, grey-suited atmosphere of 'Organisation Man' and the hey-day of the faceless Goliaths like IBM. The new capitalism is an entirely funkier affair, where surfing has become the ruling ideology and 'excitement' has replaced 'security' as the dominant value. 
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