Micropolitics Autumn 08

The Sensible At Work
Micropolitics Mondays
Beginning 13 October 6:30 PM
Housman's Bookshop, 2nd floor

5 Caledonian Road
Kings Cross
London N1 9DX
http://micropolitics.wordpress.com

Building on lessons learned from past visitors, Suely Rolnik, Brian Holmes and Franco Berardi, this year, the Micropolitics group will take it slowly. Departing from our drifts, narratives and fables of our experience of Post-Fordist life and labour, we will elaborate concepts from what Suely Rolnik calls the ‘sensible mutations’ found within our current regimes of value production. How do provoke frictions and counter-conducts, structures of support, and other forms of value, for ourselves and with others? How might we intervene into the formats and processes that manage expectations, relationships, the production of knowledge and social care?

Part seminar, part analytic support group, micropolitics will meet on the second Monday of each month.

"Worse than They Want You to Think: A Marxist Analysis of the Economic Crisis"
A Talk by Andrew Kliman

The New SPACE (The New School for Pluralistic Anti-Capitalist Education)
Tuesday, October 21 at 7:00 p.m.

In their haste to promote redistributive policies and demonize the greed and corruption of Wall Street––and in their desire to avoid advocating a liberatory alternative to capitalism––liberals and leftists have sought to downplay the severity of the current economic crisis. In contrast, Kliman will argue that the crisis is every bit as serious and acute as the fear-mongering financial analysts and officials at the Treasury and Federal Reserve say it is. If the $800 billion rescue plan does not quickly restore lenders’ confidence in the system, the flow of credit may stop, causing the real economy, in the U.S. and abroad, to seize up. Income redistribution, infrastructure investment, financial regulation, and legal protections against foreclosures are not alternatives to the Wall Street bailout. The only alternative is a new, human, socio-economic system.

Call for participation

TURN*ON
Artivistic 2009 (Fall)
Montreal, Canada
http://artivistic.org

The world to come is so sexy. We are unstoppable for we are fueled with an incredible urge to embrace the pleasure provided by difference, exchange and freedom. Our actions today are charged with an energy that is animated by the rise of change and a movement that is simply irresistible.

New movements are arising at the intersections of sex, politics and technology. These movements are inspired by, as well as critical of, the long traditions of struggle they stem from, remixing gender bending, sex work (and play), and media activism. From body hacking to the implosion of the service economy, where are we today and what new possibilities can we envision and nurture?

For its upcoming fourth edition, Artivistic is going sexy. Discussing, questioning, and imagining the past, present, future, and infinite possibilities of sex. While keeping issues of power and control in question, we want to turn to the potency of pleasure, curiosity, humor, and desire in order to TURN*ON that which has yet to be thought and experienced differently.

*Commonplaces of Transition*
Screening and talk by Joanne Richardson, D Media, Romania

Wed, 24 Sept, 7pm - 9pm
Mute, Main Hall, The Whitechapel Center, 85 Myrdle Street, London E1

*Films*
In Transit (30 min, 2008)
Precarious Lives (excerpt, 43 min, 2008)
Two or Three Things about Activism (excerpt, 73 min, 2008)

On the following night 'Two or Three Things about Activism' will be screened at RampArt, see http://therampart.wordpress.com/

Commonplaces of Transition is a collaborative project between D Media (Romania), Ak-Kraak (Germany), Interspace (Bulgaria) and K:SAK (Moldova) that has produced 8 videos about the remapping of borders, the transformation of labour and the evolution of activism. Joanne Richardson will screen In Transit (30 min, 2008), Precarious Lives (excerpt, 43 min, 2008) and Two or Three Things about Activism (excerpt, 73 min, 2008), and discuss the connection of the project to video activism and counter-documentary.

'In Transit' is a diary of a journey through space and time, composed of subjective impressions of the present, childhood memories and recycled fragments of the past. While traveling across Romania in the year of its EU accession, the monologue reflects on the meaning of transition, the re-writing of history and the relation between images and memory. Multiple layers of signification emerge in references other films by Guy Debord, Chris Marker and Peter Forgacs.

Joanne Richardson is living and working in Cluj as a theorist, artist and program director of D Media ( http://www.dmedia.ro ). She is the editor of a webzine ( http://subsol.c3.hu ) and two books on digital culture, has written essays on the radical left, video activism, tactical media, copyleft and has made videos on issues ranging from globalization, to nationalism and postcommunism.

"From the Edge of the Blade"
New Documentary on Oaxaca

On June 14th 2006, when police forces attacked thousands of striking teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, the annual strike turned into a widespread popular rebellion, demanding the governors' resignation. A broad social movement of teachers, social organizations, unions, students, activists, and indigenous communities took over the city in an effort to change the devastating conditions imposed on them by international trade agreements and corrupt politicians.

To watch a preview, and for more info, go to http://www.trickleupfilms.org.

"From the Edge of the Blade" tells the story about the 2006 popular uprising in Oaxaca, as put by some of the teachers, activists, workers, students, human rights workers, tortured and imprisoned.

Do you want to arrange a screening? I can help! Send an email to contact@trickleupfilms.org.

[Alan Moore notes: "This is Nato Thompson’s joint. I must recommend it and him as a stand-up do-right political cutrator working in the institutional mainstream. He has roots. His gang was responsible for the exciting 2003 Chicago weekend guerrilla action called "Department of Space and Land Reclamation (DSLR)" (see http://www.counterproductiveindustries.com/ for details). So this is probably going to be pretty good… Here is the event website: http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2008/democracy/convergence.... ]

Artists Soldier for Democracy at the Park Avenue Armory 9/21-27
Daniel Kunitz (Village Voice, September 03, 2008)

About a year ago, Nato Thompson, a curator and producer at the public-art organization Creative Time, woke up wondering why "life was such a bummer."

"I thought I might actually be politically depressed," he says. "Political depression set in among a lot of people after the second election of George W. Bush—not just artists, but all sorts of people nationwide." With the war in Iraq, revelations about torture and illegal wiretapping, and the failures after Hurricane Katrina, there was "real confusion about democracy. There was this feeling that you can't stop anything."

Thompson's cure for this depression was to organize "Democracy in America: The National Campaign," an artistic and political initiative, which during the week of September 21 to 27 will culminate in the Convergence Center at the Park Avenue Armory, a sort of political Lollapalooza. "It's not an art exhibition in the traditional sense," he says—though some 45 artists will be included. "It's more of a rally, more of a place to discuss, to hear speeches, to get excited."

Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now
September 20 – November 22, 2008
Opening: September 20, 2008, 7-10pm
Exit Art, 475 Tenth Ave., New York City

Signs of Change is a major exhibition opening at Exit Art on September 20, 2008, chronicling 50 years of the cultural productions of social movements. Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee have curated over 600 posters, prints, photographs, moving images, audio clips, and other ephemera from over 30 countries. Signs of Change provides a dialogue with the past and an engagement with the present about the important cultural work of social movements. From the American Indian Movement to Women's Liberation, the South African Anti-Apartheid struggle to Portugal's Revolution of the Carnations, German Autonomen and squatters to South Korea's Kwang Ju uprising, this exhibition carries us through the whirlwind of people taking action to change the world.

RENEWING THE ANARCHIST TRADITION
A Scholarly Conference
November 7-9, 2008 in Montpelier, Vermont

The ninth edition of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference, sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), once again aims to provide a participatory and scholarly space in which to reexamine, reinvigorate, and make relevant the social and political tradition of anarchism.

Each year, RAT brings together anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and libertarian leftists who want to critically engage both the tradition itself and the world in which we live. Participants and presenters at the conference thereby contribute to developing a more rigorous contemporary theoretical framework for anarchism as well as a stronger basis from which nonhierarchical movements can organize and resist.

2008 is a strange time to be an anarchist in North America. Thomas Friedman is calling for a green revolution, and Bono is at the forefront of a global war on poverty. The bright light of the U.S. presidential election campaign, anointed by Silicon Valley capital, has harnessed massive popular desire for radical social transformation--"Change"--to propel himself toward the White House. The reception he receives abroad articulates a thirst for a genuine internationalism, even as he signals his readiness to command more of the same military interventionism that has devastated people and social movements around the world. As anarchists and anti-authoritarians, it is easy to feel marginal, dissipated, defeated, and irrelevant as we watch some of our dearest ideas co-opted, sucked of content, turned inside out, and projected into the mainstream political scene.

What better moment, then, to come together to reflect on and honestly appraise the practices, platforms, convictions, dogmas, truisms, and theories that anarchism offers? What better moment to reimbue that tradition with a crucial sense of urgency and the substance that can genuinely challenge racism, imperialism, sexism, colonial pillage, capitalist exploitation, and the multifold and mutually reinforcing forms of oppression and systems of domination?

BENEFIT CD RE-RELEASE: MARIE MASON’S ‘NOT FOR PROFIT’

This music CD is a 2008 benefit re-release of Marie Mason's ‘Not For Profit’, which was originally released in 1999. A classic anarchist neo-folk record, these eight songs feature Marie (accompanied by guitarist and Earth First! activist Darryl Cherney) singing against the destruction of the earth and the oppression of humanity.

Mason is a recent Green Scare arrestee who is facing Life in prison for two acts of property destruction in which no one was hurt.. She is a long-time IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and Earth First! activist, as well as a writer for ‘Fifth’ Estate magazine. All proceeds from this re-release go to the Marie Mason General Support Fund. For more information visit: http://freemarie.org.

:: Call for Papers, Presentations, and Interventions ::

The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts
April 29th to May 1st, 2009
Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, University of Leicester

Keynote speakers:
Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples L’orientale
Natalie Jeremijenko, New York University
Nick Dyer-Witheford, University of Western Ontario

In a more wistful moment, Marx asked what commodities would say if they could speak. Surely, if he listened long enough, they would have announced the various traumas of their exploitatative and violent birthing to him. Eventually, one imagines, they would have described the nature of the various forms of labour necessary for their production as the apparitionally elementary components of the capitalist mode of production. So would the commodity’s autobiography be the same now, one wonders.

Today we live in a much different state of things: the artifice of artefacts is evident all around us. A parliament of communication technologies, from RFIDS to bluetooth devices, constantly exchange information and network all around and through us. Wireless networks of communication, control, and cooperation proliferate in mysterious ways, all speaking an infra-language of organization, inscribing new techniques of governance. But these networks have become all the more indiscernible by the open secret of their appearance.