Books by Stevphen Shukaitis
Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been easy. Creative workers find... more Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of economic growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as the conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious. How can you make a living today in such a situation? That is, how to hold together the demands of paying the rent and bills while managing all the tasks necessary to support one’s practice? How to manage the tensions between creating spaces for creativity and imagination while working through the constraints posed by economic conditions?
In a more traditional workplace it is generally easy to distinguish between those who planned and managed the labor process and those who were involved in its executions: between the managers and the managed. For creative workers these distinctions become increasingly hard to make. Today the passionate and self-motivated labor of the artisan increasingly becomes the model for a self-disciplining, self-managed labor force that works harder, longer, and often for less pay precisely because of its attachment to some degree of personal fulfillment in forms of engaging work. And that ain’t no way to make a living, having to struggle three times as hard for just to have a sense of engagement in meaningful work.
The Wages of Dreamwork investigates how cultural workers in the modern metropolis manage these competing tensions and demands. Does the cultural economy treat you as a tool? If so, perhaps it’s time to rethink how to down tools in this metropolitan factory.
Dialogues and essays exploring collaboration in artist collective & self-organized cultural produ... more Dialogues and essays exploring collaboration in artist collective & self-organized cultural production
During the industrial revolution artisans and craft workers sparked struggles against exploitation while the force of law drove unions underground. Today conditions are different… yet they are not. Collective organizing is pre-empted not by legal prohibition but rather by a perverse internalized neoliberal logic that celebrates the precarious creative worker as its exemplar.
Combination Acts draws together fifteen years of conversations with artists, musicians, activists, and theorists about the nature of collaborative practice. What sociality is produced by their practices? What forms of collectivity do they animate and embody? Taken together these dialogues provide a series of study notes for and from the self-organization of the undercommons, gesturing towards an aesthetics that occupies a space of power for itself by coming to close to, but never finally reaching, a set form.
“The mood and tense of revolution can be obscure even to those who act it out – as polyphonic combination, cutting normative conceptions of person and number – in beautifully everyday experiments that strain against the brutally ongoing. Thankfully, in this timely primer, Stevphen Shukaitis reminds us how to conjugate the verbs to live, to fight, and to enjoy.” – Fred Moten, New York University
“Combination Acts offers an overview of political cultural tools and tactics radicals have mobilized over the 20th century and into the 21st. Shukaitis steers through rebellious terrain, from cyberhacking and forms of sabotage to critiques of global neoliberal institutions and horizontal re-commoning, opening new terrains of speculative imaginative possibilities. A necessary guide to militant culture in the new millennium.” – Jaleh Mansoor, University of British Columbia
“Combination Acts is an exhilarating read as it boldly combines optimism (the always renewed burden of struggles on the left) and pragmatism (the requirement of actually existing praxis). Engaging dialogues and theoretical analysis are also combined in this cutting-edge study, on material and in ways that are indispensable for carrying forward the spirit and actuality of insurgent togetherness. The key question of the book – what interventions would be needed so that the grammar of self-organization would not find itself rendered into the fixed forms of capital’s continued accumulation demands? – is answered through multiple narrative documents of real-life experience crossing through the art field. At the very least, the book informs us of the depth of critical thought from which practices of anti-status-quo alternatives stem; as for what the book achieves at its best, this is dependent on whether and how we seek to implement what we learn from it. An essential and inspirational reality check on collaboration, labour, its content and discontent, and the conundrum of art activism, among numerous other markers of the zeitgeist.” – Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh
Preface and Introduction from
The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labor ... more Preface and Introduction from
The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde
Stevphen Shukaitis
How does the avant-garde create spaces in everyday life that subvert regimes of economic and political control? How do art, aesthetics and activism inform one another? And how do strategic spaces of creativity become the basis for new forms of production and governance?
The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor. It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these considerations.
“With The Composition of Movements to Come Stevphen Shukaitis does again what he has been doing as an author and editor for years: pushing the boundaries of intellectual and activist thought on the Left. By insisting that culture be understood strategically, rather than merely employed tactically, Shukaitis has unlocked the secret of an affective and effective artistic activism for our times. Brilliant and useful.” – Stephen Duncombe, New York University; Co-Director, Center for Artistic Activism
“Stevphen Shukaitis has produced an exposition on the strategic – as opposed to purely tactical – possibilities immanent within the post-war avant-garde that is as beautiful as the chance meeting of Autonomous Marxism and the Situationist International on the dissecting-table of critical theory.” – Gregory Sholette, Queens College Art Department, City University of New York
“Can strategy emerge from out of the diverse, fragmentary and temporary tactics of contemporary social movements? In this important book, which offers telling historical perspectives and is at the same time forged in the practice of political opposition, Stevphen Shukaitis offers a sustained argument that it can, and that it should.” – Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art
“I was convinced it was impossible to say something new about politics and the avant-garde, and I really enjoyed being proved wrong in so many different ways.” – David Graeber, London School of Economics
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International:
http://www.rowmaninternational.com/books/the-composition-of-movements-to-come
And when we are called to this other place, the wild beyond, "beyond the beyond" in Moten and Har... more And when we are called to this other place, the wild beyond, "beyond the beyond" in Moten and Harney's apt terminology, we have to give ourselves over to a certain kind of craziness. Moten reminds us that even as Fanon took an anti-colonial stance, he knew that it "looks crazy" but, Fanon, as a psychiatrist, also knew not to accept this organic division between the rational and the crazy and he knew that it would be crazy for him not to take that stance in a world that had assigned to him the role of the unreal, the primitive and the wild. Fanon, according to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the end of the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense. In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to power, one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other, the other who has been rendered a nonentity by colonialism. Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order. Moten takes us there, saying of Fanon finally: "Eventually,
Mike Dines is seeking contributions from the wide spectrum of musicology and social sciences for ... more Mike Dines is seeking contributions from the wide spectrum of musicology and social sciences for an edited text on the anarcho-punk scene of the 1980s that will reflect upon its origins, its music(s), its identity, its legacy, its membership and circulation. Seven years ago, I was awarded my PhD for my research into the emergence of the anarcho-punk scene and, to my surprise, there are still no academic texts that fully unpack this fascinating movement and its politics. As such, I would like to put out a call for proposals in the hope that we might rectify this omission: and thus raising questions as to how we can define aesthetically, culturally, politically and ideologically the concept and meaning of the anarcho-punk scene. As such, the volume has guaranteed contributions from the likes of Andy Worthington, author of The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and Russell Bestley, whose book The Art of Punk is due for release. Furthermore, George McKay, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Communication, Cultural & Media Studies Research Centre from the University of Salford will preface the volume. Perhaps the foremost academic in the field of alternative cultures and protest movements, George is the author of a number of books including Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties and Glastonbury: A Very English Fair.
Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces is a first of its kind -- an anthology of voi... more Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces is a first of its kind -- an anthology of voices from the post-1968 squatting movement in Europe which is focused on creative production and cultural innovation. Is squatting art? It is certainly a tactic which has enabled a tremendous body of collective work in culture to be done, and new kinds of lives to be lived. Making Room lays it out in the words of those who did it and study it.
Free pdf download via link
With contributions by:
Alan W. Moore, Stevphen Shukaitis, Universidad Nómada, Tino Buchholz, Vincent Boschma, Geert Lovink, Alan Smart, Aja Waalwijk, Jordan Zinovich, Britta Lillesøe,Tina Steiger, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, x-Chris, Kasper Opstrup, Azomozox, Ashley Dawson, Sarah Lewison, Azomozox, Nina Fraeser, Julia Ramírez Blanco,
Tobias Morawski, Eliseo Fucolti, Gianni Piazza, Assembly of Teatro Valle, Patrick Nagle, Emanuele Braga, Margot Verdier, Vincent Prieur, Jon Lackman, Jacqueline Feldman, Julia Lledin, Elisabeth Lorenzi, Julia Lledinm, Stephen Luis Vilaseca, La Casa Invisible, Stephen Luis Vilaseca, Yasmin Ramirez, Gregory Lehmann, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, Jasna Babic, Tristan Wibault, Galvao Debelle dos Santos, E.T.C. Dee, Spencer Sunshine, Maxigas, mujinga.
All power to the imagination? Over the past forty years to invoke the imagination as a basis for ... more 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.
cs 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
MÁQUINAS IMAGINANTES, 2017
This is a Spanish translation of the introduction and first two chapters of "Imaginal Machines: A... more This is a Spanish translation of the introduction and first two chapters of "Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life."
Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life
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
What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more ... more What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic authors and engaged intellectuals--including Antonio Negri and Colectivo Situaciones--provide some challenging answers. In the process, they redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself.
Includes materials from Brian Holmes * Ben Holtzman // Craig Hughes // Kevin Van Meter * Antonio Negri * Colectivo Situaciones * Gavin Grindon * Maribel Casas-Cortes + Sebastian Cobarrubias * Angela Mitropolous * Jack Bratich * Harry Halpin * Jeff Juris * Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma * Ben Shepard * Kirsty Robertson * Bre * Anita Lacey * Michal Osterweil + Graeme Chesters * Dave Eden * Uri Gordon * Ashar Latif + Sandra Jeppesen
"These essays present a series of inspiring examples of how to conduct research for radical politics both inside and outside the university." - Michael Hardt, author (with Antonio Negri) of Empire and The Labor of Dionysus
"This book is one of a kind. This book answers the question of what anarchist social studies, as opposed to conventional marxism or liberalism might look like. It combines a searching discussion of methods of research with substantive issues such as “who is the researcher?” Arguing that research is engaged or it is nothing, that “academics” who have no commitment to fundamental social change generally cannot produce work that illuminates the world and sparks the radical imagination, the various authors represented in this volume have collectively made a critical contribution to knowledge. The introduction is itself a major contribution to our understanding of the significance of what the editors call '68 thought', the reference being not only to the famous May events in France but to the Italian hot autumn of the following year." – Stanley Aronowitz, author of False Promises and The Knowledge Factory
Papers by Stevphen Shukaitis
Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, 2025
This article explores the work of Gee Vaucher. Vaucher is best known for her work with the band C... more This article explores the work of Gee Vaucher. Vaucher is best known for her work with the band Crass but has an extensive range of work from the 1960s until the present. The article delves into Vaucher's relationship with surrealism, through her project A Week of Knots (2013-2022). In this project, Vaucher uses the psychoanalytic insights of R.D. Laing to rewrite Max Ernst's collage novel, Une semaine de bonté. Doing so provides a space for Vaucher to explore the nature of violence, power, and care, among many other aspects. What can we learn from Vaucher's collaging practice that combines influences from Ernst and Laing? And what can this way of using that backdrop as a kind of collective psychoanalytic tool tell us about the family's changing nature?
American Journal of Sociology Volume 129, Number 4, 2024
It’s somewhat paradoxical that when writing about Sun Ra, discussing as- pects of his work and l... more It’s somewhat paradoxical that when writing about Sun Ra, discussing as- pects of his work and life, from music to philosophy, and his role as found- ing figure in Afrofuturism, is made more difficult by the figure of Ra himself. How, or why, is this? It is because in the accounts of his life and work, it is easy to approach and become enamored by Ra as a larger-than-life figure and to stay focused on his idiosyncratic personal traits, more so than the context and times from which he emerged and to which he responded. This is precisely what William Sites’s book Sun Ra’s Chicago does very well: it steps back from engaging with Ra’s performative persona to examine the context in which this performative persona was developed and shaped. As Sites puts it in the introduction, Ra’s “self-presentation as a traveler from a different world can overshadow his creative and often deeply critical en- gagement with this one” (p. 2). By stepping back in this manner, we get a different sense of that critical and creative engagement that leads to emer- gence of Ra the free jazz band leader from outer space.
Southeast of Now, 2023
This interview with comic and graphic artist Sonny Liew surveys his work over the past 15 years, ... more This interview with comic and graphic artist Sonny Liew surveys his work over the past 15 years, which has brought more attention to comics from Southeast Asia and expanded the possibilities of the medium. Liew discusses his influences and approach to storytelling, and engaging with the histories and political milieus that often form the backdrop to and inform the stories being told.
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2019
This article explores the expanded and transformed nature of the psychological work contract for ... more This article explores the expanded and transformed nature of the psychological work contract for forms of cultural and artistic labour in precarious conditions. The forms of passionate work found within cultural production are argued to form a new model for governing our subjective involvement in and attachment to work. This more expansive and demanding relationship with work has become generalized beyond the specific area of cultural production into employment relationships more generally. In doing so the expanded psychological contract of work comes to operate as a form of logistical media and infrastructural governance, connecting the micropolitics of governing labour with larger structural conditions of precarity and instability. Thus, while work today is less stable in what it offers, it demands even greater psychological investment despite increased uncertainty.
In March 2017, Firstsite, a contemporary art gallery in Colchester, UK, hosted #WorldsUpsideDown,... more In March 2017, Firstsite, a contemporary art gallery in Colchester, UK, hosted #WorldsUpsideDown, an exhibition curated by Stevphen Shukaitis that explored art’s treatment of moments of destabilization, crisis, and renewal. Included were photographs by Cairo-based artist Mosa’ab Elshamy of the 2011-2013 revolt in Egypt; Justseeds’s Celebrate People’s History poster series; and David Mabb’s Long Live the New! Morris & Co, Hand Printed Wallpapers and K. Malevich’s, Suprematism. These works were chosen because each communicates or represents moments of upheaval and provokes questions for audiences about how such moments resonate with each other and about what we can learn from aesthetic representation of such moments. Connecting with the themes of this issue, the exhibit explored how cycles of struggle expand aesthetic possibilities and media communications, from the Russian revolution’s embrace of the avant-garde to more recent utilization of social media. A public seminar with Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Stevphen Shukaitis was organized to explore themes in the exhibition and in their respective writings. What follows is an excerpt from that seminar.
Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 2018
Book review of Sam C. Y. (2017). Private education in Singapore. Contemporary issues and challeng... more Book review of Sam C. Y. (2017). Private education in Singapore. Contemporary issues and challenges. Singapore: World Scientfic.
This article addresses the class composition of artistic and cultural labor in the metropolis: pr... more This article addresses the class composition of artistic and cultural labor in the metropolis: practices bringing with them political possibilities and potentials for renewed economic growth, but also the threat of exploitation and precarity. To shed light on the area of knowledge engaging with the lived realities of creative workers and the forms of subjectivation occurring in forms of labor, we bring together existing accounts addressing the politics of cultural work and the findings of our “Metropolitan Factory” research project. The research project, based on an investigation of the conditions and activities of independent cultural producers and drawing from the tradition of workers' inquiry, addresses, among other issues, the spatial organization of the creative labor process, the language used by workers to describe relations between life and work, and various forms of self-expression.
ephemera, 2013
What would commodities say if they could speak? If Marx had listened long enough, would these tal... more What would commodities say if they could speak? If Marx had listened long enough, would these talking commodities announce the traumas of their exploitative and violent birthing to him? Eventually, one imagines, they would have described the nature of the various forms of labour necessary for their production in the capitalist mode. As Fred Moten (2003) points out, history is marked by the revolt of the screaming commodity: the body of the slave fighting against its imposed status of thing-liness. The rise of consumer culture, the proliferation and intensification of the commodity form, can be understood as the expansion of the violence of accumulation all across the social field. The ferocious forces which separate the producer from the product of the labour process have not waned; on the contrary, they have become monstrously multiplied and rendered all the more invisible by their ubiquity in the society of the spectacle.
ephemera, 2013
In Precarious rhapsody (2009) Franco 'Bifo' Berardi argues that autonomous political movements in... more In Precarious rhapsody (2009) Franco 'Bifo' Berardi argues that autonomous political movements in Italy in 1977 marked an important turning point in moving beyond modernity with its concomitant trends of progressive modernisation and class conflict as the driving motor of social transformation. Putting aside the epochal claims contained in this claim it is interesting to reflect on the role played by the notion of precarity in this description 1. Berardi describes a moment in February 1977 when at the occupation of the University of Rome the head of the Communist Party, while attempting to give a speech, was thrown off campus by the students. Rejecting the party's politics, in particular its almost exclusive focus on the wage earning industrial working class, the students shouted, 'we are all precarious'. Berardi concludes that the students did not realise how correct they were. Over the subsequent years precarity has moved from what was then considered a marginal phenomenon, and one which was often held to be quite desirable (as a form of escape from the dictates of permanent wage labour in industry), to a much more central dynamic of neoliberal labour markets. Postwar social welfare programs were rolled back, and the presumed stability of employment has been undercut by massive increases in what used be referred to as 'non-standard' forms of work such as temporary contracts and project based work. Similarly, in more recent years, the question of precarity has moved from one of marginal importance to a much more debated area w ithin political and theoretical debates. 1 The protest movement that Berardi describes in some ways seems quite similar to the tactics and approach of the recent occupation movements (or of the global justice movement) in a rejection of fixed party structures, a focus on joyful convergences in the streets, and a heavy focus on media politics.
Maximumrocknroll, 2018
Not Some Third World Country Band.
Senyawa Interview for Maximumrocknroll
If there’s anything t... more Not Some Third World Country Band.
Senyawa Interview for Maximumrocknroll
If there’s anything that characterizes experimental music ensemble Senyawa, it certainly isn’t being easy to describe. Consisting of vocalist Rully Shabara and multi-instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi, they draw upon traditional Indonesian music, but in a way that does not seem like it’s ready for National Geographic. Likewise they draw from on the energy of punk, metal, and free jazz, but without clearly belonging to any of those genres. Over the past seven years they have toured the world extensively playing with a wide variety of musicians including Melt Banana, Damo Suzuki, and Keiji Haino. Their vocals, which range from gentle birdcalls to guttural death screams, are matched by a range of sounds emerging from idiosyncratic homemade instruments.
In December 2015 Senyawa was in Singapore to perform as part of the improv and noise music festival “Closer to the Edge,” organized by Japan’s Asian Meeting Festival and The Obsevatory, an indie band from Singapore who often embraces experimentation and noise in their music. Stevphen Shukaitis got a chance to ask them a few questions about their music.
Review of Cox, Geoff and Alex McLean (2013) Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expr... more Review of Cox, Geoff and Alex McLean (2013) Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression. London: MIT Press.
Rhizomes Number 26 (2014): http://www.rhizomes.net/issue26/shukaitis/index.html
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Books by Stevphen Shukaitis
In a more traditional workplace it is generally easy to distinguish between those who planned and managed the labor process and those who were involved in its executions: between the managers and the managed. For creative workers these distinctions become increasingly hard to make. Today the passionate and self-motivated labor of the artisan increasingly becomes the model for a self-disciplining, self-managed labor force that works harder, longer, and often for less pay precisely because of its attachment to some degree of personal fulfillment in forms of engaging work. And that ain’t no way to make a living, having to struggle three times as hard for just to have a sense of engagement in meaningful work.
The Wages of Dreamwork investigates how cultural workers in the modern metropolis manage these competing tensions and demands. Does the cultural economy treat you as a tool? If so, perhaps it’s time to rethink how to down tools in this metropolitan factory.
During the industrial revolution artisans and craft workers sparked struggles against exploitation while the force of law drove unions underground. Today conditions are different… yet they are not. Collective organizing is pre-empted not by legal prohibition but rather by a perverse internalized neoliberal logic that celebrates the precarious creative worker as its exemplar.
Combination Acts draws together fifteen years of conversations with artists, musicians, activists, and theorists about the nature of collaborative practice. What sociality is produced by their practices? What forms of collectivity do they animate and embody? Taken together these dialogues provide a series of study notes for and from the self-organization of the undercommons, gesturing towards an aesthetics that occupies a space of power for itself by coming to close to, but never finally reaching, a set form.
“The mood and tense of revolution can be obscure even to those who act it out – as polyphonic combination, cutting normative conceptions of person and number – in beautifully everyday experiments that strain against the brutally ongoing. Thankfully, in this timely primer, Stevphen Shukaitis reminds us how to conjugate the verbs to live, to fight, and to enjoy.” – Fred Moten, New York University
“Combination Acts offers an overview of political cultural tools and tactics radicals have mobilized over the 20th century and into the 21st. Shukaitis steers through rebellious terrain, from cyberhacking and forms of sabotage to critiques of global neoliberal institutions and horizontal re-commoning, opening new terrains of speculative imaginative possibilities. A necessary guide to militant culture in the new millennium.” – Jaleh Mansoor, University of British Columbia
“Combination Acts is an exhilarating read as it boldly combines optimism (the always renewed burden of struggles on the left) and pragmatism (the requirement of actually existing praxis). Engaging dialogues and theoretical analysis are also combined in this cutting-edge study, on material and in ways that are indispensable for carrying forward the spirit and actuality of insurgent togetherness. The key question of the book – what interventions would be needed so that the grammar of self-organization would not find itself rendered into the fixed forms of capital’s continued accumulation demands? – is answered through multiple narrative documents of real-life experience crossing through the art field. At the very least, the book informs us of the depth of critical thought from which practices of anti-status-quo alternatives stem; as for what the book achieves at its best, this is dependent on whether and how we seek to implement what we learn from it. An essential and inspirational reality check on collaboration, labour, its content and discontent, and the conundrum of art activism, among numerous other markers of the zeitgeist.” – Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh
The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde
Stevphen Shukaitis
How does the avant-garde create spaces in everyday life that subvert regimes of economic and political control? How do art, aesthetics and activism inform one another? And how do strategic spaces of creativity become the basis for new forms of production and governance?
The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor. It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these considerations.
“With The Composition of Movements to Come Stevphen Shukaitis does again what he has been doing as an author and editor for years: pushing the boundaries of intellectual and activist thought on the Left. By insisting that culture be understood strategically, rather than merely employed tactically, Shukaitis has unlocked the secret of an affective and effective artistic activism for our times. Brilliant and useful.” – Stephen Duncombe, New York University; Co-Director, Center for Artistic Activism
“Stevphen Shukaitis has produced an exposition on the strategic – as opposed to purely tactical – possibilities immanent within the post-war avant-garde that is as beautiful as the chance meeting of Autonomous Marxism and the Situationist International on the dissecting-table of critical theory.” – Gregory Sholette, Queens College Art Department, City University of New York
“Can strategy emerge from out of the diverse, fragmentary and temporary tactics of contemporary social movements? In this important book, which offers telling historical perspectives and is at the same time forged in the practice of political opposition, Stevphen Shukaitis offers a sustained argument that it can, and that it should.” – Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art
“I was convinced it was impossible to say something new about politics and the avant-garde, and I really enjoyed being proved wrong in so many different ways.” – David Graeber, London School of Economics
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International:
http://www.rowmaninternational.com/books/the-composition-of-movements-to-come
Free pdf download via link
With contributions by:
Alan W. Moore, Stevphen Shukaitis, Universidad Nómada, Tino Buchholz, Vincent Boschma, Geert Lovink, Alan Smart, Aja Waalwijk, Jordan Zinovich, Britta Lillesøe,Tina Steiger, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, x-Chris, Kasper Opstrup, Azomozox, Ashley Dawson, Sarah Lewison, Azomozox, Nina Fraeser, Julia Ramírez Blanco,
Tobias Morawski, Eliseo Fucolti, Gianni Piazza, Assembly of Teatro Valle, Patrick Nagle, Emanuele Braga, Margot Verdier, Vincent Prieur, Jon Lackman, Jacqueline Feldman, Julia Lledin, Elisabeth Lorenzi, Julia Lledinm, Stephen Luis Vilaseca, La Casa Invisible, Stephen Luis Vilaseca, Yasmin Ramirez, Gregory Lehmann, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, Jasna Babic, Tristan Wibault, Galvao Debelle dos Santos, E.T.C. Dee, Spencer Sunshine, Maxigas, mujinga.
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.
cs 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
Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life
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
Includes materials from Brian Holmes * Ben Holtzman // Craig Hughes // Kevin Van Meter * Antonio Negri * Colectivo Situaciones * Gavin Grindon * Maribel Casas-Cortes + Sebastian Cobarrubias * Angela Mitropolous * Jack Bratich * Harry Halpin * Jeff Juris * Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma * Ben Shepard * Kirsty Robertson * Bre * Anita Lacey * Michal Osterweil + Graeme Chesters * Dave Eden * Uri Gordon * Ashar Latif + Sandra Jeppesen
"These essays present a series of inspiring examples of how to conduct research for radical politics both inside and outside the university." - Michael Hardt, author (with Antonio Negri) of Empire and The Labor of Dionysus
"This book is one of a kind. This book answers the question of what anarchist social studies, as opposed to conventional marxism or liberalism might look like. It combines a searching discussion of methods of research with substantive issues such as “who is the researcher?” Arguing that research is engaged or it is nothing, that “academics” who have no commitment to fundamental social change generally cannot produce work that illuminates the world and sparks the radical imagination, the various authors represented in this volume have collectively made a critical contribution to knowledge. The introduction is itself a major contribution to our understanding of the significance of what the editors call '68 thought', the reference being not only to the famous May events in France but to the Italian hot autumn of the following year." – Stanley Aronowitz, author of False Promises and The Knowledge Factory
Papers by Stevphen Shukaitis
Senyawa Interview for Maximumrocknroll
If there’s anything that characterizes experimental music ensemble Senyawa, it certainly isn’t being easy to describe. Consisting of vocalist Rully Shabara and multi-instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi, they draw upon traditional Indonesian music, but in a way that does not seem like it’s ready for National Geographic. Likewise they draw from on the energy of punk, metal, and free jazz, but without clearly belonging to any of those genres. Over the past seven years they have toured the world extensively playing with a wide variety of musicians including Melt Banana, Damo Suzuki, and Keiji Haino. Their vocals, which range from gentle birdcalls to guttural death screams, are matched by a range of sounds emerging from idiosyncratic homemade instruments.
In December 2015 Senyawa was in Singapore to perform as part of the improv and noise music festival “Closer to the Edge,” organized by Japan’s Asian Meeting Festival and The Obsevatory, an indie band from Singapore who often embraces experimentation and noise in their music. Stevphen Shukaitis got a chance to ask them a few questions about their music.
Rhizomes Number 26 (2014): http://www.rhizomes.net/issue26/shukaitis/index.html
In a more traditional workplace it is generally easy to distinguish between those who planned and managed the labor process and those who were involved in its executions: between the managers and the managed. For creative workers these distinctions become increasingly hard to make. Today the passionate and self-motivated labor of the artisan increasingly becomes the model for a self-disciplining, self-managed labor force that works harder, longer, and often for less pay precisely because of its attachment to some degree of personal fulfillment in forms of engaging work. And that ain’t no way to make a living, having to struggle three times as hard for just to have a sense of engagement in meaningful work.
The Wages of Dreamwork investigates how cultural workers in the modern metropolis manage these competing tensions and demands. Does the cultural economy treat you as a tool? If so, perhaps it’s time to rethink how to down tools in this metropolitan factory.
During the industrial revolution artisans and craft workers sparked struggles against exploitation while the force of law drove unions underground. Today conditions are different… yet they are not. Collective organizing is pre-empted not by legal prohibition but rather by a perverse internalized neoliberal logic that celebrates the precarious creative worker as its exemplar.
Combination Acts draws together fifteen years of conversations with artists, musicians, activists, and theorists about the nature of collaborative practice. What sociality is produced by their practices? What forms of collectivity do they animate and embody? Taken together these dialogues provide a series of study notes for and from the self-organization of the undercommons, gesturing towards an aesthetics that occupies a space of power for itself by coming to close to, but never finally reaching, a set form.
“The mood and tense of revolution can be obscure even to those who act it out – as polyphonic combination, cutting normative conceptions of person and number – in beautifully everyday experiments that strain against the brutally ongoing. Thankfully, in this timely primer, Stevphen Shukaitis reminds us how to conjugate the verbs to live, to fight, and to enjoy.” – Fred Moten, New York University
“Combination Acts offers an overview of political cultural tools and tactics radicals have mobilized over the 20th century and into the 21st. Shukaitis steers through rebellious terrain, from cyberhacking and forms of sabotage to critiques of global neoliberal institutions and horizontal re-commoning, opening new terrains of speculative imaginative possibilities. A necessary guide to militant culture in the new millennium.” – Jaleh Mansoor, University of British Columbia
“Combination Acts is an exhilarating read as it boldly combines optimism (the always renewed burden of struggles on the left) and pragmatism (the requirement of actually existing praxis). Engaging dialogues and theoretical analysis are also combined in this cutting-edge study, on material and in ways that are indispensable for carrying forward the spirit and actuality of insurgent togetherness. The key question of the book – what interventions would be needed so that the grammar of self-organization would not find itself rendered into the fixed forms of capital’s continued accumulation demands? – is answered through multiple narrative documents of real-life experience crossing through the art field. At the very least, the book informs us of the depth of critical thought from which practices of anti-status-quo alternatives stem; as for what the book achieves at its best, this is dependent on whether and how we seek to implement what we learn from it. An essential and inspirational reality check on collaboration, labour, its content and discontent, and the conundrum of art activism, among numerous other markers of the zeitgeist.” – Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh
The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde
Stevphen Shukaitis
How does the avant-garde create spaces in everyday life that subvert regimes of economic and political control? How do art, aesthetics and activism inform one another? And how do strategic spaces of creativity become the basis for new forms of production and governance?
The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor. It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these considerations.
“With The Composition of Movements to Come Stevphen Shukaitis does again what he has been doing as an author and editor for years: pushing the boundaries of intellectual and activist thought on the Left. By insisting that culture be understood strategically, rather than merely employed tactically, Shukaitis has unlocked the secret of an affective and effective artistic activism for our times. Brilliant and useful.” – Stephen Duncombe, New York University; Co-Director, Center for Artistic Activism
“Stevphen Shukaitis has produced an exposition on the strategic – as opposed to purely tactical – possibilities immanent within the post-war avant-garde that is as beautiful as the chance meeting of Autonomous Marxism and the Situationist International on the dissecting-table of critical theory.” – Gregory Sholette, Queens College Art Department, City University of New York
“Can strategy emerge from out of the diverse, fragmentary and temporary tactics of contemporary social movements? In this important book, which offers telling historical perspectives and is at the same time forged in the practice of political opposition, Stevphen Shukaitis offers a sustained argument that it can, and that it should.” – Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art
“I was convinced it was impossible to say something new about politics and the avant-garde, and I really enjoyed being proved wrong in so many different ways.” – David Graeber, London School of Economics
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International:
http://www.rowmaninternational.com/books/the-composition-of-movements-to-come
Free pdf download via link
With contributions by:
Alan W. Moore, Stevphen Shukaitis, Universidad Nómada, Tino Buchholz, Vincent Boschma, Geert Lovink, Alan Smart, Aja Waalwijk, Jordan Zinovich, Britta Lillesøe,Tina Steiger, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, x-Chris, Kasper Opstrup, Azomozox, Ashley Dawson, Sarah Lewison, Azomozox, Nina Fraeser, Julia Ramírez Blanco,
Tobias Morawski, Eliseo Fucolti, Gianni Piazza, Assembly of Teatro Valle, Patrick Nagle, Emanuele Braga, Margot Verdier, Vincent Prieur, Jon Lackman, Jacqueline Feldman, Julia Lledin, Elisabeth Lorenzi, Julia Lledinm, Stephen Luis Vilaseca, La Casa Invisible, Stephen Luis Vilaseca, Yasmin Ramirez, Gregory Lehmann, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, Jasna Babic, Tristan Wibault, Galvao Debelle dos Santos, E.T.C. Dee, Spencer Sunshine, Maxigas, mujinga.
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.
cs 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
Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life
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
Includes materials from Brian Holmes * Ben Holtzman // Craig Hughes // Kevin Van Meter * Antonio Negri * Colectivo Situaciones * Gavin Grindon * Maribel Casas-Cortes + Sebastian Cobarrubias * Angela Mitropolous * Jack Bratich * Harry Halpin * Jeff Juris * Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma * Ben Shepard * Kirsty Robertson * Bre * Anita Lacey * Michal Osterweil + Graeme Chesters * Dave Eden * Uri Gordon * Ashar Latif + Sandra Jeppesen
"These essays present a series of inspiring examples of how to conduct research for radical politics both inside and outside the university." - Michael Hardt, author (with Antonio Negri) of Empire and The Labor of Dionysus
"This book is one of a kind. This book answers the question of what anarchist social studies, as opposed to conventional marxism or liberalism might look like. It combines a searching discussion of methods of research with substantive issues such as “who is the researcher?” Arguing that research is engaged or it is nothing, that “academics” who have no commitment to fundamental social change generally cannot produce work that illuminates the world and sparks the radical imagination, the various authors represented in this volume have collectively made a critical contribution to knowledge. The introduction is itself a major contribution to our understanding of the significance of what the editors call '68 thought', the reference being not only to the famous May events in France but to the Italian hot autumn of the following year." – Stanley Aronowitz, author of False Promises and The Knowledge Factory
Senyawa Interview for Maximumrocknroll
If there’s anything that characterizes experimental music ensemble Senyawa, it certainly isn’t being easy to describe. Consisting of vocalist Rully Shabara and multi-instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi, they draw upon traditional Indonesian music, but in a way that does not seem like it’s ready for National Geographic. Likewise they draw from on the energy of punk, metal, and free jazz, but without clearly belonging to any of those genres. Over the past seven years they have toured the world extensively playing with a wide variety of musicians including Melt Banana, Damo Suzuki, and Keiji Haino. Their vocals, which range from gentle birdcalls to guttural death screams, are matched by a range of sounds emerging from idiosyncratic homemade instruments.
In December 2015 Senyawa was in Singapore to perform as part of the improv and noise music festival “Closer to the Edge,” organized by Japan’s Asian Meeting Festival and The Obsevatory, an indie band from Singapore who often embraces experimentation and noise in their music. Stevphen Shukaitis got a chance to ask them a few questions about their music.
Rhizomes Number 26 (2014): http://www.rhizomes.net/issue26/shukaitis/index.html
Towards the end of 2015, the ephemera collective organised, chaired and participated within two separate Q+A panels celebrating the launch of Gerard Hanlon’s The dark side of management: A secret history of management theory. The events took place in The University of Leicester’s School of Management and Copenhagen Business School’s Management, Politics and Philosophy Department. Each of the events were recorded, transcribed, edited and amalgamated into the following feature
Text to accompany Heath Bunting’s A Member of Team GB (2010)
There is something inherently unnerving about the crossing of national borders, or to be crossed by them, when you think about it. And that’s not something just residing in the performative alienation of the checkpoint ritual, whether literal, physical, or data-morphic, real as that may be, and, frequently is. It’s something more ephemeral, but hard to shake once realized: namely, if the nation (and therefore one’s belonging or exclusion from it) is the formation of an imagined community, that status is only as transitory or permanent as the stability of the imagination that underlies it. You can be imagined in (welcome!) or forgotten out, or caught in some intricate web of complicated disavowal-embracing, excluded-inclusion. Beneath every border to be crossed there are more borders to be crossed. In the same way that in the primitive cosmological myth of the world sitting on a turtle, which sits on another turtle, which is on another, in an infinite regression that ‘goes all the way down’, every border exists as defined by the border of two imaginations. And these two imaginations likewise have defined borders that are both crossed and defined by the ordering borders of two more imaginations; infinitely regressing to something which may be an egg, or perhaps an omelette, depending on whom you ask.
According to art historical legend, there was much tension at the 0.10 Exhibition in Petrograd in December 1915, otherwise known as the Last Futurist Exhibition, or the first exhibition of Suprematism. So much so that the exhibition, which was designed to celebrate the best of the avant-garde, nearly didn’t happen. Vladimir Tatlin accused Kazmir Malevich’s new work of lacking professionalism and being an embarrassment to the art community, leading to Malevich’s new works being sequestered within their own isolated room. The tensions continued to mount in the run up to the exhibition’s December launch, culminating in a fistfight between Tatlin and Malevich at the opening. If available sources can be believed, the fight was broken up by the Russian-French Suprematist-Constructivist painter Alexandra Exter.
In this particular moment of art historical ephemera, within these tensions and debates of the avant-garde, we can find something that is quite significant for the NSK and has continued to inform the Slovenian group’s approach and practices for many years. If we understand the approach of NSK’s work as revisiting previous historical traumas and events to excavate their continuing resonance and influence, then their work can also be seen to intervene in re-processing these very antagonisms by trying to re-mediate between various factions of the Russian avant-garde. Rather than accept the avant-garde divisions between an interventionist constructivist practice and a mystical and escapist Suprematism, NSK’s projects have found ways to revisit and revitalize moments of art historical materials as readymades that can be deployed to affect unexpected disturbances within the present. He who has material power, has spiritual power.
Published in conjunction with the "Gee Vaucher – Introspective" exhibition
12 November, 2016 – 19 February, 2017
Firstsite, Colchester, UK
Gee Vaucher (1945) is an internationally renowned political artist living outside Epping, Essex. She is best known for her radical creativity, montages and iconic artwork for the infamous anarcho-pacifist band Crass. Employing an eclectic range of styles and techniques, coupled with an essentially DIY aesthetic, she creates powerful images exploring political, cultural and personal issues. She sees her work as a tool for social change.
This retrospective survey of Vaucher’s work is her premiere in the UK, bringing together for the first time a comprehensive collection of her paintings, collages, prints, photographs, videos and sculptures plus installation work and rare archive
in Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Space. Alan Moore & Alan Smart, Eds. Berlin: Other Forms: 20-23.
Paul Willis in his classic book Learning to Labor (1982) describes the way that it is precisely the rejection of education by working class British lads that slots them into their continued role as future factory workers. By refusing knowledges and skills within education, and the opportunity for advancement offered through such, the lads refusal means that they have little other choice than taking the low-skilled, low paying factory jobs. What we see here is a kind of refusal of pedagogical labor, of academic achievement, which ends up forming the lads for their place in the working of the economy: the reproduction of the class relationship.
In considering the relation between labor and pedagogy it is key to that while the institutional space in which formalized teaching occurs is indeed a prime space for how that relation is formed, it is far from the only site this occurs. This is what someone like Tiziana Terranova points toward in her exploration of labor involved in the functioning of what she describes at “network culture” (2004). For Terranova this means that various information technologies, from mass media to the Internet, interactive and participatory media, have congealed together into one integrated media system. Terranova argues that such an integrated network culture can only function through an immense supply of the “free labor” of participation, which can range anywhere from the building of websites and running of listservs, to generating content through social networking sites, to writing open source code.
This essay will explore the pedagogical function of these dispersed forms of free labor, which occur throughout the social field, and that are very much part of structuring the habitus of today’s student-workers. From compulsory engagement in social media to the expectations of taking on unpaid internships, today’s proletarian learns that they will only advance if they are willing to take part in an arrangement that demands the de-valuing of their labor as a necessary entrance cost of trying to claim any future value over its worth. The question of mass intellectuality thus attempts to reorient this conjunction of labor and pedagogy, to find ways to turn this dynamic of engagement with these very conditions as a step towards organizing to change them.
“Precarious Politics and Recomposing the Radical Imagination” (2012) Maps of Precariousness: Forms and processes, social imaginaries and subjectivities. Bologna: I libri di Emil: 231-252.
It’s somewhat paradoxical that when writing about Sun Ra, discussing as- pects of his work and life, from music to philosophy, and his role as found- ing figure in Afrofuturism, is made more difficult by the figure of Ra himself. How, or why, is this? It is because in the accounts of his life and work, it is easy to approach and become enamored by Ra as a larger-than-life figure and to stay focused on his idiosyncratic personal traits, more so than the context and times from which he emerged and to which he responded. This is precisely what William Sites’s book Sun Ra’s Chicago does very well: it steps back from engaging with Ra’s performative persona to examine the context in which this performative persona was developed and shaped. As Sites puts it in the introduction, Ra’s “self-presentation as a traveler from a different world can overshadow his creative and often deeply critical en- gagement with this one” (p. 2). By stepping back in this manner, we get a different sense of that critical and creative engagement that leads to emer- gence of Ra the free jazz band leader from outer space.