[Autonogram] August Autonogram

Wed Aug 19 14:35:59 EDT 2009

Greetings Autono-nauts & friends,

We hope the dog days of August are not beating down on you with more than
a bearable amount of thermal fury.

It’s very hot outside, but there are a number of developments and upcoming
events in the works here at Autonomedia, so without further ado, here is
the shortlist (see more detailed information below):

1. CONNECTIVE MUTATIONS seminar with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi at 16Beaver,
September 3rd– 6th, 2009

2. PRECARIOUS RHAPSODY by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi released by Minor
Compositions, a new imprint distributed by Autonomedia

3. CRITICAL STRATEGIES IN ART AND MEDIA conference September 10th at
Austrian Cultural Forum with Konrad Becker, Ted Byfield, Jim Fleming,
Steve Kurtz, Amanda McDonald-Crowley, Claire Pentecost, and Peter Lamborn
Wilson

4. Autonomedia tabling at multiple upcoming bookfairs and events

5. Several other new titles we distribute in our online bookstore

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1. CONNECTIVE MUTATIONS: AUTONOMY & SUBJECTIVATION IN THE COMING CENTURY
A SEMINAR WITH FRANCO ‘BIFO’ BERARDI
September 3–6, 2009 in New York City

Building upon the format of the “Continental Drift” seminars that Brian
Holmes and 16Beaver have conducted during the past several years, this
seminar is part of an ongoing series of dialogues and encounters. It will
thus mix together presentations by Bifo along with interventions and
discussions with Bifo and other invited contributors and collectives.

This seminar will focus on arguments and debates over the nature of the
subject; the location and nature of the revolutionary subject have vastly
shaped radical politics and organizing. The work of Felix Guattari and
Gilles Deleuze changed the frame of this discussion, proposing the concept
of subjectivation, or becoming-subject, as a framework to understand the
multiple becomings and states of social encounters. This concept of
subjectivation overlaps significantly with the concept of class
recomposition developed in the 1960s and 70s by autonomist thinkers such
as Sergio Bologna, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri. Both strains of thought
focus on how forms of social antagonism and resistance give rise to new
social positions and possibilities for collective becomings.

Today we find ourselves in a transformed condition, one created by
techno-anthropological and connective mutations, marked by overwhelming
flows of immaterial labor and information flows that threaten to exceed
the limits of the body. Cyberspace may be infinite, but cybertime is not.
This intensification and expansion of technological dynamics and
automatisms makes problematic the very possibility of collective
subjectivation. Have we reached a stated where the immersive flows of
information, affect, and desire act to dampen or even preempt the
emergence of new collective subjects? These are the questions this seminar
seeks to answer.

Organized by 16Beaver (http://www.16beavergroup.org) & Minor Compositions
(http:// www.minorcompositions.info)
For more information: http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo

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2. PRECARIOUS RHAPSODY: SEMIOCAPITALISM AND THE PATHOLOGIES OF POST-ALPHA
GENERATION
by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Edited by Erik Empson & Stevphen Shukaitis
Translated by Arianna Bove, Michael Goddard, Giuseppina Mecchia, Antonella
Schintu, and Steve Wright

This is the first released by Minor Compositions, which is a new series of
interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde
aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

PRECARIOUS RHAPSODY explores how the story of our life, our loves, but
also the history of revolts, defeats and restorations of order is an
infinite series of bifurcations. At any given moment different paths open
up in front of us, and we are continually presented with the alternative
of going here or going there. Then we decide, we cut out from a set of
infinite possibilities and choose a single path. But do we really choose?
Is it really a question of a choice, when we go here rather than there? Is
it really a choice when masses go to shopping centers, when revolutions
are transformed into massacres, when nations enter into war? It is not we
who decide but the concatenations: machines for the liberation of desires
and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. The fundamental bifurcation
is always this one: between machines for liberating desire and mechanisms
of control over the imaginary. In our time of digital mutation, technical
automatisms are taking control of the social psyche.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a contemporary writer, media-theorist and
media-activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was
part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in
Italy (1976-1978). He is and author of numerous books, including ETHEREAL
SHADOWS: COMMUNICATIONS AND POWER IN CONTEMPORARY ITALY, FELIX GUATTARI:
THOUGHT, FRIENDSHIP, AND VISIONARY CARTOGRAPHY, THE PANTHER AND THE
RHIZOME, POLITICS OF MUTATION, PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS IN THE TWILIGHT OF
MODERNITY, and THE FACTORY OF UNHAPPINESS. He is currently collaborating
on the magazine DERIVEAPPRODI as well as teaching social history of
communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan.

To view and purchase this book, go to:
[http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=71&products_id=629]

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3. CRITICAL STRATEGIES IN ART AND MEDIA: PERSPECTIVES OF NEW CULTURAL
PRACTICES

September 10, 2009, 1:30–9:00 pm
Austrian Cultural Forum (ACF)
11 East 52nd Street New York, NY 10022
http://world-information.org/wii/critical_strategies

A roundtable discussion of digital theorists and practitioners on the
future of cultural intelligence and freedoms with: Ted Byfield, Steve
Kurtz, Amanda McDonald-Crowley, Claire Pentecost, Peter Lamborn Wilson,
Konrad Becker, Jim Fleming

Among the questions to be addressed during this conference are:

Beyond the obsolete models of artist or author as genius and their fetish
objects, what collective and collaborative practices are inventing new
terrains and flows? As information and communication technologies saturate
our world, how is art giving way to new forms of cultural symbolic
manipulation? Can we identify new models to replace the auteur and the
artwork? If so, where do they come from and what might that say about the
future of critical practices? What new kinds of “virtual” spaces are
opening up for cultural practice in electronic media? As “old media” begin
to collapse under the pressures of the virtual, what new media can we
find? How are didactic illustration and channeled dissidence giving way to
new forms of surprise and intensity? What strategies elude the creative
industries’ seemingly infinite appetite for things radical? Are there any
strategies that can elude being reduced to styles in the service of sales,
or are critical practices doomed to play cat and mouse with the forces of
consumerism?

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4. UPCOMING BOOKFAIRS & EVENTS
Autonomedia will be tabling at a number of events and bookfairs in the
coming months. Come visit us at the following:

Is Black & Red Dead? Conference at Nottingham (UK): September 7th–9th
(http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/IsBlackAndRedDead)

Bristol Anarchist Bookfair (UK), September 12th
(http://www.bristolanarchistbookfair.org)

Manchester Anarchist Bookfair (UK), September 26th
(http://www.bookfair.org.uk)

We will also be tabling at the London Anarchist Bookfair
(http://www.anarchistbookfair.org) on October 24th and participating in
the Edinburgh Radical Bookfair
(http://www.word-power.co.uk/viewEvents.php), October 28th–November 1st.

5. New distribution titles
Autonomedia is not only a small publisher of radical books, we also
distribute a curated selection of very reasonably priced books in our
online bookstore.

Here is a sample: two new titles from Mayfly Books, a radical publisher in
the UK that focuses on ethics and politics in organizational life:

ART AND CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL PRACTICE: REINVENTING INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE
Edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray

‘Institutional critique’ is best known through the critical practice that
developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented
radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has
been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering
and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The
essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models
of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art.
Interrogating the shifting relations between ‘institutions’ and
‘critique’, the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present
of institutional critique and propose lines of future development.
Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as
Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno
and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between
critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions
for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.

http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=25&products_id=632

NEGATIONS
By Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse’s NEGATIONS is both a radical critique of capitalist
modernity and a model of materialist dialectical thinking. In a series of
essays, originally written in the period stretching from the 1930s to
1960s, Marcuse takes up the presupposed categories that have, and continue
to, ground thought and action in our administered society: liberalism,
industrialism, individualism, hedonism, aggression. This book is both a
testament to a great thinker and a still vital strand of thought in the
comprehension and critique of the modern organized world. It is essential
reading for younger scholars and a radical reminder for those steeped in
the tradition of a critical theory of society. With a brilliance of
conception combined with an insistence on the material conditions of
thought and action, this book speaks both to the particular contents
engaged and to the fundamental grounds of any critique of organized
modernity.

http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=3&products_id=633

That’s all for now (as a side note we will be sending out Autonogram
updates on new publications and distribution titles, events, and other
lovely things on a more regular basis, although you need not worry about
your inbox overflowing, it will not go over one message per month or so).

Cheers + solidarity,
Stevphen

http://www.autonomedia.org
http://info.interactivist.net
http://www.myspace.com/autonomedia

-- 
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://slash.interactivist.net

"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is
created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political
practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory
cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of
welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position for it
thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of
resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these
depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration.
Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and
power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule." -
subRosa Collective