The NY Art Book Fair
September 28–30, 2012

Preview: Thursday, September 27, 6–9pm

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
Long Island City, NY

Autonomedia will be tabling at this event.

Printed Matter presents the seventh annual NY Art Book Fair, from September 28 to 30, at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens. Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world's premier event for artists' books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines presented by more than 270 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-five countries.

Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67
Margalit Fox

Shulamith Firestone, a widely quoted feminist writer who published her arresting first book, “The Dialectic of Sex,” at 25, only to withdraw from public life soon afterward, was found dead on Tuesday in her apartment in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. She was 67.

Ms. Firestone apparently died of natural causes, her sister Laya Firestone Seghi said.

"Vanishing Art and Hoodoo Metaphysics"
An Exhibition by Peter Lamborn Wilson

1:1 Gallery
121 Essex Street, 2nd floor
NY, NY 10002

Contact: Jarrett Earnest at jarrett@1to1ny.com
www.1to1ny.com

Opening Reception: 4PM-7PM, Sunday, September 23, 2012
Show ends October 20, 2012

Gallery is open daily, noon to 7 PM

Beyond the Old Virtue of Struggle: Autonomy, Talent, and Revolutionary Theory
Richard Gilman-Opalsky

(For the precarious people of Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, and Elsewhere - 4/26/2011)

1. STRUGGLE & PLEASURE: PRELIMINARY GESTURES

[1] The concept of "struggle" has occupied a central place in the radical imagination. For Frederick Douglass, all progress requires struggle, and for Karl Marx, human history consists of human conflict and class struggle. Struggle has become an integral substance, and is often the crux, of transformative projects and politics. Even today, influential thinkers like the autonomist Marxist John Holloway understand that, fundamentally, revolution begins with a scream of sadness. From an affective point of view, however, people do not want to struggle or to scream with sadness. I explore the contradiction of desire embodied in wanting a different world without wanting to struggle. I argue that there is an intractable absurdity at the heart of any politics that valorizes struggle: If the narrative on virtuous struggle is not deconstructed, it shall always be ultimately undesirable to make the world that we desire.

Is capitalism a market society?
Wildcat

It is a common view nowadays that acts of exchange and their logic are at the centre of capitalist society and that many social processes can be explained on the basis of exchange relations. From this viewpoint the current strategies of ‘privatisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’ become more plausible—both for followers and critics of these strategies. This notion has little to do with the reality of global accumulation of capital, but it is socially confirmed in our daily atomisation, which itself is only the flipside of a lack of open struggles and new collective relationships emerging from within them. To the isolated individual, social processes actually appear to be exchange transactions, or more precisely, it rationalises the experience of powerlessness, because the essence of exchange is just the assumption of the independence and autonomy of individualised subjects. By perceiving social relations as acts of exchange—social relations, which are essentially based on organised and institutionalised violence, exploitation and oppression—the idea of ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ of the individual or certain social groups is rescued. For the individual the perception of social relations as being based on exchange is more than mere imagination. It is a very real experience, given that daily reproduction is mediated by markets and acts of exchange. This form of mediation seems to confirm our individual freedom—and in a certain way actually does confirm it.

New Culture Machine Issue on "Paying Attention"
edited by Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley

How are the ways we understand subjective experience – not least cognitively – being modulated by political economic rationales? And how might artists, cultural theorists, social scientists and radical philosophers learn to respond – analytically, creatively, methodologically and politically – to the commodification of human capacities of attention? This special issue of Culture Machine explores these interlinked questions as a way of building upon and opening out contemporary research concerning the economisation of cognitive capacities. It proposes a contemporary critical re-focussing on the politics, ethics and aesthetics of the ‘attention economy’, a notion developed in the 1990s by scholars such as Jonathan Beller, Michael Goldhaber and Georg Franck.

International Call for Solidarity with Zapatista Support Bases of San Marcos Aviles
Jessica Davies

“It is not only the task of the independent/alternative media to circulate the truth, but rather it is the responsibility of us all to do so.”

“Our compas from San Marcos Avilés are suffering this violence because they are indigenous, because they are Zapatistas, and because they have opened their own autonomous school."

Terror hangs in the air of San Marcos Avilés, a small indigenous Tzeltal-speaking community located in the highland region of the state of Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico. The women, men and children from the community have sent out an urgent call to the world for support, a call that echoes in our very heartbeat and demands our solidarity, “as if it were said in the very language of our being”.

This urgent message comes from the nearly 200 Zapatista support bases members (BAZ) in San Marcos Avilés, who are fighting to live according to their own indigenous culture and struggling for freedom, justice, democracy and a dignified life for all. But they are faced with men with firearms and other weapons who intend to eradicate all that the Zapatistas represent and believe in.

"Was it Bad for You Too?"
Lehman Weichselbaum

THE UNBEARABLES BIG BOOK OF SEX , Edited by Ron Kolm, Carol Wierzbicki, Jim Feast, Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo and Shalom Neuman.
Unbearable Books/ Autonomedia. 2011. 640 pps. $18.95.

First, to dispense with the obvious: THE UNBEARABLES BIG BOOK OF SEX is not a stroke book. To be sure, you (or the grubby inner adolescent of you) will find, inevitably, a sprinkling of verifiable “dirty parts” (as a time-saving service, we refer you to pgs. 156, 165, 431 and 485). But savvy readers, looking past the book’s formal category as “erotica,” will surmise that the words “Unbearables” and “sex” appearing in the same title will more than likely yield, for the most part, a bumptuous pageant of squalid missed connections, subliminal-to-outright multigendered abuse, delusional gambits of seduction and, overall, a Cook’s tour of carnal dysfunction in its myriad sordid forms. And, of course, they will be right.

Gore Vidal 1925–2012
Andrew Tonkovich

Almost everybody in Southern California has, or should have, a
Gore Vidal story, because if you have been in any way active
in anything here --- anti-war or civil rights or environmental
activism, you would have encountered - and I use the word
pointedly, admiringly - Vidal, at a debate, lecture, reading,
demonstration, book fair, any public celebration of the life
of the mind, and of civic participation. He lived here, in
the Hollywood Hills, and regularly attended marches and
gatherings, in fact was one of the small, reliable group of
local Left stalwarts who'd add their names and deliver their
bodies to a cause. As an undergraduate years ago at Cal State
Long Beach, and as a young, eager and impressionable student
activist, I met him. I'd been invited to join a small group
meeting with the candidate when he visited campus during his
1982 run for US Senate. Sincere, good-hearted liberal and
progressive faculty, staff and other students were there, with
their questions for the Great Man, who seemed to only put up
with the responsibility of listening to his presumed
constituents, the whole tiny opera of expectations a farce of
course, since we were all there to listen to him, to be
delighted, impressed, instructed, amused and, yes, empowered
to imagine, absurdly, that an American man of letters, of
history, a radical gay public intellectual and literary artist
might stand a chance of being elected to one of nation's
highest offices as a Democrat.

Chris Marker Dead at 91
Elaine Woo

Chris Marker, an enigmatic figure in French cinema who avoided publicity and was loath to screen his films yet was often ranked with countrymen Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard as an avant-garde master, died at his home in Paris on Sunday, his 91st birthday.

His death was reported by Agence France-Presse, but the cause was not given.

Marker, who worked well into his 80s, made more than two dozen films during a six-decade career. Known as a pioneer of the film essay, he was most admired for "La Jetee" (1962) and "Sans Soleil" (1983), which explored time, memory and history in an unconventional and evocative style.