"Insolvency"
Franco “Bifo” Berardi

A Talk at MoMA PS1
Saturday December 17, 4 pm, free
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
Long Island City, NY

The concept of insolvency as it has been applied in the US and
especially in the EU has to do with economic debt, but also with the
symbolic debt implied in the capitalist process of exploitation. In
the EU, this symbolic debt is bound to tensions that haunted European
modernity—between Calvinist and Catholic, Baroque and Gothic, good
German laborers and bad lazy Mediterraneans. It is a subject often
avoided for being politically incorrect, because no one wants to see
the religious, anthropological, and aesthetic implications of the
crisis. But the concept of symbolic debt may also provide a way out:
What if debt as semiotization and insolvency could actually provide
autonomy from capitalist semiotization—a direct move from insolvency
to emancipation? What is the meaning of the word “revolution” anyhow?
Let us consider how the concept of emancipation will replace of the
concept of revolution.

This is the second in a season of talks and discussions presented by
e-flux book co-op at MoMA PS1. Hito Steyerl was the first to present
in the series, which will continue throughout the season with
presentations by artists, writers, and theorists such as AA Bronson,
Paul Chan, Sven Lütticken, Elizabeth Povinelli, and others considering
the recent intensification of political life.

Occupy! Onward Conference
New School, New York City, December 18, 2011

Dear Friends,

Sorry for the short notice: the Occupy! Gazette has put together a conference on some of the main issues around the current crisis and what Occupy Wall Street and the rest of us can do about it. The conference this Sunday, the 18th, from noon to six at the New School (55 W. 13th Street). It will consist of four lightning-fast panels with some of the most interesting thinkers and activists in the field and then ``report-backs``ˇ from several of the most active OWS working groups, including labor, legal, and facilitation. It`s everything you always wanted to know about OWS but were afraid to ask. Schedule below. The conference is free but space in the auditorium is limited, so please let us know if you`re coming (at our Facebook event page or at editors [at] nplusonemag.com) and please come on time.

Schedule below.

Capitalism or Markets?: An Exchange
Bernard Stiegler and Scott Lash
Monday 9 January 2012, 5pm-6.45pm
Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building
Goldsmiths, London

What is critical political economy today? Has neo-liberalism produced a system of domination in which capital has reduced labour not just to an object but to what Heidegger called a 'standing reserve',: that is a Marxist ‘reserve army of labour’ that no longer has a stake in the productive system resulting in conflagrations like Tottenham 2011? Or does a new industrialism driven by technological media open up a possible political space of 'care', enabling open relations of bonding between humans and among human and code-driven machines? How would such a political economy address the emerging powers in an age when Obama is destined to be the last president of what will have been the world's most powerful nation? Is China (India) neo-liberal or is it possible to have the sociality of markets without capitalism? Is Foucault right to counterpose the positivity of a liberalism based in a classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo against the bio-poli! tical domination of a neo-liberalism and today’s neo-classical economics? Do we live in a post-industrial, knowledge society, or instead in the possibility of a new industrial order, in which industrial classes are pitted against the excesses of finance capital? Bernard Stiegler (Paris) and Scott Lash will address these and other issues in an exchange on 9 January in the second in the Goldsmiths’ Centre for Cultural Studies’ series of Interventions in Critical Political Economy.

Legacies of Tactical Media
Eric Kluitenberg

Tactical Media employ the ‘tactics of the weak’ to operate on the terrain of strategic power by means of ‘any media necessary’. Once the rather exclusive practice of politically engaged artists and activists, the tactical appropriations of media tools and distribution infrastructures by the disenfranchised and the disgruntled have moved from the margins to centre stage. The explosive growth of mass participation in self-mediation incountless blogs, video sharing platforms, micro-blog ging, social networking has created an unprecedented complexity in the info-sphere.

While this frenzy of media activity has been heralded as the catalyst of the new democratisation movements in North-Africa and the Middle-East, the anti-austerity/precarity movements in Southern Europe and the UK, and the recent #occupy movements in the US and Northern Europe, its increasingly intransparent complexity combined with the post 9/11 ‘crash of symbols’ has thrown its political efficacy into question. The demise of WikiLeaks as the crown jewel of on-line whistle-blowing has added to a thoroughly opaque picture.

More than ever tactical media operators require effective instruments to the create tactical cartographies they need to navigate the hybrid realities they are immersed in. This notebook traces the legacies of tactical media to begin creating these hybrid cartographies.

We Are Not Contingent: An Academic Manifesto

We are the non-tenure track faculty who now constitute two-thirds of the instructional workforce at universities and colleges across the nation. We are frequently invisible to administrators, yet we are the first professors and instructors that undergraduate students meet on their journey to becoming engaged learners. We are the majority. We have been silent too long, and it is time for us to reclaim our voices and outline our demands.

WE ARE ESSENTIAL. Words carry within them powerful connotations. Contingency implies that we, as non-tenure track faculty, are incidental or even accidental to the educational mission of the colleges and universities where we work. No employees, regardless of their field, would willingly apply this stigma to themselves. To continue calling ourselves “contingent labor” is to accept the fate that has been chosen for us by administrators who view us as easily disposable freelancers or potential tenure track faculty in a period of transition.

Beyond Adbusters
Jason Adams

Despite his comparative anonymity, it may actually turn out to be James Alex, the blogger/artist who kicked off the recent pepper-spray cop meme, who becomes the more important model for the future of Occupy Wall Street than Kalle Lasn, the now-famous head of Adbusters. Let me explain why, through my own encounter with each of them. In Summer 2002, fresh out of liberal arts school, I was, like many, disheartened by emergent post-9/11 culture and ready for new surroundings generally. So I moved from the U.S. Pacific Northwest to Vancouver, Canada, where I pursued a graduate degree in Political Science.

In the wake of what had up until then been a steadily growing antiglobalization movement, it wasn’t long before the thought occurred to me that the skills I’d honed in the design and technology niches within which I’d involved myself might be useful at the city’s most impactful alternative media institution: Adbusters. So, I called them up, proposed to share my work, and following an affirmative response, made my way down to the headquarters in West Vancouver.

Suspended Civilization
James Howard Kunstler

Question du jour: why is Jon Corzine still at large? In what fabulous
Manhattan restaurants has he been enjoying plates of cockscombs and
lobster with sauce hydromel and cinghiale ai frutti di bosco, while less
well-connected citizens of this degenerate republic have to order their
suppers from the dumpster in the WalMart parking lot where they have
been living lately.

Is there still an Attorney General in this country? Will somebody please
follow Eric Holder down a hallway and see if he leaves a trail of
sawdust on the floor. Or did congress just retract all the fraud
statutes by stealth in the same way that the Federal Reserve handed out
$7.7 trillion in bailouts back in 2008 (much more than the generally
accepted figure of the $800 billion TARP) without anyone finding out
until three years later when some Bloomberg reporters rooted the numbers
out of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filing. And by the way, what
is the US Federal Reserve doing handing out billions of dollars to the
Royal Bank of Scotland? Was Scotland admitted to the Union by stealth,
too? Or did Jamie Dimon just buy it as a birthday present for Barack
Obama, who likes golf.

The Big Ideas of 2012:
Situating Occupy Lessons From the Revolutionary Past
David Graeber

Perhaps the greatest world historian alive today, Immanuel Wallerstein,
has argued that since 1789 all major revolutions have really been world
revolutions.

The French revolution might have appeared to only take place in one
country, but really it quickly transformed the entire North Atlantic
world so profoundly that a mere 20 years later, ideas that had
previously been considered lunatic fringe – that social change was good,
that governments existed to manage social change, that governments drew
their legitimacy from an entity known as the people – had been propelled
so deeply into common sense that even the stodgiest conservative had to
at least pay lip service to them. In 1848 revolutions broke out almost
simultaneously in 50 different countries from Wallachia to Brazil. In no
country did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterwards,
institutions inspired by the French revolution – universal education
systems, for instance – were created pretty much everywhere.

Theses for Discussion
Loren Goldner

1) CONTRACTING SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

The current crisis, on a world scale, began ca. 1970, as the postwar boom—reconstruction from the destruction of the 1914- 1945 period—exhausted itself, first in the US, and then shortly thereafter in Europe and Japan. Since that time, capitalism has struggled to “recompose” itself, through a grinding down of social reproduction, most importantly of the total working class wage bill (“V”) and aspects of constant capital (“C”),both fixed capital and infrastructure. It has done this by debt pyramiding, outsourcing of production around the world, technological innovation (in telecommunications, transportation and technology-intensive production), all having the same goal of transferring “V” and “C” to “S” (surplus value), while enforcing an overall NON-REPRODUCTION of labor power.

From Inoperativeness to Action: On Giorgio Agamben’s Anarchism
Lorenzo Fabbri

The recent publication by Stanford University Press of Giorgio Agamben’s What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays constitutes a very welcome occasion. The essays included in What Is an Apparatus? offer a very accessible pan over Agamben’s latest findings and give the readers an outline of the move from sovereignty to governmentality performed by Agamben in his 2007 The Kingdom and The Glory. Homo Sacer II.2, as well as providing some hints on the vectors that the announced Homo Sacer epilogue on forms-of-life will pursue. Yet, the importance of this book reaches well beyond Agamben scholarship: it provides also an opportunity to reflect on the status and on the mutation of critical theory today, as French can no longer claim any hegemony over it and as its most vital centers are now located across the Alps, beyond the Rhine, and on the other side of the Atlantic rather than in Rue d’Ulm or Saint-Denis. I will say something about the future of “theory” at the end of my essay. For now, I would like to start by briefly surveying what was left under-explored in Leland de la Durantaye’s recent and impressive introduction to Agamben, not to belittle his enterprise but only to sketch a complementary reading protocol. While de la Durantaye dismisses Agamben’s anarchic overtones, my intention is to show that anarchism lies at the heart of his philosophical project.