"On Failure and its Possible Remedies" Wayne Spencer In June 2007, when my text 'On Lice and Fleas' first appeared, one of the members of the partnership that writes under the pseudonym Monsieur Dupont asked me what I would do in the event of defeat. It would seem too soon to talk of defeat, but perhaps it is time to acknowledge and confront some measure of failure.

"On Décapitalisme" Granad(a) Collective I. gravity is the first law of force that is inscribed into our bodies. grammar is the second. social war is the third and self management is the fourth. II. how do we decapitate capitalism? by cutting of its head. a rhizomatic internet devoid of its tags, a sentence with a lower-case beginning. an always emergent discourse without a title. decentralised institutions that become constellations of extitutions. deindividuated bodies in acéphalous collectives. III. an “I” that is always decapitalised. we own no proper nouns just as i do not want to own you and you do not want to own me. only the Structures that we imagine to still be standing retain their brand names and ownership capital. structures that must be decapitalised and torn down. IV. no longer anarchists or socialists or communists or marxists or situationists or nihilists or new hegelians or nietzscheans or surrealists. no longer any ‘ists’ or ‘-ans’ or ‘ishes’ or ‘ics’ and no longer any national identities. no more hyphens hugging our fragmented sense of self identification, only outstretched arms.

The 12hr ISBN-JPEG Project _ |__ __| | /_ |__ \| | | __| | | | (_) | | __/ (__| |_ __ | | | | | | __/ | |/ /_| | | | | _ | | | '_ \ / _ \ | | / /| '_ \| '__| The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project >>>> posted since 1994 <<<< _ | | | '_ \ / _ \ | | / /| '_ \| '__| -_ | | | |__ ___ | | ) | |__ _ __ _ | __ \ (_) | | "An impassive observer, { brad brace } forges a personal aesthetic in these 12hr-images infused with blank-sadness and a sense of mystery. What makes them both new and significant is the fact that he organizes its contents in sequences, applying the principles of cinematographic montage to fixed images." You begin to sense the byshadows that stretch from the awe of global dominance. How the intersecting systems help pull us apart, leaving us vague, drained, docile, soft in our inner discourse, willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed -- easy retreats, half beliefs. Works of art are complex formal interventions within discursive traditions and their myriad filiations. These interventions are defined precisely by their incomparable capacity to trace the dynamics of historical process in paradoxical gestures of simultaneously prognostic and mnemonic temporalities.

Guy Debord, A Natonal Treasure? Frederique Rousell France has decided to classify the archives of the situationist philosopher coveted by an American university. Guy Debord erected as a national monument. . . . The French state has refused to allow the personal archives of the founder of the Situationist International to leave France. The injunction of 29 January [2009], signed by the Minister of Culture, Christine Albane, and published on Thursday in The Official Journal, stipulates that the archives assume "a great importance for the history of the ideas of the second half of the 20th century and for the knowledge of the still-controversial work of one of the last great French intellectuals of the period." A major and symbolic decision. "This classification as a national treasure reveals a recognition by the State that what Debord represents in the intellectual and artistic life of the just-ended century," emphasized Bruno Racine, President of the National Library of France, who has worked to keep the archives in France.

"The New Cooperativism" Call for papers for issue #3 Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action Since at least the mid 19th century, cooperative modes of organizing social and economic life have proved promising alternatives to capitalist norms of production and distribution. These have included worker, agricultural, and consumer coops; mutual societies; credit unions; cooperative daycares and educational initiatives; artist-run centres; health care coops; and other forms of service-oriented cooperatives controlled and co-owned by their members. Despite the entrenchment of the neoliberal global order in the past four decades, cooperative practices and values that both challenge the neoliberal status quo and create alternatives to it have returned in recent years–both within and beyond the cooperative movement.   Examples of contemporary groups practicing both reclaimed and new cooperative values of autonomy, direct-democracy, self-reliance, equity, and solidarity include Brazil’s landless peasants’ movements, Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises, the Zapatistas and other indigenous autonomist movements around the world, North America’s intentional communities and housing cooperatives, and Europe’s myriad autonomous social centres and squats. We might call these experiments that both resist neoliberal enclosure yet also prefigure different forms of economic organization the new cooperativism. What is the genealogy of these new cooperative movements? What do these new yet historical-materially rooted experiments in collectivity, cooperation, and cooperativism look like? Where are they to be found within today’s neoliberal global reality?   Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action invites cooperative practitioners, members of artist collectives, activists engaged in affinity groups, and academics working within anarchism, Marxisms, critical theory, indigenism, feminism, or other traditions, to submit either theoretical papers or case studies that analyze and demonstrate how cooperation, cooperativism, or cooperatives are being re-imagined by groups committed to sustainable alternatives to neoliberalism and the capitalist nation-state. 

"Dispensing with Clausewitz" Not Bored! Once employed by the political consultancy group Devine Mulvey, and now pursuing a graduate degree at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Gene McHugh says he is interested in "questioning the applicability of [Guy] Debord's own conception of resistance (particularly detournement) in an age of networked, topological communication." Perhaps "Debord's strategies of resistance do not in fact jive with our version of the society of the spectacle."[1] Then why keep bringing him up? Like so many before him, McHugh needs to both cite Debord (an obligation at this point) and put Debord behind him so that he (McHugh) can continue to do what he is doing "in good faith."[2] McHugh's article on the Radical Software Group's version of Debord's cabinet game Kriegspiel -- which drew a cease and desist letter, alleging copyright infringement, from a lawyer retained by Debord's widow, Alice Becker-Ho, in April 2008 -- attacks Debord's relevance on two fronts.

Autonomy, Composition, and the Radical Imagination Seminar with Stevphen Shukaitis, Vilnius Free University (Laisvasis Universitetas) October 9th – 10th, 2008 Thursday October 9th, in gallery “Kaire-Desine” (Left-Right), Latako Street 3, Vilnius. 6pm. Friday October 10th, in Contemporary Art Centre, Vokieciu Street 2, Vilnius. 6pm. What is the nature of the radical imagination? Drawing from autonomist and anarchist politics, class composition analysis, and avant-garde arts, this seminar will explore the emergence, functioning, and constant break down of the resistant social imaginary: the continual cycles of composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the potentiality of struggles composed by capacities created within social movement. It is these cycles of composition, the circulation of struggle, which compose the revolutions of everyday life. To invoke the imagination as underlying and supporting radical politics, over the past forty years, has become a cliché. A rhetorical utilization of ideas that are already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process of circulation. But what exactly is radical imagination? And more specifically, what are the compositional capacities created by the emergence, transformation, mutation, and decomposition of collective imagination within social movements? Imagination is not something that is ahistorical, derived from nothing, but an ongoing relationship and material capacity constituted by social interactions between bodies. While liberatory impulses might point to a utopian (no)where that is separate from the present, it is necessary to point from somewhere, from a particular situated imagining. The task of a radical politics is one of understanding and renewal of forms of self-organization and the imagination. These are questions fruitfully approached through a renewal of militant research, workers inquiry, and class composition analysis, which will be explored. This seminar will investigate the construction of imaginal machines, that is, the socially, historically embedded and embodied manifestations of the radical imagination. Imagination, not as something possessed by individuals, but rather the composition of capacities to affect and be affected by the world developed movements toward creating forms of autonomous sociality and collective self-determination. What does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized power (through media flows and the power of the spectacle)? Does any subversive potentiality remain, or are we left with simply more avenues for the rejuvenation of questionable fields of power and rearticulating regimes of accumulation? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally bounded subversive power, one that like the mayfly has its day in the sun. It might be that imaginal machines, like all desiring 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 exploring a politics continually reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation, to keep open an antagonism without closure that is continually recomposed. To develop tools necessary in resisting the continual subdivision and suburbanization of the radical imagination.

"The Social Factory" Otonom “Meanwhile, and incidentally, there opened up for us the prospect, which cannot be sharply defined yet at this point, of a specific relation of capital to the communal, general conditions of social production, as distinct from the conditions of a particular capital and its particular production process.” (Marx, Grundrisse Notebook V, 1973)1 This emphasis by Marx which has mostly remained unrealized among the lines of Grundrisse has not been paid attention and reflected upon by Marxists in general except Negri. Even if it may have been reflected upon, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the implications of such a reflection have been very few in political theory and practice. This is not a problematic which is disregarded intentionally. As Marx has already said, this is related to the insufficient historical and social development of the specific relation of capital to communal, general conditions of social production, which is a prospect for us that cannot be defined yet at this point.

RENEWING THE ANARCHIST TRADITION A Scholarly Conference November 7-9, 2008 in Montpelier, Vermont The ninth edition of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference, sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), once again aims to provide a participatory and scholarly space in which to reexamine, reinvigorate, and make relevant the social and political tradition of anarchism. Each year, RAT brings together anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and libertarian leftists who want to critically engage both the tradition itself and the world in which we live. Participants and presenters at the conference thereby contribute to developing a more rigorous contemporary theoretical framework for anarchism as well as a stronger basis from which nonhierarchical movements can organize and resist. 2008 is a strange time to be an anarchist in North America. Thomas Friedman is calling for a green revolution, and Bono is at the forefront of a global war on poverty. The bright light of the U.S. presidential election campaign, anointed by Silicon Valley capital, has harnessed massive popular desire for radical social transformation--"Change"--to propel himself toward the White House. The reception he receives abroad articulates a thirst for a genuine internationalism, even as he signals his readiness to command more of the same military interventionism that has devastated people and social movements around the world. As anarchists and anti-authoritarians, it is easy to feel marginal, dissipated, defeated, and irrelevant as we watch some of our dearest ideas co-opted, sucked of content, turned inside out, and projected into the mainstream political scene. What better moment, then, to come together to reflect on and honestly appraise the practices, platforms, convictions, dogmas, truisms, and theories that anarchism offers? What better moment to reimbue that tradition with a crucial sense of urgency and the substance that can genuinely challenge racism, imperialism, sexism, colonial pillage, capitalist exploitation, and the multifold and mutually reinforcing forms of oppression and systems of domination?

:: Call for Papers, Presentations, and Interventions :: The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts April 29th to May 1st, 2009 Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, University of Leicester Keynote speakers: Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples L’orientale Natalie Jeremijenko, New York University Nick Dyer-Witheford, University of Western Ontario In a more wistful moment, Marx asked what commodities would say if they could speak. Surely, if he listened long enough, they would have announced the various traumas of their exploitatative and violent birthing to him. Eventually, one imagines, they would have described the nature of the various forms of labour necessary for their production as the apparitionally elementary components of the capitalist mode of production. So would the commodity’s autobiography be the same now, one wonders. Today we live in a much different state of things: the artifice of artefacts is evident all around us. A parliament of communication technologies, from RFIDS to bluetooth devices, constantly exchange information and network all around and through us. Wireless networks of communication, control, and cooperation proliferate in mysterious ways, all speaking an infra-language of organization, inscribing new techniques of governance. But these networks have become all the more indiscernible by the open secret of their appearance.