No Poetry After Adorno
Niall McDevitt

10 Problems with Adorno’s Dictum “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric)

1. Adorno’s dictum is like Fukuyama’s ‘the End of History’, an infuriatingly untrue soundbite that only makes the philosopher look ridiculous. Melodramatic, arrogant, obsolescent, it looks ever more wrongheaded as the decades roll on. A groan of despair, it might have been excusable as a Facebook status update, but not as serious philosophy.

UK Launch, Expect Anything Fear Nothing, MayDay Rooms,
Saturday September 22, 8pm



Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere

This volume is the first comprehensive English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s that strived to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society.

The evening will include interventions from Peter Laugesen, Stewart Home, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen.

The Combustible Campus
From Montreal to Mexico City, Something Is Stirring in the University
Enda Brophy

For three decades now, the neoliberal restructuring of post-secondary education has sought to implant market logic and corporate-style management into the academy. The systematic defunding of public education that enables this process has only intensified in recent years with the global financial crisis and the austerity measures imposed in its wake. The resulting transformation of public university systems has brought us corporatized administrations, rising tuition, departmental closures, expanded class sizes, noxious corporate food, offensives against academic workers, and ethically dubious corporate donations.

In its current form, one could argue that the academy produces little that extends our collective social capacities and much that diminishes them: hierarchy, exploitation, debt, individualism, precarious employment, and cynicism. At a time when knowledge is increasingly seen as a commodity to be produced in accordance with the demands of profit, and public education is decried as an unjust fetter on the ruthless pedagogy of the free market, the private sector has turned its attention to the university and is fervently dedicated to its transformation. The state has mostly obliged, with centre-right and centre-left governments across the world taking turns at accelerating this epochal shift in post-secondary education.

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.

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.

From Wildcat to Insurrection, from insurrection to wildcat: Screening Day
15 July 2012 – 3:30PM - The Brecht Forum - 451 West Street, New York, NY 10014

A full-day screening program organized with the Our Lives Are Not Negotiable reading group, and the new Group Affect collective project. Please join us for discussion, food, and drink (please bring things to share!).

OLANN, organized through the Public School New York, has met 25 times since last December, an attempt to give ourselves space to "collectively study anarchism, autonomism, biopolitics, communism, insurrectionism, nihilism, structuralism, our relationship to capital and the state, and other forms of exchange and authority." We've looked at such authors as Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Antonin Artaud, Aufheben, Jean Baudrillard, Alfredo M. Bonanno, Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, Colectivo Situaciones, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, the Motherfuckers, Precarias a la Deriva, Tiqqun, Alexander Trocchi, and Raoul Vaneigem, among others.

Artpolitik Site Launch

Inspired by the Institute for the Future of the Book, Minor Compositions is launching a digital form for the forthcoming book Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation by Neala Schleuning.

Over the next month the entirety of the draft manuscript will be posted here: http://artpolitik.digress.it.

Comments and discussions will be integrated into revisions of the book before it is printed later this year (which will, as with all other Minor Compositions titles, be available for free download).

Back to 1911
Temporal Autonomous Zones
Peter Lamborn Wilson

Reversion to 1911 would constitute a perfect first step for a 21st century neo-Luddite movement. Living in 1911 means using technology and culture only up to that point and no further, or as little as possible.

For example, you can have a player-piano and phonograph, but no radio or TV; an ice-box, but not a refrigerator; an ocean liner, but not an aeroplane, electric fans, but no air conditioner.

You dress 1911. You can have a telephone. You can even have a car, ideally an electric. Someday, someone will make replicas of the 1911 “Grandma Duck” Detroit Electric, one of the most beautiful cars ever designed.

1911 was a great year for Modernism, Expressionism, Symbolism, Rosicrucianism, anarcho- syndicalism and Individualism, vegetarian lebensreform, and Nietzschean cosmic consciousness, but it was also the last great Edwardian year, the twilight of British Empire and last decadent gilded moments of Manchu, Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, French and Ottoman monarchy; last “old days” before the hideous 20th century really got going.

April 25th is “1T Day”: Occupy Student Debt
Ann Larson and Malav Kanuga

“We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we
work toward are the jobs we already have. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.”

— Communiqué from an Absent Future
(from the UCSC occupation barricades September 2009)

In the United States, two-thirds of college graduates leave school with student loan debt, an average of $25,000 each. Debt rates have increased 500 percent since 1999, and there are more and more of us across the country facing six-figure loans who will make monthly payments for the rest of our lives. Those of us who are low-income and working-class students often incur debts for degrees we will never complete because it is especially difficult balancing school and employment in this precarious economy. Student debt will burden us and our families for years to come. It will be the breath down our neck at every life choice and the clock that disciplines our present and future labor time. Debt is profoundly alienating and individuating. It separates us from each other and the commonwealth of our education gained from generations of social movements.