Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

1. Post-Oedipal
The process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have dramatically changed in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that book was a defining moment in my intellectual and political experience, in the first years of the 19070s, when students and workers were fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book the landscape has changed so deeply that very concept of desire has to be re-thought, as it is marking the field of subjectivation in a very different way.

The proliferation of sources of enunciation in this age of the networks, the globalization of the economy and the media, was predicted and in a sense pre-conceptualized Deleuze and Guattari, but they could not know in advance the effects that global capitalism has produced on the unconscious and the dynamics of desire. As production, media and daily life have been subsumed into the sphere of semiocapital we need to reconsider the unconscious from this transformed position.

My starting question is thus: what is capitalism and what is schizophrenia after the psychosocial landscape has been reshaped by the tendencies described by Deleuze and Guattari?

"Waking Up, Walking Away"
John Michael Greer

Last week’s Archdruid Report post, despite its wry comparison of
industrial civilization’s current predicament with the plots and
settings of pulp fantasy fiction, had a serious point. Say what you will
about the failings of cheap fantasy novels – and there’s plenty to be
said on that subject, no question – they consistently have something
that most of the allegedly more serious attempts to make sense of our
world usually lack: the capacity to envision truly profound change.

That may seem like an odd claim, given the extent to which contemporary
industrial society preens itself on its openness to change and novelty.
Still, it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of that
very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty to which it
applies amount to, basically, more of the same thing we’ve already got.
A consumer in a modern industrial society is free to choose any of a
dizzying range of variations on a suffocatingly narrow range of basic
options – and that’s equally true whether we are talking about products,
politics, or lifestyles.

A Memorial Event for Ira Cohen (1935-2011)
Poet, Filmmaker, Photographer

Sunday, Feb 5th, 2012, 6pm - 10pm at The Living Theatre, 21 Clinton St, NYC

Space is limited - please RSVP for further attendance details:
RSVP

"If Sabu came crashing
through the coconut palms
on his elephant to tell me
this was all a dream
I would not believe him."
-- Ira Cohen, ON WAKING

Readings In Memoriam by
Judith Malina, Allan Graubard, Tom Walker, Steve Dalachinsky, Jordan Zinovich, Valery Oisteanu, Bonny Finberg, Bill Wollak, Clayton Patterson, Louise Landes-Levi, Penny Arcade, Jeremiah Newton, Indra Tamang, Timothy Baum & others T.B.A.

Music & Performances In Memoriam by
Butch Morris Chorus of Poets, Alice Farley Dance Theatre, Wayne Lopes & Sylvie Degiez, Perry Robinson, Will Swofford Cameron & others T.B.A.

The event will include a video presentation of Ira Cohen reading poetry along with excerpts of his work in film and photography.

Donations to The Living Theatre will be accepted in lieu of admission.

Press inquires contact: press [at] iracohen [dot] org

Ira Harvey Cohen, of New York, NY, died peacefully on April 25th, 2011 at the age of 76. He will always be loved and always be missed. His legacy lives on.

Ira Cohen was born in New York, NY on February 3rd, 1935. He is the son of the late Lester Cohen and the late Faye Cohen. Mr. Cohen was an innovative and original poet, photographer, filmmaker, publisher, and editor. A self-described "Electronic Multimedia Shaman", he was an active humanist from the 1960s to the present. Mr. Cohen was educated at Horace Mann, Cornell and Columbia. He spent the early 1960s in Tangier, Morocco, where he lived and worked with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Paul Bowles. While there, he prepared his first major work; editing and publishing the anthology Gnaoua (1964). This volume contained work by William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Jack Smith, and others.

Towards a Futurology of the Present
Marco Cuevas-Hewitt

‘Tomorrow never happens, man’ – Janis Joplinii

Has there ever been a revolution without its musicians, artists, and writers? Could we imagine the Zapatista movement, for example, without its poetry and lyricism? At this moment, I am writing from the specific location of the west coast of Australia, on land known to Aboriginal Australians as Beeliar Boodjar. Across the Indian Ocean, remarkable things are happening in North Africa. I listen on the internet to the songs of freedom being sung in Tahrir Square, as well as to the young hip-hop artists who provided the soundtrack to the revolution in Tunisia. But their YouTube videos are not the only things going viral. Significantly, their mutant desires, of which their music is an expression, are also beginning to ripple outwards. I feel it here at my kitchen table as I type, as viscerally as the caffeine flowing through my body. I also see it on the evening news in Spain and Greece. Perhaps the alterglobalisation movement never died, but was simply laying in wait. Perhaps we are only at the beginning. And perhaps there is little real difference in our movements between making music and making change; between the creation of art and the creation of new social relations through our activisms. Our common art is the crafting of new ways of being, of seeing, of valuing; in short, the cultivation of new forms of life, despite and beyond the deadening, ossified structures all around us.