Remembering the Impossible Tomorrow:
Italian Political Thought and the Recent Crisis in Capitalism
The British Society for Phenomenology 2013 Annual Conference
5th- 7th April, 2013 St Hilda’s College Oxford

During Marx’s time radical thought was formed from a convergence of three sources: German philosophy, English economics, and French politics. In the introduction to Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (1996) Michael Hardt argued that these tides had shifted, with radical movements drawing from French philosophy, US economics, and Italian politics. More recently, Matteo Pasquinelli has argued that ‘Italian theory’ has attained an academic hegemony comparable to that held by French philosophy in the 1980s.

But despite the proliferation of analysis and organizing drawing from and inspired by the history of autonomous politics in Italy, where are these voices today? In 2012, if you listened to the mainstream politicians and economic experts and no one else, you would hardly know that there was any financial crisis in 2008. You might have a faint recollection that for a brief moment alternative voices were heard in the media, but now it as if nothing at all had happened. The waters that once had parted have now engulfed us again. It is the same voices articulating the same tired ideas as the whole of Europe slides into the nightmare of austerity, despite the fact they do not appear to have any relation to reality, and even those who speak them seem exhausted and worn out.

Silvia Federici Talk Reproduction and Women's Struggles in an Era of "Primitive Accumulation"
Monday, Dec. 10, 2012 @ 6PM
THE WENNER-GREN FOUNDATION, NYC

Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, will discuss the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the global political economy and reproductive labor, focusing on the crisi that "new enclosures" are producing in our everyday lives, and the struggles that women internationally are making, in response to it, to create new forms of social cooperation and reproductive "commons."

Open Utopia Launch December 5th NYC
Stephen Duncombe and Bob Stein - Launch for Open Utopia
Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - 5:30PM - 7:30PM
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor

Join Stephen Duncombe (Gallatin and MCC, NYU) and Bob Stein (Institute for the Future of the Book) for the launch of Open Utopia, an open-source project based on Sir Thomas Moreʼs Utopia. Using the platform Social Book, users can add their own notes, criticisms, or anecdotes to the text which can be read by everyone.

Colectivo Situaciones Talk November 20th NYC
Between Impasse and Insurrection: Notes on the Crisis of Neoliberalism from Argentina 2001 to the Present
With Verónica Gago and Diego Sztulwark of Colectivo Situaciones, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Tuesday, November 20th 7PM
Join us for a talk and discussion with Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina.
Co-sponsored by the Committee on Globalization and Social Change | Graduate Center CUNY, Room 5307 | 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10016

The moments of political and economic crisis in Argentina in 2001, specifically the 19th and 20th of December do not merely mark an event, a day, or even a year. Rather 2001 is an active principle, a key to thinking about this past decade from the perspective of the crisis of neoliberalism between impasse and insurrection. It is a method, a way of looking by seeing the crisis in motion and in time. It becomes a premise with its multiple meanings, spaces, and temporalities.

This talk will be given by Verónica Gago and Diego Sztulwark, members of Colectivo Situaciones and of the Buenos Aires-based radical press Tinta Limón. Colectivo Situaciones is a collective of militant researchers based in Buenos Aires. For more than twelve years, they have participated in numerous grassroots militant-research projects with unemployed workers, peasant movements, human rights groups, neighborhood assemblies, and alternative education experiments. Their published works include several articles and books, among them Genocide in the Neighborhood (Chainlinks, 2010) and 19&20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism (Autonomedia/Minor Compositions/Common Notions, 2011).

Discussions have covered a range of topics.

- The struggle for land as a central focus of class struggle in an age of resource peaks.
- The limitations of ‘clean’ energy and the critique of technological fixes. Ie. Indigenous resistance to windfarms in Mexico to strikes in the German wind sector. Solar panel toxic-waste struggle in China.
- ‘Green’ capitalism’s ability ( or not ) to adapt to climate crises and create new forms of accumulation.

Critical Arts Ensemble Book Launch London October 6th
Marcus Campbell Arts Books

Four Corners Books and Marcus Campbell Art Books are delighted to invite you to a talk by artist Steve Kurtz, who will discuss the work of Critical Art Ensemble, the artists' group he co-founded and the making of their new book: Disturbances. Steve's talk will be followed by a general discussion and Q&A with Steve and other members of the group.

The book will be available for sale at the shop as part of the Four Corners Books residency program at the shop for the next 2 months.

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.

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.

The Real Truth: A World's Fair July-August London
Raven Row 56 Artillery Lane London E1 7LS

A project by Suzanne Treister at Raven Row over four weekends featuring four keynote speeches within a specially designed theatre: A global futurist, a U.S. Security Agency insider, an anarcho-primitivist and the international expert on world's fairs... Alongside an exhibition including three unique libraries, two video lounges and designs for a virtual world's fair.

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.