The New Spaces of Freedom Félix Guattari Montréal, November 1984 Translated by Arianna Bove and Noe Le Blanc We might refuse to resign ourselves to it, but we know for a fact that both in the East and in the majority of the Third World rights and liberties are subject to the discretionary powers of the political forces in charge of the state. Yet we are not so ready to admit, and often refuse to confront, the fact that they are equally threatened in the West, in countries that like to call themselves ‘champions of the free world’. This hard question, so close to the skin and pregnant with dramatic human implications, is hardly resolved if we remain at a level of statements of principle. It would be impossible to fail to recognize the fact that for a dozen years a whole bundle of rights and freedoms and a whole series of spaces of freedom continued to lose ground in Europe. If we consider what is happening to immigrants and the distortions that the right to political asylum is undergoing in France alone this fact is manifestly unequivocal. But the defeat stares us in the face even when detached from mere narrow jurisprudence, when considering the actual evolution of the ‘right’ to dispose of basic material means of survival and labor for millions of people in Europe (the unemployed, young and old people, the precarious); the ‘right to difference’ for all kinds of minorities; and the ‘right’ to effective democratic expression for the large majority of peoples. Militants might object that the conflicts related to formal juridical freedoms should not be treated on par with the conquest of new spaces of freedom because only the latter is relevant to concrete struggles (to be fair, this reaction is reminiscing of an era that has long gone). Justice never kept out of the social fray (it never stood over and above social struggles); democracy was always more or less manipulated; there is nothing, no greatness, to be expected from the realm of formal juridical freedom, whilst, on the contrary, everything is still to be done when it comes to new spaces of freedom.

Social Security and the Global Crisis Andreas Exne In 2007, few people believed that the financial turbulences in the US housing market would have any significant repercussions on the world economy, let alone that they would trigger a financial 9/11 as the failure of Lehmann Brothers 2008 was called afterwards. Even less would have argued, that the global system of capitalism headed full speed into a systemic crisis that would shatter its foundations in a way the world hasn’t seen since the interwar period in the 1930s. Though, there have been such people and we can draw on their analyses. My task here is to develop a line of thoughts concerning the challenges to social security in a time of global crisis. This task thus involves a threefold analyses: (1) what is the character of crisis, (2) which role does social security play and (3) how does the crisis influence security? All three questions relate to the question, which kind of society it is, that we actually live in.

"Knowledge Commons, Power, Pedagogy, and Collective Practice" Cara Baldwin in Conversation with Paula Cobo Q>Paula Cobo: At a moment where art institutions operate as corporations, where we are witnesses of an ongoing endogamy of interests, how do you feel about the role of the self-Institution, or the Anti-University? A>Cara Baldwin: Art institutions have historically operated as corporations, with varying effects/affects. At this particular moment what interests me in terms of collective practices are those that are incredibly open. This is not anti-corporate necessarily.

"Not Such Wicked Leaks" Umberto Eco [For the celebrated novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco, the Wikileaks affair or "Cablegate" not only shows up the hypocrisy that governs relations between states, citizens and the press, but also presages a return to more archaic forms of communication.] The WikiLeaks affair has twofold value. On the one hand, it turns out to be a bogus scandal, a scandal that only appears to be a scandal against the backdrop of the hypocrisy governing relations between the state, the citizenry and the press. On the other hand, it heralds a sea change in international communication – and prefigures a regressive future of “crabwise” progress.

Twelve Theses on WikiLeaks Geert Lovink & Patrice Riemens Thesis 0 "What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!" (after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on "Western Civilization") Thesis 1 Disclosures and leaks have been a feature of all eras, however never before has a non-state or non- corporate affiliated group done anything on the scale of what WikiLeaks has managed to do, first with the "collateral murder" video, then the "Afghan War Logs", and now "Cablegate". It looks like we have now reached the moment that the quantitative leap is morphing into a qualitative one. When WikiLeaks hit the mainstream early in 2010, this was not yet the case. In a sense, the "colossal" WikiLeaks disclosures can be explained as the consequence of the dramatic spread of IT use, together with the dramatic drop in its costs, including for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets -- never mind private ones -- has become difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. WikiLeaks becomes symbolic for a transformation in the "information society" at large, holding up a mirror of things to come. So while one can look at WikiLeaks as a (political) project and criticize it for its modus operandi, it can also be seen as the "pilot" phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.

What does Resistance Look Like? The Niger Delta Model by Ray Boudreaux When black plumes of oil began gushing forth from the silent bottom deep in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th, everyone in South Louisiana reverted to the crisis mode we have all lived in for periods of time since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Our first question became “What can we do to help save our wetlands?” Thousands of willing Louisianians signed up to volunteer in the protection and cleanup efforts, and people began planning to carpool down the road to the coast to help out. Like a mine explosion, an outbreak of smallpox, or a chestnut blight, BP’s oil spill looked like just another disaster, a tragic mistake made by benevolent capitalists. But like those past tragedies, this oil spill is a predictable consequence of an industrial civilization where risks are not calculated by those who will face the consequences should something go wrong. There was no doubt a deepwater oil spill could rob people of their landbase and their ability to feed themselves, but that consequence was considered an acceptable risk by those who do not live in South Louisiana: those affected by a spill could just move to the city and work for money to buy their food if something did happen. As is always the case, the people weighing these risks were not those who would be denied the ability to feed themselves; they were lawyers, CEOs, and businessmen in corporate offices, where shrimp cocktail plates and grilled fish greet their conference room meetings exactly at 12:30pm every day.

Movement, Learning: A Few Reflections on the Exciting UK Winter 2010 Manuela Zechner Something starts. An event rocks our world. It produces a rupture in the continuous flow of our life; is has a ‘before’ and ‘after’, it marks a clear point or intervention in the flow of our life and into our understanding of who we are, what we are doing and why. An event is a powerful dynamic of subjectivation, a movement through which we are recomposed as subjects. It’s not a merely quantitative dynamic that determines how much of an importance a situation takes on for us, but the degree to which we are moved by it, its degree of resonance. An event resonates, and so we hold it dear even once the situation that brought it about has passed: we want to stay faithful to it. Most events are short, pass in a flash, but they can have a long echo, many waves. They can transform us, and because we want them to transform us, we operate all kinds of efforts to stay close to what they made us see, feel, grasp, become. We try to re-member events, give them a body, inhabit and incorporate them into our previous life. And so we do with this November: remember remember. After Millbank, I heard people say, over and again and in different formulations: ‘I can’t believe it’, ‘something has moved’, ‘we have done it!’, ‘it is really happening’, ‘there’s a movement’… We remember by holding meetings, assemblies, training sessions, discussions, preparing ourselves to become more, more like what we want to be. This text tries to operate this sort of re-membering through writing.We liked the taste of 50.000 people gathered in joy and anger. It rocks what our bodies can do together. This text attempts to reflect on the emergence of a student movement in November 2010 through retracing its affective dimension.

US Education and the Crisis Michael Hardt Governments across the globe are dramatically reducing funding for public education and raising university tuition rates. These measures are often cast as a response to the current economic crisis but really their implementation began well before it. Whereas in Britain, Italy, and other European countries students battle police in the streets and experiment with new means to protest such government actions, there is a relative calm on U.S. campuses.

The Debt-Based Tendency of Japan’s Student Movement: The View of the Association of Blacklisted Students Norihito Nakata Following the financial crisis of the fall of 2008, struggles in universities erupted across the world. Beginning from the Greek Insurrection, universities in Italy, Spain, England, and France witnessed student uprisings. In North America, the New School University in New York and the UCs in California were shaken by occupations. Having had its ups and downs, the impetus of students’ struggles goes on or is even intensified in places in Europe, as we have just heard about the Milbank occupation. In retrospect, what the financial crisis provoked was nothing but a reinforcement of the exploitative regime of cognitive capitalism, in the costume of a fake Keynsianism called the Green New Deal. During the past forty years, capitalism has been trying to dodge the material limitation of growth and the tendency of the interest rate to fall by way of capturing our immaterial activities and transforming them into commodities. Calling out “There is no money to clean up your mess”; “let capitalism die,” students and teachers have continued their struggles, precisely because they intuited this course of events from the onset. Having functioned as an authorized basis for cognitive and affective productions, universities are now the lifeline of capitalism that it cannot let loose. This essay is the contribution of the Association of Blacklisted Students (hereafter ABS), a Japan-based new student movement, to the discussion of “a global campaign for a debt abolition movement” and to promote “a global day of action,” launched by Edu-factory. We would like to share the history, problems, and aspirations of the student movement in Japan, now facing a new phase with the broad crisis surrounding student loans, with the participants and readers of the Edu-factory project, and get as much feedback as possible, to empower our movement and to be an active part of the global impetus to abolish capitalism and the state that in amalgamation are growing into an unprecedentedly menacing apparatus.

Does the Notion of Activist Art Still Have Meaning? Alain Badiou [Is it still possible to propose a general definition of a militant vision of artistic creation? Alain Badiou proposes a work of art which is in relationship to local transformations and experiences, which is intellectually ambitious and which is formally avant-garde in the classical sense of the substitution of presentation for an ornamental vision of representation. A Lecture presented at the Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York City, October 13, 2010, in collaboration with Lacanian Ink.] My question this evening will be: Is it still possible to propose a general definition of a militant vision of artistic creation? The first and simple possibility is to say that a militant vision of artistic creation is when an art – a work of art – is a part of something which is not reducible to an artistic determination; for example, stained glass windows in churches. Stained glass is a symbol of the light of God and it is also part of artistic creation. Greek temples are also something for a collective cult. Military music is something inside the creation of patriotic courage. Egyptian pyramids are works of art certainly but also the whole symbolic question of the temple, and so on.