You say you want a revolution…

Edward Ludlam’s name didn’t do the decent thing and die with its owner in the summer of 1776. Instead it emerged rudely triumphant more than 30 years after Edward – or Ned – was laid to rest at St Mary’s Church in Anstey.

If the name rings a bell, it’s because Ned Ludd was once used as a signatory by smash-happy men and women across Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Men and women who were out of work because new knitting and stocking machines had taken their jobs.

During five years of hardship and strife, many a wooden frame was chopped to bits. Who dunnit? Ned Ludd dunnit officer. Duh.

Dead Ned’s name was to plague those technology-savvy industrialists who had brought poverty to thousands of families across the East Midlands. Threatening letters were sent to factory owners signed Ned Ludd, General Ludd and King Ludd.

The Luddites, as they now called themselves, destroyed 200 new stocking frames in one three-week period in early 1811. In the East Midlands, the heart of the country’s textile industry, the fighting spread from Nottinghamshire and then to Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

Parliament, as it is wont to do, cruelly rounded on the starving and desperate, passing legislation which made damaging machines punishable by death. At this time, almost 90 per cent of the 20,000 stocking frames in use in the country were located in the region, with records showing almost 12,000 were in Leicestershire.

Lord Byron, quite possibly the sexiest person who ever lived, was one of the few MPs to speak in defence of the starving people in his native Midlands. Byron, FYI, was a Nottinghamshire lad.

And factory owners, we know, had good cause to worry about their safety.

In 2006, underground passages and a chamber were found beneath a house in Loughborough that once belonged to lace magnate John Heathcote.

Heathcote had good reason to fear the Luddites – they had already destroyed a lace mill of his in Loughborough in 1816. But with all this, the mystery still remains – why did the Luddites take Ned Ludlam’s name?

“It was a cover name, the same as Robin Hood,” local history enthusiast Brian Kibble told the Mercury in 2006.

“They used it to protect their real names. The Luddites supposedly got their name by the actions of Ned Lud, or Edward Ludlam, from Anstey.

“Ned, well, he wasn’t quite all there, and that is one of the stories that has come down.

“There’s a story that he’d been teased by local children, and he chased them and he lost them. And, apparently, in his frustration, in one of the cottages, he smashed up this knitter’s frame.

“The other legend was that he was the son of a knitting frame worker and his father had chastised him one day and, in revenge, he smashed up the frame.

“Whatever the truth,” says Brian, “somewhere along the line he seems to have been responsible for smashing up machinery.”

Ned’s name lived on in the village down the years.

“Apparently,” chortles Brian, “it used to be a saying in the village that if something was broken or damaged it had been Ned Ludded.”

Ever since, “Luddite” has been a Leicestershire-inspired entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. One, as a word for the English workers who fought for their jobs between 1811 and 1816, and now, more commonly, a disparaging word used for those opposed to or uneasy with new technology.

https://leicestershirelalala.com/you-say-you-want-a-revolution-the-luddites-were-chissits-too/

 

Childhood's End The digital revolution isn’t over but has turned into something else

Childhood's End

The digital revolution isn’t over but has turned into something else

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.

The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.

Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. A small number of people and companies who helped spawn self-replicating codes became some of the richest and most powerful individuals and organizations in the world.

Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun. None dare speak its name.Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well.

Text by George Dyson

https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-childhoods-end

Η Μνήμη της Επανάστασης

Memorial to Collective Utopia, 2010

#kostisvelonis#sculpture#memorial#collectiveconsciousness#collective#utopia#dystopia #domesticity#furniture#statemuseumofcontemporaryart#colorstudy#gustavklucis #gustavklutsis#colortheory

Την εκδοχή 70 σύγχρονων Ελλήνων εικαστικών δημιουργών για τα σύμβολα, τις εικόνες και τους πρωταγωνιστές της Οκτωβριανής Επανάστασης, τα μηνύματα, τα συνθήματα, το πνεύμα, την ορμή και τον δυναμισμό της, τις διαστάσεις ενός από τα ιστορικά γεγονότα που «συγκλόνισαν» τον κόσμο και καθόρισαν την ιστορία του 20ού αιώνα φιλοξενεί η έκθεση «Η Μνήμη της Επανάστασης – Σύγχρονοι Έλληνες Εικαστικοί», σε συνδιοργάνωση του Κρατικού Μουσείου Σύγχρονης Τέχνης της Θεσσαλονίκης Κρατικό Μουσείο Σύγχρονης Τέχνης / State Museum of Contemporary Artκαι της Ανωτάτης Σχολής Καλών Τεχνών / Ανωτάτη Σχολή Καλών Τεχνών.

Η έκθεση διοργανώθηκε και πρωτοπαρουσιάστηκε με μεγάλη επιτυχία στο ΚΜΣΤ στη Θεσσαλονίκη την άνοιξη του 2017, όπου είχαν την ευκαιρία να τη δουν χιλιάδες επισκέπτες. Η έκθεση παρουσιάζεται στην Αθήνα εμπλουτισμένη με έργα περισσότερων καλλιτεχνών. Συνοδεύεται από αναπαραγωγές έργων της συλλογής Κωστάκη του ΚΜΣΤ που σκιαγραφούν το σκηνικό της εποχής της ρωσικής πρωτοπορίας. Η τέχνη της ρωσικής πρωτοπορίας αποτελεί, εξάλλου, μέχρι σήμερα για τους καλλιτέχνες μια ανεξάντλητη πηγή έμπνευσης, προβληματισμού και ερεθισμάτων, οδηγεί σε θετικούς ιστορικούς και πολιτισμικούς συνειρμούς, αφού υλοποιεί εξαιρετικά και υποδειγματικά ριζοσπαστικές καλλιτεχνικές και κοινωνικοπολιτικές ουτοπίες.

Η έκθεση «Η Μνήμη της Επανάστασης – Σύγχρονοι Έλληνες εικαστικοί» δεν στοχεύει να υποκαταστήσει την αυστηρή ιστορική μελέτη, τις διαφορετικές αναγνώσεις, αντικρουόμενες ερμηνείες και αποτιμήσεις των ιστορικών. Αντίθετα, επικεντρώνεται σ' έναν ξεχωριστό προβληματισμό με τις έννοιες της Ουτοπίας και της Επανάστασης, αλλά και τους πειραματισμούς των Ρώσων πρωτοπόρων καλλιτεχνών, να βρίσκονται στον πυρήνα της και να συγκροτούν το νοηματικό της άξονα. Οι καλλιτέχνες της έκθεσης μέσα από διαφορετικές προσεγγίσεις "μεταφέρουν" την έννοια της Επανάστασης δυναμικά στο παρόν, έρχονται να μιλήσουν για τη δυναμική και την αντοχή της στον χρόνο, σε μια κρίσιμη περίοδο μετάβασης, κρίσης και αναμονής, αμφισβήτησης και έκπτωσης των ιδεολογιών.

Την έκθεση πλαισιώνουν επίσης αντικείμενα (αφίσες και προτομές με τους ηγέτες της Οκτωβριανής Επανάστασης, φωτογραφίες, ζωγραφικοί πίνακες σοσιαλιστικού ρεαλισμού, κ.ά.) της συλλογής του Βασίλη Κωνσταντίνου, την οποία έχει παραχωρήσει στο ΚΜΣΤ. Η συλλογή έχει συγκροτηθεί μέσα από πολυάριθμα ταξίδια και πεισματικές αναζητήσεις του συλλέκτη στη μεγάλη γεωγραφική περιοχή των Βαλκανίων και λειτουργεί αναμνηστικά, αλλά και ως υπόμνηση μιας μεγάλης πολιτικής ιστορίας και ταυτόχρονα πιο προσωπικά, αφού αποκαλύπτει πολλές κρυφές ιστορίες της ατομικής διαχείρισης της ιστορίας.

Συμμετέχοντες καλλιτέχνες: Γιώργος Αλεξανδρίδης, Άγγελος Αντωνόπουλος, Νίκος Αρβανίτης, Αννίτα Αργυροηλιοπούλου, Μιχάλης Αρφαράς, Βασίλειος Βασιλακάκης, Κωστής Βελώνης, Μπάμπης Βενετόπουλος, Ανδρέας Βούσουρας, Βασίλης Γεροδήμος, Δημήτρης Γεωργακόπουλος, Μανώλης Γιανναδάκης, Λεωνίδας Γιαννακόπουλος, Κορνήλιος Γραμμένος, Λυδία Δαμπασίνα, Γιώργος Διβάρης, Στέφανος Επιτρόπου, Θεόδωρος Ζαφειρόπουλος, Δημήτρης Ζουρούδης, Βασίλης Ζωγράφος, Αντιγόνη Καββαθά, Στέφανος Καμάρης, Δημήτρης Καρλαφτόπουλος, Γιάννης Καστρίτσης, Θεόφιλος Κατσιπάνος, Θοδωρής Λάλος, Γιάννης Λασηθιωτάκης, Ανδρέας Λυμπεράτος, Αλέξανδρος Μαγκανιώτης, Μιχάλης Μανουσάκης, Πάνος Ματθαίου, Ειρήνη Ματσούκη, Δημήτρης Μεράντζας, Τάσος Μισούρας, Μανώλης Μπαμπούσης, Εμμανουήλ Μπιτσάκης, Ξενοφών Μπήτσικας, Νικόλας Μπλιάτκας, Άλκης Μπούτλης, Νίκος Παπαδημητρίου, Αντώνης Παπαδόπουλος, Λήδα Παπακωνσταντίνου, Αιμιλία Παπαφιλίππου, Λίλα Παπούλα, Αλίκη Παππά, Κωνσταντίνος Πάτσιος, Νατάσσα Πουλαντζά, Γεωργία Σαγρή, Ξενής Σαχίνης, Χριστίνα Σγουρομύτη, Νίκος Σεπετζόγλου, Δήμητρα Σιατερλή, Γιάννης Σκαλτσάς, Άγγελος Σκούρτης, Μάριος Σπηλιόπουλος, Στεφανία Στρούζα, Δημήτρης Τάταρης, Νίκος Τρανός, Βίκυ Τσαλαματά, Γιώργος Τσεριώνης, Κώστας Τσώλης, Πάνος Χαραλάμπους, Γιώργος Χαρβαλιάς, Μανώλης Χάρος, Θάλεια Χιώτη, Κώστας Χριστόπουλος, Διονύσης Χριστοφιλογιάννης, Έλλη Χρυσίδου, Θοδωρής Χρυσικός, Γιάννης Ψυχοπαίδης

Επιμέλεια έκθεσης: Γιάννης Μπόλης, Ιστορικός της τέχνης - Επιμελητής του ΚΜΣΤ

Ανώτατη σχολή καλών τεχνών 

12.02 -14.04 

http://www.greekstatemuseum.com/kmst/exhibitions/article/1313.html 

La Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt avant l’attaque par les troupes du général Lamoricière

Thibault, La Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt avant l’attaque par les troupes du général Lamoricière, le dimanche 25 juin 1848

Monument Dedicated to the Exercise of Sovereignty of the People in Primary Assemblies

This design for a monument to popular sovereignty was produced by the French artist and designer Jean Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) at the time of the French Revolution. After gaining a solid education as an architect and making a promising start to his career, Lequeu failed to channel his architectural and philosophical ideas into concrete projects that would ensure him fame. Lequeu was a man of his times in his faith in science and his religious eclecticism, but he was also a troubled visionary, known to be unorthodox and eccentric. He designed several projects that were inspired by the new revolutionary era, none of which he managed to complete. Lequeu’s semicircular design is dated, in the title above the design, June 24, 1793, and, in the lower right-hand corner, Messidor 9, Second Year of the Republic. In its efforts to eliminate traditional influences from French life, the French Revolution instituted a new calendar that featured a set of renamed months, divided into three ten-day weeks. “Messidor 9” refers to the ninth day of the month of Messidor, the first month of the summer, named after the Latin word messis, meaning harvest. Years were numbered starting with the proclamation of the French Republic in September 1792. Napoleon abolished this system and restored the Gregorian calendar with effect from January 1, 1806.

How to Make Almost Anything

How to Make Almost Anything: pIn recent decades, the world has been rocked by revolutions in the digitization of computation and communication. Now the physical world is being digitized, thanks to new technologies that can turn data into things and things into data. Digital fabrication will let people build custom home furniture, living organs out of cells, and drones that can fly out of a printer; science fiction is becoming industrial fact./p

The Digital Fabrication Revolution

By Neil Gershenfeld

www.foreignaffairs.com

Mystical Anarchism

We are living through a long anti-1960s. The various anticapitalist experiments in communal living and collective existence that defined that period seem to us either quaintly passé, laughably unrealistic, or dangerously misguided. Having grown up and thrown off such seemingly childish ways, we now think we know better than to try to bring heaven crashing down to earth and construct concrete utopias.

Despite our occasional and transient enthusiasms and Obamaisms, we are all political realists; indeed, most of us are passive nihilists and cynics. This is why we still require a belief in something like original sin, namely, that there is something ontologically defective about what it means to be human. The Judeo-Christian conception of original sin finds its modern analogues in Freud’s variation on the Schopenhauerian disjunction between desire and civilization, Heidegger’s ideas of facticity and fallenness, and the Hobbesian anthropology that drives Schmitt’s defense of authoritarianism and dictatorship (which has seduced significant sectors of the left hungry for what they see as Realpolitik).Without the conviction that the human condition is essentially flawed and dangerously rapacious, we would have no way of justifying our disappointment, and nothing gives us a greater thrill than satiating our sense of exhaustion and ennui by polishing the bars of our prison cell. Nothing can be done about it, we say. Humanity is a plague.

It is indeed true that those utopian political movements of the 1960s, in which an echo of utopian millenarian movements like the Free Spirit could be heard – such as the Situationist International – led to various forms of disillusionment, disintegration, and, in extreme cases, disaster. Experiments in the collective ownership of property, or in communal living based on sexual freedom without the repressive institution of the family – or indeed R. D. Laing’s experimental communal asylums with no distinction between the so-called mad and the sane – seem like distant whimsical cultural memories captured in dog-eared, yellowed paperbacks and grainy, poor-quality film. As a child of punk, economic collapse, and the widespread social violence in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, it is a world that I have always struggled to understand. Perhaps such communal experiments tried to be too pure and were overfull of righteous conviction. Perhaps they were, in a word, too moralistic to ever endure. Perhaps such experiments were doomed because of what we might call a politics of abstraction, in the sense of being overly attached to an idea at the expense of a frontal denial of reality. Perhaps, indeed.

At their most extreme – say in the activities of the Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades in the 1970s – the moral certitude of the closed and pure community becomes fatally linked to redemptive, cleansing violence. Terror becomes the means to bring about the end of virtue. Such is the logic of Jacobinism. The death of individuals is but a speck on the vast heroic canvas of the class struggle. Such thinking culminated in a heroic politics of violence, where acts of abduction, kidnapping, hijacking, and assassination were justified through an attachment to a set of ideas. As a character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique remarks, “To kill a human being in order to defend an idea is not to defend an idea, it is to kill a human being.”

Perhaps such groups were too attached to the idea of immediacy, the propaganda of the violent deed as the impatient attempt to storm the heavens. Perhaps such experiments lacked an understanding of politics as a constant and concrete process of mediation. That is, the mediation between a subjective ethical commitment based on a general principle – for example the equality of all, friendship, or, as I would say, an infinite ethical demand – and the experience of local organization that builds fronts and alliances between disparate groups with often conflicting sets of interests, what Gramsci called the activity of “hegemony.” By definition, such a process of mediation is never pure and never complete.

Are these utopian experiments in community dead, or do they live on in some form? I’d like to make two suggestions for areas in which this utopian impulse might live on, two experiments, if you will: One from contemporary art, one from contemporary radical politics. These two areas can be interestingly linked. Indeed, if a tendency marks our time, then it is the increasing difficulty in separating forms of collaborative art from experimental politics.

Perhaps such utopian experiments in community live on in the institutionally sanctioned spaces of the contemporary art world. One thinks of projects like L’Association des temps libérés (1995) or Utopia Station (2003), as well as many other examples gathered together in a show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in Fall 2008, Theanyspacewhatever. In the work of artists like Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick, or curators like Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Maria Lind, there is a deeply felt Situationist nostalgia for ideas of collectivity, action, self-management, collaboration, and indeed the idea of the group as such. In such art practice, which Nicolas Bourriaud has successfully branded as “relational,” art is the acting out of a situation in order to see if, in Obrist’s words, “something like a collective intelligence might exist.” As Gillick notes, “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three.” So much contemporary art and politics is obsessed with the figure of the group and of work as collaboration, perhaps all the way to the refusal of work and the cultivation of anonymity.

Of course, the problem with such contemporary utopian art experiments is twofold. On the one hand, they are only enabled and legitimated through the cultural institutions of the art world and thus utterly enmeshed in the circuits of commodification and spectacle that they seek to subvert; and, on the other hand, the dominant mode for approaching an experience of the communal is through the strategy of reenactment. One doesn’t engage in a bank heist, one reenacts Patty Hearst’s adventures with the Symbionese Liberation Army in a warehouse in Brooklyn, or whatever. Situationist détournement is replayed as obsessively planned reenactment. The category of reenactment has become hegemonic in contemporary art, specifically as a way of thinking the relation between art and politics – perhaps radical politics has also become reenactment. Fascinating as I find such experiments and the work of the artists involved, I suspect here what we might call a “mannerist Situationism,” where the old problem of recuperation does not even apply because such art is completely co-opted by the socio-economic system which provides its lifeblood.

To turn to politics, perhaps we witnessed another communal experiment with the events in France surrounding the arrest and detention of the so-called “Tarnac Nine” on November 11, 2008, and the work of groups that go under different names: Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee, the Imaginary Party. As part of Nicolas Sarkozy’s reactionary politics of fear – itself based on an overwhelming fear of disorder and a desire to erase definitively the memory of 1968 – a number of activists who had been formerly associated with Tiqqun were arrested in rural, central France by a force of 150 anti-terrorist police, helicopters, and attendant media. They were living communally in the small village of Tarnac in the Corrèze district of the Massif Central. Apparently a number of the group’s members had bought a small farmhouse and ran a cooperative grocery store, besides which they were engaged in such dangerous activities as running a local film club, planting carrots, and delivering food to the elderly. With surprising juridical imagination, they were charged with “pre-terrorism,” an accusation linked to acts of sabotage on France’s TGV rail system.

The basis for this thought-crime was a passage from a book published in 2007 called L’insurrection qui vient, or The Coming Insurrection. It is a wonderfully dystopian diagnosis of contemporary society – seven circles of hell in seven chapters – and a compelling strategy to resist it. The final pages of L’insurrection advocate acts of sabotage against the transport networks of “the social machine” and ask the question, “How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?” Two of the alleged pre-terrorists, Julien Coupat and Yldune Lévy, were detained in jail and charged with “a terrorist undertaking” that carried a prison sentence of twenty years. The last of the group to be held in custody, Coupat, was released without having faced prosecution on May 28, 2009, on bail of 16,000, and was forbidden to travel outside the greater Parisian area. Late that year, fresh arrests were made in connection with the Tarnac affair. Such is the repressive and reactionary force of the state – just in case anyone had forgotten. As the authors of L’insurrection remind us, “Governing has never been anything but pushing back by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will hang you.”

L’insurrection qui vient has powerful echoes of the Situationist International. Yet – revealingly – the Hegelian-Marxism of Debord’s analysis of the spectacle and commodification is replaced with very strong echoes of Agamben, in particular the question of community in Agamben as that which would survive the separation of law and life. The question is the relation between law and life, and the possibility of a nonrelation between those two terms. If law is essentially violence, which in the age of bio-politics taps deeper and deeper into the reservoir of life, then the separation of law and life is the space of what Agamben calls politics. It is what leads to his anomic misreading of Paul.

The authorship of L’insurrection is attributed to La Comité Invisible and the insurrectional strategy of the group turns around the question of invisibility. It is a question of “learning how to become imperceptible,” of regaining “the taste for anonymity,” and of not exposing and losing oneself in the order of visibility, which is always controlled by the police and the state. The authors of L’insurrection argue for the proliferation of zones of opacity, anonymous spaces in which communes might be formed. The book ends with the slogan, “All power to the communes” (Tout le pouvoir aux communes). In a nod to French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, these communes are described as “inoperative” or “désœuvrée,” as refusing the capitalist tyranny of work. In a related text simply entitled Call, they seek to establish a “series of foci of desertion, of secession poles, of rallying points. For the runaways. For those who leave. A set of places to take shelter from the control of a civilization that is headed for the abyss.”

A strategy of sabotage, blockade, and what is called “the human strike” is proposed in order to weaken still further our doomed civilization. As the Tiqqun group write in a 1999 text called “Oh Good, the War!”: “Abandon ship. Not because it’s sinking, but to make it sink.” Or again: “When a civilization is ruined, one declares it bankrupt. One does not tidy up in a home falling off a cliff.” An opposition between the city and the country is constantly reiterated, and it is clear that the construction of zones of opacity is better suited to rural life than the policed space of surveillance of the modern metropolis. The city is much better suited to what we might call “designer resistance,” where people wear Ramones T-shirts and sit in coffee shops saying “capitalism sucks,” before going back to their jobs as graphic designers.

L’insurrection is a compelling, exhilarating, funny, and deeply lyrical text that sets off all sorts of historical echoes with movements like the Free Spirit and the Franciscan Spirituals in the Middle Ages, through to the proto-anarchist Diggers in the English Revolution and different strands of nineteenth-century utopian communism. We should note the emphasis on secrecy, invisibility, and itinerancy, on small-scale communal experiments in living, on the politicization of poverty that recalls medieval practices of mendicancy and the refusal of work. What is at stake is the affirmation of a life no longer exhausted by work, cowed by law and the police. These are the core political elements of mystical anarchism.

This double program of sabotage, on the one hand, and secession from civilization on the other, risks, I think, remaining trapped within the politics of abstraction. In this fascinatingly creative reenactment of the Situationist gesture – which is why I stressed the connection with contemporary art practice – what is missing is a thinking of political mediation, where groups like the Invisible Committee would be able to link up and become concretized in relation to multiple and conflicting sites of struggle, workers, the unemployed, even the designer resisters and – perhaps most importantly – more or less disenfranchised ethnic groups. We need a richer political cartography than the opposition between the city and the country. Tempting as it is, sabotage combined with secession from civilization smells of the moralism we detected above: An ultimately anti-political purism.

That said, I understand the desire for secession: It is the desire to escape a seemingly doomed civilization that is headed for the abyss. I would argue that the proper theological name for such secessionism is Marcionism (an early Christian belief system) which turns on the separation of law from life, the order of creation from that of redemption, the Old and New Testaments. In the face of a globalizing, atomizing, bio-political legal regime of violence and domination that threatens to drain dry the reservoir of life, secession is withdrawal, the establishment of a space where another form of life and collective intelligence are possible. Secession offers the possibility of an antinomian separation of law from life, a retreat from the old order through experiments with free human sociability: In other words, communism, understood as the “Sharing of a sensibility and elaboration of sharing. The uncovering of what is common and the building of a force.”

It is also the case that something has changed and is changing in the nature of tactics of political resistance. With the fading away of the so-called anti-globalization movement, groups like the Invisible Committee offer a consistency of thought and action that possesses great diagnostic power and tactical awareness. They provide a new and compelling vocabulary of insurrectionary politics that has both described and unleashed a series of political actions in numerous locations, some closer to home, some further away. The latter is performed by what the Invisible Committee calls – in an interesting choice of word – “resonance.” A resonating body in one location – like glasses on a table – begins to make another body shake, and suddenly the whole floor is covered with glass.

Politics is perhaps no longer, as it was in the so-called anti-globalization movement, a struggle for and with visibility. Resistance is about the cultivation of invisibility, opacity, anonymity, and resonance.

Text by Simon Critchley , 01 Jun. 2012

Source : www.adbusters.org

L'eloge de l'amour

Alain Badiou a aimé la révolution et est devenu l'un des prophètes de la contestation. Philosophe difficile, pamphlétaire acéré, activiste infatigable, ce communiste canal historique parle aussi d'amour.

Badiou : une certaine Idée de l'amour - Propos recueillis par Elisabeth Lévy

Le Point : On attend Lénine ou Mao, et on découvre Comte-Sponville. Sans amour, dites-vous, point de philosophie. Vous devenez fleur bleue ? Alain Badiou : Vous exagérez ! Quand je dis que le philosophe doit être un amant, ou un aimant, c'est une référence très classique à Platon, qui établit un lien intime entre la philosophie et l'amour. La philosophie est amour de la vérité, mais au sens fort de ce terme. Il faut être dans l'élément de l'amour, savoir ce qu'est l'amour pour éprouver l'amour de la vérité. En déployant cette idée, je postule que quatre expériences fondamentales de la vie humaine sont les conditions de la philosophie : la science, les arts, la politique évidemment, et enfin l'amour, qui n'est donc pas une excursion loin de mes terres.
Ne cédez-vous pas à une vision irénique ? Dans votre idée de l'amour comme « revanche du Deux », il y a peut-être du drame, mais pas beaucoup de tragédie. Il n'est guère question de l'impossibilité de l'amour, de sa fin programmée. Je rappelle au contraire qu'il y a non seulement du drame, mais aussi du meurtre, du sang. Il y a peut-être autant de tragédie en amour qu'en politique. L'amour est une chose difficile et, en fin de compte, rare. L'échec, les malentendus, l'épuisement, le négatif, on en a tant qu'on veut. On peut les ressasser - la plainte est une disposition spontanée. L'art s'alimente de la plainte humaine et la sublime en quelque chose qui, en fin de compte, est du plaisir. Mais être philosophe, c'est ne pas trop faire confiance aux dispositions spontanées ou aux opinions dominantes. La philosophie doit donner à l'humanité le courage de la création et de l'affirmation. Sinon, elle ne sert à rien.
Répondant à Lacan qui affirme qu'« il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel », vous prétendez qu'il y a un rapport amoureux. En dehors de votre expérience, qu'est-ce qui vous prouve que le Deux de l'amour n'est pas une chimère ? Je précise que je ne suis pas totalement lacanien, car je crois qu'il y a un rapport sexuel. Cela étant, je ne pense pas que l'amour soit la connaissance de l'autre. Je crois que, dans la durée amoureuse et pas seulement dans l'illumination initiale, peut se construire une expérience du monde décentrée par rapport à la vision individuelle, au narcissisme. Le monde que j'expérimente, la vie qui est la mienne, le temps que j'y passe sont imprégnés du fait que c'est avec l'autre que ça se passe. C'est cela que je nomme l'amour. Le monde du Deux se superposant au classique monde de l'Un.



Vous avez défendu Mai 68 contre les attaques du candidat Sarkozy. Mais l'amour-Meetic, qui a détrôné l'amour mythique, est aussi un héritage de Mai. Vous ne pouvez ignorer que la libération s'est muée en libéralisation. Dans Mai 68, si vous me permettez de le dire trivialement, j'en prends et j'en jette. Dans « L'hypothèse communiste », je soutiens qu'il y a eu quatre Mai 68 dont les bilans sont contradictoires. Le courant que je qualifie de libertin-libertaire revendiquait en effet la sexualité sans rivage, la jouissance pour tous. J'admets tout à fait qu'il a conduit assez directement à la jouissance marchande. Il y a donc quelque chose de vaguement héroïque à maintenir vivantes une autre idée et une autre expérience de l'amour.
La philosophie fait donc lien entre l'amour et la politique. Mais vous aimez l'amour bien qu'il soit violent et la politique parce qu'elle est violente. Cela est une pure légende. Je ne suis pas du tout un amoureux de la violence en politique. Etre acculé à la violence est bien plus un problème qu'une issue. Les seules violences parfois nécessaires et légitimes en politique sont des violences strictement défensives. Même s'agissant de la politique « révolutionnaire », encore que ce mot soit devenu bien obscur, je pense que tout fétichisme de la violence est périlleux. Par ailleurs, il y a des circonstances où la violence est inévitable. Cette idée n'est pas non plus l'apanage des révolutionnaires, elle anime tout autant les impériaux qui font la guerre en Afghanistan ou en Irak, comme ils l'ont faite en Algérie ou au Vietnam.
Vous semblez penser que cette violence, aujourd'hui, est inévitable parce que la société y serait « acculée » par le pouvoir. Citez-moi un seul texte où j'appellerais à la violence ! Il est évident qu'il y a une injustice du pouvoir et que toute injustice est soutenue par la violence qui permet de la perpétuer. Tout le monde voit bien que la société est entièrement bâtie sur la défense acharnée de privilèges et d'inégalités qui ne se maintiennent qu'à grand renfort de lois répressives. Faut-il pour autant opposer la violence à cette violence-là, je n'en crois rien. Les tâches politiques de l'heure relèvent de l'idéologie et de l'organisation, pas du tout de la lutte armée, surtout pas au sens où l'entendent certains groupes. On est tellement loin d'une situation où la violence pourrait être productive que c'est une absurdité.
Le Deux de l'amour est une extension, un agrandissement par rapport au Un de l'individu. Mais le Deux de la politique - ami/ennemi - n'est-il pas un rétrécissement par rapport à la pluralité du monde ? Je ne suis pas un disciple de Carl Schmitt. Je suis très loin de penser que la politique consiste à désigner l'ennemi. Je dis simplement qu'en politique il y a des ennemis, ce qui est une grande différence avec l'amour.
Mais vous définissez bien le XXe siècle comme « le siècle du Réel » et celui du chiffre Deux, de l'antagonisme, du grand Autre ? C'est exact, mais je pense qu'il faut sortir du XXe siècle. Le réel, tel que l'a pensé le XXe siècle politique et révolutionnaire, a été non seulement celui de l'antagonisme, mais aussi celui de la purification. Au bout du compte, l'idée révolutionnaire a été dévorée par une sorte de suspicion généralisée. Il faut penser autrement. Ce qui compte, c'est de créer une nouvelle unité à partir d'une multiplicité, d'intégrer les différences dans un camp multiforme qui inventera un chemin égalitaire nouveau. Et, pour y parvenir, la question des amis est beaucoup plus importante que celle des ennemis.
« Dans l'amour, écrivez-vous, on fait confiance à la différence au lieu de la soupçonner. La Réaction disqualifie la différence au nom de l'identité. » Vous, vous disqualifiez l'identité au nom de la différence. L'amour et la politique ne seraient-ils que deux moyens de se délivrer de l'identité ? Absolument pas ! Il serait absurde de prétendre que les identités ne doivent pas exister puisqu'elles constituent la trame de tout ce qui existe ! Je dis seulement que tout ce qui est vrai, tout ce qui unit les hommes et leur appartient de façon générique est fait à la fois de matériaux identitaires et de leur dépassement. La philosophie est nécessairement la promotion, non des identités, mais de la part universelle dont les identités sont capables. Surtout quand on remet au goût du jour la notion d'identité nationale, qui sent son pétainisme.
En somme, vous rejetez l'amour-fusion, mais vous croyez à la politique-fusion. D'ailleurs, dans communisme il y a communion. Pour moi, le communisme n'a rien à voir avec la communion ou la totalité. La question est de savoir si la norme égalitaire est à l'oeuvre dans le travail collectif. Mais l'égalité ne consiste nullement à réduire les singularités. Simplement, si une vérité intéresse l'humanité tout entière, c'est qu'elle n'est pas réductible aux singularités qui la composent. Je suis le premier à reconnaître l'existence des identités nationales et des historicités distinctes. Mais, en définitive, le cosmopolitisme et l'internationalisme leur sont supérieurs.
On a l'impression que vous sacrifiez aisément la vie concrète à l'Idée. D'où, d'ailleurs, votre mépris pour le nombre de victimes comme critère du communisme ou du fascisme. Vous êtes injuste ! Tout le monde a du sang jusqu'aux oreilles et je trouve intellectuellement honteux qu'on brandisse les morts contre certaines idées, et pas contre d'autres. En 1914, ce sont les régimes parlementaires qui ont organisé une sensationnelle fête des morts. Tous les régimes ont du sang sur les mains et, dans les dernières décennies, les démocraties continuent à en avoir beaucoup, et d'assez bon coeur.
Peut-être, mais, comme l'observe Sloterdijk, l'érotisme de l'avidité l'a emporté sur l'héroïsme, y compris chez les damnés de la terre : les victimes du capitalisme en redemandent. Cela ne m'impressionne pas le moins du monde. A toutes les époques, de larges pans du monde dominé aspirent à partager les valeurs du monde dominant. Bien des serfs souhaitaient un monde où ils auraient été nobles. Il s'agit de faire en sorte que l'énergie populaire, au lieu d'être fascinée par la richesse et l'opulence, se projette dans un monde dans lequel cette division-là n'existerait plus. Ce passage peut être grevé de passions brutales, et même envieuses. Reste que, dans leur ambivalence, ces mouvements de masse sont nécessaires. Ce n'est pas parce qu'il y a mouvement qu'il y a politique. Mais il n'y a pas de politique sans mouvement.
D'où votre admiration pour la Révolution culturelle chinoise, à laquelle vous trouvez une certaine grandeur. Evidemment ! La Révolution culturelle tente de redonner au socialisme épuisé la signification d'un mouvement. Comme le dit Mao, « sans mouvement communiste, pas de communisme ». Alors que les Etats socialistes sont des monstres bureaucratiques, la régénération, dans les années 60, ne peut plus venir du Parti ni même de la masse des gens intégrés vaille que vaille au nouvel ordre. Comme dans le monde entier, elle ne peut venir que du mouvement de la jeunesse, étudiante et/ou ouvrière. Or celui-ci est capable du meilleur et du pire quand il n'est pas structuré par une véritable discipline politique.
Où était le meilleur ? Le meilleur, c'était, comme partout ailleurs, l'idée qu'on allait changer tout ça, renverser les despotes locaux, faire progresser partout, singulièrement dans les usines et les universités, une sorte d'égalité pratique nouvelle. Entre 1966 et 1968, il y a eu des millions de gens dans les rues, des courants, des contre-courants, des masses de journaux, de caricatures, d'affiches.
Dans cette magnifique effusion, les victimes sont-elles les oeufs nécessaires à la fabrication de l'omelette qu'est l'Histoire ? La question des victimes de la Révolution culturelle est singulièrement compliquée. Qui a tué qui ? La séquence a duré une dizaine d'années et il y a eu des victimes à tous les étages de l'appareil et de la société. La Révolution culturelle est peu à peu devenue une guerre civile incontrôlée, et c'est ce qui en a scellé l'échec.
Sous prétexte que les victimes sont recrutées de façon égalitaire, le crime serait-il moins grave ? La démocratie parlementaire est au moins aussi guerrière et conflictuelle que ceux auxquels elle s'en prend. Je le répète, en politique, on a des ennemis et, quand on n'en a pas, on les invente. C'est aussi vrai des démocraties que des défunts Etats socialistes. La vérité est qu'il faudra en finir avec l'Etat, quelle qu'en soit la forme.
La démocratie est aussi le régime où vous avez pu mener, de la Rue d'Ulm, une attaque au vitriol contre l'un des deux principaux candidats à la présidence de la République... Cet argument n'est pas entièrement convaincant. Que le système des libertés soit plus déployé dans les sociétés protégées est indéniable. Mais c'est parce qu'elles en ont les moyens économiques et ferment leurs frontières aux hommes, et non aux marchandises ou aux capitaux, pour conserver ce privilège. La question qui m'intéresse est tout autre : peut-on soutenir, nommer, faire exister quelque chose qui relève d'une autre hypothèse stratégique que celle de la continuation de l'univers réglé par le profit qui régente les sociétés dominantes ? Bien entendu, il faut intégrer le bilan des tentatives précédentes. On ne va pas rééditer ce qui a été fait au XXe siècle.
Bonne nouvelle... Je n'aboierai cependant pas avec les loups. C'était la première fois dans l'Histoire que les gens d'en bas prenaient le pouvoir. Comment peut-on avoir le front d'exiger qu'ils réussissent du premier coup ? Le pouvoir des riches, lui, est millénaire ! La Révolution, telle qu'elle a existé au XXe siècle, est une figure aujourd'hui morte. Faut-il pour autant devenir un honorable réformiste-libéral ? Je n'ai pas envie de faire entrer la philosophie dans le cadre de ce conservatisme. C'est l'unique raison pour laquelle je ressors du ruisseau où il est tombé le signifiant « communisme ».
Adversaire déterminé du pouvoir, vous exercez un pouvoir considérable, notamment auprès de ce que votre ex-compagnon Jean-Claude Milner appelle la « petite-bourgeoisie intellectuelle ». Normalien, vous enseigniez à Normale, d'où sortent vos disciples. Gauchet remarquait ici-même que vous êtes un produit très français. J'assume ce paradoxe, si c'en est un. Dans l'un de mes premiers livres, j'écrivais : « J'aime mon pays, la France. » Comme je vous l'ai dit, toute universalité se fabrique à partir de singularités. Et les singularités françaises ont leur généalogie propre. Au XVIIIe siècle, les « philosophes » constituaient quasi un parti politique. On peut jouer sur deux tableaux, être à la fois un homme public et un savant. Quant au pouvoir... Franchement, comment un philosophe peut-il servir la part du peuple la plus démunie s'il ne la fait pas bénéficier, directement et indirectement, de son aura, des lambeaux de pouvoir que son oeuvre lui permet d'arracher ? Ce pouvoir n'est au fond que celui de l'Idée. Je combattrai jusqu'au bout la misérable maxime du monde contemporain, cachée sous le manteau de la fameuse mort des idéologies : « Vis sans Idée. » La vraie vie est la vie habitée par l'Idée. En amour comme en politique

Source: Le Point, no. 1938 - Idées, jeudi, 5 novembre 2009.

Living Revolution : How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the '1 Percent'

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”


A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbo will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.

When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.

In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.

The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!

The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.

The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.

Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.

Text By George Lakey, January 25, 2012
Source : http://wagingnonviolence.org.

‘Decommission, Rewrite, and Change’ Franco Berardi alias Bifo

Franco Berardi in a demonstration in in the seventies

Franco Berardi is one of the controversial Italian thinkers who are seeking a solution for the gradually collapsing capitalistic system. For him, the best method of fighting today’s abuses comes from an unexpected corner, through love. Only in this manner can the tormented social body recover after years of being driven into the ground.

Merijn Oudenampsen:
How do you look at the present crisis from the perspective on capitalism that you have developed in your work, which revolves around the interconnectedness of economy, language and psychology?
Franco Berardi:

‘Do you remember what happened at the end of the nineties and especially in the spring of the year 2000? After a decade of development, after the belief in the possibility of the infinite expansion of a virtual capitalism based on new technologies, there was a collapse. The bursting of the dot-com bubble. It was a very important moment. And in a sense, what happened in September 2008 in the United States and what is happening now in Europe can be considered as the long after-effects of the crisis of 2000. Because in that crisis, all the elements of novelty, of the new forms of capitalism which I like to call semiocapitalism, became apparent.

The idea of semiocapitalism is based on the interconnection of information technology and the production of economic value. But in this kind of relationship, the human brain and human sensibility is deeply involved as part of the production process, and it also has a fundamental role to play in consumption. The boom of the nineties was based on the exploitation of the human brain, if we look at it from the point of view of immaterial labour and from the attention economy, or rather, the invasion and occupation of our attention by new technologies. Writers like Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, Nicholas Negroponte: all those people were theorizing the possibility of what they called a long boom, an infinite boom. Their theories were deeply flawed, because they were unable to understand that the capacities of the human brain are not infinite. The human brain is limited with regard to physical energy, with regard to affection, with regard to desire, suffering and depression. The days of the long boom, the decade of the nineties, were also the years of Prozac. These were also the years of excitement, produced by the hyper-exploitation of the human mind and the intense use of euphoric drugs.

Now, the crisis of 2000 has been forgotten, because immediately after came the shock of September 11, the beginning of the infinite war launched by the Bush administration. This has been an insane escape from the effects of the crisis. It was an attempt to renew military production, but the war has not been a good pharmaceutic. You can compare it with a person who is in a deep depression, taking amphetamines. It is not the right therapy for depression.
Year after year, the global schizo-economy – a concept I use to bring together economic production and the exploitation of the mind – has been building up to a new, and I think final, collapse. What we see is the coming true of an old prediction, that of the Club of Rome, who in the year of 1972 published a report titled The Limits to Growth. Economic growth cannot be infinite, for a very simple reason. Namely that physical resources are limited, as well as the psychic and mental resources of human kind. The network form has hugely enlarged the possibilities of production, but we are limited as human beings.’
Merijn Oudenampsen:
One could say that whereas before, politics revolved around the promise to increase the size of the pie, characterized by ‘win-win’, presently it is limited to the evermore-bitter struggle over the distribution of what is left of it, a ‘zero-sum-game’. To give you an example, currently in the Netherlands the government has money to bail out the banks, to subsidize home-owners, to build roads, but in order to do that it extracts money from education, from culture, from handicapped people, from healthcare, from social housing and so on. Similar things are happening in Italy now, with the austerity package being implemented by Berlusconi. What is your take on that?
Franco Berardi:

‘I just came back from a demonstration that happened this morning in the city of Bologna. Students were protesting in front of the Banca de Italia, chanting slogans such as ‘more money for the schools, less money for the banks’ and so on. These kinds of protests are spreading all over Europe nowadays. Everybody understands that if you destroy the school system or something simple like the sewage system, let’s say the basic infrastructure of production, it will not help the future economy. But this is the current policy of the European Central Bank, this is the policy for dealing with the financial crisis at the European level. Look at what is happening in Greece, for instance. In Greece, in April 2010, the problem of that country’s huge public debt exploded. The Greek government was obliged to start a policy aimed at extracting resources from the economy in order to pay the German and French banks. Now, one and a half years after that decision, the Greece’s gross national product has fallen by seven percent. The result is that production is going down, and the debt, unavoidably, is skyrocketing up. It makes you wonder: Are those people leading the central bank crazy? Do they understand that what they are doing is totally crippling the basis of what is a healthy economy? Because you cannot withdraw resources from production, from effective demand, from society, and ask for the payment of the debt. That is impossible. I have the suspicion that they are not working on fixing the European economy. They perceive the end of something and they are looking towards a sort of hold-up, a robbery, a huge displacement of wealth from workers, from society, from education, towards the banks and the financial class.

I know that this can seem paranoid, and I do not like to be paranoid. But this is not the effect of a human conspiracy; I do not think it is Angela Merkel, Jean Claude Trichet or Nicolas Sarkozy who are masterminding this dark future. I think it is something that is deeply inscribed in the software of the financial architecture. We have been producing a machine that is only able to think in terms of fighting inflation, enhancing profits, and enforcing competition. The automated system, I mean the software, has been conceived in a form that has now turned destructive in relation to social wealth.
Just to say a word or two on Italy: during the last two years, eight billion Euros have been withdrawn from education. And a hundred thirty thousand teachers have been fired in the Italian schools. What do you think, is this the way to renew growth in Italy? Is it the way to think of the future of Italian society? Obviously not.’
Merijn Oudenampsen:
You just published a new book, After the Future. Could you tell us something about the book?
Franco Berardi:

‘I started writing the book in February of 2009. It was the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Futurist Manifesto. Futurism is a literary and artistic movement that has been hugely important, both culturally and politically. It can be seen as the first avant-garde movement, which was actively out to overturn society. What defines the Futurist Manifesto, and the Futurist culture in general? It is the exaltation of the virtues of the future. In a sense the futurist movement is an extreme version of the modern veneration of the future as progress, as expansion, and finally, as growth. There is no reason to assume that our idea of the future is something natural. Just think of the theological man of the middle ages: for him, perfection was not in the future. For him perfection was in the past, the time of paradise lost, when God created the world. Then there’s the Renaissance, when the idea comes up of a future produced by man, in a conscious and voluntarist way, politically and economically. In the nineteenth century, the idea of the future as progress becomes part of the human psyche. At the end of the twentieth century, this mythology comes to an end. First of all because of the crisis in the field of energy resources, especially fossil fuels, because of the awareness that growth cannot be infinite.

The beginning of that awareness was already present in the seventies, especially in the year 1977. The year when Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols went in the streets of London, crying ‘NO FUTURE’. That cry produced deep ripples in the youth culture of the following decades. After the Future is an attempt to rethink the present moment. We live in a time when the expectation of a progressive, expansive future proves illusionary. And it is a dangerous illusion, also because the world is getting old. The human population, not only in Europe but also in China, in India, in Latin America, with the exception of the Arabic world, is ageing. People are living longer and birth rates are going down. The physical energies of the planet are running out. So we have to live with the exhaustion, which can be a very interesting experience if we are able to face it in a non-aggressive and non-competitive way. We don’t need more things. We have too many things in our houses. We need more time, more affection, more solidarity. If we do not understand that, then war will become the only language between humans.
To finish, let me talk about an initiative, a call that I have written together with Geert Lovink. It is directed at the large army of lovers and the small army of software programmers. This is a call to resist, and our main point is that the movement that is coming to the streets in New York and Europe will not win this fight, because this fight cannot be won in the streets. Going to the streets is important, absolutely necessary. It is the way to start the real fight that will come afterwards. And what is the real fight? It is the fight of love. The ability to reactivate the bodies, the social and erotic body, that has been paralyzed by twenty years of precarization, by twenty years of impoverishment. Secondly, the real fight is the fight of software developers, of the people who have been writing the software of the financial system. We call on them in order for them to do what Wikileaks has done in the field of information: decommission, rewrite, and change the course of the future.


Source: http://metropolism.com
Metropolis M

Ludwig XVI. mit Jakobinermütze

Noel Lemire, „Ludwig XVI. mit Jakobinermütze", 1792
LWL - Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster / Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif

The Grand Domestic Revolution – User's Manual

Revolution' is no longer just a notion from a bygone era that is periodically resuscitated as a fashion buzzword or in celebration of some technological innovation. The current crisis makes it abundantly clear that the triumph of neoliberalism has not guaranteed a better life for the majority of citizens and non-citizens. Living means struggling with perpetually rising housing rents and mortgage pressure, with the consequences of having work or no work, and anxieties arising from exploitation and self-exploitation. Living is flailing under the constant demand for individualised performance. Living means being locked up in our homes and workplaces, connected mainly through the Internet. Our lives have been distanced from families, friends, colleagues, neighbours and strangers. We want to change this—and that change has to be more than cosmetic.

'The Grand Domestic Revolution—User's Manual' (GDR) is our proposal for taking action and amending our precarious living conditions right here and now, starting from our homes, neighbourhoods and work places, to our towns, cities and beyond. After two years of 'living research' residencies, home productions, town meetings and affinity actions, GDR culminates in an exhibition that aims to share proposals for a grand domestic revolution today. We ask you to join us in our investigation of the conditions and status of the contemporary domestic sphere and in exploring ways of transforming it—building new forms of living and working in common.

Long Live The Grand Domestic Revolution!

The exhibition includes works by:

Agency, Ask! (Actie Schone Kunsten) with Andreas Siekmann, Sepake Angiama & Sam Causer, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Doris Denekamp & Arend Groosman, Domestic Workers Netherlands (part of FNV Bondgenoten) with Matthijs de Bruijne, Paul Elliman with Na Kim, Hans van Lunteren and Rob van de Steen, Casco-HKU Creative Lab 'Extended Family', Andrea Francke, 'Our Autonomous Life' with Nazima Kadir, Maria Pask and evolving cooperative cast, Shiu Jin, Mary Kelly with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, kleines postfordistisches Drama, Germaine Koh, Graziela Kunsch, Wietske Maas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Travis Meinolf, Emilio Moreno, Read-in, Martha Rosler, Helke Sander, Kateřina Šedá, Patricia Sousa, Xu Tan, Valerie Tevere & Angel Nevarez, Mirjam Thomann, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jort van der Laan, Agnès Varda, Werker Magazine, Vincent Wittenberg, and Haegue Yang.

Spatial design is by Ruth Buchanan and Andreas Müller. Exhibition map and signage is developed by Åbäke.

Themes:

Through the two-year research process, four main themes emerged that have become key lines of thought for engaging the large scope of GDR research and actions.

- Domestic space: housing the commons and living together
- Domestic work: invisible labour and working at home
- Domestic property: struggles between ownership and usership
- Domestic relations: extended families, neighbours versus networks

Locations:

The works themselves perform their positions in dialogue with the exhibition themes across Casco and other venues shared by our neighbours.

1. Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Nieuwekade 213–215, Utrecht www.cascoprojects.org
Casco is transformed into a living and working space, functioning as 'home base' of the exhibition and further actions. It is also where GDR's cooperative sitcom 'Our Autonomous Life?' is produced and screened, and includes space for children and the GDR library.

2. Volksbuurt Museum, Waterstraat 27–29, Utrecht www.volksbuurtmuseum.nl
The Volksbuurt Museum finds its seed in Committee Wijk C, founded in 1974 to preserve and recover the neighbourhood, where Casco is also situated, in response to rapid urban renewal and demolition projects. GDR works are cohabiting with the various documents and objects in this local folks' museum. Annexed as a temporary structure to Volksbuurt Museum is 18b Pavilion consisting of the structural devices installed in the former GDR apartment.

3. De Rooie Rat, Oudegracht 65, Utrecht www.rooierat.nl
De Rooie Rat is the oldest leftist political bookstore in the Netherlands, established in 1974 just up the canal from Casco. Works that call for action mingle with the inspiring books at De Rooie Rat!

Occasions:
Watch out for the activities throughout the exhibition, including pilot premiere of the cooperative sitcom 'Our Autonomous Life?', 'Teach-in' by Read-in, 'Kitchen 139' organised by W139, Amsterdam with Casco in conjunction with GDR, 'Assembly (The Grand Domestic Revolution)' by Agency, 'Keywords Cooking School' book launch by Xu Tan, collective futurist fiction writing conference and home schools on GDR Future' (finnissage?). More information is available on our website or GDR wiki.

6 November 2011–26 February 2012
Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory
Utrecht,The Netherlands
Source :www.cascoprojects.org