Hi Jacque, can you get us a sneaky copy of the SAAS-Fee reader from this year?
A digital copy would be even better, because then we could add it to the
Frontyard “A Library” - can tell you more about this when you start your
residency.
Connie
On 28 Apr 2016, at 1:49 PM, jacquelene drinkall
<jacquelene.drinkall@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Great paper Marco! Thanks for sharing Alex :-) It really joins up a few
left-centric dots for me, and it is great to get a sense of your work as it
is so relevant to postcapitalism.
I totally love all the references to orgasm. The only person who I have heard
talk more about orgasm in Bifo at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA)
last year! Its good to counter those spasms from the penetration of
capitalism into the infosphere with subversive orgasms! I just saw that the
deadline for this years SFSIA is extended to May 1 :
https://www.facebook.com/events/1338373769512203/ ;
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1338373769512203/> and Bifo will be there
again along with other greats. As with Psychopathologies of Cognitive
Capitalism organised by Warren Neidich, the SFSIA also has a strong Operaist
element, whilst being art centric. And it is perfect art school for anyone
who can not get enough cutting edge reading material - the reader is most
substantial. Wouldn't it be great if SFSIA also came to Sydney one day? It is
roving to Berlin this year.
I'm going to think some more about Lazzarato's notion of multiplicity and how
it relates to the increased modulations of control acting-at-a-distance
enabled from 1968 onwards, which my main interest in Lazzarato, as it is
definitely all connected.
Regarding sexism of black power movement, I am aware that in some ways the
women black panthers were in some regards way ahead of the men in many ways,
running more horizontal and practical soup kitchens and child care
centres,and they definitely cultivated alliances with the feminisms of the
time.
It especially interesting for me to see some of the lefty dots networked as a
post-left impressions, which could literally lead to some
post-impressionistic leftistism, or something. hehe, bad jokes aside (but I
must admit that as an artist I am working with spheres in my art at the
moment, sometimes focussing on images of revolutionaries, that sometimes
flatten into dots as well as blurs) I totally get how subversive
postcapitalist thinking might also be post-sociallist in order to create
space for something entirely new and how the role of visioning in terms of
impressionism and abstraction is important for hybrid activist-theorists. I
think you mention how social change requires abstraction at some point too.
MacKenzie Wark's reflections on Occupy as an abstraction of telethesia is
important for my thinking. I wasn't just drawn to Occupy as an activist, I
was also there as an artist-theorist interested in crowd behaviour, following
Gabriel Tarde (and Gustave Le Bon). Now I am looking more at Gilbert
Simondon's politics of individuation - such a shame I cant afford to go to
SFSIA this year, as that is the theme. Last reading group I brought along
Gerald Raunig's new book "Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular
Revolution", which is exploring some similar concerns, whilst *almost* making
a point of avoiding Simondon. More recently Wark is looking back at the time
of Lenin and unearthing figures pushed aside and even persecuted by
Leninists, and somewhat neglected by history too, such as Alexander Bogdanov.
Wark's book Molecular Red is where I read about Bogdanov, who can be seen as
integrating ecological awareness into the equation of capital resources and
ethics. And he was also a science fiction author! Maybe all political leaders
should embrace a bit of futurist imagination.
Im still navigating the quirks of the list - its presented me with a few
exhausting glitch-hurdles already, so I have only now started to catch up a
bit.
On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 11:41 PM, Marco Cuevas-Hewitt <birdsong703@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:birdsong703@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Wow, thank you Alex! I'm humbled that you took the time to read and engage
with my work. Will send a longer reply soon - must sleep.
Cheers for now,
Marco
On 19 April 2016 at 09:30, alex wisser <lenscap105@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:lenscap105@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hi Marcus,
I read your post leftist essay. Really liked it, a cogent and comprehensive
argument. It made me think a bit of the role of anarchism in revolution.
Both the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. You mention the
latter, opposing the anarchists to Franco's fascist forces, but really the
opposition should be to the communist forces they fought next to (and fought
with) who represent the force of inversion. In this situation, it was the
internal struggle between these two forces that played a large part in their
failure to resist fascism at that time. In the Russian revolution, it played
out more like the Arab Spring in Egypt. As soon as the war was one, the
forces of inversion took power and quickly squashed the anarchist elements
(along with any opposing inversive forces).
My knowledge of these histories is only glancing and incidental and it makes
me wish I had done more homework on this. My knowledge of the Paris Communes
is also sketchy, but I have the impression some bad shit went on with that as
well. This is almost the point of your essay: that moment when you pose the
challenge of how do we engage in the strategies of post leftist community
building without leaving them completely vulnerable to the hawkish element,
the punishers and straighteners who will foreclose the new order over the
forces that brought down the old. So many questions Spring to mind, but I'll
leave them for now.
Thanks. For anyone following, I highly recommend Marcus' essay. I'll repost
the link here so you don't have to dig for it
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol13no2_2014/cuevas-hewitt_postleft.pdf ;
<http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol13no2_2014/cuevas-hewitt_postleft.pdf>
Sent from my iPad
On 18 Apr 2016, at 6:06 PM, Marco Cuevas-Hewitt <birdsong703@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:birdsong703@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hola Ben and others =)
...the prehistory of neoliberalism. I was also starting to read David
Harvey's A brief history of neoliberalism
(http://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090cc90300 ;
<http://aaaaarg.fail/thing/51c5856f6c3a0e090cc90300>), which seems to be a
corner stone of these shared histories.
As I see it, there's two main problems with how the history of neoliberalism
is usually narrated by western academics like David Harvey:
1) It looks at the First World in isolation from the Third... as if colonial
and postcolonial relationships between the two don't factor at all into
historical and economic developments in the metropole. On the contrary, I
maintain that the overdeveloped world can't be understood at all without
reference to the underdeveloped world - the two worlds are mutually
constitutive of each other. So the standard account of neoliberalism is that
there were a few market fundamentalist think-tanks in the West, which slowly
propagated their ideology, until it became orthodoxy with Thatcher and
Reagan. This feeds into the other issue; namely...
2) Conventional histories of neoliberalism see the capitalists as having all
the initiative, and the working classes, the Left, the people of the Third
World, etc. only ever react to the impositions of the powerful... we're
forever on the backfoot. History unfolds independently of us, we're the
victims, and so our only role is to resist and fight back, but we're never
seen as having an autonomous agency and initiative of our own. I personally
feel this is bullshit, and so am really drawn to the kind of historiography
that emerged out of the Italian autonomist milieu of the 1970s: Like Deleuze
and Guattari, they argued that desire is primary, with desire having a
precise philosophical meaning which I won't go into here. But think of a
wild river before it's dammed, canalised, tamed, controlled, regulated. What
comes first is creative/constituent power (potenza in Italian), and coercive
power (potere) only comes into the picture later. What this means for the
historiography of how capitalism has evolved and developed is this: there is
an irrepressible creativity and desire and generativity amongst the
subaltern classes which the forces of potere (capitalists, the state, etc.)
are forever trying to contain, control, recapture and channel for their own
ends. So in my view, neoliberalism didn't evolve of its own accord...
rather, the agency was with the subaltern classes, who put capitalists onto
the backfoot and forced them to come up with a new strategy of rule. The
river had breached its banks and had to be re-tamed. i.e. the rebellions of
the 1960s in the West, and the Third World national liberation movements
that won independence from Europe after centuries of colonial rule marked
the end of one era of capitalism and the inauguration of another... Deprived
of their colonies, the rulers in the West had to work out new (neoliberal)
mechanisms of control, e.g. conditional loans, structural adjustment, and
all the bullshit that the finance sector has come up with... We thus saw a
shift from formal to informal empire (AKA neoliberalism)... Control that
didn't mean direct colonial occupation, but could be wielded by remote
control. This feeds back into my first point that metropole and periphery
can't be understood independently of one another. So it was the Left and the
poor and the Third World revolutionaries that unwittingly forced a change of
strategy on the part of the Potere. The great question, then, is how to
finally free constituent from coercive power, without it being re-contained
and brought back into the capitalist fold...
Thoughts? Reactions? Criticisms? Alternative viewpoints? Of course I'm
always open to all of these.
its my hope that our interest will solidify around a central focus at some
point, becoming a sharpened point.
Me too, but not at the expense of difference. One way of putting it might
be: seeking a unity that isn't equivalent to uniformity.
Cheers, talk soon!
Marco
