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Finance, Money and the Common. A plenary to the EBEN conference with Christian Marazzi, Marina Vishmidt and Marco Sachy. 13 April 2011. |
Self-organising: a series of encounters. March-June 2011.
the art of rent: a series of open seminars
January-June 2008 - As part of an ongoing collective project, the organisers of this seminar series seek to promote a discussion on the rise of rent as the current form of capitalist appropriation and the way in which new levels of association in the arts and culture, information, communication and labour have made this rise possible, and, from the perspective of private accumulation, necessary. To this end, the seminar brought together various perspectives on the Art of Rent taking in analyses of cognitive capitalism and intellectual property, the financialisation of everyday life, gentrification, the impending crisis, migration and the new international division of labour, and the governance of the common. The series was sponsored by Queen Mary and organised in collaboration with generation-online.org and factoryofthecommon.org
communism is back: a book launch and discussion with Franco Berardi
February 2009 - The event marked the first and long awaited publication of his work in English: Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (London: Palgrave, 2008), and Precarious Rhapsody. Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (London: Autonomedia, 2009). The launch was be followed by a social evening at the Freedom Bookshop, Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX.
"One hundred years ago Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism. It inaugurated a century that believed in the future - initiating a process where the collective organism became machine-like. This becoming-machine has reached its finale with the concatenations of the global web and is now being overturned by the collapse of a financial system founded on the futurisation of the economy, debt and economic promise. That promise is over. The era of post-future has begun." From the Manifesto of Post-Futurism
"Gilles Deleuze was welcomed into the reception room of university respectability, while Félix Guattari was left out. He was not an academic and he mixed with the wrong crowd. Guattari without Deleuze built a philosophical style out of his psychiatric practice, his work as a political militant, and his training in biology and pharmacology. To the rhizomatic machine Guattari brought the concrete micro-material of his inquiry, the molecular method of 'cut-up', montage, decomposition and recomposition, and combinatory creation. The crystalline acuity of the Deleuzian philosophical razor combined with the Guattarian material swarm of bio-informational principles form the rhizomatic machine." From Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography. Franco is a writer, critic, and pioneer media theorist. Like others involved in the Italian political movement of Autonomia, during the 1970s he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. He is the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and the free television network Telestreet. He is also Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan. For more information and writings by the author, click here.
measure for measure: a workshop on value from below
Spirits are not finely touch’d
But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
September 2007 - Is there a crisis in the measurement of value today? Or do new developments in the cultural industries, in technoscience, in finance and in management and governance represent new triumphs in the measurement of value and a new reign of specifically capitalist value? Has what Marx called that miserable base been transubstantiated through immaterial and affective labour into something much more powerful? Or in fact do the rise of these new industrialisations of the body, soul and mind open the potential for forms of association that can issue their own currency, a new kind of value from below measured by novel means?
Participants to the workshop contributed a short presentation on the place of the measure of value in their field of inquiry and engaged with others in a wide-ranging discussion on the politics of the measure of value today.
Text and resources on this topic
papers
'An irreconcilable crisis? The paradoxes of strategic operational optimisation and the antinomies of counter-crisis ethics', Business Ethics: A European Review (with Erik Empson) (forthcoming); 'Citius, Altius, Fortius', London Remade, Debate on Sustainability and Democracy, August 2012 (with Erik Empson); ‘For Whose Benefit? Fear and Loathing in the Welfare State’, Journal of Political Marketing, Special Issue on Propaganda (November 2012);‘The old was dying but the new could not be born: an awakened generation’s thwarted revolution’ Antonio Gramsci: L'Ordine Nuovo and Piero Gobetti: Energie Nuove, Rivoluzione Liberale, Il Baretti’ in P. Brooker (ed.) Oxford Critical History of Modernist and Avant-Garde Magazines: Europe Vol. 3, Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming), part of the Modernist Magazines Project; ‘Short-circuiting organisation’, final workshop on Self-Organising. Queen Mary, University of London, May 2011; ‘Disobedience and Exodus’, two-day symposium on Disobedience. School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, May 2011;‘The work of translation’, workshop on The Labour of Translation. Queen Mary, University of London, April 2010;‘Antonio Negri’ in J. Simons (ed.) Contemporary critical theory. From Agamben to ŽiŽek, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2010);‘Affect and the Language of Authenticity’, workshop on Authenticity in Contemporary Organisations, University of Cambridge: May 2008;‘Back to the future: Hondamentalism’, Art Commerce Journal, Issue 2, June-July 2007; full text in pdf page 1 - page 2;‘A politics of the present’, Tailoring Biotechnologies, volume 2, issue 1, Spring-Summer 2006; full text in pdf.
teaching
research methodology - a second year undergraduate module on political epistemology
social and political marketing - a third year undergraduate module on the use of marketing in the public and not for profit sectors
dissertations and research supervision - recent and current students research projects supervised:
The Influence of Education on a Changing Labour Market in Thailand. (2012)
It's complicated. Making sense of life in a recession. (2012)
The Digitisation of Knowledge: Googlebooks and the Future of Libraries. (2011)
Neoliberalism in Crisis. (2011)
Fair Trade and Supermarket Monopolies. (2011)
The Asymmetrical condition: New Forms of Conflict within the Knowledge Economy and New Media Culture. (2011)
Putting to work what was use-less. The instrumentalisation of Art. (2010)
Power relations and knowledge formation. Shock tactics as marketing techniques. (2010)
An intelligence that watches itself. Spontaneity in art, education and agriculture. (2009)
Digital technologies and news gathering. Recent transformations of journalism. (2009)
The Global University. The new political economy of knowledge and the trasnationalisation of the higher education. (ongoing)
Shifting frameworks, collective practices. Creativity and Care. (ongoing)
links
kein.org collaborative working environment
contact web designer:arianna bove
