Berlin Reader 02

8/3/2019 Berlin Reader 02

1/23

GOING FRAGILE. BERLIN. JANuARy 18 - 22. 2010

A workshop organised by Howard Slater, Anthony Davies, Nils Normanand the School of Walls and Space

A READER


2/23

GOING FRAGILE. BERLIN. JANuARy 18 - 22. 2010

What follows is a grop of texts and excerpts that we are pooling together as a semi-prompteror sb-gideline for what will or will not happen in Basso Berlin. In presenting these texts andthemes we are not pre-empting an collective decision as to how the week will progress. I thinkall of s hope that there cold be something nsal, stimlating or forward-leaning that coldcome from this week; something that comes from a collective pooling of or ftre-anterior

experiences, desires and fragilities. There can be no experts if we are aiming for the rgentcreation of co-meaning!

Having said that, there is a sggested general framework for the week. We are proposingthat we meet each da of the week from 1pm to 6pm (with an hor or more break) and thatthis is followed p b a more co-planned evening slot from 6 ntil 10pm. The morning slot willbe started b a check in each da (see short paragraph in the reader) and it is proposedthat, at least at the start of the week, the rst part of the da cold be open ended. More likewhats known in therapetic circles as grop process. We are thinking of having a 4-6pmslot that could be more planned/generated out of the discussions and that could draw uponsome of the themes of the reader: Moishe Postone and post-marxism, the crrent movement

of stdent occpations, John Cnninghams text on commnisation, Bifos text on therapand singlarisation, Agsto Boal and the Theatre of the Oppressed, Mattins AgainstRepresentation text. Crcial here can be presentations and proposals from stdents themselvesand an gests who drop b.

We are also proposing to bring a pool of lms (see the reader) that we envision cold beshown in the remaining evening slots (bt this is not restricted i.e. we cold decide to watch onein an afternoon session etc). This lm pool more latel incldes a ver rare cop of a Newsreelactivist lm shot in the midst of the 70s Grnwick dispte. To end each afternoon slot (i.e. from5,30-6,00) it ma be good for s to check-ot and sa how were feeling abot how the da

has progressed.

So far the exceptions on the grid were looking at are (I) a proposed presentation b or hostsat Basso introdcing s to the space the are kindl opening p for or se and the politicalbackgrond of Berlin at the present moment. We are thinking that this will take place before orrst schedled session takes place on Monda so as to set the scene for s. (ii) Thogh we hopeMattin will be with s for the whole week, we are arranging that he will present/lanch thebook Noise and Capitalism to s all on the Thrsda evening and mabe do a performance...who knows. (iii) On the Wednesda evening there is a long standing experimental lm night atBasso that we are invited to attend. (iv) And, on Frida, after what cold be a da that is totall

open-ended or lled with all the things weve missed ot, we can have a part that ma involvea friend of ors called Florian.

Really looking forward to it

Howard, Nils, Anthon.Aka HNA

For Going Fragile b Mattin/Rad Malfatti see http://www.formedrecords.com/formed03.html


3/23


4/23

CHECK IN

On the counselling course I did we started each day by checking

in. This was an opportunity to nd out how other people were

feeling, what was pre-occupying them. Each person had a chance to

speak without being interrupted or quizzed. Conversations didnt

start in the check in. It helped to establish a sense of cohesion via

empathic understanding of each other. It also enabled affects to

circulate in that normally suppressed feelings (its too selsh of me

to say what Im feeling etc) are permitted a supportive space and

the time for articulation. Often, it could be that people explored an

affect, tried to explain what they felt, perhaps inconclusively but

thats no bother. Other times people would say Im blank, ive got

nothing to say. Above all, to facilitate the expression of our feelings,its best to be as non-judgemental as possible. The check-in can build

trust and safety which facilitate the expression of feelings (and the

taking of risks), but it is not an enforced collective confessional, it

is not the tyranny of being forced to express. Silent participation is

valued too. The check-in was the precondition for group process

which was convened for an hour at the end of the day

Howard


5/23


6/23

Against Representation:

A Revolution In Front Of You(2 extracts)

The representation of the working class radically opposes itself to the working class.- Guy

Debord, thesis 100 Society of the Spectacle

Improvisation: Elusive and Unstable

In speaking of improvisation we not only discuss the production of particular sounds or events but

the production of social spaces as well. We invoke this as both a strategic term and a conceptual tool.

Improvisation can therefore refer both to experimental music making as well as everyday and mundane

practices. Where applied, improvisation brings about glimpses of instability. If it is working, its elusive

qualities evades solidication and commodication - at least in the moment.

Towards a Dense Atmosphere: radical performativity & Site-specicity

Within the context of art, is it possible to have a non-representational relationship to reality? If yes, this is

surely done by acknowledging all the specicities of the room. One should try to activate the room as much

as possible and disrupt previous habits and behaviors to create different ones. In other words, to go against

the normalization process. I have found improvisation to be a practice which takes into account everything

happening in the room. Not to create something new that later could be used elsewhere, but as a way of

intensifying the moment through changing social relations.

Improvisation can be an extreme form of site-specicity as well as a radical, intimate and immanent self-

criticality. As there is no need to defend or build a position for future situations, improvisation always points

towards self-destruction.

We could see improvisation as pure mediality with no outside to itself, as pure means with no end,

countering any form of separation, fragmentation or individuality.

When can one feel this activation of the space taking effect? When there is a dense atmosphere which

makes you aware that something important is at stake. As there are no predetermined categories or words

to describe this experience, what is at stake is very difcult to articulate. Because of the difculties to

assimilate it or to immediately understand it, this strangeness counters the normalization process. When

this dense atmosphere is produced, the people involved become painfully aware of their social position and

usual behavior. If the density of the atmosphere is sufcient it can become physical, disturbing our senses

and producing strange feelings in our bodies.Through a disruption in the appearance of neutrality, one gets

the sense of being in a strange place - not really knowing where to stand. Every movement or word becomes

signicant. What is created is not a unied sense of space or time, but a hererotopia where one locationcontains different spaces and temporalities. Previous hierarchies and established organizations of space are

exposed. The traditional time of the performance and distribution of attention (the audiences respectful

behavior towards the performers etc.) is left behind. If one goes far enough, these hierarchies could be

diffused, not to give a false sense of equality, but to produce alternative social relations of time and space.

Dont get me wrong, I am not talking about relational aesthetics where some audience interactivity adds

cultural capital to some bland artworks done by very concrete artists with dubious ideologies.

By Mattin from http://www.mattin.org/essays/Against_Representation.html


7/23


8/23

Rainbow of Desire

As a Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner, I have found myself most at-

tracted to the techniques of Rainbow of Desire, the term used to refer to Boals

body of therapeutic techniques. These techniques (also colloquially referred

to as cop-in-the-head techniques), which focus on internalized oppressors, are

the ones that best demonstrate the merits of ambiguity and imprecision. Theytend to exploit Boals notion of resonance [Boal 1995: 69]. Within the aesthet-

ic language that he created, Boal discusses his notions of identication, recog-

nition, and resonance.

identication

When presented with an image, identication occurs when someone can say,

I am exactly like that [68]. The viewers own personality animates the im-

age being seen.

recognition

In recognition, one says, This is not me, but I know who he is, I know people

like him [97]. In these instances, the mobilizing factor is knowledge of an

other he or she knows well.

resonance

Resonance is the most diffuse of the relationships between person and image,

but in Boals lexicon, of no less import. Resonance encompasses a wide range

of reactions inspired through a range of feelings and emotions and associa-

tions that can only be vaguely delineated. When relating through resonance,

ambiguity and imprecision are foregrounded and given as much pedagogi-

cal, therapeutic, and pragmatic value as identication and recognition. Boal

employs resonance in order to exploit the ambivalences and polysemies that

mingle with our perceptions of an event. There are times when superposi-

tions, double meanings, the nebulous, and the hidden guide our senses to anunderstanding that would otherwise remain indiscernible. It is a way of allow-

ing approximation to steer us out of the oppression of overdetermined cat-

egories whether they be of racial, sexual, criminal, or medical types. A way of

allowing us to recognize ourselves in others who are positioned in more or less

privileged groupings with more or less power to determine the boundaries of

those very groupings.

My favorites include Kaleidoscopic Image, Circuit of Rituals and Rashomon.

rainbow of desire, Mady Shutzman fromhttp://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol6/iss3/schutzman/joker_2_0.html


9/23

AUGUSTO BOAL - THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED

JUAN GONZALEZ: Were joined by Augusto Boal who is the founder of the Theatre of the Oppressedmovement in Brazil and globally. Boal is the author of several books, including his 2001 autobiographyHamlet and the Bakers Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics. Welcome back so we can continue theconversation. Could you talk to us about the Forum Theater? What is the Forum Theater, and how didthat develop?

AUGUSTO BOAL: The Forum Theater is exact the image of the mirror. We present the problem

because sometimes we know what the problem is. All of us agree we have this problem. So, forinstance, the workers that go to claim for better conditions of work or better salaries, or whatever.Everyone agrees. But how to do it, we dont know. So what we do? We present the play, whatever thetheme is, whatever the problem is. We present the play, and then we look at like normal spectators.But at the end we say, okay, this ended in failure. So how could we change the events? Everything isgoing to change in society and our biological life. Everythings always changing. Nothings going to staythe way it is. All is going toso how can we change this for better? And then we start again the sameplay and we invite the audience to anytime they want to say stop, go to replace the protagonist andshow alternatives. So we learn from one another. You have in the scene the wrong solution, the wrongway. And then we try to see what is the right way. We dont know. We dont do the political theatre ofthe 50s in which we had the propaganda. You had an idea, you have a message. We dont have themessage, we have the questions. We bringwhat can you do? And democratically, everyone can say

stop and jump on the scene and try a solution or an alternative and then we discuss that alternativeand then a second or third, as many as people are there. So what we want is to develop the capacity ofpeople to create, to use their intelligence, to use their sensibility, because we live in a society which isvery imperative, who says all of the time: Do this, Go that way, dress this way, eat that. And we dontwant the orders, we dont want the imperative mood. We want the subjunctive theater, in which wesay, how would it be if it were like that? Then we ask, we bring questions. We dont bring certitudes,but the questions. The doubts are the seeds of certitudes. Then some certitude comes out. But it isfrom everyone. Everyone has the right to speak their word and to act their thoughts, not only to talkabout, but to act their thoughts.

Excerpt from 2005 interview with Juan Gonzalez on http://www.democracynow.org/2005/6/3/famed_brazilian_artist_augusto_boal_on

------00-----

International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation (ITO)Declaration of Principles

Preamble1. The basic aim of the Theatre of the Oppressed is to humanize Humanity.2. The Theatre of the Oppressed is a system of Exercises, Games and Techniques based on theEssential Theatre, to help men and women to develop what they already have inside themselves:theatre.

Essential Theatre3. Every human being is theatre!4. Theatre is dened as the simultaneous existence in the same space and context of actorsand spectators. Every human being is capable of seeing the situation and seeing him/herself in thesituation.5. Essential theatre consists of three elements: Subjective Theatre, Objective Theatre and theTheatrical Language.6. Every human being is capable of acting: to survive, we necessarily have to produce actions andobserve those actions and their effects on the environment. To be Human is to be Theatre: the co-existence of actor and spectator in the same individual. This is the Subjective Theatre.7. When human beings limit themselves to observing an object, a person or a space, renouncing

momentarily to their capacity and necessity of acting, the energy and their desire to act is transferredto that space, person or object, creating a space inside a space: an Aesthetic Space. This is theObjective Theatre.8. All human beings use, in their daily lives, the same language that actors use on the stage: theirvoices, their bodies, their movements and their expressions; they translate their emotions and desiresinto the Theatrical Language.


10/23

Theatre of the Oppressed9. The Theatre of the Oppressed offers everyone the aesthetic means to analyze their past, in thecontext of their present, and subsequently to invent their future, without waiting for it. The Theatre ofthe Oppressed helps human beings to recover a language they already possess we learn how to livein society by playing theatre. We learn how to feel by feeling; how to think by thinking; how to act byacting. Theatre of the Oppressed is rehearsal for reality.10. The oppressed are those individuals or groups who are socially, culturally, politically, economically,racially, sexually, or in any other way deprived of their right to Dialogue or in any way impaired to

exercise this right.11. Dialogue is dened as to freely exchange with others, as a person and as a group, to participate inhuman society as equal, to respect differences and to be respected.12. The Theatre of the Oppressed is based upon the principle that all human relationships should be ofa dialogic nature: among men and women, races, families, groups and nations, dialogue should prevail.In reality, all dialogues have the tendency to become monologues, which creates the relationshipoppressors - oppressed. Acknowledging this reality, the main principle of Theatre of the Oppressed is tohelp restore dialogue among human beings.

Principles and Objectives13. The Theatre of the Oppressed is a worldwide non-violent aesthetic movement which seeks peace,not passivity.

14. The Theatre of the Oppressed tries to activate people in a humanistic endeavor expressed by itsvery name: theatre of, by, and for the oppressed. A system that enables people to act in the ction oftheatre to become protagonists, i.e. acting subjects, of their own lives.15. The Theatre of the Oppressed is neither an ideology nor a political party, neither dogmatic norcoercive and is respectful of all cultures. It is a method of analysis and a means to develop happiersocieties. Because of its humanistic and democratic nature, it is widely used all over the world, in allelds of social activities such as: education, culture, arts, politics, social work, psychotherapy, literacyprograms and health. In the annex to this Declaration of Principles, a number of exemplary projectsare listed to illustrate the nature and the scope of its use.16. Theatre of the Oppressed is now being used in approx. half the nations around the world, listed inthe annex, as a tool for the making of discoveries about oneself and about the Other, of clarifying andexpressing our desires; a tool for the changing of circumstances which produce unhappiness and painand for the enhancement of what brings peace; for respecting differences between individuals and

groups and for the inclusion of all human beings in Dialogue; and nally a tool for the achievement ofeconomical and social justice, which is the foundation of true democracy. Summarizing, the generalobjective of the Theatre of the Oppressed is the development of essential Human Rights.

The International Theatre of the Oppressed Organization (ITO)17. The ITO is an organization that coordinates and enhances the development of Theatre of theOppressed all over the world, according to the principles and objectives of this Declaration.18. The ITO does so by connecting Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners into a global network,fostering exchange and methodical development; by facilitating training and multiplication of theexisting techniques; by conceiving projects on a global scale; by the stimulation of the creation of localCentres for Theatre of the Oppressed (CTOs); by promoting and creating conditions for the work ofCTOs and practitioners and by creating an international meeting point on the internet.

19. The ITO is of the same humanistic and democratic nature as its principles and objectives; it willincorporate any contributions from those who are working under this Declaration of Principles.20. The ITO will assume that anyone using the various techniques of Theatre of the Oppressedsubscribes to this Declaration of Principles.

From Under Pressure 12/13, February 2003 athttp://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org/en/index.php?nodeID=1


11/23


12/23

Draft extract from Anomie/Bonhomie

5. Mogadon Capital

I live beneath a political tyranny which, although, it does not oppress me directly, still offends some hidden

principle of my soul Fernando Pessoa 1

There are many denitions of depression. The foregoing thumbnail depictions of some of the becomings of

capital and the way they effect us could join the denitions: being overdetermined and willless, dependent

and compelled beyond our ken whilst being urged to the maximum self-fulllment and independence is

a double bind too far for many. The intensities of a labour that demand improvisation, language skills

and professionalised affect do not reap such benets as to allow us the luxury of coping with existential

anxities and the species-suffering of ourselves as sensual and passionate beings. The manifold mediations

of social life, growing social phobias and the competitive accent of self-promotion aid in divorcing us from

forms of relational life that could be non-judgemental, empathic and congruent; in other words provide the

mimimum from which we can regain condence and become human. The solution offered seems to be an

entrepeneurial insensitivity from which many (survivalists and the career-obsessed both) do not awaken,

nor can afford to awaken from. Objecthood of the self as a morphogenic defence-mechanism. That this is

continually being noticed is no surprise, but, as usual its being noticed is dependent upon welfare cash costs.

Patrick Butler, reporting on a recent dossier by the Young Foundation, paraphrases that millions of peopleare unhappy, lonely and unable to cope with profound changes in the workplace. Quoting the dossier itself

he reports: a more overtly meritocratic society has encouraged people to be more ambitious for themselves,

but also made them more vulnerable to failures and more likely to blame themselves (rather than fate or

the class system) if things go wrong2. The picture painted is one of job insecurity, socialised vulnerability

and emotional precarity held together in a fragile affective equilibrium. The fallout of the recent credit

crunch as it wends its cutting way through local services can only excacerbate this growing endocolonial

effect of the value-form as it instills and diffuses depression and hopelessnes as it circulates.

However, it is not only Charitable Foundations and Government sponsored think tanks that are taking notice

of these issues. Scattered throughout the pronouncement of the insurrectionary Greeks of 2008 were suchphrases as the middle and lower classes are exhausted and we are shaking with worry over the future

of our children. A World Revolution manifesto from the same period included amongst its appellants

the clinically depressed. In the popular booklet, the Coming Insurrection, it was offered movingly that

society is run on a gigantic resevoir of unwept tears. In a joint declaration of an Argentinian Network

of Alternative Resistence from 1999, it is offered that sadness is the way in which capitalism is present

in our lives. There is, then, a sneaking awareness, of, as Bifo puts it, the question of sensibility becoming

one with politics. In his re-reading of Guattari, Bifo has recently drawn attention to capital as a pathogenic

mechanism and has called for an awareness of depression that would not be depressing (Soul:134).

Taking up Felix Guatarris call for personal problems to be able to irrupt on the private or public scene

of ecosophic enunciation3 , Bifo has proposed that future political action is endangered lest it include

modalities of therapeutic intervention to reweave the fabric of social relations. 4(Soul: 140). In a similar

vein Julia Kristeva, writing in the Guardian, offered that politics has to take into account the intimate acts

of the modern personality5 .

This kind of pyshco-politics has had a long history that stretches back to Reichs Sexpol movement and up

through feminist groups and anti-psychiatry to such initiatives as La Borde and Franco Basaglias work in

Italy (which is not to forget cultural movements from Artaud to Mad Pride). What makes it different in our

times is that the growing incursion of endocolonisation (including the governmental regularisation of the

up-to-now condential and potentially autonomous space of therapeutic counselling) can extend to an inner

1 Fernando Pessoa: The Book Of Disquiet, Serpents Tail 198?, p69.

2 Patrick Butler: Millions of Britons Unhappy in Guardian 7/2/09.

3 Felix Guattari: Chaosmosis, Power Publications, 1995, p128.

4 Franco Bifo Berardi, ibid, p134.

5 Julia Kristeva in Guardian 7/4/07. Kristeva remarks on daily anguish through which people live in conditions of instability. See Revolt She Said,Semiotexte 2002, p104.


13/23

dialogue that, having continually to ingurgitate the ever changing abstract operative rules, excercises a

debilitiating conditionality over us that is less benign than a negotiable super-ego. Depression can be a

paralysis, a refraction, a self-blame that is rarely recognised as a suffering under a political tyranny but as

a personal and personalised failing. This endocoloniosation, the progressive exploitation of non-material

species-life, is having an impact on mental health to the degree that the UK Labour Government appointed

a happiness Czar in the form of Lord Layard. It is also planning to have CBT counsellors installed in UK

job centres. Other statistics are always coming to light such as that reported by Allegra Stratton:Some 6

million adults in the UK have been diagnosed with depression ot anxiety 6. This can translate into a suicide

rate, especially amongst young men, that is said to be rising, and there was, in 2007, the grim outbreak of

what the media called a suicide cult in the former industrial hub of Brigend. Hidden principles (made

up, for me, from an other centred sensuous practice) are being more than offended. They are being

permanently occulded by a socially produced arrested development that could nd its conceptual twin in

Postones notion of capitals treadmill effect

What is also disturbing is the effect of the lefts disenchantment with itself, with its subject etc. This has

led to the quest for a new social subject (Negris and Harrdts Multitude, Bifo cognitariat etc), a questioning

of modes of organisation and new theoretical tools (communisation, capital as subject, post marxism

etc). Unfortunately, this very disenchantment, while discernible in a constant rieteration of truths and a

self-certainty that itself could be deemed pathological, is very reluctant to bring itself to expression. Onefactor in depression is the hardening and clogging up of the self-image, there is an immovability that is the

inverse of a becoming and an opening out to new experiences. The problem of the other is guarded against.

It is too risky to adopt experimental positions in a reception context that expects the same refrain and in

fact retroactively instills the refrain as a factor in belonging. You are who you are. An identity is won and

this is a struggle in itself. An identity as a rst step towards independence but then there arises a dependency

on this identity and hence our refrains harden; we become identiable and attractive of a living attention

which we do not want too loose. This could well be a description of all forms of social-relational life from

infancy through adolescent and so on. It could well be speaking of our reputation at work or amidst

comrades etc. But does this not amount to the way our refrains and institutions, in a manner akin to abstract

labour, organise stabilities for our dependencies(Call) which are themselves the source of a constantpsychic struggle? This foregoing may be a description of defensiveness, a mechanism of self-maintenance

that is intimately tied-in to the reproduction of social relations. For the Left, with its advocated concern

for the other sufferer, there is a taboo on its own suffering (which can only be excacerbated by its wilful

alienation from the mores of the value-form) which disables it from speaking of its own disenchantment, an

abreaction of which, a speaking of depression in a non depressive way, could well bring forth the relief of

acknowledged sadness and the exploration of feelings that subsist within us that are not readily articulateable

but which may well reveal the becomings that capital has made of us. As Marx had it we must get beyond

the stage of self-reference in alienation.7

Howard

6 Allegra Stratton: Unemployed to be offered talking treatment. Guardian 5/12/09. Psychoanalyst Darien Leader is less empirically minded: The morethat society insists on the values of efciency and economic productivity, the more depression will proliferate as a necessary consequence. See The New Black,

Penguin 2008, p13.

7 Marx, Early Writings, p398.


14/23

Communism is back but we should call it the therapy of singularisation

(last two sections)

6. Singularities

The industrial working class, being external to the production of concepts, could only identify with the mythology

of Abolition and Totalization, but the general intellect cannot do that. The general intellect is like the sh of IggyPop: The sh is mute expressionless, because the sh knows. Everything.

The general intellect does not need an expressive subject, like the Leninist Party was in the 20th century. Thepolitical expression of the General Intellect is at one with its action of knowing, creating, and producing signs. Wehave abandoned the ground of Dialectics in favour of the plural grounds of the Dynamic of singularization and themultilayered co-evolution of singularities. Capitalism is over, but it is not going to disappear. The creation of NonTemporary Autonomous Zones is not going to give birth to any totalization. We are not going to witness a catharticevent of Revolution, well not see the sudden breakdown of State power. During the next months and years wellwitness a sort of Revolution without a Subject. In order to subjectivate this revolution we have to proliferatesingularities. This, in my humble opinion, is our cultural and political task.

After abandoning the eld of the Dialectics of Abolition and Totalization, we are now trying to build a Theory of theDynamics of recombination and singularization, a concept that is clearly drawn from the works of Felix Guattari,

particularly from his last book, Chaosmose . Singularity does not mean individual, because you can have collectivesingularities. By the world singularity I mean an agency that does not follow any rule of conformity and repetition,and is not framed in any historical necessity. Singularity is a process that is not necessary, because it is implied inthe consequentiality of history neither logically nor materially.

7. Unending process of therapy

Rather than a swift change in the social landscape, we should expect the slow surfacing of new trends:communities abandoning the eld the crumbling ruling economies, more and more individuals giving up their searchfor a job and creating their own networks of services.

The dismantling of the industry is unstoppable for the simple reason that social life does not need industrial labour

anymore. The myth of Growth is going to be abandoned and people will look for new modes of wealth distribution.

Singular communities will transform the very perception of well-being and wealth in the sense of frugality andfreedom. The cultural revolution that we need in this transition leads from the perception of wealth as the privateownership of a growing amount of goods that we cannot enjoy because we are too busy purchasing the moneyneeded for acquisition, to the perception of wealth as the enjoyment of an essential amount of things that we canshare with other people.

The de-privatization of services and goods will be made possible by this much needed cultural revolution. This willnot happen in a planned and uniformed way, this will rather be the effect of the withdrawal of singular individualsand communities, and the result of the creation of an economy of shared use of common goods and services andthe liberation of time for culture, pleasure and affection. While this process expands at the margins of society, thecriminal class will hang on to its power and enforce more and more repressive legislation, the majority of peoplewill be increasingly aggressive and desperate. Ethnic civil war will spread all over Europe, wrecking the very fabric

of civil life.

The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of non temporary autonomous zones) will be a pacicprocess, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is already happening. The conformist majority isfrightened by the eeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intelligentactivity. The situation can be described as a ght between the Mass Ignorance produced by Media-totalitarianismand the shared Intelligence of the General Intellect.

We cannot predict what the outcome of this process will be. Our task is to extend and protect the eld ofautonomy, and to avoid as much as possible any violent contact with the eld of aggressive mass Ignorance.This strategy of non confrontational withdrawal will not always succeed. Sometimes confrontation will be madeinevitable by racism and fascism. What has to be done in the case of unwanted conict is not foreseeable. Non

violent reaction is obviously the best choice, but it will not always be possible. The identication of well-being withprivate property is so deeply rooted that a barbarization of the human environment cannot be completely ruledout. But the task of the general intellect is exactly this: eeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance,experimenting autonomous forms of production based on high-tech-low-energy production whilst avoidingconfrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population.


15/23

Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming time. People will feel hopeless and depressedand panicking, because they are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss the

dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity,showing them the way of a happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of humanresistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion. The process of autonomisation has not to be seen as a

Aufhebung , but as Therapy. In this sense it is not totalizing and intended to destroy and abolish the past. Likepsychoanalytic therapy it is rather to be considered as an unending process.

London, February 2009

By Franco Bifo Berardi from http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo6.htm


16/23

PREOCCUPIED, PREOCCUPATION, OCCUPIED, DEOCCUPIED

Communiqu from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life (extract)

WE LIVE AS A DEAD CIVILIZATION. We can no longer imagine the good life except as a series ofspectacles preselected for our bemusement: a shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-lled life andour own imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more lavish and inhumanethan anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally beyond reach. No one believes in suchoutcomes anymore. The truth of life after the university is mean and petty competition for resourceswith our friends and strangers: the hustle for a lower-management position that will last (with luck)for a couple years rifted with anxiety, fear, and increasing exploitationuntil the rm crumbles and wemutter about plan B. But this is an exact description of university life today; that mean and petty lifehas already arrived.

Just to survive, we are compelled to adopt various attitudes toward this ssure between bankruptpromises and the actuality on offer. Some take a nave romantic stance toward education for its ownsake, telling themselves they expect nothing further. Some proceed with iron cynicism and scorn,racing through the ludicrous charade toward the last wad of cash in the airless vault of the future. Andsome remain committed to the antique faith that their ascendingly hard labor will surely be rewardedsome day if they just act as one who believes, just show up, take on more degrees and more debt,work harder.

Time, the actual material of our being, disappears: the hours of our daily life. The future is seized

from us in advance, given over to the servicing of debt and to beggaring our neighbors. Maybe wewill earn the rent on our boredom, more likely not. There will be no 77 virgins, not even a plasmamonitor on which to watch the death throes of the United States as a global power. Capitalism hasnally become a true religion,wherein the riches of heaven are everywhere promised and nowheredelivered. The only difference is that every manner of crassness and cruelty is actively encouraged inthe unending meantime. We live as a dead civilization, the last residents of Pompeii.

Romantic navete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment. The university and the life it reproduceshave depended on these things. They have counted on our human capacities to endure, and to propup that worlds catastrophic failure for just a few more years. But why not hasten its collapse? Theuniversity has rotted itself from the inside: the human capital of staff, teachers, and studentswould now no more defend it than they would defend a city of the dead. Romantic navete, ironcynicism, scorn, commitment: these need not be abandoned. The university forced us to learn them

as tools; they will return as weapons. The university that makes us mute and dull instruments of itsown reproduction must be destroyed so that we can produce our own lives. Romantic navete aboutpossibilities; iron cynicism about methods; scorn for the universitys humiliating lies about its situationand its good intentions; commitment to absolute transformation not of the university, but of our ownlives. This is the beginning of imaginations return. We must begin to move again, release ourselvesfrom frozen history, from the igneous frieze of this buried life.

We must live our own time, our own possibilities. These are the only true justications forthe universitys existence, though it has never fullled them. On its side: bureaucracy, inertia,incompetence. On our side: everything else.

From: http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/

Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation (extract)

(IV). How does one block the inertia of banality that structures our daily rhythms? Not by activatingthe identity of a political subject within us, an identity which only works to tailor more precisely theclothing of our subjugation, but by demobilizing the eld of vision before us. For every object we seeand every movement we envision is already a fossilization of our desires, and in order to truly wrenchopen a course of action, we must close down every route weve been given. Our dreams provideno directions and no maps. It is rather from within the territory itself that our imaginations can beconstructed.

The intersecting vectors of capital and governance bind us to forms of living that are notstraightforwardly deected. It is easy to stop exploiting others for a day; it is hard to stop exploitingoneself. We are not up against an enemy that can be knocked down and trampled over; we arepositioned within an enemy that must be stripped away. Every site houses the potential for this

stripping, but not every time welcomes this interruption. The task of the provocateur is to probe thelocations that stitch together their own circulation within the metropolis. One must listen to the tempoof authority that codes the functions, logics, and schedules of order on every block. Penetrating thesecret of every site, it is only a matter of time before time can be exposed therein too. There is acadence to chaos, and if its notes are played right, inertias silence will shatter like glass.


17/23

(V). Unalienated activity doesnt just happen but neither is it so well planned. Only its conditions canbe staged, and from then on, nothing is certain. But if one can achieve even that moment, that break-through, then nothing else matters.We notice three moments in this gesture: solidify, probe, strike.

To solidify is to build secret solidarities with others based on the sharing of wants and needs. Thisis not the creation of a political organization or the formation of an afnity group. This is the practice ofbinding oneself to others through a collective dependency that makes common the means of existence.No more loose networks and no more short experiments. To solidify means to dis-identify oneself

alongside others, creating denser relations of mutual necessity in the process. Ones self dissolves asthe relations solidify, building shared trust, commitment and desires without individual interruption.One solid relationship is more effective than a hundred vague ones. The extension of the domain ofstruggle will be determined by such solidities...

By The Inoperative Committee (NYU). From: http://info.interactivist.net/node/11869

Project Sigma: Invisible Insurrection of a Milllion Minds (extracts)

Revolt is understandably unpopular. As soon as it is dened, it has provoked the measures for itsconnement. The prudent man will avoid his denition which is in effect his death-sentence. Besides, itis a limit

So the cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind.Intelligence must become self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcendingfunctions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow nationalgovernments; it will outank them. The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionatesubstructure of a new order of things.

Art can have no existential signicance for a civilization that draws a line between life and art, andcollects artifacts like ancestral bones for reverence. Art must inform the living; we envisage a situationin which life is continually renewed by art, a situation imaginatively and passionately constructed toinspire each individual to respond creatively, to bring to whatever act a creative comportment. Weenvisage it. But it is we, now, who must create it. For it does not exist.

The individual has a profound sense of his own impotence as he realizes the immensity of the forcesinvolved. We, the creative ones everywhere, must discard this paralytic posture and seize controlof the human process by assuming control of ourselves. We must reject the conventional ction of

unchanging human nature. There is in fact no such permanence anywhere. There is only becoming

We have already rejected any idea of a frontal attack. Mind cannot withstand matter (brute force) inopen battle. It is rather a question of perceiving clearly and without prejudice what are the forces thatare at work in the world and out of whose interaction tomorrow must come to be; and then, calmly,without indignation, by a kind of mental ju-jitsu that is ours by virtue of intelligence, of modifying,correcting, polluting, deecting, corrupting, eroding, outanking . . . inspiring what we might call theinvisible insurrection. It will come on the mass of men, if it comes at all, not as something they have

voted for, fought for, but like the changing season; they will nd themselves in and stimulated by thesituation consciously at last to recreate it within and without as their own.

we have always envisaged our experimental situation as a kind of shadow reality of the futureexisting side by side with the present establishment, and the process as one of gradual in(ex)ltration

This confusion of value with money has infected everything. The conventional categoriesdistinguishing the arts from each other, tending as they do to perpetuate the protable institutionswhich have grown up around them, can for the moment only get in the way of creativity and ourunderstanding of it.

Our rst move must be to eliminate the brokers.

By Alexander Trocchi (1964). From http://www.infopool.org.uk/6301.htmlandhttp://www.notbored.org/sigma.html


18/23

Invisible Politics - An Introduction to Contemporary Communisation(two excerpts)

Bracketing off the question of political agency and subjectivity in favour of historical structuralism, waving goodbyeto the multitude and other spectral forms, is a welcome dose of anti-humanism. However, Theorie Communisteseem too eager to remove any subjective agency from oppositional politics. Theres a pessimism underlying theirevacuation of any possibility in history that is an inversion of the classic 20th century social democratic Marxistparadigm of an inexorable movement towards communism. Too much value is xed on the movement of historytowards real subsumption of capital rather than evaluating history as composed of discontinuous breaks, fracturesand events. One such might be the Paris Commune.

In its brief existence, the Commune pregures many of the themes in contemporary discourse aroundcommunisation as both an immanent process of attempting to construct a non-state public sphere and aninsurrectionist outburst that broke with the slow advance of 19th century commodity capitalism. Marx graspedthat the whole sham of State mysteries and State pretensions was done (away) by a Commune, mostly consistingof simple working people and that the aim of the commune was the expropriation of the expropriators, thedissolution of class and property.11 While the commune was primarily political it indicated for Marx the intertwinednature of revolutionary change, abolishing the separation between the economic and political and at certainconjunctures being wedded to insurrectionist force. For Marx the great social measure of the Commune was itsown working existence, but he believed it gestured towards social emancipation in the limited measures, (such asthe appropriation of disused workshops), it was able to undertake in its brief existence.12 He wrote that ... thepresent rising in Paris - even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society - is the mostglorious deed of our Party... .13

The image of a proliferation of communes as a power of production that is just incidentally relationships ofproduction establishes what is best termed desiring production.29 It arises through assemblages of communisedspaces, knowledge, means, bodies and desires that establish a refrain between them, displacing the secessionistcollective from capital and those identities such as worker or migrant that are xed within it. This could producea blockage within the ows of value production as information and commodity in what The Invisible Committee,again taking their lead from Agamben, theorise as the metropolis; the undifferentiated, sprawling non-place ofcontemporary biopolitical capital.30 This process of blockage is expressed in The Coming Insurrection thus:

The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable [...]. Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with anyreal effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks.31

Does this simultaneous production of subjectivity and disruption of value production posit whatever being as

a new form of political agency? As the model of an actualised Fourierist utopia, or even as an allegory of theproduction of oppositional politics this seems ne, but communes form an insurrectionist phantom organisation, apiloting machine that is more or less organically formed through the act of secession, constituting an avant gardeof the disaffected and voluntarily displaced. A residual aristocratism emerges alongside a phantom vanguardismthat is revealed in the formulation, Making the paralyzed citizens understand that if they do not join the warthey are part of it anyway.32 These communes that, for The Invisible Committee, are immanent in the presentbut not formalised encompass any number of spaces and collectivities, from proletarian to counter-cultural andillegal. Squats, wildcat strikes, riots, rural collectives, any bunch of the disaffected or excluded (re)appropriatingthe neighbourhood. At its best this carries within it an involuntary viral diffusion of communal and subjectivedisafliation from capital as a social relation. At its worst they all end up sharing within the insurrectionist thematicvoluntary renunciation and conscious refusal. For me this loses something of the negativity of the more primordialhuman strike hinted at, that refuses as much as an involuntary reaction to unbearable social relations, as througha conscious act of will. Theres an import to human strike that restores an actuality to the ways that depressionfor instance might function as both a sign of vulnerability and site of resistance. As The Coming Insurrection notes,

depression is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a side-step towards apoliticaldisafliation.33 Ratherthan the insurrection, its this awareness that most productively marks The Invisible Committee off from moreconventional radical milieus. What Camatte termed the real subsumption and domestication of the human by thecommunity of capital here turns to speculative forms of resistance.

By John Cunningham. Invisible Politics - An Introduction to Contemporary Communisation. Mute MagazineSeptember 2009. Full text athttp://www.metamute.org/en/content/invisible_politics_an_introduction_to_contemporary_communisation


19/23


20/23

FILM POOL

ASYLUM (Peter Robinson, 1971)In 1971, lmmaker Peter Robinson and a small crew entered a world of anarchic madness and healing compassion unlikeany other. The resulting lm, Asylum, records their seven week stay in radical psychiatrist R. D. Laings controversial ArchwayCommunity -- a London row-house where the inmates literally run the asylum. Laings conviction that schizophrenics can onlyheal their shattered self where theyre free and yet are held responsible for their actions, challenged patients, doctors and, inAsylums incredible document, the lmmakers, to live communally and peacefully.

I think its possible to get lost here, offers one of the uneasy medical volunteers plunged into Archways tribal society.Fiercely intellectual David demands attention by engaging anyone and everyone in an unending and increasingly menacingillogical discourse. Consumed by the emotional need that has claimed her sanity, beautiful, lost Julia regresses to infancy. Inone astonishing scene, a patients father blithely explains that he has hired a girl to date his nearly catatonic son. As Archwaysresidents are pushed to the point of confrontation by Davids belligerence, these and other vivid real life characters are exploredbut not exploited by this enterprising but humanly decent lm. (The New York Times)

A documentary treasure built from truthful moments of astonishing tension and grace, Asylum takes on a gripping narrativestrength usually only seen in ction. Hailed as beautifully done by The Village Voice at the time of its 1972 release, Asylum hassince become a model of cinema verit. (The New York Times)From: http://www.kino.com/video/item.php?lm_id=697

SPACE IS THE PLACE (John Coney, 1974)Avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra stars in the movie version of his concept album Space Is the Place. Not following a linearplot line, this experimental lm is a bizarre combination of social commentary, blaxploitation, science ction, and concertperformance. The opening scene is set in an intergalactic forest, with Sun Ra introducing his plan to use music as salvation forthe black community. Back on Earth, he wears a disguise as Sunny Ray, a piano player in a 1940s Chicago strip club who causesan explosion with his sounds. Switching to a scene in a desert, he plays a card game called The End of the World, with theOverseer (Ray Johnson), who is dressed in white and drives a white Cadillac. Sun Ra pulls out a spaceship card and the Arkestraplay the song Calling Planet Earth as their spaceship lands in Oakland, CA. Perpetually dressed in sparkling gold robes andheaddresses, he sets out to save the black people from oppression. He visits a community center and sets up the Outer SpaceEmployment Agency, occasionally switching back to the desert to continue his game with the Overseer. Eventually, Sun Ra getskidnapped by two white guys and forced to listen to Dixie on headphones, but some kids from the community center.

By Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide. From: http://www.swapadvd.com/

PRESSURE (Horace Ove, 1975)Aside from Pressures obvious aesthetic merit, what makes this lm important is the bold way it deals with institutionalracism and police brutality without ever falling into the trap of treating such matters simplistically. Based on a script co-writtenby director Horace Ov and novelist Samuel Selvon (best known for The Lonely Londoners), the lm is nevertheless partlyimprovised. Pressures plot centres on Tony, a young London born school-leaver whose parents and older brother come fromTrinidad. Tony has good academic qualications but cant nd a job. His brother Colin, a black power activist, derides Tonys tastesin food and music as white and attempts to radicalise him. Tonys growing frustration with the institutional racism that preventshim nding employment that is commensurate with his academic accomplishments, leads to an increasing consciousness of hisalienation from the bourgeois (i.e. also white) power structure, and he opens up to radical ideas.By Stewart Home. From:http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/luv/pressure.htm

EVERY LITTLE THING (Nicolas Philibert, 1996)The protagonists in this lm are the patients and staff at the La Borde psychiatric institute in France. Each summer they performa play on a stage set in the beautiful grounds of the chateau. The lm charts the passage of this magical event and allows theviewer a glimpse at life in one of the worlds most highly regarded psychiatric institutions. Philibert, director of the hugely-acclaimed Etre et avoir and In the Land of the Deaf, calmly and compassionately builds an experience that is less like watching adocumentary than like being enveloped in a book of breathlessly honest poetry. He delicately celebrates the work of La Bordeand quietly makes us question the distinctions that society applies in classifying as normal or abnormal).From http://www.secondrundvd.com/release_elt.php

** Short excerpt from Patrick Lebouttes interview with Nicolas Philibert (translation by Tim Leicester)

PL: How did the idea for the lm come about?NP: Originally,several people had suggested that I go to La Borde I had often heard people talking about this atypical institution,but had long since rejected the idea of going there: I couldnt see how to make a lm in such a place without being intrusive. Thepeople who are there have, after all gone to get some peace and quiet! What higher interest could possibly justify my lming,with complete peace of mind, people in a situation of weakness, made fragile by suffering? And how to overcome being frivolousand avoid the picturesque quality of madness? As soon as I visited however, I was struck by the atmosphere emanating from this


21/23

bizarre chateau lost in the middle of the woods: the effort made to welcome and respect one another Its not easy to ndoneself in an asylum even if it is only as a visitor: the distress of some people is particularly obvious. But there was somethingcalming there, no white walls or uniforms, a strong sense of community, a feeling of freedom And even though I was outwardlya bit reticent, some patients and carers started to encourage me: that I had such misgivings was considered to be a good signAs some patients themselves pointed out there was no reason to think that they would let themselves be manipulated by thecamera simply because they suffered from psychiatric problems or mental illness! In short, my preconceptions progressivelyvanished, and the fears which arose from my questioning were eventually transformed into a desire to confront themFrom http://www.secondrundvd.com/release_more_elt.php

STAND TOGETHER - 52 MINSLOOK BACK AT GRUNWICK - 26 MINSProduced by Newsreel Collective 1977

The dispute at the Grunwick lm processing plant (1976 - 1978) was one of the most signicant strikes of the second half ofthe twentieth century. The dispute, involving mainly asian women workers, became a rallying point for the whole of the labourmovement. Thousands came to support the picket lines, postal workers refused to deliver the mail, print workers refused to printan article condemning the strikers, and Yorkshire miners joined the march to the factory gates. Even cabinet ministers joined thepicket line. The police employed heavy handed tactics, with over 600 hundred arrested and many injured. A right-wing pressuregroup, The National Association for Freedom, gave its backing to the employer, using the courts against the strikers.

STAND TOGETHER documents the tremendous support the strikers received from the trade union movement and theirattempts to win the backing necessary to win.

LOOK BACK AT GRUNWICK shows that in spite of the determination of the strikers and tremendous solidarity the strike waslost and teh reason why.


22/23

Toward Agonism Moishe Postones Time, Labour & Social Domination

(Opening paragraphs)

And she gave away the secrets of her past,And said Ive lost control again,And of a voice that told her when and where to act,She said Ive lost control again- Ian Curtis

In Time, Labour & Social Domination Moishe Postone discusses labour by following Marxs analysisof the commodity as split between exchange value and use value. For Marx, this leads to a doublecharacter of labour in capitalism: labour as a directly productive activity, a useful labour creatingparticular products (concrete labour) and labour as a socially mediating activity, a mean of labouruniting disparate labours (abstract labour). The former seems to encapsulate the current tenor ofdiscussions of immaterial labour; immaterial labour as a concrete practice that seeks legitimation as aproductive activity. The latter, abstract labour, operating for Postone in lieu of overt social relations, isnot only, for him, the key to value as objectied social mediation, but gures commodity-determinedlabour as that which constitutes social mediation: a social means of acquiring the products of others.For Postone, this labour creates a fabric of society almost as a by-product: no one consumes what one

produces, but ones own labour... functions as the necessary means of obtaining the products of others.In serving as such a means, labour and its products in effect pre-empt that function on the part ofmanifest social relations.If a certain independence could accrue to concrete labour practices (artisanal, etc.), a certain

autonomy of use value, then these are more and more placed in this fabricated framework ofdependence (in the goods/services of others) as the labour process is recomposed and the meansand materials of production are more and more tightly enclosed. Labouring activity, by means of its

abstract character, by means of being press-ganged by necessity, is, beside-itself, also productive ofthese very dependences; objective social mediations. Postone:

A characteristic of capitalism is that its essential social relations are social in a peculiar manner. Theyexist not as overt interpersonal relationships but as a quasi-independent set of structures that are

opposed to individuals, a sphere of impersonal objective necessity and objective dependence.

This is tantamount, as Postone later states, to our maintenance of relations-of-production as non-conscious social determinations (dispositifs) [Here and throughout the text the author makes use ofthe Foucauldian or Deleuzian concept ofdispositif,described later in the text as abstract operativerules]. Or, as Rubin states of value, it is tantamount to the transformation of social labour into aproperty of the products of labour i.e. commodities (p.121).

So, labour as a form of capital, a commodity, interacts with other commodity forms and thereby, in theprocess of producing particular products (concrete labour), also constitutes (abstract labour) sets ofstructures throughout society that operate as an impersonal power: from the institutions of work andwelfare to the institutions of culture. Postone: labour in capitalism is not mediated by social relationsbut, rather, constitutes itself as a social mediation. If in traditional societies, social relations impart

meaning and signicance to labour, in capitalism labour imparts an objective character to itself andsocial relations.

The impersonal power of relations-of-production, the objectivity of self-interest as a stand-in forovertly interpersonal and socially sensuous relations, has it that labour is experienced as an abstractcompulsion, a means to exchange labour for money for goods and services, and whilst this is closeto the notion ofdispositifas, say, abstract operative rules, it sheds light on how rules such as workprocedures and terms and conditions can be characterised as instaurating a personal independence inthe framework of a system of dependence(p.123).

Using Postones articulation of abstract labour, then, we could come to say that immaterial labouris a moment in the wider becoming of labour as the materialisation of abstract labour, the work

on mediating activity that bets general management work as much as that of immaterial labour.Postone states that in real subsumption abstract labour begins to quantify and shape concretelabour in its image; the abstract domination of value begins to be materialised in the labour processitself. One could suggest that the growing absurdity of a work that measures itself, a productiveactivity that measures its own productivity by means of arbitrary targets, invigilation, monitoring andstatisticalisation of all types, is one where objectication is interpolated into the labouring subject:


23/23

self-management not of the enterprise, but of a now explicit mediational activity (labour) that ismade increasingly concrete, productive not only of value but of an attendant subjectivity. Postone:

in this sense, objectivity can be seen as the non-overtly social meaning that arises historically whenobjectifying social activity reexively determines itself socially. We may not all be bourgeois, but weare all increasingly managers of the animate and inanimate..

By Howard Slater from http://www.metamute.org/en/toward-agonism

BERLIN

Basso Florians Loft

Structure vs Freeform

The Fragile and CollaborationDrama

Planning Structure

as a Group

Theatre

of the

Oppressed

The Check-in

Discussion 2pm till late

Evening Presentation/Screening

Party

Basso presentation

Berlin Reader 02

Documents