Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber (eds.): Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (2007)

“From the ivory tower to the barricades! Radical intellectuals explore the relationship between research and resistance.

What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic authors and engaged intellectuals—including Antonio Negri and Colectivo Situaciones—provide some challenging answers. In the process, they redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself.

The twenty essays cover a broad range: embedded intellectuals in increasingly corporatized universities, research projects in which factory workers and academics work side by side, revolutionary ethnographies of the Global Justice Movement, meditations on technology from the branches of a Scottish tree-sit. What links them all is a collective and expansive re-imagining of engaged intellectual work in the service of social change. In a cultural climate in where right-wing watchdog groups seem to have radical academics on the run, this unapologetic anthology is a breath of fresh air.”

Edited with Erika Biddle
Publisher AK Press, Oakland / Edinburgh / West Virginia, 2007
ISBN 1904859356, 9781904859352
336 pages

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Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Precarious Rhapsody: Semocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (2009)

An infinite series of bifurcations: this is how we can tell the story of our life, of our loves, but also the history of revolts, defeats and restorations of order. At any given moment different paths open up in front of us, and we are continually presented with the alternative of going here or going there. Then we decide, we cut out from a set of infinite possibilities and choose a single path. But do we really choose? Is it really a question of a choice, when we go here rather than there? Is it really a choice, when masses go to shopping centers, when revolutions are transformed into massacres, when nations enter into war? It is not we who decide but the concatenations: machines for the liberation of desires and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. The fundamental bifurcation is always this one: between machines for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. In our time of digital mutation, technical automatisms are taking control of the social psyche.

Edited by Erik Empson & Stevphen Shukaitis
Translated by Arianna Bove, Erik Empson, Michael Goddard, Giuseppina Mecchia, Antonella Schintu, and Steve Wright
Publisher Minor Compositions, London, 2009
ISBN 1570272077, 9781570272073
153 pages

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Félix Guattari, Antonio Negri: New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty (1985/2010)

“The project: to rescue ‘communism’ from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the liberation of work through mankind’s collective creation, communism has instead stifled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation of both collective and individual possibilities must reverse that regimentation of thought and desire which terminates the individual….”

Thus begins the extraordinary collaboration between Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, written at dawn of the 1980s, in the wake of the crushing of the autonomous movements of the previous decade. Setting out Guattari and Negri diagnose with incisive prescience transformations of the global economy and theorize new forms of alliance and organization: mutant machines of subjectivation and social movement.

Prefiguring his collaboration with Michael Hardt, Negri and Guattari enact a singular hybridization of political and philosophical traditions, brining together psychiatry, political analysis, semiotics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Against the workings of an increasingly integrated world capitalism, they raise the banners of singularity, autonomy, and freedom to search out new routes for subversion.

This newly expanded edition includes previously untranslated materials and a new introduction by Matteo Mandarini.

Main text originally published in French in 1985 as Les nouveaux espaces de liberté. First English edition, 1990, published under the title Communists Like Us.
Translated by Michael Ryan, Jared Becker, Arianna Bove, and Noe Le Blanc
Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis
Publisher: Minor Compositions, London / New York in conjunction with Autonomedia and MayFlyBooks
ISBN 978-1-57027-224-0
144 pages

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