Paolo Plotegher, Manuela Zechner, Bue Rübner Hansen (eds.): Nanopolitics Handbook (2013)

The invention of new modes of sensibility is vital to enriching and sustaining political engagements, labours and lives in the situated contexts of urban collectivity. The nanopolitics handbook investigates the neoliberal city and workplace, the politics of crisis and austerity, precarious lives and modes of collaboration – through bodies and their encounters. Starting from the exploration of what bodies can do – with curiosity, courage and care – nanopolitics is a proposal for producing new collective subjectivations.

Based on the experiments and experiences of the nanopolitics group, this book proposes exercises, concepts and ideas as little maps and machines for action. Drawing on social movements, grassroots organizing, dance, theatre and bodywork, the reflections and practices here present strategies for navigating and reconfiguring the playing field of ‘nanopolitics’, activating its entanglement with the major politics of our time.

Texts and exercises by: the nanopolitics group, esquizo-barcelona, David Vercauteren, Camila Mello and Fabiane Borges, Nelly Alfandari, Jorge Goia, Lottie Child, Carla Bottiglieri, Gabriella Alberti, Paolo Plotegher, Davyd Bodoun, Emma Dowling, Mara Ferreri, Manuela Zechner, Bue Rübner Hansen, Amit Rai, Anja Kanngieser, Lisa Burger, Irina Burger and Signe Lupnov.

Publisher Minor Compositions, 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
ISBN 9781570272684
280 pages

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Culture Machine, 14: Platform Politics (2013)

This special issue explores how digital platforms can be understood, leveraged and contested in an age when the ‘platform’ is coming to supplant the open Web as the default digital environment.

Platforms can be characterized as resting on already existing networked communication systems, but also as developing discreet spaces and affordances, often using ‘apps’ to circumvent any need to access them via the Internet or Web. Papers in this issue explore the nature and distinctive aspects of the ‘platform’: as something that can be positioned as more than just a neutral space of communication; and as a complex technology with distinct affordances that have powerful political, economic and social interests at stake. In this respect the platform constitutes a zone of contestation between, for example, different formations and configurations of capital; social movements; new kinds of activist networks; open source and proprietary software design. Platforms also constitute spaces of struggle between mass movements and governments, users and the extractors of value, visibility and invisibility: witness the various debates over the role of ‘social media’ in the Arab Spring, anti-austerity, student and occupy movements. Such struggles entail a compelling intersection between technology and design, capital, multitude, the democratization of technology and ‘subversive rationalization’.

The platform represents not just a question of software and control, then; it also connects to wider social struggles in the sense that ‘platform’ can refer to a ‘political platform’, and can thus take on the agenda setting or framing role of political discourse more generally. Accordingly, this special issue looks to understand ‘platform politics’ as a broad social assemblage, complex or form of life. Linking particular platforms across the molecular and molar, it thinks about platform politics as a distinct new context of power operating at the intersection of technological development, software design, cognitive/communicative capitalism, new forms of social movement and resistance, and the attempts to contain them by the exiting democracies. (adapted from call for papers for this issue)

Edited by Joss Hands, Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois
Publisher Open Humanities Press, 2013
Open Access
ISSN 1465-4121

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Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds.): We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy From Occupation to Liberation (2012)

We have all been swept up by the momentum of the Occupy movement. We have seen the results of years of organizing in different communities come together in ways that few could have imagined, bolstered by the scores of people who have left the comfort of their daily routine behind and taken to the streets. Yet as a movement so overflowing with new social and political actors, we lack the framework we need to help us all to understand what a social movement is, to understand how change has happened in the past, to understand what this moment means and what this movement makes possible.

We Are Many is a reflection on Occupy from within the heart of the movement itself. Examining key questions—what worked? what didn’t? why? how? is it reproducible?—the authors and activists in this collection point toward a movement-based framework for future organizing. Heavily illustrated and annotated, We Are Many is a celebration of what worked, and a thoughtful analysis of what didn’t.

With contributions by Michael Andrews, Michael Belt, Nadine Bloch, Rose Bookbinder, Mark Bray, Emily Brissette, George Caffentzis, George Ciccariello-Maher, Annie Cockrell, Joshua Clover, Andy Cornell, Molly Crabapple, CrimethInc., Croatoan, Paul Dalton, Chris Dixon, John Duda, Brendan M. Dunn, Lisa Fithian, Gabriella, David Graeber, Ryan Harvey, Gabriel Hetland, Marisa Holmes, Mike King, Koala Largess, Yvonne Yen Liu, Josh MacPhee, Manissa M. Maharawal, Yotam Marom, Cindy Milstein, Occupy Research, Joel Olson, Isaac Ontiveros, Morrigan Phillips, Frances Fox Piven, Vijay Prashad, Michael Premo, Max Rameau, RANT, Research & Destroy, Nathan Schneider, Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Some Oakland Antagonists, Lester Spence, Janaina Stronzake, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Team Colors Collective, Janelle Treibitz, Unwoman, Immanuel Wallerstein, Sophie Whittemore, Kristian Williams, and Jaime Omar Yassin.

Afterword by David Graeber
Publisher AK Press, 2012
ISBN 1849351163, 9781849351164
355 pages

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