TkH (Walking Theory), 19: Politicality of Performance (2011) [Serbian/English]

“In a broader historical perspective, the social position of art seems relatively marginal, which could serve as a possible starting point to think about what the politicality of performance might mean today. It seems that the political relevance of art has become disputable, due to its commercialisation and commodification by the entertainment and creative industries, the mass media’s at least partial appropriation of its political relevance, and an overall “aestheticisation of life” in the 20th century, to name only a few possible factors. But at the same time, the topic itself has been attracting more and more theoretical and artistic attention. We devote this issue of the TkH journal to the topic of the politicality of performance because we want to open up more space for thinking about these two seemingly irreconcilable tendencies. The discussion may include (but is not limited to) questions such as the following: What is the meaning of these notions nowadays and how are they disconnected or interconnected? Why do we find the proposed topic important or, to put it simply, why is there such a preoccupation with the political in the performing arts today? Might it merely be an alibi concocted to secure the support of public funds and various other foundations? Maybe it is just a desperate attempt to be recognised as a socially relevant practice instead of being dismissed as an elitist type of entertainment? Or is it just the neo-liberal capitalist state of affairs, which blurs the borders between different social practices and where some old questions – such as how we practise politics and where politics is located today – are still waiting for an answer?” (from the introduction)

The topic of this issue was researched in the context of TkH project “Performance and the Public” produced at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.

With contributions by Sezgin Boynik, Gregory Sholette, Grupa Umetnost kao politika/Group Art and/as Politics (Aneta Stojnić, Ana Isaković, Marko Đorđević i Sava Jokić), Aleksandra Jovićević, Bojana Kunst, Aldo Milohnić, Gerald Raunig, Janelle Reinelt, Jelena Vesić, Ana Vujanović.

TkH, Journal for Performing Arts Theory, 19
Edited by Ana Vujanović and Aldo Milohnić
Published by TkH (Walking Theory) theoretical-artistic platform, Belgrade, December 2011
Creative Commons License BY-NC-SA 3.0 Serbia
ISSN 1451-0707
164 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2017-7-11)

transversal, 01/12: Unsettling Knowledges (2012) [EN, DE, FR, ES, HI]

“The crises within cognitive capitalism and cognitive labor are mirrored in the reproduction and exacerbation of global divisions of labor and the emergence of new forms of exploitation as part of a regime of flexible capital accumulation. While drastic austerity measures and heightened control mechanisms lead to a radical transformation of the welfare state on the one hand, new networks of communication, struggle and alternative forms of knowledge emerge on the other.

This issue of transversal attempts to review some of the general assumptions of a theory of cognitive capitalism and to unsettle the very notions of knowledge and its production, discussing the conditions of its capture, its “re-invention” and its capacity for creating worlds. The individual essays follow the lines of a (post-)colonial historicity and a feminist and geopolitical critique of capitalist valorization, thereby questioning the materiality of knowledge and its production in relation to resources and bodies, as well as how art and knowledge production are interwoven with political struggles.”

With contributions by Lina Dokuzović, Silvia Federici, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Therese Kaufmann, Christian Kravagna, Brigitta Kuster, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter Mignolo, Raimund Minichbauer

Editors: Aileen Derieg, Lina Dokuzović, Marcelo Expósito, Therese Kaufmann, Raimund Minichbauer, Radostina Patulova, Gerald Raunig
Publisher eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna/Linz
Copyleft
ISSN 1811-1696

HTML (updated on 2020-4-18)

Gerald Raunig: A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (2008–) [Spanish, English]

“In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O’Brien’s fiction to Vittorio de Sica’s Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.”

First published in German as Tausend Maschinen. Eine kleine Philosophie der Maschine als sozialer Bewegung, Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2008.

English edition
Translated by Aileen Derieg
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2010
Intervention series, 5
ISBN 1584350857, 9781584350859
128 pages

Reviews

Publisher (EN)

Mil máquinas. breve filosofía de las máquinas como movimiento social (Spanish, trans. Marcelo Expósito, 2008, added 2014-3-16)
A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (English, trans. Aileen Derieg, 2010, 19 MB, updated on 2017-6-26)