Gerald Raunig: Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (2005–) [DE, SR, EN, RU]

“Gerald Raunig has written an alternative art history of the ‘long twentieth century,’ from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the turbulent counter-globalization protests in Genoa in 2001. Meticulously moving from the Situationists and Sergei Eisenstein to Viennese Actionism and the PublixTheatreCaravan, Art and Revolution takes on the history of revolutionary transgressions and optimistically charts an emergence from its tales of tragic failure and unequivocal disaster. By eloquently applying Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the “machine,” Raunig extends the poststructuralist theory of revolution through to the explosive nexus of art and activism.

As hopeful as it is incisive, Art and Revolution encourages a new generation of artists and thinkers to refuse to participate in the tired prescriptions of marketplace and authority and instead create radical new methods of engagement. Raunig develops an indispensable, contemporary conception of political change—a conception that transcends the outmoded formulations of insurrection and resistance. Too much blood and ink has been shed for the art machines and the revolutionary machines to remain separate.”

Originally published in German as Kunst und Revolution. Künstlerischer Aktivismus im langen 20. Jahrhundert by Turia+Kant, Vienna, 2005. New edition by transversal texts, Vienna, 2017.

English edition
Translated by Aileen Derieg
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2007
Active Agents series
ISBN 1584350466, 9781584350460
319 pages

Reviews and commentaries: Marco Meseriis (Mute, 2008), Rob Myers (Furtherfield, 2009), Nettime discussion (2008), Gray Kochhar-Lindgren (Culture Machine), Beatrice von Bismarck (Texte zur Kunst, DE). Reuben Fowkes (Art Monthly), Karl Reitter (Grundrisse, DE), Ivan Pravdić (Filozofija i društvo).

Author, more
Editor (SR)
Publisher (EN)

Kunst und Revolution. Künstlerischer Aktivismus im langen 20. Jahrhundert (German, new ed., 2005/2017, added on 2024-1-5, EPUB)
Umetnost i revolucija. Umetnički aktivizam tokom dugog XX veka (Serbian, trans. Relja Dražić, ed. kuda.org, 2006, updated on 2015-8-30)
Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (English, trans. Aileen Derieg, 2007, updated on 2017-6-26)
Iskusstvo i revoluciia: khudozhestvennyi aktivizm v dolgom dvadcatom veke (Russian, trans. Eugenia Shraga and Alexander Skidan, 2012, DJVU, 28 MB, updated on 2017-6-26)

UNDP: Social Media, Accountability, and Public Transparency in Eastern Europe and CIS (2011)

The domination of the executive over other branches of the government and the media is frequent in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), but the rapid development of social media is changing this pattern by transforming personal conversations and individual opinions into a subject of public debate.

Publisher UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre, October 2011

review (Eva Vozárová, Fair-play Alliance)

PDF
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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)