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

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-1)
View online (Scribd.com)

Richard Sennett: The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006) [EN, ES, PT]

The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls “the specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.

In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”

Publisher Yale University Press, 2006
Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics and Economics series
ISBN 0300119925, 9780300119923
214 pages

Publisher

The Culture of the New Capitalism (PDF), PDF (English, updated on 2014-12-22)
La cultura del nuevo capitalismo (PDF), PDF (Spanish, trans. Marco Aurelio Galmarini, 2006, no OCR, updated on 2014-12-22)
A cultura do novo capitalismo (PDF), PDF (Portuguese, trans. Clovis Marques, 2006, updated on 2014-12-22)

Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders 1-2 (2010)

Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders #2

When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural.

Editors: Kernow Craig, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Soenke Zehle
December 2010
48 pages
Creative Commons License

Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders #1

Transit-labour investigates changing patterns of labour and mobility in the whirlwind of Asian capitalist transformation. Mindful of the view of Asia as the world’s factory, this three year research project examines the role of creativity, invention and knowledge production in the new economic order being forged from the region’s capitalist centres. Particular attention is given to changing relations of culture and economy in this transition and their entanglement with the production of new subjectivities and modalities of labour.

Editors: Kernow Craig, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter
July 2010
20 pages
Creative Commons License

authors

Direct download, Volume 2
Direct download, Volume 1