Tuesday Night — Bifo Seminar + Reading — 08.25.09
Comments Off on Tuesday Night — Bifo Seminar + Reading — 08.25.09Tuesday Night — Bifo Seminar + Reading — 08.25.09
Contents:
0. About this Tuesday
1. Seminar Update
2. How to Participate
3. The First Bifurcation
4. For updates on the seminar
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A VERY IMPORTANT NOTE:
For those who emailed us to enroll in the
upcoming seminar with Bifo. Due to an error
with the email directory, we were not able to
receive any emails. We have a new email address
so please re-send your emails to this address:
subject [AT] 16beavergroup [DOT] org
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0. About this Tuesday
What: Discussion
When: Tuesday 08.25.09
Where: 16 Beaver Street
When: 7:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
After last week’s discussion of Bifo’s text, there was a lot of interest for a subsequent session. We would like to invite all who are interested in the discussion and/or in the upcoming seminar to meet this Tuesday evening. Last week’s reading was from an article that was written in 1998. This week, we will look at the most recent book by Bifo, published by Min0r.c0mp0siti0ns. entitled “Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation.” Those who are enrolling in the seminar can pick up available copies at 16Beaver this Tuesday night. The reading is also available at
http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/precariousrhapsodyweb.pdf
Rather than suggest a specific chapter, we thought, we would leave it up to each person, to find their own chapter of interest and for the discussion, we will ask each participant to discuss one passage within their chosen chapter. We are looking for specific questions that emerge for you in these writings. We will collect them in preparation for the seminar.
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1. Seminar Update
a. The most important update is our email address. For anyone interested in participating or you have any questions, suggestions. Please write to subject [AT] 16beavergroup [DOT] org.
b. As mentioned in our last email, our schedule will go from Thursday to Sunday, September 3-6. Thursday schedule will be from 17:00 – 20:00. Friday will be from 12:00 to 23:00. Saturday, and Sunday will go from 11:00 to 23:00 .
Friday, Saturday, Sunday will include brunch / snacks / dinner.
c. We also would like to encourage those who are participating to commit to the entire program of four days. It is understandable that some may have to miss a session for work or prior commitments, but it would be great if participants can minimize their absences. Our experience has been that the most successful seminars have a stable group of active participants.
d. We are looking to have a few groups of individuals who might lead some discussion sessions around specific issues connected with subjectivation / autonomy. If you are interested and have a suggestion please write to the aforementioned email.
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2. How to Participate.
As mentioned last week …
If you are interested in attending the seminar, please write to the aforementioned email.
We need to have a good sense of how many people we will have and doing so will help us organize better.
In case you already sent an email to register (as we have indicated above) please re-send your email to our new address
subject [AT] 16beavergroup [DOT] org
We are asking for a modest sliding scale fee ($25-50), which should help us defray costs associated with bringing Bifo to NYC, as well as covering our food for the 4 days. Of course, we will not turn away anyone who cannot afford to pay. Min0r.c0mp0siti0ns is kindly donating a copy of the book for participants of the seminar.
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3. First bifurcation: 77 the year of premonition
This chapter from Precarious Rhapsody may be a nice introduction to Bifo’s 70’s experiences, practice, and activism.
When the future began
What happened in Italy in 1977 is difficult to understand in the framework of modern political concepts. At the time, Italy was in a deeply conflictual period, and a strong movement of students and young proletarians had surfaced, challenging economic and state power. The year 1977 is generally recorded as a year of violence. Indeed it was the year that the Red Brigades started their crazy, bloody campaigns, and the riots that exploded in the streets of Rome, Bologna and many other towns at the time were not at all peaceful meetings and friendly promenades. But violence was not an issue when the movement broke out. It became an issue when the police reacted violently to the demonstrations, when the government ordered their repression and the police shot dead students in Bologna and in Rome, and elsewhere. There was a rage in the air. This was not only because 15% of the population, especially young people, was unemployed. There was a kind of existential rage, a wave of insubordination that was not confined to Italy. Rather than focus on the violent side of 1977, I prefer to concentrate on the heterogeneous faces of the cultural process which emerged when baby boomers all over the world were hit by the premonition that the modern horizon was drawing to its dissolution. I want to talk about the general landscape of the 1970s, and it is here that I want to situate the Italian uprising. 1977 is not an Italian year: it is the year when Steve Wozniak and Steven Jobs created the trademark of Apple and what is more, created the tools for spreading information technology; when Alain Minc and Simon Nora wrote L’informatisation de la societé, a text which theorizes the coming dissolution of nation states due to the political effects of emerging telematics. In that year Yuri Andropov, secretary of the KGB, wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, arguing that the Soviet Union was in danger of disappearance if the gap with the USA in the field of informatics was not bridged. It was the year when Jean François Lyotard wrote the book La condition postmoderne. The year when Charlie Chaplin died; the man with the bowler hat and the cane passed away. This was the year of the end of the twentieth century: the turning point of modernity. What is special about the Italian situation is not the smoke of the riots and molotov cocktails. In that experience you can see both faces of the changing times: the happy utopian side of creativity and the despair and hopelessness, and terror. 1977 saw the last revolt of the communist proletarians of the twentieth century against capitalist rule and against the bourgeois state. But at the same time it saw the first revolt of the cognitariat, the intellectual workers, and of Technische Wissenschaft Intelligenz. In the culture produced during that year, we can see the premonition of a new cultural process and a new social landscape. In a rhetorical way, I could call it the first rebellion of the new times that we are living now. But I cannot be sure of this, I do not know if the time we are living now will be again a time of insurrection. Maybe yes, maybe not. In a certain sense it could be said that we are witnessing the realization of a bad dream, of the dystopian imagination that was present in the movement that exploded in 1977. For that movement was not only, as the legend goes, a happy event, the free expression of creativity. Contained within was a perception of a deep social deterritorialization, of an economic change bound to destroy the human landscape of the cities; bound to subjugate every fragment of time. In the very chronology of that year we can see the happy phase, which began in 1976 rather than in 1977. But in the months after the violent uprisings in Rome and Bologna, March 1977, one can also see a changing perception, the feeling of terror. In that transition there is something that totally escapes the political framework. In 1977 Ingmar Bergman produced the movie The Serpent’s Egg, probably not one of the best movies of Bergman, but a very interesting insight in the construction of the totalitarian mind all the same. When I saw it, right at the end of that year, I felt that in that movie something was directly speaking to me, to us. The Serpent’s Eggis a movie about the incubation of Nazism during the years 1923 to 1933. In those years, the egg of the serpent was slowly opening, and giving birth to the monster. In the time that followed the students’ uprising of March 1977 we felt something like this. We detected the smell of a new totalitarianism in the making. During the months of Spring 1977, scores of militants and intellectuals were arrested, the radio stations of the movement were closed by force, and the movement launched an international meeting against the repression which took place in Bologna in September. A hundred thousand people gathered in Bologna, expecting to hear a magic word of liberation but the magic word was not found. After the September meeting we perceived the defeat of the movement, the spreading of violence, and the growing strength of the Red Brigades who were gaining energy and militants out of the defeat of the movement. In Germany, Fall 1977 was a very gloomy month. Hans Martin Schleyer, an important corporate man, was kidnapped and killed by the Rote Armee Fraktion, and some days later, Andreas Baader Carl Hans Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin died in their prison cells in Stammheim, possibly killed by the guards. The impressive movie by Schlöndorff, Fassbinder and others, Germany in Autumntells of the widespread perception of the coming end of social solidarity. In that movie you can perceive the sudden sadness, the fog, and the clouds descending over people’s lives, and the prison of Stammheim becomes a kind of metaphor for the everyday jail that social life is becoming. Revisiting and reassessing that movement may be interesting if within those times you can find the premonition of what is happening nowadays, the premonition of an anthropological mutation that is unfolding in the new century that we inhabit. Moreover, that movement also created some antidotes to today’s problems and some possibilities for looking in another direction.
to continue reading the chapter and for better formatting please see:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/precariousrhapsodyweb.pdf
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4. For updates on the seminar please check the following link
http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/