OCCUPY, OVERFLOW AND COOPERATE A KNOWLEDGE-SHARING MEETING ON THE NEW GLOBAL WAVE
The term 'Open PEI' refers to the specific activities organised as part of the MACBA Independent Studies Programme that are open to the public.
These activities – which can include public debates, seminars, workshops, audiovisual screenings and lectures – share and bring to light the research lines developed in the PEI, which also engage with the MACBA's programme of exhibitions and activities.
This seminar revolves around the 'grammars' of the new global cycle of movements. It will outline some core themes in relation to the grammar of protest, expressive politics, critiques of representation, and organisational experimentation, based on a cluster of case studies that include Occupy, 15M and the student movements in Chile, Columbia, Mexico, Canada…
With the presence of Franco Berardi Bifo, Isabell Lorey, Gerald Raunig, Nicolás Sguiglia and Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH). The seminar also includes online conversations with spokespersons and participants, and screenings of related audiovisual material of #Occupy (United States), #15M (Spain) and the student movements in Chile, Colombia (MANE [Mesa Amplia Nacional Estudiantil]) and Mexico (#YoSoy132).
Coordinated by Marcelo Expósito with the collaboration of Paula Cobo Guevara.
The word 'crisis' has gained widespread popularity as a new semantic fetish. Our ability to grasp the situation in its present and historical complexity is obstructed by the short memories of the mass media serving private interests and of the political classes managing the so-called "austerity policies". These are simply the socialisation of the debt arising from the privatisation of profit. As the Italian-French political theorist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has written, the current system of exploitation is based on the production of the indebted subject – an attempt to dismantle the Welfare State or abandon it as a horizon for social well-being, replacing it with a new 'Debtfare State'.
With a different crisis situation in mind, Jean-Luc Godard pointed out that the problem with the impoverishment of the language of TV was not the loss of the artistic nature of the images but the associated loss of the tools that make it possible to think about reality from the complexity of the off-screen reality (which takes into account the overall context of situations, the space around the reality that has been cropped to fit the screen) and the counter-field (which consists of juxtaposing a virtual image and an actual image in order to allow a counter-point of view to emerge). If the methodologies of art criticism and production can still be of any use to us, it is because they can offer tools for producing the critical subjectivity of those who reveal the complexity of events by going against the reality cropped within the frame. And cultural institutions can still serve a purpose in the current profound crisis of the institutions we have inherited from modernity (museum, university, parliament…) only if they have the capacity to be self-critical of their systemic functionality, and then open up to social processes that strive to create a new field of the possible.
This seminar will revolve around what could be considered a new global movement 'wave'. Since the beginning of the current historical cycle of conflict (which we can date at approximately the late 1980s to mid 1990s), a series of 'waves' of social or protest struggles have radiated out from several epicentres all over the planet. The multiple crisis we are now facing as a result of the intensification of neoliberal policies is prompting social movements in many parts of the world to start talking revolutionarily in the simplest terms: democracy, transparency, justice. Free basic conditions and services. Universality of rights. People before money, and before financial gain. These are not just protest movements. Rather, both in their modes of articulation and their proposals, they are an updated embodiment of an after-neoliberalism and after-the-crisis.
This seminar highlights a cluster of case studies that will allow us to map a series of core themes: grammars of protest, expressive politics, critiques of representation, organisational experimentation, prefiguration of new possible futures.
The approaches present at this seminar will be far from homogenous. On the contrary, it will set up discussions that aim to show the new wave of movements as an agonistic space of complex dynamics: de-constituting impulses / constituent processes, the construction of a non-State Commons / the demand for a State-owned public sector, the creation of an inclusive consensual democratic space / decision-making in the midst of differences that cannot be reconciled, 'monstrous' organisation and institutional experimentation / organisations derived from the traditions of the left, expressive politics / politics of representation, macropolitical impact / micropolitical intensities, subjective mutations / large-scale institutional transformations, etc.
The complexity that we hope will emerge as the presentations and discussions unfold will not be at the expense of the strictly informative, communicational purpose that is also one of the aims of the seminar. For this reason, the programme is organised into three types of formats: verbal presentations (lectures or talks), conversations (public discussion), and documentation (video screenings).
Programme
Monday 28 and Thursday 29 January, 5 to 10 pm
Monday 28
GRAMMARS OF THE NEW GLOBAL WAVE
5 pm Introduction by Marcelo Expósito
5.30 pm Gerald Raunig. The Molecular Strike
On the role of knowledge production in the current cycle of protest movements.
6.30 pm Franco Berardi, Bifo. Poetry and Finance
PEI faculty member Bifo will develop his hypothesis on the need for a new political 'poetics' embodied in bodies in order to confront the cycle of systemic crisis.
7.15 pm Break
7.30 pm Screening: Oackland General Strike Footage (Crimethinc/Anonymous, USA, 2011, 5 min.)
Joan Donovan. Online talk on '#Occupy in the United States
8 pm Nicolás Sguiglia. How do we Imagine Winning?
A short genealogy of the experimentation of the movement that catalysed as 15M. Looking ahead: 15M as a constituent movement, as a prefiguration of a plausible new democratic future.
9 pm Screening: Libre te quiero (Basilio Martín Patino, Spain, 2012, 60 min.)
Tuesday 29
THE PRODUCTION OF THE INDEBTED SUBJECT
5 pm Isabell Lorey (Berlin). Governing the Precarious
On the precariazation of life as a context for the emergence of new subjectivities in revolt (Background reading: Die Regierung der Prekären).
6 pm Screening of Por la educación (Kinorama, Colombia, 13 min., 2011)
Paola Galindo, Online talk about MANE (Mesa Amplia Nacional Estudiantil), a broad platform of the Columbian movement.
Camila Vallejo. Online talk on the Student Movement in Chile
7.30 pm Break
7.45 pm Screening:
Manifiesto #YoSoy132 (Mexico, 2012, 8 min.)
6 días para salvar México (Frente Autónomo Audiovisual, Mexico, 2012, 6 min.)
Cualquier sistema (Frente Autónomo Audiovisual, Mexico, 2012, 2 min.)
8 pm Screening of La Plataforma (Jon Herranz, Spain, 2012, 65 min).
Ada Colau and other members of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) will introduce the screening followed by a discussion with the audience.
DOCUMENTATION FOR THE SEMINAR
Amador Fernández Savater, Marta Malo de Molina Marisa Pérez Colina and Raúl Sánchez Cedillo: 'Ingredientes de una onda global'
Franco Berardi Bifo: 'Emancipation of the Sign. Poetry and Finance During the Twentieth Century'
Gerald Raunig: 'The Molecular Strike'
Joan Donovan: 'How Occupy Birthed a Rhizome'
Crimethinc. Ex-Workers' Collective (Estados Unidos)
n+1 magazine, Occupy! Monograph. Includes 'Strike Debt Manifesto'
Nicolás Sguiglia et al.: Social Centres: Monsters and political machines for a new generation of movement institutions.
La Casa Invisible: 'La potencia de la cooperación'
AA.VV.: 'Tecnopolítica, internet y r-evoluciones. Sobre la centralidad de redes digitales en el 15-M'
Isabell Lorey: 'Governmentality and Self-Precarization'
MANE (Mesa Amplia Nacional Estudiantil) (Colombia): 'Propuesta de exposición de motivos de una nueva Ley de Educación Superior para un país con soberanía, democracia y paz'
Producciones Kinorama (Colombia)
Student Movement (Chile) 2011-2012
Camila Vallejo: ¿Qué es lo que ya cambió en Chile?'
#YoSoy132
Frente Autónomo Audiovisual (Mexico)
PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca)
Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany: 'Vidas hipotecadas. De la burbuja inmobiliaria al derecho a la vivienda'
Marcelo Expósito: 'Diez tesis sobre el arte politizado en la nueva onda global de movimientos'
PARTICIPANTS
Bifo co-organised some of the most innovative experiences of the 'creative wing' of the 1977 movement in Italy, such as the magazine A/traverso and Radio Alice, and has continued to extend these initiatives by means of experimental prototypes and collective projects in the subsequent three decades (Rekombinant, Telestreets, European School of Social Imagination and many more). He has published numerous books, including The Factory of Unhappiness and The Uprising. On Poetry and Finance. But above all, he generously disseminates his writing through non-academic media in contributions to blogs and mailing lists, among others. He has been a relevant participant in dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel.
Gerald Raunig teaches at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) in Zurich and works at the european institute for progressive cultural policies (eipcp) in Vienna. From there, he has launched projects such as transform (on institutional critique), the online multilingual journal transversal and the lecture and publication series Inventionen. His book Art and Revolution is a counter-history of twentieth century art from the point of view of its activist overflows, while A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement and his more recent Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity are critical philosophy handbooks written in the heat of the new movements.
Joan Donovan participated in #Occupy in California and facilitates interoccupy.net. She is the author of the essay How Occupy Birthed a Rhizome.
Nicolás Sguiglia is a sociologist and member of the Centro Social La Casa Invisible (Málaga), Universidad Nómada and Fundación de los Comunes. He has participated in many important projects over the last two decades of the current cycle of struggles, including the network No One is Illegal, the global movement of movements and the EuroMayDay network. He was one of the spokespersons for #OcupaelCongreso, an event that grew out of the mass protest action against the Congress of Deputies in Madrid (26 September 2012). He has written collaborative essays such as Cartography and War Machines. Challenges and Experiences around Militant Research in Southern Europe and Social Centres: Monsters and political machines for a new generation of movement institutions.
Isabell Lorey teaches at the University of Vienna and Humboldt University in Berlin. Her theoretical work interweaves feminist and queer theory, postcolonial studies, analysis of political immunisation (Figuren des Immunen) and a critique of the political economy of precarization. She has written a key essay on this last topic, Governmentality and Self-Precarization, which she has expanded in her latest book, Die Regierung der Prekären. She is a member of the collective kpD (kleines postfordistisches Drama), which investigates the precarization of cultural work. She has also written about the new protest movements in the collective book Occupy! Die aktuellen Kämpfe um die Besetzung des Politischen.
Paola Galindo is one of the elected spokespersons of MANE (Mesa Amplia Nacional Estudiantil), the platform of organisations that has coordinated the Colombian student movement since it began.
Camilla Vallejo is a militant in the Communist Youth of Chile and was President of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile (FECh). One of the most prominent voices in the Chilean student movement, her articles and speeches have been collected in the book Podemos cambiar el mundo (We can Change the World).
The Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) is a self-organised, assembly-based movement of people affected by the mortgage crisis that operates all over Spain. For several years, it has been coordinating the struggles against evictions – one of the clearest consequences of the neoliberal management of the crisis. Boosted by the emergence of #15M, which it predates, the PAH is currently one of the most visible and widely recognised social movements in Spain. Its spokesperson Ada Colau has co-written the book Vidas hipotecadas. De la burbuja inmobiliaria al derecho a la vivienda along with Adrià Alemany, also a PAH spokesperson. The background of the PAH, its actions, analysis and proposals are described in the documentary La Plataforma, directed by Jon Herranz and produced by SICOM and Namuss Films.
Crimethinc, Kinorama and Frente Autónomo Audiovisual are collectives and/or audiovisual production and distribution platforms linked to #Occupy (USA), the Colombian student movement and #YoSoy312 (Mexico), respectively.
Basilio Martín Patino is one of the most prominent filmmakers in the history of Spanish cinema. In May 2011 he filmed #acampadasol at Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the occupation by protesters that began after the mass demonstration that sparked off the #15M movement. This audiovisual footage was used to produce his documentary Libre te quiero.
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