The legendary Dutch anarchist movement Provo staged political and
cultural interventions into the symbolic and everyday spaces of Holland
from 1965 – 1967. The rise and fall of Provo stretches from early
Dutch “happenings” staged in 1962 to the “Death of
Provo” in 1967. Although a small group they cast a
disproportionately large shadow on the events of the time due to their
skillful analysis of social unrest among Dutch youth. By tying
their political program to the rich magical heritage of
Amsterdam’s bohemian subculture they created political street
theater that captured the pulse of Amsterdam’s population.
Come join us to celebrate the release of Provo: Amsterdm’s
Anarchist Revolt by Richard Kempton, the first book length English
history and analysis of Provo. We will be joined by several of the
members of Provo including Nico van Apeldoorn, Eljakim Borkent, Eric
Duivenvoorden, Hans Plomp, and Arie Taal. The evening will include
appearances by members of
Radio Joy as well as
recently recovered and translated video footage from the period. We
will explore the history and activities of Provo, tracing out their
legacies and continuing influence in the realm of autonomist politics
and ludic interventions in public space.
As a novelist and fiction SF writer, JG Ballard developed one of the
most dynamic (and disturbing) exploration of collective
psychopathology, excesses in organizational life, and the collapsing of
the Western imaginary. From the fetish of the car crash to obscene
hidden violence of the business park, internment camps to masochist
fantasies directed through the mediated form of Ronald Reagan’s
body, Ballard’s work ventures into territories that are
disconcerting to explore, but from which one can learn a great deal.
Rather than assuming that disorder and excess is a condition that
management and organization must respond to, this event will explore
the proposition that what might really be psychopathological is the
desire to impose order upon an inherently ungovernable and excessive
condition.
By Stevphen Shukaitis
October 29th, 2009
All power to the imagination? Over the past forty years to invoke the
imagination as a basis for radical politics has become a cliché:
a rhetorical utilization of ideas already in circulation, invoking the
mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process. But what
exactly is radical imagination? Drawing from autonomist politics, class
composition analysis, and avant-garde arts, Imaginal Machines explores
the emergence, functioning, and constant breakdown of the embodied
forms of radical imagination.
Several
release events are planned
to occur in the near future in
London, Edinburgh, and Vienna.
October 23, 2009 - London
The aim of this encounter is to explore the connections between
anarchism, autonomism, and the revolutions of everyday life, drawing
out conceptual tools useful to developing and deepening the politics of
these infrapolitical spaces and organization. How can we strategize and
build from the connections and movements of the undercommons, working
from everyday encounters to compose new forms of social movement? How
can we connect and work between spontaneous forms of resistance without
forcing them into some larger form that ossifies them?
By Franco 'Bifo' Berardi
Edited by Erik Empson & Stevphen Shukaitis
Translated by Arianna Bove, Michael Goddard, Giuseppina Mecchia,
Antonella Schintu, and Steve Wright
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.
