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TELIC ARTS EXCHANGE

Hello, Clootz. Could you possibly scan ch3 and post it on AAARG? I am technically inept and don't have a scanner. thank you. mario

Hi,
I'm pretty new to this online class thing. Is there a date set for ch3?

not yet . . . i think the class has to get enough votes and then be approved by the board . . . let's keep our fingers crossed

Hi,
I've sent Mario chapter three of Commonwealth. We might start honing on other relevant texts and try to come up with a sequence of possible readings?
--Clootz

Bellow is a link to an excellent article by Maurizio Lazzarato titled 'Biopolitics/Bioeconomics: a politics of multiplicity'

Also, how about possibly reading chapter 1 of Marx's, 'Capital'? It is here that Marx proclaims that the ultimate objective of capital is not commodities, but social relations or forms of life.

www.generation-online.org/p/fplazzarato2.htm

Clootz, I received the pdf, but don't know how to upload on to AAARG . . . aaargh!

The following may serve as a great encapsulation for thinking about 'immaterial labor and biopolitics': "By reversing the Marxian definition we could say that capitalism is not a mode of production, but a production of modes." — Lazzarato

Clootz sent this via email so it didn't get posted here, so I'm quoting:

"I'll see if I can figure out how to upload the file.
As for Marx, given the nature of this chapter in Commonwealth, I would suggest focusing on the distinction between rent and profit and/or the chapter on primitive accumulation in the first volume. That said, maybe we can hash these things out when and if the class gets authorized?"

A couple things... first, Commonwealth is on AAAARG already, in its entirety:
http://a.aaaarg.org/text/6594/commonwealth
If you want to share anything there, then you have to be logged in... when you are, there is a little link that says "add text" at the top of the library page.

Second, there are obvious cross-overs with the recent IDC conference on the Internet as Playground or as Factory; and Ken who went there has just proposed another class called Neoliberalism and Human Capital (http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1897). What does everyone think about putting these classes into conversation (combining, running in parallel, in sequence, etc.)?

And as a spinoff from that point, perhaps you've seen the newish Armin Medosch and Brian Holmes project (http://www.thenextlayer.org/) which I think deals with many of the same things and perhaps we could open up a conversation?

yes, the distinction between rent and profit and how it corresponds with the shift from immobile to mobile capital . . . great idea !

Hardt and Negri posit that the critiques of 'neoliberalism' are not sufficient. Hardt and Negri write:

". . . political economists should not be satisfied with accounts of neoliberalism that pose capitalist accumulation as merely or primarily the expropriation of existing wealth. Capital is and has to be in its essence a productive system that generates wealth through the labor-power it employs and exploits."

ATTN! TOMORROW'S CLASS HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FEBRUARY 6TH!
We're sorry for the last minute change, but it is necessary due to a couple unforeseen circumstances.

But I'll also break some other news to you, which is that we'll be screening "Facs of Life" (http://facsoflife.wordpress.com/) on Sunday, February 21 and have Silvia and Graeme to lead a discussion afterwards

Hi, this is a friendly reminder that this class meets tomorrow at 1pm at 951 Chung King Road. If you're looking for the reading to be discussed, it is here:
http://a.aaaarg.org/text/6594/commonwealth

Hi,

Looking forward to tomorrow.

It strikes me that the wiki page on "externality" is quite handy. It seems to me that the discussion of "Externalities" on p. 141 of Commonwealth is an important transition of the central thesis of the chapter, as far as I read it, namely the necessity to understand the nature of biopolitical exploitation no longer in terms of profit, but of "capitalist rent."

If you really want to nerd out on this, you can find the source of Hardt and Negri's argument in a long, difficult text by Carlo Vercellone. Here:

http://www.generation-online.org/c/fc_rent2.htm

Also, related but not as closely, a good text by Tirizia Terranova on the role of "free labor" in biocapitalism:

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary

-Clootz

Thanks for the good class today. To bad I had to leave early, but hope to see some of you at theory/practice next saturday.

Hi--

Enjoyed yesterday, hope we can follow up in some way.

I wanted to send a link to the book I mentioned, Steve Wright's Storming Heaven. This is by far the best historical account of Italian operaismo and post-operaismo:

http://www.amazon.com/Storming-Heaven-Composition-Struggle-Autonomi/dp/0...

You can find a few articles here:

http://libcom.org/tags/steve-wright

Take care,
Clootz

Next Sunday will be the first session of "Neoliberalism and Human Capital" http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1897 and it may be of interest for you all.

Here is a note from Ken about the class:

Dear All:

Really looking forward to getting started on this material. Feels like the timing for this class is just right.  After the Continental Drift last weekend, which contained a number of related conversations on precarity, finance capital, speculative economy, neoliberalism, and the excesses of privatization; February’s TPS seminar on Immaterial Labor, where Jason Smith led a very rigorous discussion about Autonomia, as well as outside events like Brian Holmes’ presentation on neoliberal subjectivity at UC, Riverside on March 3, there seems to be a number of ongoing threads that can be extended through this class to give it richness and complexity.

The idea for the class is this: the current financial crisis has broadened and intensified an analysis of neoliberal economics as it has been and continues to be critiqued from the left.  But these analyses are usually founded upon the refrain of positions taken up in secondary sources without any direct reference to the primary source material that helped establish and legitimize the economic logic itself.  Many of us on the left--I include myself here--are quick to engage in a critique of neoliberalism without a deeper understanding of what that word actually means in its own native sense. Thus “Neoliberalism” often vaguely stands for anything that generally seems bad about our contemporary political, economic, and cultural situation; this tends to dilute the force of the critiques behind it. With this in mind, one might say that the objective of this class is to know your enemy, to work through some of the key primary texts and discuss the generative historical context of the development of neoliberalism by carefully attending to the writings of the Chicago School, a group that was instrumental in shaping the implementation of the economic doctrine in global economic and social policy ca. 1980.

I still think we should continue to read some secondary sources to fill in the critical analysis side of things, and this brings me to the other piece of fortuitous timing of the class.  It so happens that the scheduling for this class falls on the exact same dates as Foucault’s weekly lectures on American neoliberlaism 31 years ago and which can now be read in English with the recent translation of The Birth of Biopolitics.  Whether written in the stars or simply a serendipitous accident, it seems a perfect time to revisit Foucault’s lectures over the next three weeks, getting his read on neoliberalism in its incipient form.

So the reading for this first class on March 14 will be the following:

Michel Foucalut, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 215-237. (March 14th lecture)
Gary Becker, Human Capital,  pp. 1-11.
Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, Part 1, pp. 3-14

Next week we will read more Foucault along Hayek, Friedman, and possibly some more Becker and/or Andre Gunder Frank and perhaps something about the fascinating cultural history of the Chicago School in Chile. But this is all up for discussion.

All readings are on aaaarg of course.

Best,

Ken