THE
PUBLIC
SCHOOL
TELIC ARTS EXCHANGE

please note. i offered to teach this class but only because i thought it would help get it scheduled faster. perhaps we can have different people run the sessions for each book? this way we could have at least one person well versed in each book and all it's reference material. does this sound like a good idea?

Hey all,
I'm happy to organize one of the sessions.
Jason

awesome. would it be ideal or awkward for you to do the session on Introduction to Civil War?

I'd be happy to do civil war or coming insurrection...
Jason

I could facilitate discussion for the Coming Insurrection. Any time after September 1st. I will also email Jason Smith, who I think is the translator. Are Clootz and Jason one and the same?

Best,
Zen

Yeah, clootz is Jason. I'll be there for as much of this as I can.

zen if you are interested the coming insurrection thats fine. unless someone else really wants to do it, i would like to focus on a thousand machines. any takers for the other books?

Solomon, I could teach The Screwball Asses or The Violence of Financial Capitalism... although i would also love to do A Thousand Machines. Put me up for something if it helps get the class up.. and let's schedule it!

-Liz

claudia (missfirn) asked to do a thousand machines. let me know which of those others you want to do and i will edit you into the note with the list. as soon as i hear back from zen we can get things scheduled.

this looks great. sign me up as a helper if you need help with any texts. i would love to spend some serious time with a thousand machines s. thanks for setting this up.

cara, if you want to you are welcome to facilitate one of the days. the available books are ‘the screwball asses’, ‘the violence of financial capitalism’, and ‘the agony of power’. its not a big deal either way, i'm going to try to cover any books for which i don't find another facilitator.

i'm willing to try and facilitate the violence of financial capitalism (or to try and find someone else, more able than me, to do it)

now we just have ‘the screwball asses’ and ‘agony of power’ left to decide upon facilitators. anyone is welcome to take these books, otherwise i will do both of them.

i need to start getting dates from people. the plan is to have sessions every two or three weeks. so far the dates are 9/18 and 10/2. sean you have the third session which should be mid october, jason you have the fourth session which should be the end of october or the beginning of november, and claudia your session should be mid to late november.

i could take a stab at ‘agony of power’.

-c

Hey, looks like we're on our way.

I wonder if I might be able to nail down the October 16 date? I ask only because this would be perfect timing for me, as I go to NYC to do something on Tiqqun on October 20.

If not, October 30 could work for me; Nov 13 won't, though, as I'll be out of town.

thanks,
Jason

jason, assuming sean is okay with it we can switch the schedule of both your sessions allowing you to take the october 16th date. i'll wait to schedule it till i hear from sean but i assume he will be fine with that.

Hey Solomon,
I was thinking I was doing one session, with Zen doing Coming Insurrection? I'm happy to do two if the dates work, but can you actually spell out here which texts are for which dates?

And maybe it's good to just set aside five Saturdays, spaced two weeks apart, and fill in the texts. Then, if those people who are presenting the texts find the dates unworkable, we can swap them around?

So, in other words:
9/18
10/2
10/16
10/30
11/13

Or maybe this has been figured out and I'm not looking in the right place.

thanks, J

that sounds like an easier way to setup the schedule. the dates will be exactly as jason suggested (9/18,10/2,10/16,10/30,11/13,11/27). 9/18 is taken with ‘the coming insurrection’ but all other dates are open. we do not have to do this in order of book release. will everyone who volunteered to facilitate get back to me with which dates they want.

10/30 would work best for me (agony of power)!

If we can nail down 10/16 for Tiqqun, great. J

jason no problem on that date.

caleb, ‘the agony of power’ isn't released until late october. are you sure you don't want a november date?

hi solomon,
11/13 would work for me for a thousand machines, I am not sure about the 27th, I might be out of town...
thanks,
claudia

Solomon, 11/27 is Thanksgiving weekend; could we move it one week earlier, to 11/20. I could do Screwball Asses then. -L

i'm worried about the timing with the release of ‘agony of power’. assuming it comes out early in october then everyones proposed dates are fine.

Let me ask Hedi at semiotexte when he expects to get physical copies. The official publication date might be later than the arrival of the books?
J

November is going to be really tough for me. I could do early December, like the week after Thanksgiving, if October won't work.

caleb. you can do the class whenever, assuming the book is available. i'm waiting for a response from mitpress about special orders so i should find out about this soon.

Hey all,

Looking forward to facilitating the Coming Insurrection on the 18th.

While we will cover the whole book, I thought that just to prepare us a little, I would say that I would especially like to focus on pages 95-end of the Semiotext(e) version.

I think that looking at their ideas about Communes, friendship and how some of their more practical claims for action might play out in the US would be interesting.

In particular, I thought we might try to understand better how a group passes over into a Commune, how friendship can be wrested from both structured organizations and how "normal" friendship can turn more radical, if they offer insights into how to break the deadlock of isolation and individuality that prevents the formation of Communes.

That said, I am trying to open conversation here so we can get more ideas about what interests us, and in what way people want to approach the book...

Hey all,

Looking forward to facilitating the Coming Insurrection on the 18th.

While we will cover the whole book, I thought that just to prepare us a little, I would say that I would especially like to focus on pages 95-end of the Semiotext(e) version.

I think that looking at their ideas about Communes, friendship and how some of their more practical claims for action might play out in the US would be interesting.

In particular, I thought we might try to understand better how a group passes over into a Commune, how friendship can be wrested from both structured organizations and how "normal" friendship can turn more radical, if they offer insights into how to break the deadlock of isolation and individuality that prevents the formation of Communes.

That said, I am trying to open conversation here so we can get more ideas about what interests us, and in what way people want to approach the book...

Also, two quick links:

The first to what I think is a very thoughtful critique of the book's shortcomings:
http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/11743

The second, is a link to the class held at the Public School previously, on the Coming Insurrection. It lays out some of the discussion that happened there and key points they hit: http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1366

nice links zen. it might be a good idea to copy the specters class and setup a note for each book so that we can produce organized sets of data about each.

hey everyone. the editors of semiotext(e), chris kraus and hedi el khoti, are giving a lecture at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts next weds, september 15th, from 12-2pm. It's in the middle of the day because the lecture series is given as a class for the MFA program. It is most certainly free and open to the public, however this may be quite a popular lecture and there will be seats reserved for students, so plan accordingly if you're interested.

http://roski.usc.edu/calendar/event/879045/mfa-lecture-series-chris-krau...

this is a reminder that the first session will be next saturday the 18th. we will be discussing the coming insurrection. we will be using the semiotexte translation. the copy on aaaaarg, is an older translation. it will be okay if you cant buy the new one, but you will have some trouble citing passages.

The version of the text on the aaaarg site is actually the semiotexte version, just reformatted to printed and made into a booklet. The problem is, it seems, that the pagination is different.
--JS

Just a reminder that The Coming Insurrection class will be taking place tomorrow at noon. Hope to see you all there!

Best,
Zen

hey there, somehow I couldn't find a schedule for the coming week(s) regarding the books. so next week, will it be civil war or agony? or are we going to screwball?
thanks,
claudia

hi claudia,

sorry about the confusion. i posted the facilitator/book schedule as a note attached to this class. notes are found in a link at the top of the page. regardless, here is the schedule:

the coming insurrection - zen dochterman 9/18
the screwball asses - liz glynn 11/20
the violence of financial capitalism - sean dockray 10/2
introduction to civil war - jason smith 10/16
a thousand machines - claudia (missfirn) 11/13
the agony of power - Caleb Waldorf 10/30 (or to be decided)

this is a reminder that the third session of the reading is coming up. we will be meeting at noon this saturday and will discuss ‘introduction to civil war’ with jason smith.

Hi --

I want to note that I have asked Olive M. to co-organize that session.

See you Saturday.

--Jason S.

thanks to everyone who attended yesterday. the next session of the reading group on ‘the agony of power’ is postponed. the date for it is to be decided. all other classes will occur as noted in the schedule with ‘the screwball asses’ on 11/20 as the next class. sorry for the inconvenience.

regarding the discussion of judaism which came up at the end of our discussion: i was looking at gershom scholem's ‘major trends in jewish mysticism’ and the first passage i saw when i opened the book was "the spread of lurianic kabbalism with its doctrine of tikkun, of the restitution of cosmic harmony through the earthly medium of a mystically elevated judaism, this doctrine could not but lead to an explosive manifestation of all those forces to which it owed its rise and its success."

hi, this is a notice that the class on the agony of power has been rescheduled to december 11th at noon. Also, the next class scheduled is a 1000 machines on 11/13 with claudia (fissfirn) facilitating.

looking forward to tomorrow's session!

here's a link to the journal that Gerald Raunig publishes online - one issue called "machines and subjectification." it contains essays by him that he later reworked a bit and put in the book but also this interesting essay by Maurizio Lazzerato written as epilogue for the German edition.

http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lazzarato/en

this is a reminder that this saturday (11/20) liz glynn will be facilitating the session on ‘the screwball asses.’ we will be meeting at noon.

everyone who participated in this reading group: thank you.

unfortunately the final book ‘the agony of power’ is not yet available and so we will be canceling the last session. it may be included in a future semiotext(e) reading group.

if anyone's interest was sparked by this reading group, i would like to encourage you to create a course proposal around that spark.