A Guattari & Bifo Reading Group

Facilitated by Alessandra Renzi & Christine Shaw

A Joint Initiative by Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry and the Hart House Art Committee Education Sub-Committee

Thursday 26 March, 6:00pm
Committees Room | Hart House 2nd Floor | 7 Hart House Circle | University of Toronto

The problem of art for [Félix] was completely located in the possibility of putting in motion assemblages of enunciation, housing, urbanism and technologies. (Bifo, 34)

In his extraordinary final statement “Remaking Social Practices,” Guattari suggests how marginal groups acting on their subjective territories can put together experimental formations at the cutting edges of art, science, and technology. Bifo’s “Postmediatic Affect” looks specifically to Guattari’s support of the Radio Alice project that unfolded in Bologna during the Italian social upheavals of 1977. Bifo charts Guattari’s cartographic vision of the future, a future of “communication flows, of economic exploitation, of psychic suffering, and affective solicitation” that we are now living. These two chapters combined open onto a field of questions to be taken up during the reading group session: What are the affective, ecological and political consequences of what Guattari called the ‘post-mediatic era’? How might experiments in social creativity deterritorialize the dynamics of ‘new economy’ capitalism? What is the potential of ‘techno-nomadic thought’? Can the networked diffusion of communication become a privileged plane of social self-organization, rather than merely increase the output of commodified messages and information?

The reading group is a follow-up to Franco (Bifo) Berardi’s talk “The Visionary Cartography of Félix Guattari” on Wednesday 25 March at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, Rm 066.

The reading group is open to a maximum of 20 participants. Please RSVP to Maiko Tanaka at hh.educationcommittee@gmail.com or 416-978-8463 by Tuesday March 24, 5pm. Hart House is wheelchair accessible.

Readings

• Félix Guattari, “Remaking Social Practices,” in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Blackwell, 1996)
• Franco Berardi (Bifo), “Postmediatic Affect,” in Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (Palgrave, 2008)

Alessandra Renzi studied and worked with migrant communities in Berlin and is now completing her PhD on Telestreet at the University of Toronto. She has been involved in various Toronto-based media, immigrant and labour rights projects like CAMERA (The Committee on Alternative Media Experimentation, Research and Analysis) and Precarity Toronto. As a member of Telestreet’s TV channel InsuTv in Naples she is currently collaborating on a feature-length documentary project investigating Naples’ garbage crisis and its connections with organized crime and political corruption.

Christine Shaw holds a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University. Her dissertation Connect, Conjugate, Continue included a translocal curatorial project called Public Acts 1-29 that unfolded along the Trans-Canada Highway. Currently, she co-organizes events with Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry and is developing a series of curatorial projects on affective participation including The Work of Wind, Stubborn Matter and Emergency Rooms (with Steven Eastwood).

Collaborating with a network of activists, artists, and theorists, Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (TSCI) initiates events that inquire into the new enclosures and creative pathways beyond them.

With the Reading Group Series, the student-run Hart House Art Committee’s Education Sub-Committee aims to facilitate self-reflexive critical dialogue focusing on the potential of radicalized learning in galleries, museums, and art institutions. The series takes the form of a casual Reading Group inviting guest readers to recommend texts and facilitate structures for discussion. The group is open to and encourages experimentation with discursive forms of learning. The Reading Group Series is a supplement to the Education Sub-Committee’s regular programming of art workshops and seminars targeted at the student body of the University of Toronto.

Mondays, 7:30-9:30pm
22 January – 26 March 2007

What forces brought an alleged ‘post-Fordist’ regime into being? What is its composition? What are the possibilities and limits of this concept? How is it manifesting in labour, the city, cultural production…? How, and with what effects, are flexibilization and decentralization operating as new forms of control? How do these forms of control coexist with centralized command? How does it relate to neoliberalism? What radical proposals and potentialities are emerging under conditions of advanced post-Fordism?

Reading List

• Bob Jessop. “The Regulation Approach.”
• David Harvey. “Fordism” and “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation.”
• Michel Aglietta. “The Transformation of the Wage-Earners’ Conditions of Life.”
• Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. “The Formation of the Projective City” and “1968: Crisis and Revival of Capitalism.”
• John Holloway. “The Great Bear: Post-Fordism and Class Struggle.”
• Bob Jessop. “Post-Fordism and the State.”
• Antonio Negri. “Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker.”
• Thomas Atzert. “About Immaterial Labor and Biopower.”
• Gilles Deleuze. “Postscript on the Control Societies.”
• Brian Holmes. “The Flexible Personality.”
• J-K Gibson-Graham. “Post-Fordism as Politics.”
• Linda McDowell. “Father and Ford Revisited: Gender, Class, and Employment Change in the New Millennium.”
• Kathi Weeks. “The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective.”
• Andrea Fumagilli. “Ten Propositions on Basic Income: Basic Income in a Flexible Accumulation System.”
• David Harvey. “Neoliberalism and the Restoration of Class Power.”