[Minorcompositions] New books & events: Squatting in Europe, The Undercommons

[Minor Compositions]

Greetings,

Here's information about some new books and events:

1. New books: Squatting in Europe; The Undercommons
2. Event: The Shape of the Contemporary Workplace  -- May 27@ 2pm
3. Upcoming tabling: London Radical Bookfair & Balkans Anarchist Bookfair

*1. New books:*

*Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles*
Edited by the Squatting Europe Kollective
http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=504

Squatting in Europe aims to move beyond the conventional understandings 
of squatting, investigating its history in Europe over the past four 
decades. Historical comparisons and analysis blend together in these 
inquiries into squatting in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, 
Germany and England. In it members of SqEK (Squatting Europe Kollective) 
explore the diverse, radical, and often controversial nature of 
squatting as a form of militant research and self-managed knowledge 
production.

Essays by Miguel Martínez, Gianni Piazza, Hans Pruijt, Pierpaolo Mudu, 
Claudio Cattaneo, Andre Holm, Armin Kuhn, Linus Owens, Florence 
Bouillon, Thomas Aguilera, and ETC Dee.

"Amidst the proliferation of post-political banter, it is refreshing to 
see the time-tested politics of pre-figurative direct action being 
taking so seriously.  This is a must-read for anybody who wants to 
better understand how the politics of squatting offer a set of 
transformative strategies for a creating a more egalitarian world.  
Furthermore, this collection illustrates how such transformative 
politics so often start in the world's cities through deliberate 
organizing and thoughtful reflection by committed groups of activists, 
scholars and everyday citizens." -- Nik Heynen, University of Georgia

--

*The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study*
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=516

In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the 
theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, 
inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and 
aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself 
confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation 
of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of 
pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the 
undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: 
study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path 
of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume 
unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social 
life that are launched every day and every night amid the general 
antagonism of the undercommons.

"This is a powerful book, made of words and sounds, crisscrossed by 
subversion and love, written and studied 'with and for,' as Stefano 
Harney and Fred Moten put it. The roar of the battle is never distant 
while reading The Undercommons. The London riots and occupy, practices 
of refusal, marronage and flight, slave revolts and anti-colonial 
uprisings frame a challenging rethinking of concepts such as policy and 
planning, debt and credit, governance and logistics. The Undercommons is 
a homage to the black radical tradition, to its generative and 
constituent power before the task of imagining 'dispossessed feelings in 
common' as the basis of a renewed communism." -- Sandro Mezzadra

*2. The Shape of the Contemporary Workplace  -- May 27@ 2pm*
Auto Italia South East
Unit 2, 3 York Way, King's Cross, N1C 4AE
http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/projects/immaterial-labour-isnt-working/

How is a contemporary workplace organised? In Fordist workplaces, time 
and motion studies monitored workers' activity in order to make the 
industrial process more efficient and productive. In response, workers 
and intellectuals in post-war Italy began mapping their own workplaces 
in order to better plot resistance and sabotage. How can we, as workers 
within the 'new economy' begin to understand our own working conditions? 
Joanna Figiel and Stevphen Shukaitis (Metropolitan Factory: 
http://metropolitanfactory.wordpress.com/) will look at contemporary 
working conditions for precarious workers within the arts, culture and 
education and how we understand our own working lives.

Joanna Figiel is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Culture Policy 
Management, City University London. Her research focuses on labour 
issues, precarity and policy within the creative and cultural sectors. 
She completed her MA at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths. She 
is a member of the editorial collective of ephemera.

Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the 
University of Essex. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & 
Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009, Autonomedia) 
and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent 
Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK 
Press, 2007). Previously he has worked for as producer for Ever Reviled 
Records and WBAI (both in the New York City metropolitan region), and is 
all too familiar with the contradictions of trying to survive as a 
creative worker today.

*3. Upcoming tabling:*
London Radical Bookfair May 11: http://londonradicalbookfair.wordpress.com/
Balkan Anarchist Bookfair May 24-26th, Ljubljana: 
http://www.a-federacija.org/2013/01/26/balkan-anarchist-bookfair-2013/

--

Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing 
from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of 
everyday life.

http://www.minorcompositions.info
http://www.facebook.com/groups/255105881183214/

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