sábado, 30 de março de 2013

Felix Guattari: Nós chamamos de comunismo



“O comunismo é criação e reconhecimento de novos modos de vida comunitários e libertação da singularidade. Comunidade e singularidade não se opõem. A edificação do mundo novo não opõe os processos de singularização ao enriquecimento das potencialidades coletivas. (...)”
“O comunismo não é coletivismo cego, redutor, repressivo. É a expressão singular do devir produtivo de coletividades que não são redutíveis, ‘relacionáveis’ umas com as outras. E este devir implica ele próprio um questionamento contínuo, uma defesa, um reforço, uma amplificação, uma reafirmação permanente desse caráter de singularização. O comunismo, de qualquer modo, não saberia ser reduzido a uma adesão ideológica, a um simples contrato jurídico, a um igualitarismo abstrato (...)”. Felix Guattari. Nós chamamos de comunismo In. Novos espaços da liberdade. (...).

segunda-feira, 25 de março de 2013

Crowd-Funding Meets Peer-To-Peer At Hamburg’s Neighborhood’s University


Crowd-Funding Meets Peer-To-Peer At Hamburg’s Neighborhood’s University
“A DIY low-budget high-quality community-run luxury-hotel and ‘university as a marketplace’ in the neighborhood”? Many trending keywords in a raw, one great crowd-funded peer-to-peer project!
Four years ago the Urban Design department of the HCU-Hamburg took the initiative to turn an old, abandoned building in Hamburg’s Wilhelmsburg district into a Neighbourhood’s University. By using the department’s expertise and knowledge in the fields of education, low-budget architecture, locally embedded economy, re- and up-cycling of materials and social engagement in the neighbourhood as well as volunteer spirit and passion, the team managed to create a space that can host workshops, seminars, research activities and housing.

The vision of the building’s re-use and regeneration doesn’t end here. The initiators decided to merge the already existing academic perspective and use of the building with that of a hotel, and create the Neighborhood’s University ‘Hotel Wilhelmsburg’. The new function will serve as a “spatial and functional extension of the UdN”. Thus, it would be possible to advance this working space into a co-creating one. What is more, by adding a local entrepreneurial initiative within a volunteer academic concept it would be possible to create a connecting link between the local community and the developing hub.
 
The dual development and use of the space derived from the challenges and research questions that the academic team has stated in the beginning of their project: “(W)hat does “Quality” mean under the aspect of low-budget conditions?” and “(H)ow can “dwelling as a practice” be understood regarding changing conditions of demography, economy, migration and environment?”. By adopting an embedded research design and thus managing to deal on a face-to-face level with the local issues, the initiators came up with the realization of this bottom-up and somehow DIY development project. It should be mentioned that the final design for the accommodation addition to the building has derived from a series of workshops and co-design sessions.
Another very interesting aspect of the project, except for its architectural concept and realization, is that the initiators of the Neighborhood’s University established a crowd-funding and peer-to-peer campaign. It could be argued that their campaign is mainly aiming on the latter one, as it invites people of any field, who are willing to offer their skills, to participate in the co-design and building processes. Following two major urbanism trends (check here and here), the research group is about to prove that low budget conditions can lead to high quality development results with an important outcome for the local community as well. Their goal is to prompt local actors to participate not only in the realization process, but also in the future daily operation of the hotel.
The initiative’s goal to put radical pragmatism into test is a really intriguing one. The building and organizational processes of the accommodation facility as well as its further development to a multifunctional space make this project a keep-an-eye-on urbanism project.

Read more: http://popupcity.net/2013/03/crowd-funding-meets-peer-to-peer-at-hamburgs-neighborhoods-university/#ixzz2OZysEGSX
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial


Read more: http://popupcity.net/2013/03/crowd-funding-meets-peer-to-peer-at-hamburgs-neighborhoods-university/#ixzz2OZyln6KR
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial

Read more: http://popupcity.net/2013/03/crowd-funding-meets-peer-to-peer-at-hamburgs-neighborhoods-university/#ixzz2OZycdDet
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial

Read more: http://popupcity.net/2013/03/crowd-funding-meets-peer-to-peer-at-hamburgs-neighborhoods-university/#ixzz2OZyXgwOW
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial


Read more: http://popupcity.net/2013/03/crowd-funding-meets-peer-to-peer-at-hamburgs-neighborhoods-university/#ixzz2OZySsdp4
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial

ver link _

domingo, 3 de março de 2013

Dois livros, muitos Negris

Dois livros, muitos Negris

Resenha dupla de SERSANTE, Mimmo. Il ritmo delle lotte. La pratica teorica di Antonio Negri. (ombre corte, 2012) e MURPHY, Timothy S. Antonio Negri. Modernity and the Multitude. (polity, 2012). texto completo no link que leva ao quadrado dos loucos...

sexta-feira, 1 de março de 2013

molecular becoming - christoph brunner - Part 2

molecular becoming - christoph brunner - Part 2

While reading in parallel two fairly important texts for my work: Deleuze’s talk “What is the Creative Act?” and Toni Negri’s collection of letters published in English as Art & Multitude I feel compelled to juxtapose them with the aim to work out resonances and productive dissonances. A general statement of Negri provides the fundament:
“Art, as we have said, is labour, living labour, and therefore invention of singularity, of singular figures and objects, linguistic expression, invention of sings. There, in this first movement are lodged potenza of the subject in action, the subject’s capacity to deepen knowledge to the point of reinventing the world. But this expressive act only achieves beauty and the absolute when the signs and the language through which it expresses itself transform themselves into community, when they are embraced and contained within a common project. The beautiful in an invention of singularity which circulates and reveals itself as common in a multiplicity of subjects who participate in the construction of the world. The beautiful is not the act of imagining, but an imagination that has become action. Art, in this sense, is multitude” (xii)
In this paragraph Negri condenses the founding principles to establish art as a creative and political act of a multitude. Three important blocks occur at this intersection: 1) The function of living labour as production,2) the potenza lodged in the expressive act of a subject in action, and 3) Beauty as expressive act through a community, i.e. art as expressive act of the multitude. The repeated critique on the concept of multitude is going to be sidelined in what follows, since the concept of the collective takes a more prominent role in my work on Simondon. Another difficult part that I am dealing with in another place is the role of the subject in relation to action or the expressive act. Even though it might seem like Negri and Deleuze conceive of a subject as the locus of creation in both texts that are discussed here, I deem their concept of the subject closer to Guattari’s notion of the production of subjectivity. Hence, subjectivity is a process of creation where acts become expressive but alsways already as a collective that assembles the subjective form of an event. Such a notion of the subjective form refers to Alfred North Whitehead for whom the subjective form is the expressive moment of an event before it perishes, it is concrescence.
For Negri it is crucial to abandon a notion of the natural as separate from the human. What he calls abstraction defines the state of encounter with “nature” as always already artificially shaped by human presence. This general state is lodged in the overall transformation of labour from abstract to immaterial labour as bottom-line of his work with Michael Hardt. For Negri “living labour is nothing but immaterial production, whether it is intellectual or affective” (xiii). Enmeshed in workings of abstraction the subject and in particular the human subject cannot be accounted for as natural.
Both, Deleuze and Negri point out the importance of a necessity or the work/labour that emerges out of a struggle. For Deleuze in relation to philosophy this means not to engage with thinking in general but to invent and create concepts. In a similar way, Negri points out that the work of constitution has to engage with what he considers as the “truth of the factitious” (3). This truth is not a hermeneutic truth but a truth that is constituted by and through the real. The real is not an empirical matter of fact but rather to speak with Deleuze and Latour a transcendental-empirical matter of concern. Negri considers ontological experience “as a truth of abstraction, and the recognition of this as a condition of experience” (5). In other words, for Negri the constitution of truth as factitious means that truth will be always constituted by means of abstraction. Abstraction defines not a pure transcendentality but manifests abstraction as a mode of existence (I will at greater length deal with the notion of “modes of existence” through the work of Gilbert Simondon an Étienne Souriau in a later post and in my PhD-Thesis).
The potential of an anthropomorphizing notion of the subject shifts once we address the process of constitution as partaking in seeking the real. The real is always synthetic as Isabelle Stengers would probably say. As such the seeking of the real is not a desire for final truth. As Negri says: “There are no longer natural determinisms or historical vestiges, nor finality of fulfillments which hold: the space has become entirely a-teleological” (11). To seek the real means to seek it “until it falls into our hands: an encounter, an event” (10). Hence, it is not a final real but a singularity as part of a wider collective that is defined as the quality of art as living labour for Negri: “The abstract is the sole community in which we exist” (11). Such an abstract defines part of Negri’s use of the concept of multitude. Labour, so my own interpretation, is not necessarily only a human concept. How could it be solely human if the human itself does not hold sway as a natural entity? If the human defines an individual or an individual of labour it would lose its factitious mode of existence. From this perspective, labour is not human as such but a collective abstract process with tendencies towards autonomous production. This mode of production defines what Negri calls the beautiful as collective act, an imagination that has become action. Imagination, again, has to be regarded as synthetic and factitious. It is not human but abstract and therefore collective.
For Negri a truth that will be constituted moves trough processes of empirical traces. He proposes: “So let us begin by putting together the most simple things. Both the space of our habitat and the time of our conscience require objects in relation to which we can re-take the measure of our life” (10/11, my emphasis). The objects might be the creation of works of art. Art does not have to be a physical object but marks a mode of existence. Its presence has an incurrence into the ontological experience of the event. Negri defines the abstract as collective. This mode of collectivity is a pre-individual and potential one. For what comes along as abstract might be also called the “autonomy of affect” (Massumi 2002)[1]. The autonomy of affect as the abstract collective relational bond for potentiality to surface in its actual effects requires another component as helpmate to its emergence: space-time. Talking about the differences between philosophy, art and science, Deleuze evokes their common limit as space-time: “All of these disciplines communicate at the level of something that never emerges for its own sake, but is engaged in every creative discipline: the formation of space-time” (Deleuze 2007, 320). Deleuze extends the linking collectivity of abstraction towards its potential holding together in space-time through different modes of expression (which is another notion for disciplines). The seeking as encounter or event is a shock in a double sense: A virtual shock as much as an actual shock neither of them coming in first but both vibrating across their continuum. A shock occurring in space-times delimiting and at the same time populating the limits with potentials. Such is the creative practice that does not allow to speak of creation as such but only to “speak in the name of … creation” (320). To speak in the name of creation accounts for the act of creation as autonomous, as part of an abstraction of living labour. In that sense, as Deleuze alludes to Malreaux “art is the only thing that resists death” (328). To resists death means to engage in the process of constitution of a truth as a collective matter of concern. Negri’s conception of the multitude aims at dealing with the singularity of each mode of existence and their potential for a transindividual force of expression. Only through that abstract collectivity a work of art might achieve beauty, not as the beautiful opposed to the ugly but as a felt increase of potential for a different future to come. Such a collectivity requires always a struggle and a crisis, the continuous movement of thought, a pragmatics of of discomfort, a discomfort that does not stop to ask questions, similar to the idiot invoked by Deleuze and one of Stenger’s main protagonists. Such a struggle defines the relation between the human and the work of art expressed through Deleuze referring to Paul Klee as the people that are missing: “The people are missing means that the fundamental affinity between a work of art and a people that does not yet exist, will never be clear. There is no work of art that does not call on a people who does not yet exist” (329).
[1] Brian Massumi  grants affect an autonomous state to avoid any one-to-one mapping of affect and effect or affect and emotion. Affect exists but autonomously incurs into actual occasions (events) without pre-defining its actual effects. Without affect’s autonomous state, there would be no elbow-room for novelty (Massumi 2002, 23-45).
Deleuze, Gilles, “What is the Creative Act?,” in Two Regimes of Madness, Cambridge Mass.: Semiotext(e), 317-329.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2002, 23-45.
Negri, Toni. Art & Multitude. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.

Rules for Radicals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rules for Radicals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
  • RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
  • RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
  • RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
  • RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
  • RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
  • RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
  • RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
  • RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
  • RULE 10: "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." It is the unceasing pressure that will result in the reaction of the opposition that is essential for the success of the campaign.
  • RULE 11: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
  • RULE 12: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
  • RULE 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Paisaje Transversal: Crónica del recorrido Espacios de Batalla

Paisaje Transversal: Crónica del recorrido Espacios de Batalla

15M «Excelente. Revulsivo. Importante» v.1.6

Paisaje Transversal: Movilización de edificios públicos vacíos: servici...

Paisaje Transversal: Movilización de edificios públicos vacíos: servici...: Por Javier Burón Cuadrado No descubro nada si digo que en España hay cientos de edificios públicos singulares sin uso alguno . Muchos d...

Naquerant Espais, proceso para la dinamización del Centro Multiusos vacío de Náquera (fuente: Paisaje Transversal)

""Pues bien, hay gente que está (estamos) en el empeño de vertebrar proyectos públicos de movilización de estos edificios singulares ociosos. Supongo que varias son las opciones, pero nosotros estamos pensando en lo siguiente:

  1. La creación de una sociedad pública tenedora del edificio ocioso.
  2. La puesta en marcha de un proceso de participación ciudadana y dinamización comunitaria para darle visibilidad social al edificio y, con ello, tratar de volver a prestigiarlo y devolverlo simbólicamente a la ciudadanía que lo pago y no lo usa.
  3. Licitar la gestión de la sociedad pública, con un modelo como el que ya describí en los artículos La empresas pública totalEl gestor integral de proyectos públicos.
  4. Utilizar el edificio con el triple propósito ya comentado: prestar servicios públicos, ser lugar de encuentro comunitario y generar ingresos adicionales para el ayuntamiento, a través de actividades económicas públicas locales (prestación de servicios deportivos, culturales, educativos, comerciales, etc.).
  5. En los casos en sea posible impulsar las actividades económicas mencionadas directamente por la sociedad pública, y con ello se viabilice económicamente el edificio, el proyecto estará ya en marcha y no necesita más elementos.
  6. Pero en muchos casos, con la mezcla de servicio público, encuentro comunitario y economía pública local no será suficiente. En estos casos, habrá que recurrir a inversores privados que pongan en marcha en estos edificios negocios susceptibles de encajar en estos edificios (aparcamiento, supermercados, hoteles, restaurantes, etc.). Pero, en nuestra filosofía de proyecto, estos negocios son concesiones de una sociedad pública que sigue siendo titular del suelo y el edificio y que llega a un acuerdo de cesión de parte de los mismos a cambio de una contraprestación económica que ayude a viabilizar el edificio. No se trata de vender, sino de ceder temporalmente para la explotación. No se trata de permitir un negocio y después no saber nada del mismo, sino de participar en sus beneficios (la contraprestación no tiene porque ser ingresada de una vez a tanto alzado, sino que puede ser un porcentaje de los beneficios del negocio privado) y, por tanto, seguir su gestión más o menos de cerca."""

Paisaje Transversal: Arquitectura Viva 145: Colectivos españoles

Paisaje Transversal: Arquitectura Viva 145: Colectivos españoles