A Reading List for #Occupy - Part II

Edited by Paolo Mossetti

After the Occupy Wall Street "People's Library" was brutally dismantled by the police, last November, I asked some of my favourite writers, activists, and academics to help me compile a list of books that would recreate, though only virtually, the library's shelves. 
This is the second part of the answers I collected. 

Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus

Written by Franco Berardi Bifo, 12.03.2012
1. Post-Oedipal
 
The process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have dramatically changed in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that book was a defining moment in my intellectual and political experience, in the first years of the 19070s, when students and workers were fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book the landscape has changed so deeply that very concept of desire has to be re-thought, as it is marking the field of subjectivation in a very different way.
 
The proliferation of sources of enunciation in this age of the networks, the globalization of the economy and the media, was predicted and in a sense pre-conceptualized Deleuze and Guattari, but they could not know in advance the effects that global capitalism has produced on the unconscious and the dynamics of desire. As production, media and daily life have been subsumed into the sphere of semiocapital we need to reconsider the unconscious from this transformed position.
 
My starting question is thus: what is capitalism and what is schizophrenia after the psychosocial landscape has been reshaped by the tendencies described by Deleuze and Guattari?
 

A Reading List for #Occupy - Part I

Edited by Paolo Mossetti

Cover by Kaf & Cyop. Image courtesy of the artist

While the Occupy Wall Street "People's Library" was being brutally dismantled by the police, last November, I asked some officers why they were seizing those books and throwing them into trash cans.

Only one of them replied by saying, simply, "I don't know."
Then I decided to ask some of my favourite writers, activists, and academics to help me compile a list of books that would recreate, though only virtually, the OWS library.

Discipline: on writing and collectivity

Written by Federico Campagna, 07.03.2012
If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
Linji Yixuan
 
 
It is common practice to look at humans through the filter of the collectivities they supposedly belong to. This is particularly evident in conservative discourses, such as those on Nation and Ethnicity, or in the marketing categorization of different Consumer typologies. But also discourses which self-define as emancipatory rarely constitute an exception to this norm. When fighting for gender equality, for example, it is always through the filter of Gender that we look at our fellow humans kettled inside the various gender categories. Even when talking about humanity tout court, it is once again through the filter of Humanity that we look at the singular lives that are gathered on this planet. This is how we often end up fighting for the Woman, the Migrant, the Human, and so on, and hardly ever for the individual woman, the individual migrant, the individual human. Fooled by the pretense of such abstract collectivities to truly embody those who are comprised within them, we often find ourselves fighting, not for the emancipation of our fellow humans, but for that of their collective, capitalized names.

Turbulence of Radiation and Revolution

Written by Sabu Kohso, 03.03.2012

An Ex Post Facto View of 2011

When we reflect upon the year 2011, especially the situations surrounding 3/11 and the global uprisings, everything that happened before appears to have been in preparation for these two extreme moments. All events in the recent past seem to have been proceeding toward or engulfed into these currents: radiation and revolution. This is mainly due to our habit of thinking itself that always thinks things ex post facto rather than ex ante facto. But at the same time this most deadly disaster and the insurrections across the globe, the extreme poles of despair and hope, are framing our present as the accumulation of all temporalities past and present and what they portend for possibilities we are confronting now. The impossible mix of the two currents is, as many of us are forced to experience, now causing a global turbulence whose dynamics and orientation are unpredictable.
 

For one thing there are unprecedented crises in the lives of the majority on the globe. All key components of the apparatus that capitalism and state power have been building up are now on the verge of collapse and are turning against and attacking the people with sheer violence, as a last resort for the maintenance of financial capitalism, industrial/military conglomeration and the governance: precarious labor conditions approaching either servitude or disposal (expendability), debt of various scales imposed upon entire populaces, genetically modified or poisoned food products widely distributed for daily consumption, environmental contamination by various production and mining affecting the locals everywhere, escalading joblessness and homelessness, budget cuts in every corner of public services, recurring racial and gender discrimination, police brutality or war against civilians in all nation-states, and the radiation-spread instigated by a government itself… Jobs, money, housing, energy, food, medicine and environment – everything we rely on as our lifeline turns into a weapon against us. This is a total war of those in power waged against the commoners.

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