The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between (...) man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)

With the economy deindustrialized and the working class decentralized, a call for alternative horizons for resistance: the university and the art world. What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig's new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative labor (...) has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of “modulation” as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience. (shrink)

On the basis of certain tensions between Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics and his political philosophy, the article tries to trace new modes of subjectivation in contemporary activism and art. It explores how the actors of the overlapping terrains of aesthetic and political practices organize ‘different forms, different spaces of expression and distribution of ideas’ in Rancière’s sense. Yet, analysing the practices of the Occupy movement, the Spanish M15 movement, and the dOCUMENTA ‘agents’ AND AND AND as radically inclusive, polyvocal and transversal, (...) it proposes a position that differs from Rancière’s rejection of activist art, a non-totalizing political aesthetics as a component of molecular revolution. (shrink)

Raunig develops a philosophy of dividuality as a way of addressing contemporary modes of production and forms of life. The animal of the molecular revolution will be neither mole nor snake, but a drone-animal-thing that is solid, liquid, and a gas. —from Dividuum As the philosophical, religious, and historical systems that have produced the “individual” (and its counterparts, society and community) over the years continue to break down, the age of “dividuality” is now upon us. The roots of the concept (...) of the “dividuum” can be traced back to Latin philosophy, when Cicero used the term to translate the “divisible” in the writings of Epicurus and Plato; later, medieval scholars utilized the term in theological discussions on the unity of the trinity. Grounding himself in the writings of the medieval bishop Gilbert de Poitiers and his extensive commentaries on Boethius, Gerald Raunig charts a genealogy of the concept and develops a philosophy of dividuality as a way of addressing contemporary modes of production and forms of life. Through its components of dispersion, subsistence, and similarity, dividuality becomes a hidden principle of obedience and conformity, but it also brings with it the potential to realize disobedience and noncompliant con/dividualities. Raunig's bad news is that dividuality is responsible for much of the intensified exploitation and enslavement taking place under contemporary machinic capitalism. Algorithms, derivatives, big data, and social media technology all contribute to the rampant expansion of divisive management strategies and desires for self-division. The good news, however, is that this same terrain of dividuality presents an opportunity for a new kind of resistance, one that can be realized in the form of con/division. (shrink)

Résumé Le concept de pratique instituante devrait permettre d’explorer de nouvelles voies de la critique institutionnelle. Cette démarche s’appuie d’une part sur le lien qui existe entre les réflexions de Félix Guattari contre la structuralisation et la fermeture de (dans) l’institution, et les thèses de l’anarchiste individualiste Max Stirner, auteur en 1844 de L’Unique et sa propriété, que l’on peut considérer comme un concurrent de Marx et un critique de l’institution aussi radical que précoce. D’autre part, nous établissons un rapport (...) entre la généalogie conceptuelle de la pratique instituante et le concept de pouvoir constituant tel que l’a particulièrement bien développé Antonio Negri. La modalité de l’institution, et en particulier la participation au processus institutionnel, détermine la formation du pouvoir constituant. Cette problématique issue de réflexions sur la théorie constitutionnelle s’applique aussi à l’analyse de certaines pratiques artistiques qui ont traité du problème de l’institution : la théorie brechtienne du théâtre didactique, la création des situations dans la pratique de l’Internationale situationniste, et enfin le processus permanent des pratiques instituantes de Park Fiction, un projet hambourgeois mêlant l’art et la politique, qui depuis une dizaine d’années n’a cessé de déclencher de nouvelles vagues de production collective de désir. (shrink)