Now available for direct ordering and/or free download…
Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the
Undercommons
Stevphen Shukaitis
Dialogues and essays exploring collaboration in artist collective
& self-organized cultural production
During the industrial revolution artisans and craft workers sparked
struggles against exploitation while the force of law drove unions
underground. Today conditions are different… yet they are not.
Collective organizing is pre-empted not by legal prohibition but
rather by a perverse internalized neoliberal logic that celebrates
the precarious creative worker as its exemplar.
Combination Acts draws together fifteen years of conversations with
artists, musicians, activists, and theorists about the nature of
collaborative practice. What sociality is produced by their
practices? What forms of collectivity do they animate and embody?
Taken together these dialogues provide a series of study notes for
and from the self-organization of the undercommons, gesturing
towards an aesthetics that occupies a space of power for itself by
coming to close to, but never finally reaching, a set form.
“The mood and tense of revolution can be obscure even to those who
act it out – as polyphonic combination, cutting normative
conceptions of person and number – in beautifully everyday
experiments that strain against the brutally ongoing. Thankfully, in
this timely primer, Stevphen Shukaitis reminds us how to conjugate
the verbs to live, to fight, and to enjoy.” – Fred Moten, New York
University
“Combination Acts offers an overview of political cultural tools and
tactics radicals have mobilized over the 20th century and into the
21st. Shukaitis steers through rebellious terrain, from
cyberhacking and forms of sabotage to critiques of global neoliberal
institutions and horizontal re-commoning, opening new terrains of
speculative imaginative possibilities. A necessary guide to militant
culture in the new millennium.” – Jaleh Mansoor, University of
British Columbia
“Combination Acts is an exhilarating read as it boldly combines
optimism (the always renewed burden of struggles on the left) and
pragmatism (the requirement of actually existing praxis). Engaging
dialogues and theoretical analysis are also combined in this
cutting-edge study, on material and in ways that are indispensable
for carrying forward the spirit and actuality of insurgent
togetherness. The key question of the book – what interventions
would be needed so that the grammar of self-organization would not
find itself rendered into the fixed forms of capital’s continued
accumulation demands? – is answered through multiple narrative
documents of real-life experience crossing through the art field. At
the very least, the book informs us of the depth of critical thought
from which practices of anti-status-quo alternatives stem; as for
what the book achieves at its best, this is dependent on whether and
how we seek to implement what we learn from it. An essential and
inspirational reality check on collaboration, labour, its content
and discontent, and the conundrum of art activism, among numerous
other markers of the zeitgeist.” – Angela Dimitrakaki, University of
Edinburgh
Bio: Stevphen Shukaitis is Senior Lecturer at the University of
Essex, Centre for Work and Organization, and a member of the
Autonomedia editorial collective. He is the author of Imaginal
Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of
Everyday Day (2009) and The Composition of Movements to Come:
Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016). His
research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in
social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and
artistic labor.
PDF available freely online:
http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=915
Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions now
for the special price of £10.
Release to the book trade June 2019
Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations
drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the
revolutions of everyday life.
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