48 Hours of Common Effort: How Cultural Workers and Political Activists Met and Talked The entire spectrum of problems connected with the condition of creative workers has recently become the focus of fundamental discussions and reflections on the part of the artistic community as well as a number of leftist political and social activists. These discussions have revealed points of convergence between creative workers and workers engaged in nonstandard forms of employment, which have become more and more widespread in Russia. The search for new ways of regrouping radical leftists, trade unions, and social movements makes new forms of dialogue possible. The 48-Hour May Congress-Commune of Creative Workers was the first initiative to task itself with tackling both theoretically and practically the host of problems connected with the nature of the work done by cultural workers and labor relations in the cultural field.
I see the students’ mobilization that has been mounting on the North American campuses, especially in California, as part of a long cycle of struggle against the neo-liberal restructuring of the global economy and the dismantling of public education that began in the mid-1980s in Africa and Latin America, and is now spreading to Europe—as the recent student revolt in London demonstrated. At stake, in each case, has been more than resistance to the “enclosure of knowledge.” The struggles of African students in the 1980s and 1990s were particularly intense because students realized that the drastic university budget cuts the World Bank demanded signaled the end of the “social contract” that had shaped their relation with the state in the post-independence period, making education the key to social advancement and participatory citizenship. They also realized, especially on hearing World Bankers argue that “Africa has no need for universities,” that behind the cuts a new international division of work was rearticulated that re-colonized African economies and devalued African workers’ labor.
Late last summer, before the schools in Russia reopened, a remarkable beer ad about post-Soviet space aired on Russian TV. Thirty seconds of feel-good Russian classic rock: an active bass and a prominent slide guitar wafted around a voice, always-already middle-aged, slightly flat after working a night shift. Four measure whole notes by the band: the staggered vocal names the brand. Krasny Vostok. Where the sun rises / the east is red. A new day is dawning / over our land. // How can you resist. Cause' this land is not made of history's pages; it's not made through borders or territorial stages. Our land is made up of people and people are what make our land.
The New Productivisms Translated by Nuria Rodríguez Marcelo Expósito The Russian Soviet revolutionary art produced between the 1910s and 1930s continues to exert a powerful influence on many aspects of our cultural models today. But historically, references to it have tended to oscillate between fetishising its formal inventions and either exalting or denigrating its idealism, which has been portrayed as totally unattainable voluntarism within a more global chimera (the revolution, represented in the image and likeness of a mythological monster that – supposedly – always ends up devouring its children). Likewise, certain dominant visions of the Russian Soviet avant-gardes have tended to stifle its event dimension – the potency of its emergence as a singularity and a difference that should not be reconciled with the stable continuum of both the history of art and mass politics. There has, furthermore, been a tendency to overlook the strong impact of said event beyond its historical bounds, in the many experiences that undertook to explore the political nature of art in subsequent decades, driven by a desire to embrace processes of profound social change.
Public space as translation process I will discuss here the idea of public space in relation to the concept of so-called cultural translation. This concept has been deployed recently (at the end of the eighties and in the nineties) within the postmodern - and especially postcolonial - reflexion to solve some of its most challenging problems, like the problem of universality in culture, or the problem of emancipation in the social and political space which we consider to be historically - to use Ernesto Laclau' term - beyond the emancipation.
Introduction This is the last of my four scheduled Russell Scholar lectures on the theme ofacademic freedom. I would like to briefly recapitulate for you their trajectory. In my previous lectures I discussed the threats to academic freedom coming fromthe state and market and I began to sketch a theory of academic freedom taking usbeyond our need to defend academic work and institutions from these threats. I arguedthat the notion of a knowledge commons is crucial in defining the positive aspect ofacademic freedom and that the proper expression of academic autonomy in the 21stcentury is the preservation, defense and expansion of the knowledge commons. In this lecture I address the role autonomous universities can play in the practical task of making the knowledge commons. Conclusion: The Threat, an Exodus from the University similar to one between the
Our Story is Trauma In the fall of 2006, a man approached me in the late evening, shouted “CHINK!” and bashed my head open with a U-bolt bike lock. I was 23 years old at the time. I’m often tempted to consider this to be merely a case of Vincent Chin redux, since the circumstances of my assault—a young Asian-American victim, a stranger as the perpetrator, the trappings of a hate crime, the bludgeoning of the head—are remarkably similar, save one difference: Vincent Chin was killed, and I survived. The significance is not lost on me; indeed, with each day I may still write, still walk, still be present and sustain, the significance rarely ever escapes me. And yet, the more time passes and the more I dwell on it, the difference between Vincent and me—or Sean Bell, or Sanesha Stewart, to name a few—seems less and less apparent. For if Vincent had lived—lived in spite of a baseball bat cracking his skull half a dozen times, mind you—he would have surely found his resulting ‘life’ of exceeding trauma, fear, and despair to be questionable, at best. My own recovery, full of these miserable musings, has similarly made me wonder whether dying, as Vincent had, would have been preferable (i).
Authors Note: This article was written during an intense period of organizational change within The Icarus Project. A large shift is currently taking place in which space is opening up for more voices to guide the project, which involves a lot of stepping back for some folks, stepping up for others, and stepping side to side for just about everyone. Not only are we in a heightened state of change, we’re at such a place in this process that it felt unfair to try to document the day-to-day work of The Icarus Project, or to hold up our everyday functioning as a model. It also felt premature to document the shapes we’re morphing into, ’cause what those are is still being determined, and there are a lot of hands in that clay. So this piece glances at where we’ve been in the last few months and what it is we see the project participating in. As you read it, know that you are witnessing our evolution!
From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has no future” is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks.
‘They might have the strength to impose their will, but we will never give them our consent…’ Gustavo Esteva looks back at the Oaxaca uprising of 2006 and explains how the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca posits an alternative solution for governance
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