For the duration of Rossella Biscotti's exhibition "The Trial", e-flux will be hosting a regular reading group devoted to exploring the histories and legacies of the Italian Autonomia movement as they reverberate in contemporary struggles in the US–including but not limited to Occupy and its aftermath. Loosely facilitated by the editors of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy and others, the reading group aims to create space for an extended intergenerational conversation about life, labor, and liberation.
The first several sessions will involve collective learning about the background, trajectory, and political innovations of Autonomia: first, the bottom-up "workerist" politics of Potere Operaio, as well as the importance of labor militants such as James Boggs in the United States to the formation of operaismo; from there, the group will track the cresting of Autonomia in 1977 as a decentralized, experimental political culture encompassing social actors beyond that of the factory worker such as precarious students and feminist intiatives such as Wages for Housework. This will provide an opportunity to discuss the tactics and organizing of Autonomia, but also the subjective and affective dimensions of the movement as embodied in various forms of cultural production such as Alberto Grifi's Il festival del proletario giovanile al Parco Lambro (Festival of the Young Proletariat at Parco Lambro) (1976) Nanni Belestrini's We Want Everything (1971), and the phenomenon of the Metropolitan Indians. From there, we will arrive to the massive state repression of Autonomia in the name of anti-terrorism (the subject of Biscotti's work). Throughout, we will consider the porosity of the Italian context relative to kindred developments elsewhere in Europe and beyond.
A further strand of possible inquiry concerns the rich reception-history of the Autonomist tradition in the United States, encompassing intellectual networks, political struggles, and shifting economic conditions of global capitalism. Key links would include Wages for Housework, Semiotext(e), the Midnight Notes Collective, and most recently and prominently, the explosion of retroactive interest in Autonomia thinkers catalyzed in the English-speaking world by the publication of Hardt and Negri's Empire at the ripe historical moment of the counter-globalization movement. Since then, concepts such as Post-Fordism, immaterial labor, collective intelligence, and constituent power have become important points of reference for artists, academics, and political organizers. Why has the Autonomia legacy struck such a chord in the past decade? And how does it relate to the resurgent interest in communism, communization, and commoning as political horizons in the present?
Discussions indebted to Autonomia have fed directly into the phenomenon of Occupy in its verious iterations over the past two years. The ongoing and multifarious project of Occupy will constitute a consistent thread of the reading group, culminating in several concluding discussions devoted explicitly to recent movements in the US and beyond. Texts by theorists and organizers–including some with biographical ties to the histories in question such as Michael Hardt, George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici–may be drawn on as prompts for new questions grounded in recent experience and geared toward the future.
Contact [email protected] for more details.
WEEK 1: Tuesday, May 21st
Introduction:
This session will begin with a brief introduction to the overall reading group. The series of texts listed below are proposed to lay out the broad historical and theoretical trajectory for the group in coming weeks as provoked by Rosella Biscotti’s The Trial. They include both archival documents and retrospective analyses of the expanded Autonomia period in the 1970s and its afterlives in the early twenty-first century. How and why does Autonomia resonate today for us in the ongoing aftermath of Occupy and related movements around the world? These questions of historical resonance will preoccupy discusisons throughout the duration of the group, but the first session will set out some basic points of reference to be fleshed out and debated in future sessions.
The readings below for the first session are available to download here:http://www.e-flux.com/program/reading-group-autonomia-occupy-communism-legacies-and-futures/
Paolo Virno, untitled testimony from “April 7th” trial (1983-84)
Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, “The Return of Politics,” in Lotringer, ed. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (1980), pp. 8-20
Michael Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy” in Hardt, ed. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (1996), pp. 1-10
Sylvere Lotringer, “Foreword,” in Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude (2004), 7-18
Branden W. Joseph, “Interview with Paolo Virno,” Grey Room 21 (2005)
