[artinfo] Communism is Back and We Should Call It Singularity

[Stevphen Shukaitis]

Communism is Back and We Should Call It Singularity

a book launch and discussion with Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Friday February 27th, 2009
Octagon Room, People?s Palace, 5PM
University of London, Queen Mary
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

"One hundred years ago Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism.
It inaugurated a century that believed in the future - initiating a
process where the collective organism became machine-like. This
becoming-machine has reached its finale with the concatenations of the
global web and is now being overturned by the collapse of a financial
system founded on the futurisation of the economy, debt and economic
promise. That promise is over. The era of post-future has begun."
>From the Manifesto of Post-Futurism

Franco Berardi will be discussing communism as singularity and
presenting his books. The event marks the first and long awaited
publication of his work in English: Felix Guattari. Thought,
Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (2008) and Precarious Rhapsody:
Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation
(forthcoming).

The launch will be followed by a social evening at the Freedom
Bookshop, Angel Alley,
84b Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX. All welcome.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi is a writer, critic, and pioneer media theorist.
Like others involved in the Italian political movement of Autonomia,
during the 1970s he fled to Paris, where he worked with F?lix Guattari
in the field of schizoanalysis. He is the co-founder of
rekombinant.org and the free pirate television network Telestreet. He
is also Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia
di Belle Arti of Milan. For more information and writings by the
author, including his recent Post-Futurist Manifesto, visit
http://www.generation-online.org/p/pbifo.htm .


"Gilles Deleuze was welcomed into the reception room of university
respectability, while Felix Guattari was left out. He was not an
academic and he mixed with the wrong crowd. Guattari without Deleuze
built a philosophical style out of his psychiatric practice, his work
as a political militant, and his training in biology and pharmacology.
To the rhizomatic machine Guattari brought the concrete micro-material
of his inquiry, the molecular method of 'cut-up', montage,
decomposition and recomposition, and combinatory creation. The
crystalline acuity of the Deleuzian philosophical razor combined with
the Guattarian material swarm of bio-informational principles form the
rhizomatic machine.@ from Felix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and
Visionary Cartography.