[artinfo] Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons

[Stevphen Shukaitis]

Now available for direct ordering and/or free downloadŠ

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 differentŠ 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>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.