Acknowledgements / Let’s Take the First Bus Out of Here: A User’s Guide / 1. Introduction: Class Composition and the Avant-Garde / Part I: Territories: Psychogeography / 2. Theories made to die in the war of time / 3. Metropolitan Strategies, Psychogeographic Investigations / Part II: Art/Work Sabotage / 4. Can Creative Practice Break Bricks / 5. Learning Not to Labor / Part III: Institutions: Overidentification / 6. Fascists as Much as Painters / 7. Icons of Futures Past / 8. Coda: The Composition of Movements to Come / Bibliography / Index
Stevphen Shukaitis is Lecturer in Work & Organization (Assistant Professor) at the University of Essex and is a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (Autonomedia Press, 2009) and co-editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). He has written for numerous publications including Mute Magazine, Subjectivity, ephemera, Organization, Sociological Review, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Affinities, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Rethinking Marxism, and Culture Machine.
“Shukaitis's project is further distinguished by his emphasis on
using avant-garde artistic practices as a means of mobilizing
labor’s autonomy within deterritorialized capitalist spaces. [T]his
is where the drift of his research moves into high gear.”
*Critical Inquiry*
Stevphen Shukaitis's new book makes a forcible and compelling
contribution to a rejuvenated discussion on avant-garde art and
politics. . . .This is much to appreciate in Shukaitis's book. . .
.[It is] a strategic vision, and Shukaitis's Dada games and
partisan misdirection make for a spirited experiment in
pataphysical writing in the context of the real subsumption of
labor.
*Afterimage*
With The Composition of Movements to Come Stevphen Shukaitis does
again what he has been doing as an author and editor for years:
pushing the boundaries of intellectual and activist thought on the
Left. By insisting that culture be understood strategically, rather
than merely employed tactically, Shukaitis has unlocked the secret
of an affective and effective artistic activism for our times.
Brilliant and useful.
*Stephen Duncombe, New York University; Co-Director, Center for
Artistic Activism*
I was convinced it was impossible to say something new about
politics and the avant-garde, and I really enjoyed being proved
wrong in so many different ways.
*David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology, London School of
Economics*
Stevphen Shukaitis has produced an exposition on the strategic – as
opposed to purely tactical – possibilities immanent within the
post-war avant-garde that is as beautiful as the chance meeting of
Autonomous Marxism and the Situationist International on the
dissecting-table of critical theory.
*Gregory Sholette, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Social
Practice at Queens College Art Department, The City University of
New York*
Can strategy emerge from out of the diverse, fragmentary and
temporary tactics of contemporary social movements? In this
important book, which offers telling historical perspectives and is
at the same time forged in the practice of political opposition,
Stevphen Shukaitis offers a sustained argument that it can, and
that it should.
*Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art*
This is a really thought provoking book, and I would recommend it
to anyone who wants to think about art in ways that are thoroughly
social, and that try very hard indeed to rescue a radical politics
from the global institutions of art capitalism.
*Culture Machine*
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