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Omnia sunt communia! Support Minor Compositions / Purchasing Books The PDF you are reading is an electronic version of a physical book that can be purchased through booksellers (including online stores), through the normal book supply channels, or Minor Compositions directly. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university or local library purchase a physical printed copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions please contact the publisher: [email protected]. Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons Stevphen Shukaitis Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons Stevphen Shukaitis ISBN 978-157027-355-1 Cover image: Lousemouth by James Koehnline, 2017 Cover design by Haduhi Szukis Interior layout by Margaret Killjoy Released by Minor Compositions 2019 Colchester / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] Contents Je participe... ..........................................1 Standing on the Treshold ...............................13 Conversation with Brian Holmes Collective Creativity, Between Choice and Necessity............29 Conversation with WHW Provo, Autonomy, and Ludic Politics........................41 Protest Camps & Ecologies of Freedom......................57 Russian Anarchism in the 1990s Occupation Cultures. Squatting and Space for Autonomous Culture....................................67 Power, Knowledge, Hatred ...............................79 Notes on Antagonism & Autonomist Epistemology Sabotage .............................................85 Fuel to Fight ..........................................89 Conversation with Test Dept We hate the users.......................................99 Interview with UBERMORGEN Do Cybernetics Dream of Digital Resistance? . .113 Now is the only place where things can actually happen . .127 Interview with Joe McPhee From Nation Time to Management Time . .139 Spaces of Collaboration.................................147 An Interview with Ken Vandermark It takes about four years to get really good asparagus ...........163 Conversation with Gee Vaucher Watermelon Politics and the Mutating Forms of Institutional Critique Today ......................175 You Have to Fall in Love with the Territory..................185 Discussion with John Jordan Infrapolitics & the Nomadic Educational Machine ............199 Class Composition & Its Discontents ......................209 References ...........................................215 Acknowledgements This book is (literally) based on years of conversations, debates, shared meals, intense afects, and adventures. All my thanks to everyone who shared in any, or preferably, all of them. Tat includes both all the voices that appear in the text as well as those that are there unnamed. Special thanks to everyone who commented on or gave feedback on drafts, including Joanna Figiel, Marc Herbst, Liam Weikart, David Jacobs, Elaine Ho, Heath Schultz, Keith Salter, and Perry Miller. Tanks to Marie Nerland from Volt, who hosted the frst public presentation of the overall project in Bergen in April 2017. Tanks also to the folks from Rum46 in Aarhus, Denmark, who invited me to present the project in September 2018 as part of their “Room for Improved Futures: Sites of Becoming” exhibition. Much of the planning of this book came together through organizing “Artist Collectives: History, Organization, and Politics,” a PhD training course at the University of Essex with Alan Moore. Special thanks to Alan for co-or- ganizing that, and thanks to all my colleagues from the School for Philosophy and Art History and the Centre for Work, Organization, and Society. v Images viii: Atelier Populaire, “Je participe...” (1968) 12: Gustav Klutsis, ”Construction” (1922) 28: Mladen Stilinović, “I am selling, I am selling Duchamp” (2006) 40: London Provotariat, from an event at Te Foundry (2009) 56: Shadow of the Transiberian Express (2005) 66: Made Possible by Squatting exhibition, London (2013) 72: Ruf, Tuf, Cream Puf Estate Agency. Bulletin #18 (1975) 78: Images from A/Traverso (1976) 84: IWW Sabotage poster (2012) 88: Fuel to Fight poster design for 1984 Miners Support Tour 98/106: UBERMORGEN “u s e r u n f r i e n d l y” exhibition installation shots (2013) 112: Detail from the cover of Escape the Overcode by Brian Holmes (2009) 126/144: Joe McPhee performing at Café Oto (2013) 130: Cover of Nation Time by Joe McPhee (1971) 138: Advertisement in the London Underground (2014) 146/152: Ken Vandermark performing at Café Oto (2014 / 2011) 162: Te garden at Dial House (2016) 167: Installation shot from the Gee Vaucher: Introspective exhibition (2016) 174: Precarious Workers Brigade at protest in London (2011) 184 / 188: Images from the ZAD, Nantes (2017) 198: Anti-university of London (1968) vii Je participe... Atelier Populaire, a group of Marxist artists and students, produced numerous posters during the wildcat strikes and occupations that occurred in and beyond Paris during the spring of 1968. Te posters were printed by the thousands on newssheets, using a relatively simple but quite efective style of iconography, to take on questions of press freedom, migration, and discontent with the nature of consumer society. Depicting raised fsts against ugly facto- ries and menacing police, many are now iconic, flling in sometimes too neatly to represent those moments and outbursts of struggle. Tese images refect the infuence of the Situationist International. While the Situationists claim their ideas were already in people heads, they did not fnd their way by magic, but rather through the dispersed circulation and popularizing media forms of these posters and slogans scrawled on walls.1 Among these images there has always been one has stood out most vividly for me. It is one that most clearly illustrates the nature of collaboration and participation in the arts. Te poster’s design responds to eforts of the French government to encourage good citizen participation. It’s based on exercises done by French schoolchildren (and likely most children around the world) in learn- ing how to conjugate verbs. What is literally depicted is the repeated copying of diferent tenses of the French word for participation. In a way, this book does precisely that – exploring tenses and conjugations of collaboration, at both in- dividual and collective levels. Perhaps Virno’s grammar of the multitude can be simultaneously more literal and metaphoric, found within such exercises. 1 Combination aCts Te critique arrives with the third-person plural where the critique is made – and it’s very direct. I, you, we participate, but they proft. While there are many ways that current debates around activist art and politics remain with- in the shadows and frameworks from and responding to the events of 1968, here the links are clearest precisely because the problems have remained the same. Participation and collaboration, acts of self-organization, are welcome and encouraged, provided they subsist in forms amenable to exploitation and control by external interests. Tis state of afairs recalls Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s new spirit of capitalism, where the desire to fnd alternatives to the alienating