The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labour After the Avant-Garde

by Stevphen Shukaitis

Overview

This text theorizes political change from within social movement via an engagement with autonomist politics and radical aesthetics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783481736
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/11/2015
Series:	New Politics of Autonomy
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Stevphen Shukaitis is a Senior Lecturer in Culture and Organization at the University of Essex, UK.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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