Radical Media Forum
2pm-5pm Saturday 14th January 2012

Kinning Park Complex
43 Cornwall Street
Glasgow
G41 1BA

directions: http://www.kinningparkcomplex.org/directions

FREE – donations to Kinning Park welcome

The Radical Media Forum is a regular meeting for left-aligned politically-engaged media practitioners, activists and researchers. Participants include those working with: film/video and television, online media and Indymedia, radio, books and print publication, community and media events, archives, and media research. It is open to individuals and groups working at any level across voluntary activist and community-based media to those working within mainstream and academic contexts.

The forum provides a space for networking, news exchange, skills sharing, discussion, debate, and building a more consolidated base for critical media in Scotland and the UK. Meetings take place every two months at various venues.

Each forum provides time for meeting and exchanging news, issues, ideas, etc., followed by a dedicated skills and discussion session.

For the January 2012 meeting, film and documentary maker Barbara Orton will facilitate a practical workshop to discuss issues and practices around engaging audiences through mainstream formats and alternatives to these. The debate around mainstream access is an important one in political film-making, whether to work with it, challenge, or reject it, and it is useful to understand how such positions may determine the ways in which work is realised. Participants are invited to bring along film and video projects they are currently working on to review and discuss as part of the session.

Mailing list: http://groups.strickdistro.org/groups/mediaforum

Venue: Transmission Gallery, 28 King Street, Glasgow, Scotland, G1 5QP

DATES AND READING MATERIAL: 

Week 1, Tuesday 11th October, 20011, 7.00-9.00pm

Maurizio Lazzarato, Immaterial Labour. In, Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, eds, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Theory Out of Bound Series, Minnesota Press, 1996.

Week 1_Immaterial Labour_Lazzarato 

Week 2, Tuesday 18th October, 2011, 7.00-9.00pm

Paolo Virno, Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism. In, Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2004

Week 2_Ten Theses On The Multitude_Virno_LibCom

Week 3, Tuesday 25th October, 2011, 7.00-9.00pm

Wu Ming Foundation, Fetishism of Digital Commodities and Hidden Exploitation: The Cases of Amazon and Apple,  Wu Ming Foundation blog, 2011

Week 3_Digital Commodities_Wu Ming Foundation

Week 4, Tuesday 1st November, 2011, 7.00-9.00pm

Sylvia Fedrici, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, The Commoner Journal, 2011

Week 4_Feminism And the Politics of the Commons_Federici 

RECOMMENDED BACKGROUND READING

‘Bifo’ Berardi, Anatomy of Autonomy, In, Italy: Autonomia. Post-political politics.Ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, Semiotext, 1980, pp.148-170

http://www.generation-online.org/t/autonomia2.pdf

Karl Marx , Fragment on Machines, Grundrisse, pp.690-712:

http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf

1pm – 5pm, Saturday 29th October 2011

Kinning Park Complex
43 Cornwall Street
Glasgow
G41 1BA

The meeting is free, but donations to Kinning Park welcomed.

An open meeting for practitioners, groups and individuals involved in independent/radical/critical/activist/rebellious/oppositional media, to discuss the development of a broader support network, archiving, collaborations, future events, and encourage debate on current directions of ‘media from below’ in the UK.

Directions and map to Kinning Park Complex.

Venue: The Free Hetherington, 13 University Gardens, Glasgow University, Glasgow.

Autonomy is a concept much discussed, but perhaps less well understood. This may well be due to the relative neglect of autonomist thought in the UK compared to other European countries such as Italy, France and Greece. This reading group aims to make inroads into that neglect by exploring in detail four classic texts from the movement of Italian Autonomist Marxism; a movement widely considered as the most advanced expression of autonomist thought in the 20th century.

The reading group will explore key selections from Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Sergio Bologna. We introduce a broad sweep of theoretical innovation from 1964 to 1977, covering such key ideas as the mass worker; the refusal of work and the autonomy of the class; the critique of the Keynesian planner-state; feminism, reproduction and the social factory, and class composition as a mode of radical research and transformative activity.

The group is not afraid to be caught learning: our aim is to encourage an open collective learning process for working through some of the fundamental texts of autonomism and autonomia. The group aims to develop deeper critical engagement with some of what we regard as the most important revolutionary writing of the last century. To make the discussion more participatory, reading the texts before each session is encouraged, but this is not mandatory. The group is open to all.

DATES AND READING MATERIAL:

Week 1 Tuesday, 5th, July, 2011, 7.00-9.00pm:

Mario Tronti, The Strategy of Refusal, Italy: Autonomia. Post-political politics. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, Semiotext,1980,pp. 28-35.
Week 1_Tronti_1965_ Strategy of refusal

Week 2 Tuesday, 12th July, 2011, 7.00-9.00pm:

Toni Negri, Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State Post-1929, Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes & New Social Subjects, 1967-1983. Ed. Ed Emery, London: Red Notes, 1988.
Week 2_Negri_1967_Keynes

Week 3 Tuesday, 26th July, 2011, 7.00-9.00pm:

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972. With an introduction by Selma James (optional).
Week 3_Della Costa & James_ 1972_The power of women

Week 4 Tuesday, 2nd August, 2011, 7.00-9.00pm:

Sergio Bologna, The Tribe of Moles, Italy: Autonomia. Post-political politics. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi
(New York: Semiotext, 1980), 36-61.
Week 4_Bologna_ 1978_Tribe of moles

BACKGROUND READING (optional)

Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds. Italy: Autonomia. Post-political politics. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, New York: Semiotext, 1980.
http://www.generation-online.org/t/ppp.htm

Harry Cleaver. Introduction, Reading Capital Politically, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979, pp.3-66.
http://libcom.org/library/reading-capital-politically-cleaver-intro

Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, Pluto Press, 2002.
http://libcom.org/library/storming-heaven-class-composition-struggle-italian-autonomist-marxism-steve-wright

The Strickland Distribution host a special screening of The Empty Plan (2010) by Anja Kirschner and David Panos. The screening is public and will be followed by an open discussion.

Shifting between documentary, historical reconstruction and melodrama, The Empty Plan interrogates the relationship between theory and practice in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht. The film contrasts scenes from Brecht’s exile in Los Angeles (1941 to 1947) with productions of his 1931 play The Mother in the late Weimar Republic, New Deal America and post-war East Germany, exploring different modes of performance and their relation to changing historical and political circumstances.

The title of the film is taken from Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, an unfinished theoretical work written during his exile, which considers the possibilities of ‘committed art’ and its practical, theoretical and formal limits at a time when revolutionary mass movements had been defeated and theatre was supplanted by Hollywood cinema as the dominant form of popular entertainment.

Through the figures of Brecht, his collaborator Ruth Berlau and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, the film reflects on conflicting personal, artistic and political ambitions, raising questions about the nature of art and the unrealised dream of its supersession through revolutionary practice.

Funded by Arts Council England through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network, co-produced with City Projects and supported by Focal Point Gallery, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Kunsthall Oslo.

http://www.anjakirschner.com