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Labour Struggles in the Edu-factory

Discussion and book launch for Toward a Global Autonomous University, edited by the Edu-factory collective

A Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry event
In collaboration with Edu-factory and Autonomedia

Tuesday, January 26, 2010
7:30-9:30pm
Toronto Free Gallery
1277 Bloor Street West (by Lansdowne Ave)

Occupations in the United States and Austria, mass demonstrations of students in Italy and France, labour organizing drives across North America, strikes in Ontario: After decades of university restructuring, recent years have seen a surge of struggle in the sphere of post-secondary education. How have these struggles played out locally? How do they relate to the broader transformation of labour under cognitive capitalism? What is the role of trade unionism within these movements? How do we build up an international network of struggles in and around the ongoing crisis of higher education? Join us for a discussion of these questions to launch Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, the Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory, an edited volume recently published by Autonomedia.

Speakers:

Erika Biddle is a PhD candidate in Communication and Culture at York University, Toronto. She has been a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective since 2002.

Holly Baines is a precariously employed contract academic staff and member of the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association. She has been involved in academic, labour and other struggles for many years and was on the informal strike support team for the CUPE 3902 strike at McMaster in 2000 and the strike support committee during the 2008 strike at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Max Haiven is Chair of the Political Action Committee (and past president) of CUPE local 3906 which represents over 2,700 precarious academic workers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He is also a PhD candidate in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster where he researches globalization, finance and imagination.

Tom Keefer is an editor of the anti-capitalist journal “Upping the Anti” and a member of CUPE 3903 at York University, where he is a PhD candidate in Political Science.

—

Edu-factory is a transnational collective engaged in the transformations of the global university and conflicts in knowledge production. The website of the global network (www.edu-factory.org) collects and connects theoretical investigations and reports from university struggles. The network has organized meetings all around the world, paying particular attention to the intertwining of student and faculty struggles. In addition to English, the collective has published the volume in Italian, as Univerisità globale: Il nuovo mercato del sapere (Manifestolibri, 2008), and in Spanish, as Universidad en Conflicto (Traficantes de sueños, 2010).

Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (TSCI) would like to thank Toronto Free Gallery and Autonomedia for their assistance in making this event possible.

Posted 13 January 2010 † § alternatives § autonomia § book launch § capitalism § cognitive capital § education § internet § labour § technology ‡ Comments Off °

Basic Income and the Crisis

A Presentation by Andrea Fumagalli

Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 7:00-9:00 pm
Room 066 | John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design | University of Toronto | 230 College Street

“Money,” said Francis Bacon, “is like muck, not good except it be spread.” As incomes polarize, unemployment rises, precarious employment spreads, and capital’s use of ‘free labour’ and social knowledge grows more sophisticated, unorthodox economists and social movements are increasingly advocating a radical reform of the welfare system. Basic income is a social policy proposal for a new welfare in the form of an annual income that would be distributed universally and unconditionally. Aiming to guarantee a basic level of income security for all, the basic income proposal is receiving unprecedented attention, particularly in Europe. Join us for a presentation by the Italian economist Andrea Fumagalli on basic income security as a policy response to the inequalities inherent in contemporary cognitive capitalism.

Read the paper this presentation was based on: Fumagalli-Lucarelli.pdf

Andrea Fumagalli is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pavia. He also teaches political economy at Corso di laurea interdisciplinare in scienze multimediali, University of Pavia and advanced macroeconomics at Bocconi University. Professor Fumagalli is member of UniNomade Network, Vice-President of Bin-Italy (Basic Income Network, Italy), and Honoured member of BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network).

Posted 08 October 2009 † § autonomia § basic income § cognitive capital § finance § readings ‡ Comments Off °

Not an Alternative

A talk by Beka Economopoulos and Jason Jones

A Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry event


Sunday June 14, 2009, 4:00pm
Toronto Free Gallery
1277 Bloor Street West (just east of Lansdowne), Toronto

Not An Alternative is a volunteer-run non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission is to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The organization operates a multi-purpose venue, The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage, where free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations occur. The space also consists of a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like-minded cultural producers. Not An Alternative’s recent projects have focused on combating gentrification in Williamsburg (The Fugheddaboudit Project, Gentrification Tour), the whitewashing of protest from Union Square in Manhattan (Heroes of Union Square), the current housing crisis (The Real Estate Industry), and an ongoing collaboration with New York City’s Picture the Homeless. For more information see: www.notanalternative.net and http://thechangeyouwanttosee.com.

Beka Economopoulos has been a field organizer for various causes for the past 12 years. She directs the Greenpeace online organizing program, where she develops and uses technology tools to coordinate scalable online/offline grassroots organizing and volunteer efforts, and develops outreach and advocacy strategies in online social networks. She is a founding member of Not an Alternative.

Jason Jones is a practicing artist based in New York. Since completing the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2001, he co-founded Black Out Media, a nationally syndicated TV show and in 2004 acted as one of the principle organizers for Arts and Media Clearing House in preparation for the Republican National Convention. He is a founding member and Creative Director of Not An Alternative.

Collaborating with a network of activists, artists, and theorists, Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (TSCI) initiates events that inquire into the new enclosures and creative pathways beyond them.

Toronto Free Gallery is a not-for-profit art space dedicated to providing a forum for social, cultural and urban issues expressed through all media. It is intended to be a creative laboratory. We aim to provide artists with a space to experiment, explore new ideas, question norms and challenge both themselves and their audiences.

Posted 12 June 2009 † § activism § alternatives § art § cultural production ‡ Comments Off °

Out of Control

TSCI is participating in KRAX Meeting 2009
:: OUT OF CONTROL ::
power to transform, power to create
3rd meeting of urban creativity in response to the city’s transformation
Initiated by City Mine(d) Barcelona
:: 20 – 23 May 2009 ::
Barcelona

The KRAX Meeting is an international meeting of creative initiatives. The Krax Meeting visualizes and connects different independent initiatives who develop new forms of political, cultural and economic organisation and participation in the city. During the 4 days of the Jornadas, groups from 7 different cities meet in Barcelona to share creative experiences of political thought and action.

Invited Guests:
Iconoclasistas, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Not an Alternative, New York, U.S.A.
AulAbierta, Granada, Spain
Nosotros Free Social Space, Athens, Greece
Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry, Toronto, Canada
CSA Atreu!, A Coruña, Galicia
The Commoner, London – Bologna

The KRAX Meeting 2009 program includes workshops, presentations by guest initiatives, guided tours, meetings with local initiatives and a Documentation Centre (KRAX Cargo) with the material compiled through the research process. The Meeting is guided by several concepts of social processes such as autonomy, power-to, self-institution, commons…

For an extended description and the Meeting program, see
KRAX – City Mine(d)

Posted 16 May 2009 † § activism § alternatives § art § cultural production § meetings & conferences § organization § practices ‡ Comments Off °

Remaking Social Practices

A Guattari & Bifo Reading Group
Facilitated by Alessandra Renzi & Christine Shaw

A Joint Initiative by Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry and the Hart House Art Committee Education Sub-Committee
More info: www.tsci.ca | tscinquiry@gmail.com

Thursday 26 March, 6:00pm
Committees Room | Hart House 2nd Floor | 7 Hart House Circle | University of Toronto

The problem of art for [Félix] was completely located in the possibility of putting in motion assemblages of enunciation, housing, urbanism and technologies. (Bifo, 34)

In his extraordinary final statement “Remaking Social Practices,” Guattari suggests how marginal groups acting on their subjective territories can put together experimental formations at the cutting edges of art, science, and technology. Bifo’s “Postmediatic Affect” looks specifically to Guattari’s support of the Radio Alice project that unfolded in Bologna during the Italian social upheavals of 1977. Bifo charts Guattari’s cartographic vision of the future, a future of “communication flows, of economic exploitation, of psychic suffering, and affective solicitation” that we are now living. These two chapters combined open onto a field of questions to be taken up during the reading group session: What are the affective, ecological and political consequences of what Guattari called the ‘post-mediatic era’? How might experiments in social creativity deterritorialize the dynamics of ‘new economy’ capitalism? What is the potential of ‘techno-nomadic thought’? Can the networked diffusion of communication become a privileged plane of social self-organization, rather than merely increase the output of commodified messages and information?

The reading group is a follow-up to Franco (Bifo) Berardi’s talk “The Visionary Cartography of Félix Guattari” on Wednesday 25 March at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, Rm 066.
Readings (available in PDF by clicking on the links below):

  • Félix Guattari, “Remaking Social Practices,” in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Blackwell, 1996)
  • Franco Berardi (Bifo), “Postmediatic Affect,” in Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (Palgrave, 2008)

Alessandra Renzi studied and worked with migrant communities in Berlin and is now completing her PhD on Telestreet at the University of Toronto. She has been involved in various Toronto-based media, immigrant and labour rights projects like CAMERA (The Committee on Alternative Media Experimentation, Research and Analysis) and Precarity Toronto. As a member of Telestreet’s TV channel InsuTv in Naples she is currently collaborating on a feature-length documentary project investigating Naples’ garbage crisis and its connections with organized crime and political corruption.

Christine Shaw holds a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University. Her dissertation Connect, Conjugate, Continue included a translocal curatorial project called Public Acts 1-29 that unfolded along the Trans-Canada Highway. Currently, she co-organizes events with Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry and is developing a series of curatorial projects on affective participation including The Work of Wind, Stubborn Matter and Emergency Rooms (with Steven Eastwood).

With the Reading Group Series, the student-run Hart House Art Committee’s Education Sub-Committee aims to facilitate self-reflexive critical dialogue focusing on the potential of radicalized learning in galleries, museums, and art institutions. The series takes the form of a casual Reading Group inviting guest readers to recommend texts and facilitate structures for discussion. The group is open to and encourages experimentation with discursive forms of learning. The Reading Group Series is a supplement to the Education Sub-Committee’s regular programming of art workshops and seminars targeted at the student body of the University of Toronto.

Posted 20 March 2009 † § activism § alternatives § art § autonomia § cultural production § practices § psychoanalysis § reading group § readings ‡ Comments Off °

The Visionary Cartography of Félix Guattari

A Talk and Book Launch with Franco Berardi (Bifo)

Wednesday 25 March, 7:00-9:00pm
Room 066 | John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design | University of Toronto | 230 College Street

Listen to mp3 audio of event

As a political activist, Bifo has focused on the creation of autonomous sources of information, cultural production and affective participation. Like others involved in the Italian political movement of Autonomia, during the 1970s Bifo fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. Bifo’s political practice intersects with the theoretical and conceptual terrain of Guattari’s writings to rethink the potential of provisional communities, desire, depression, friendship and political errors.

This event marks the long awaited translation of Bifo’s Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (Palgrave, 2008). Bifo’s biography originates in the author’s close personal relationship and collaboration with Guattari in the 1970s and 1980s. In the words of Gary Genosko, “Bifo ensures that the refrains of Guattari’s processes of subjectivation do not petrify into academic givens but continue to sing their extraordinary singularity and make new becomings available for those engaged in tomorrow’s struggles.” Following an introduction by Gary Genosko, Bifo will traverse the pages of Félix.

Franco Berardi (Bifo) is a writer, media theorist and media activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy. He is currently collaborating on the magazine Derive Approdi and teaches the social history of communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. He is the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and of the free pirate television network Telestreet. For more information and writings by the author, including his recent Post-Futurist Manifesto, visit Generation-online.

Gary Genosko is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture Studies and Director of the Technoculture Lab at Lakehead University. He has published extensively on Félix Guattari’s life and work in The Guattari Reader, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, The Party without Bosses: Lessons on Anti-Capitalism from Guattari and Lula da Silva, and the three volume collection Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments. He also edits The Semiotic Review of Books.

Collaborating with a network of activists, artists, and theorists, Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (TSCI) initiates events that inquire into the new enclosures and creative pathways beyond them.

TSCI would like to thank Gary Genosko, Alessandra Renzi and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Posted 11 March 2009 † § activism § autonomia § book launch § capitalism § cultural production § practices § psychoanalysis ‡ Comments Off °

Grasping the Financial Crisis

A TSCI even with Sam Ginding and Leo Panitch
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
7-9pm

Listen to mp3 audio of event

John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design
Room 066 (basement)
University of Toronto
230 College Street

“This sucker could go down”: the outcome feared by George W. Bush has, for the moment, been averted. But global capitalism is, like the planet itself, in panic: stock markets continue to plunge and soar; entire countries verge on insolvency; fiercely pro-market governments nationalize their banking systems. Our political-economic system is experiencing a profound upheaval. The future of the financial crisis, and the response to it, is sure to shape the economic context of our lives for years to come.

What are the roots of the ongoing financial crisis? What might its impact be on an already dreadfully unequal world economy? What effects might it have on our cities and communities? What does it say about the place of personal finance in everyday life? What are the political possibilities and risks it carries for progressive social movements? If casino capitalism makes our lives precarious, what elements would a stable alternative to it include?

These are some of the questions we will explore with Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, who will present an explanation of the current financial crisis. Eric Cazdyn and Kanishka Goonewardena will offer responses, and then there will be a collective discussion in which the audience will be invited to participate.

Sam Gindin is Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University, and has served as research director of the Canadian region of the United Auto Workers and chief economist and Assistant to the President of the Canadian Auto Workers.

Leo Panitch is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University and an editor of the Socialist Register.

Eric Cazdyn is professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. He has recently edited a volume of South Atlantic Quarterly on the philosophical and political problem of disaster.

Kanishka Goonewardena is professor in Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. He recently co-edited Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre.

Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (TSCI) designs education events inquiring into the new enclosures: enclosures on time, space, creativity, thought, ecology, love… We seek to understand how these enclosures work. But combating against cynicism, we also inquire into creative pathways within, against, and beyond the enclosures: pathways of thinking, collaboration, organization, experimentation…

TSCI would like to thank the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Posted 20 November 2008 † § alternatives § capitalism § crisis § economics § finance § globalization ‡ Comments Off °

Inventing Institutions

A TSCI workshop with Ned Rossiter

BBQ to follow

4:00 – 7:00 (BBQ 7:00- 8:00)
Mon. 4 August 2008
The Art Gallery of Mississauga
(300 City Centre Drive, Mississauga Civic Centre, Ground Floor.
For directions from Toronto, see map)

**A free shuttle bus will depart at 3:00 from the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street West) and return at 8:00.

“A Potential Toronto” is the title of a TSCI series of public conversations that took place over several weeks in the Fall of 2007. This project engaged questions of organizing strategies, minor spaces, and alternative economies by spotlighting living local experiments: youth-run cultural spaces, worker co-operatives, accessible housing policy proposals, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell campaigns self-organized with non-status residents… Participants shared experiences, discussed strategies, introduced political concepts, and presented counter-proposals. The series confirmed the existence of a wealth of metropolitan social potential–activities that operate within, against, and beyond the protocols of wage labour, heteronormativity, representative politics, commodified sociality… But A Potential Toronto equally confirmed persistent challenges. Three of these challenges–translation, organization, sustainability–are points of departure for “Inventing Institutions.”

This collaborative workshop with Ned Rossiter will approach the question of the work of political transformation via a discussion of institutional innovation in the context of our contemporary network milieu. It proposes that the current crisis of neoliberal capital, of the traditional institutions of the left, and of widespread social precarity make the question of new institutions urgent. For Rossiter, social-technical network cultures are constitutive sites of new institutional forms, or what he terms “organized networks.” One vibrant area of experimentation on this terrain is autonomous education. At this workshop Ned will propose some theoretical concepts around the theme of inventing institutions, and will speak to his involvement in developing autonomous education institutions specifically. The workshop will unfold as a collective conversation responding to, and further developing, issues raised in Ned’s working paper, “Autonomous Education, New Institutions, and the Experimental Economy of Network Cultures.” The paper can be downloaded from here.

Ned Rossiter is currently an independent researcher based in Beijing and an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. He is author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006).

Inventing Institutions will take place within Adrian Blackwell’s installation Model for a Public Space [Speaker], a non-hierarchical circular seating structure built to facilitate conversation between large numbers of people sitting in close proximity to one another. On the outside it slopes upwards along a spiral ramp until it reaches a height of two meters and from there it slopes down until it touches the ground again at the center. Through this simple diagram it is possible to sit looking inward towards one another or outward to the surrounding city. The installation is part of Models for Public Spaces curated by Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.

Posted 26 July 2008 † § alternatives § cognitive capital § cultural production § education § institution § internet § meetings & conferences § networks § organization § technology ‡ Comments Off °

A Potential Toronto

A Potential Toronto is an event series and exhibition spotlighting alternative economies, minor spaces, and organizing strategies. It is a preliminary step in a longer-term counter-cartography project which would render currents of radical energy visible, audible, and tactile.

Full project description and more info on its exhibits and events can be accessed at the APT website and here.

Posted 31 October 2007 † § activism § alternatives § art § capitalism § commons § cultural production § economics § exhibitions § institution § labour § meetings & conferences § networks § organization § practices § queer § technology § transversal ‡ Comments Off °

A Potential Toronto | November Event Schedule

Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East (w. of Broadview)


Thursday, Nov. 1, 7:30pm
Organizing Strategies
Actualizing potential requires practicing the art of organization. How do we do what needs to get done? What strategies for mobilization and community involvement work? What blocks the flows of these strategies and diminishes the potential to get things done? Anarchist Free University, Multistory Complex, and Planning Action talk about how they organize and why they do it the way they do it.

Friday, Nov. 9, 7:30pm
Queer Publics
What creative potentials for redefining intersubjectivity emerge through the formation of queer publics, and counter-publics? How does the production of minor spaces and practices change the life of the city? And when these spaces are subsumed by dominant practices and politics, how can queer publics re-politicize themselves? Local curators, artists and educators Paul Couillard, Deirdre Logue, John Paul Ricco and Jason St-Laurent talk about the erotic, aesthetic, ethical, and political potential of queer publics.

Thursday, Nov. 15
A Conversation About Worker Co-operatives, 7:30pm
Music, a website, a vibrator, a bicycle and coffee: these are just a few essentials that can be bought in Toronto at a worker co-op—a worker-owned and democratically controlled organization. How are worker co-ops different from traditional workplaces? To what extent does this alternative business model escape, subvert, or resist capitalist conventions of competition, hierarchy, and growth? Join co-op activist and academic J.J. McMurtry and members of Blocks Recording Club, Come as You Are, The Big Carrot, and Planet Bean in a conversation about the possibilities and challenges of the worker co-op as an alternative to conventional business models and workplaces. A closing party will follow!

A Potential Toronto Exhibition and Event Series Closing Party, 9:30pm


Thursday, Nov. 29, 7:30pm
Tools for Transversality w/ Gary Genosko
Room 103, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design [Building], U of T
230 College Street
Democratizing space, cracking constraints, and co-operating differently involves producing situations, tools and modes of operation. The APT event series and exhibition brought different people together to begin to make visible, audible and tactile the forces at work in creating A Potential Toronto. But what connects them? How can these heterogeneous practices, fields, and organisations be held together without either homogenising them or randomly stringing them together? In this talk, Gary Genosko revisits the concept of transversality developed by Félix Guattari. Transversality insists on the “trans” (across, or dynamic movement of crossing). A transversal is a line that cuts across other lines or fields to create new fields. Guattari developed the term transversal to introduce open collective practices that work across the hierarchies of the psychiatric institution, creatively producing new forms of collective subjectivity. Genosko will map the development of the term from Guattari’s clinical work to its subsequent deployments as a force of resistance in other aspects of society.


IN THE GALLERY – October 27 – November 17

24 Hour Gallery (window):
‘Common Sense Revolution’ – Scott Sorli

Lower Level:
‘Toronto’s Urban Unconscious’ – Adrian Blackwell, Tina Chung, Andrea Gaus, – Davide Gianforcaro, Kim Ligers, Andrea Macecek, Graeme Stewart, and Geoffrey Thun. Projects from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Upper Level:
A Potential Toronto info-shop and library.

Posted 30 October 2007 † § alternatives § commons § cultural production § exhibitions § labour § meetings & conferences § organization § practices § queer § technology § transversal § urban space ‡ Comments Off °

A Potential Toronto | October Event Schedule

Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East (w. of Broadview)


Thurs., Oct., 11, 7:30pm
Housing Rights, Safe Spaces, Creative Actions
Exposing the connections between poverty, violence and homelessness in women’s lives, Shiri Pasternak talks with Jennifer Plyler (Women Against Poverty Collective) about their campaigns and direct actions to create safe, controlled housing for women at risk in Toronto. WAPC believe that in order for housing to be sustainable, it must be safe, and in order for housing to be safe, it must be controlled by women for women. WAPC will screen their film “Women’s Housing Takeover,” which documents the June 3rd 2007 takeover of a long-abandoned downtown house by WAPC members and allies.


Thurs., Oct., 18, 7:30pm
Youth Generated Autonomous Spaces
Catch da Flava Youth Magazine, E.Y.E. Video, Transmission Zine, and Handy Trans are just a few of the creative projects, programs and services created by and for youth at Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre and Trans_Fusion Crew (Supporting Our Youth). These youth-driven centres are autonomous spaces for racialized and marginalized youth to explore their identities, voice their experiences and create their own narratives of self. Coordinators and participants of these programs will join Sue Ruddick (University of Toronto) to talk about the possibilities and challenges youth encounter in acts of self-representation. Catch da Flava will launch the September/October Election’s Issue of their Youth Magazine.


Tues. Oct. 23, 7:30pm
Migrants, Borders, Citizenship
How are politicized groups of non-status migrants transforming established norms of citizenship? How are regularization campaigns addressing human rights and migrant safety? What networks of affinity are emerging between self-organising non-status migrants? How are municipal legalization campaigns like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell contributing to a new security for Toronto’s non-status residents? Peter Nyers (McMaster University, Citizenship Studies Media Lab), Cynthia Wright (York University), Patricia Díaz Barrero (Colombian Forced Migration Project), and members of No One Is Illegal (Toronto) open a collective conversation about how citizenship is being rethought.

Mon. Oct. 29, 7:00pm
Abandonment Issues
Join a group of Toronto activists in a panel discussion about mapping the wasted and abandoned buildings, lots, and spaces in the city. Their maps and research support a campaign for a ‘Use It or Lose It’ bylaw that would push for abandoned buildings and underutilized public spaces to be expropriated by the City and redeveloped as badly needed affordable housing and social centres, For more information see Abandonment Issues.


IN THE GALLERY – October 27 – November 10, 12-5pm Wednesday to Saturday

24 Hour Gallery (window):
‘Common Sense Revolution’ – Scott Sorli

Lower Level:
‘Toronto’s Urban Unconscious’ – Adrian Blackwell, Tina Chung, Andrea Gaus, – Davide Gianforcaro, Kim Ligers, Andrea Macecek, Graeme Stewart, and Geoffrey Thun. Projects from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Upper Level:
A Potential Toronto info-shop and library

Posted 30 September 2007 † § alternatives § citizenship § commons § housing § migration § practices § squatting § urban space § youth ‡ Comments Off °

A Potential Toronto | Launch: Thurs. 27 Sept. 2007

A Potential Toronto
Initiated by Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (TSCI)

27 Sept. – 10 Nov. 2007
Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East [map]

Fear disciplines. Capital divides. States order. Creativity sells. Cynicism saturates. Against the persisting ethos of the ‘Common Sense Revolution’ are dots that puncture the city’s territory. Where are they? A Potential Toronto is an event series and exhibition spotlighting alternative economies, minor spaces, and organizing strategies. What experiments and proposals are out there for democratizing space, cracking constraints, and co-operating differently? What works, and why? What blocks an alternative from flourishing? What concepts help us think through it? Exploring these questions, A Potential Toronto is a preliminary step in a longer-term counter-cartography project which would render currents of radical energy visible, audible, and tactile.

LAUNCH: Thurs. 27 Sept. 2007
6:30pm: Opening for ‘Common Sense Revolution’ / ‘Toronto’s Urban Unconscious’
7:30pm: ‘A Potential Commonism’ – A talk by Nick Dyer-Witheford
PARTY TO FOLLOW

‘A Potential Commonism’ – A talk by Nick Dyer-Witheford [author of Cyber-Marx]
It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Does the widespread interest in ‘commons’ by environmental, labour, and open-source activists draw a new line of fight and flight pointing beyond capital? Nick Dyer-Witheford presents a talk on the concept of commonism.

‘Common Sense Revolution’ – Scott Sorli
This information graphic tracks Ontario welfare income for a single person against the number of homeless who have died on the streets of Toronto over the past two decades. The year 1995 is particularly striking, the year that welfare income begins to plummet, the year that homeless deaths begin to jump, the year that the Harris Conservatives were first elected.

‘Toronto’s Urban Unconscious’ – Adrian Blackwell, Tina Chung, Andrea Gaus, Davide Gianforcaro, Kim Ligers, Andrea Macecek, Graeme Stewart, and Geoffrey Thun + Projects from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design

This design research project focuses on Toronto’s Western Rail triangle, an area of urban fabric that suffers from both social and physical isolation from the rest of the city. We argue that this territory acts as Toronto’s urban unconscious, divided from other spaces by ravines, railways, highways, and industrial fabric. These seven architecture and urban design projects make use of the area’s existing potential to imagine useful and pleasurable spaces for daily life.

** EVENT SERIES DETAILS:

COMMONS READING GROUP [begins 1 oct.]
WOMEN AGAINST POVERTY COLLECTIVE [11 oct.]
YOUTH [18 oct.]
BORDERS + MIGRATION [23 oct.]
ABANDONED HOUSING: USE IT OR LOSE IT [29 oct.]
ORGANIZING [1 nov.]
QUEER PUBLICS [9 nov.]
WORKER CO-OPS [10 nov.]
TOOLS FOR TRANSVERSALITY [24 nov.]

Posted 15 September 2007 † § activism § alternatives § autonomia § capitalism § citizenship § commons § cooperatives § cultural production § economics § education § exhibitions § housing § labour § networks § organization § practices § queer § reading group § squatting § state § technology § transversal § urban space § youth ‡ Comments Off °

Commons | Reading Group

Call for Participation
Part of A Potential Toronto

Mondays, 8-10pm, Oct. 1 to Dec. 3, 2007
Location TBC

Free, but spots are limited. To sign up, contact: shiri.pasternak@gmail.com

Copies of readings provided.

Facilitated by Shiri Pasternak

What are the commons and why has the idea emerged again, everywhere, in popular culture and political theory? What kinds of questions does the concept of commons seem to answer amidst the clamour of social and environmental crisis today? This reading group will approach the commons by asking questions about the nature and histories of enclosure. We will be asking: How do property regimes affect social order; how do they foreclose or fuel commons and common space? What is the relationship between sovereignty, property, and the commons? We will also look at the way the concept of the commons is being co-opted by neo-liberalism and competing hegemonic regimes and explore the relationships between information commons and place-based commons.


Week 1
Cole Harris. “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire” (2004), Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94:1, 165-182.

Nicholas Blomley. “Law, Property, and the Spaces of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid” (2003), Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93:1, March 2003, 121-141.

Week 2
Farshad Araghi. “The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times: Peasants and the Agrarian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Chapter 8 in Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment, eds. Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Frederick H. Buttel. Monthly Review Press Books, 2000.

Week 3
Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite. Information Feudalism. “Introduction.” Earthscan Publications Ltd., 2002.

Watch, if you can: Sonic Outlaws – documentary film by Craig Baldwin

Week 4
John Willinsky. “The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science,” First Monday, volume 10, number 8 (August 2005).

Week 5
Margaret E.I. Kipp. “Software and seeds: Open source methods,” First Monday, 10:9, (September 2005).

Week 6
Anthony McCann. “Enclosure Without and Within the ‘Information Commons.’” Information and Communications Technology Law 14(3):217-240, October 2005).

Week 7
Constantine Caffentzis. “A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons.”

Michael Goldman. Privatizing Nature: Political struggles for the global commons. Chapter 1. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Week 8
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies. The Subsistence Perspective. Chapter 6, “Defending, Reclaiming, and Reinventing the Commons.” Zed Books, 1999.

James McCarthy. “Commons as Counter-Hegemonic Project.” Capitalism Nature Socialism. 16:1 (March 2005).

Week 9
J.K. Gibson-Graham. A Postcapitalist Politics. Chapter 5, “The Community Economy.” University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Posted 13 September 2007 † § alternatives § capitalism § commons § economics § labour § organization § practices § reading group § readings ‡ Comments Off °

[CFC] Call for Collaboration

Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry is in the midst of mobilizing a counter-cartography initiative and we need you!  is a first-step towards mapping alternative economies and minor spaces within Toronto. It begins this fall with a 6-week event series and we invite you to join us in conceiving, organizing and animating the event series.

Join us at an Open Assembly to learn more and become involved:

Open Assembly #5:
Monday 17 September
8:00 – 10:00
Tequila Bookworm
512 Queen West

Open Assembly #4:
Park, Potluck, Plan
Wednesday 15 August
7:00 – 9:00
Scadding Court / Alexander Park (Bathurst & Dundas)

Open Assembly #3:
Tuesday 31 July
6:30 – 8:30
Alterna Room (large boardroom on 4th floor)
Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Ave, Suite 120

We will be looking at examples of counter-cartography that have been points of inspiration. Bring yours to share over a potluck dinner.

Open Assembly #2:
Tuesday 17 July
6:00 (potluck dinner)
Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East

Open Assembly #1:
Moderated by Darren O’Donnell
Sunday 8 July
2:00-5:00
Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East

Come out and share what you are doing with your hearts and minds, your bodies and organs, your spaces and flows and how you are living in your neighbourhoods, in your city, in your corporeal and technical networks.

See below for event series description…

Posted 25 June 2007 † § alternatives § assemblies § exhibitions § meetings & conferences § practices ‡ Comments Off °

A Potential Toronto [CFC]

A Potential Toronto (working title)
A Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry series
14 September – 27 October, 2007
Toronto Free Gallery and various sites throughout the city.

Another city is possible. But what is to be done? Better, what is being done? How are individuals and groups organizing themselves to do it?

A Potential Toronto is the working title of a 6-week event series. We invite you to join us in conceiving, refining, organizing, and animating the series. It is a preliminary step in what we hope will be a more long-term counter-cartography initiative. Researching and mapping some of the city’s alternative economies and minor spaces is the substance of this project: wild spaces, free services, co-operatives, community currencies, off-grid housing, informal systems of mutual aid… Where are they? How do they work? Do they connect? How might we map them as a local area network?

In order to map sites and tactics of difference, dissent, deviance, and refusal it is necessary to invent concepts and create ways of working. This requires cooperation of minds and bodies engaged in the self-organization of a collective event. The process of mapping, or of cartography, we are proposing to mobilize does not just mean surveying a territory from above, or representing a process that has unfolded in the past, but instead, effectively fleshing out the contours of a living social dynamic, of an event which bears the future, of potential.

Each of the six weeks will traverse a series of shared concerns: work, housing, ecology, health, sexuality, creativity, mobility, space, history… Every Friday evening we will gather at Toronto Free Gallery for a collaboratively generated event. Event formats could range from walking tours to collective dinners to informal conversations. Gatherings will involve participants in and theorists of alternative economies and minor spaces.

At each event we invite participants and guests to leave behind a trace—an image, a tip, a guide, directions, a piece of writing, a web link, a recommended resource… These will be added in the gallery to a collaborative emergent map of another Toronto.

Every Monday night throughout the series there will be concurrent reading groups addressing the commons, migration, counter-cartography, dynamic networks, and the art of organization.

A Potential Toronto is motivated by our desire to learn more about and raise the profile of various alternative social, economic, and subjective experiments underway locally. Our practical hope is to increase the use of these alternatives so that in our everyday lives more of us might reproduce what we value rather than what we oppose. From this, a counter-network may become visible, and, we hope, lay some groundwork for next steps towards a counter-cartography of Toronto.

Posted 01 June 2007 † § alternatives § cultural production § economics § meetings & conferences § organization ‡ Comments Off °

Political Acts of Love

An informal conversation with Michael Hardt

Sunday 20 May 2007
2:00 – 4:00
Tequila Bookworm (upstairs)
512 Queen Street West

With Michael, we want to take up the question: Can love act as a political concept? In the final pages of Multitude, Hardt and Negri approach the concept of love as what is needed to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. They end by writing, “We can already recognize that today time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living — and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous. In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future. This will be the real political act of love.” (Multitude, 358)

It is with these last words that we would like to begin our conversation on how to construct a new concept of love — a love that is both personal and political; a love capable of constructing new networks and new subjectivities; a love that is learnt and developed in relation to the network; a love based on differences; a love that creatively experiments with singularities; a love that is ontologically productive. Michael Hardt will begin with a few thoughts on why the concept interests him as well as the advantages, problems and limitations he sees with the concept. Together, we will move outwards from there.

In anticipation of the conversation we suggest reading the following texts:
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 348-358
Hardt, “Conclusion: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy,” in Gilles Deleuze, 112-122

Posted 15 May 2007 † § Deleuze § autonomia § concepts § love § multitude § prefiguration ‡ Comments Off °

Autogestión: Self-Management in Argentina

A conversation with Mario Alberto Barrios, General Secretary of the National Association of Self-Managed Workers, Argentina Workers’ Central* and president of the worker cooperative Unión Solidaria de Trabajadores (UST)

Monday, April 16, 7-9 pm
Tequila Bookworm
512 Queen St. West, Toronto

In Argentina, especially since the socio-economic crisis of 2001-02, an array of grassroots groups has been carrying out experiments in autogestión, or self-management. To self-manage is not only to organize and produce cooperatively. It is also to transform traditional economic relations into ’social economies’ that foster more equitable, humane, and horizontal relations among individuals and groups. Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry invites you to join us for a conversation about self-management with Mario Alberto Barrios, who is active in struggles for the rights of self-managed workers in Argentina. This conversation is a continuation of TSCI’s Laboratory Latin America series, a series built on the exchange of collective experiments in the production of new forms of working, living, and creating

See other events and writings in Laboratory Latin America series: Recovering and Recreating Spaces of Production | Recovery! Recreation!

*Asociación Nacional de Trabajadores Autogestionados, Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos

Posted 01 April 2007 † § Argentina § Latin America § capitalism § cooperatives § crisis § economics § labour § organization § practices § prefiguration § self-management § squatting ‡ Comments Off °

Recovering and Recreating Spaces of Production

A Virtual Roundtable with Protagonists of Argentina’s Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement

The following are excerpts from a series of exchanges, during the summer of 2005, between protagonists in Argentina’s worker-recovered enterprises movement (movimiento de empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores, or ERT) and Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry. These voices are assembled here, in a virtual roundtable,as a narrative about struggles over spaces of production. This act of assemblage is a contribution to the circulation of critical analysis, joyful affects, affirmative statements,and creative actions.

We hear from: Pablo Pozzi, an Argentine labour and guerrilla-movement historian and Chair of US History at the University of Buenos Aires who works as a radical pedagogue in numerous villas de emergencias (shantytowns) and unions across Argentina; Eduardo Murúa, an organizer of the autonomist ERT collective Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (National Movement of Recovered Enterprises, or MNER), who is currently in the midst of various workspace recoveries while forging links with the ERT movement across Latin America; Edith Oviedo, former journalist, educational book publisher, and member of the Editorial Cefomar workers’ co-operative; Plácido Peñarrieta, the current president of the Artes Gráficas Chilavert workers’ cooperative and a housing-rights activist; Cándido González, a Chilavert worker, spokesperson for MNER, and an activist who assists recovered enterprises in their crucial moments of struggle; Manuel Basualdo, an experienced book-binding specialist at Chilavert; Walter Basualdo, Manuel’s son, an apprentice machinist who has worked at Chilavert for three years; and Martín Cossarini, an apprentice machinist at Chilavert who has been active in setting up cultural spaces in workers’ cooperatives.

With these protagonists our collective shares common questions: How do bodies insulate themselves from reactive forces? What new forms of constituent sociability, subjectivity, in short, composition, are emerging today? “What alliances might be forged while under siege?”2 What are bodies, in practices of intentional cooperation, capable of? What does it mean to make subjectivity a locus of struggle? What tensions exist between a strategy oriented towards the reclamation of work and one based on the refusal of work? How might creative assemblages keep lines of affinity moving without freezing their fluid material?

We write from Toronto. These voices speak from Buenos Aires. We visit. They stay. We find ourselves recalling a closing line in an email we received from one of the protagonists who speaks in these pages: “the greatest support you compañeros from the North can offer us here in Argentina is for you to continue to struggle against the system in your own localities, where you live.”

The voices gathered here speak across the theme, “occupy, resist, and produce.” The last term is, perhaps, the key term, the catalytic force coursing throughout: production not just of goods, but of desires, of affinities, of communities—all circumscribed by struggle, ‘lucha,’ undertaken in response to an urgent need, to produce autonomous spaces.

Read article.

+++

This article also appears in: Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry, ‘Recovering and Recreating Spaces of Production’ (Interview assemblage). Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture and Action, Vol. 1 No. 1, Winter 2007, pp. 33-48.

Posted 25 January 2007 † § Argentina § Latin America § alternatives § capitalism § commons § cooperatives § crisis § economics § finance § globalization § labour § organization § practices § prefiguration § self-management § squatting § writings (tsci) ‡ Comments Off °

Post-Fordism | Reading Group

Mondays, 7:30-9:30pm
22 Jan. – 26 March 2007

What forces brought an alleged ‘post-Fordist’ regime into being? What is its composition? What are the possibilities and limits of this concept? How is it manifesting in labour, the city, cultural production…? How, and with what effects, are flexibilization and decentralization operating as new forms of control? How do these forms of control coexist with centralized command? How does it relate to neoliberalism? What radical proposals and potentialities are emerging under conditions of advanced post-Fordism?

Reading List

  • Bob Jessop. “The Regulation Approach.”
  • David Harvey. “Fordism” and “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation.”
  • Michel Aglietta. “The Transformation of the Wage-Earners’ Conditions of Life.”
  • Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. “The Formation of the Projective City” and “1968: Crisis and Revival of Capitalism.”
  • John Holloway. “The Great Bear: Post-Fordism and Class Struggle.”
  • Bob Jessop. “Post-Fordism and the State.”
  • Antonio Negri. “Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker.”
  • Thomas Atzert. “About Immaterial Labor and Biopower.”
  • Gilles Deleuze. “Postscript on the Control Societies.”
  • Brian Holmes. “The Flexible Personality.”
  • J-K Gibson-Graham. “Post-Fordism as Politics.”
  • Linda McDowell. “Father and Ford Revisited: Gender, Class, and Employment Change in the New Millennium.”
  • Kathi Weeks. “The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective.”
  • Andrea Fumagilli. “Ten Propositions on Basic Income: Basic Income in a Flexible Accumulation System.”
  • David Harvey. “Neoliberalism and the Restoration of Class Power.”
Posted 19 January 2007 † § Deleuze § alternatives § capitalism § class § cognitive capital § commons § concepts § finance § globalization § immaterial labour § labour § post-Fordism § reading group § readings ‡ Comments Off °

Defining States. Mattering Differently.

A Conversation with Brian Massumi and Erin Manning

A Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry Event

Saturday, November 25, 2006
2:00 – 4:00 pm
Rm 066, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design [Building], U of T
230 College Street

Let’s get to the heart of the matter. Nation state. Rogue state. Natural state. State of exception. State form. Head of state. Police state. State of grace. State of mind. State variable. State of fear. State of emergency. Indeterminate state. Nascent state. Static. State your point. Mental state. Emotional state. Altered state. State jurisdiction. State of the union. State of affairs. State your name. Stately. Statism. Subject of the statement. State your purpose. Smattering. Grey matter. Anti-matter. Love matters. Matter and energy. Matter and memory. Matter of principle. Reading matter. Matter of minutes. Matters of the heart. Matter of course. Matter of opinion. For that matter. Money matters. What does it matter? Mind over matter. Fecal matter. No matter what. Matter-form. Matter of fact. Matter of habit. What’s the matter? Matter of life and death.

“… the question is not how to elude the order-word but how to elude the death-sentence it envelops, how to develop its power of escape.”
–Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

What can be done in the face of states of domination that are able to thrive on the assaults against them? Can we defy these states? Can we matter differently? Join us for an intimate conversation around these questions with Brian Massumi and Erin Manning.

Brian Massumi specializes in philosophy, media theory, and visual culture. He is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. His translations from the French include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. He teaches in the Communication Department of the Université de Montréal, where he directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism.

Erin Manning is a philosopher, visual artist and dancer. She is assistant professor in Studio Art and Film Studies at Concordia University and director of The Sense Lab, an interdisciplinary research-creation laboratory. She is the author of Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada and Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty.

Posted 08 November 2006 † § Deleuze § alternatives § matter § networks § practices § prefiguration § state § technology ‡ Comments Off °

“Are we all listening for what’s to come?”

In anticipation of a presentation TSCI is giving at
collectiveXchange
SUNY Buffalo
Nov. 7, 2006:

***
Listening

***
Reading

von Gunten

Dostoevsky

Deleuze

Posted 06 November 2006 † § Deleuze § TSCI § alternatives § art § concepts § meetings & conferences § prefiguration § readings § resistance § transversal ‡ Comments Off °

Entangled Territories 2 | Reading Group

CLASS FULL!

Tuesdays, 9:00 – 11:00pm
10 October – 5 December 2006

This 9-week reading group will continue our inquiries across a radical terrain of thought (philosophical, activist, aesthetic) through which social organization is constituted by the collective practices and desires of the multitude. Our point of departure will be a return to Lazzarato’s biopower/biopolitics, via Foucault. We will then extend our encounter with biopolitics with a series of related conceptual/pragmatic tools like state of exception, bare life, sphere of gesture, affect, desire, force, exodus, creative acts, networked resistance, flexible personality…. In combination with a set of theoretical inquiries we will explore contemporary political events, lived relations of power, media activism, squatting, creative actions, the potential of bodies, and joyful life as instances of the multitude innovating alternatives.

Our conversations will inform the design of an event/workshop TSCI is planning with Brian Massumi and Erin Manning for November 2006.

While we have begun to develop a shared lexicon to explore this terrain together, we will continue to create a space of mutual respect and learning, learning that unfolds through grace and joy.

Reading List:

  • Lazzarato. “From Biopower to Biopolitics”
  • Foucault. “17 March 1976,” in Society Must be Defended
  • Agamben. Selections from Homo Sacer and Means Without Ends
  • Massumi. “Fear (the Spectrum Said),” in Multitudes
  • Virno. “General Intellect, Exodus, Multitude: An Interview with Paolo Virno”
  • Simondon. “The Genesis of the Individual,” In Incorporations
  • Malgré Tout Collective. “Manifesto”
  • Negri. Selections from The Savage Anomaly
  • Colectivo Situaciones. “Something More on Research Militancy: Footnotes on Procedures and (In)Decision,” in Ephemera
  • Manning. “Sensing Beyond Security,” in The Politics of Touch
  • Radio Ligna. Radio Ballet
  • Deleuze. “Desire and Pleasure,” in Two Regimes of Madness
  • Deleuze. “What is the Creative Act?” in Two Regimes of Madness
  • Meinhof. “Armed Anti-Imperialist Struggle,” in Hatred of Capitalism
  • Cordingley. “Can Masdeu: Rise of the Rurbano Revolution,” in Making Their Own Plans
  • Goddard. “Felix and Alice in Wonderland: The Encounter Between Guattarri and Berardi and the Post-Media Era,” in Generation Online
  • Holmes. “The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance,” in Interactivist Info Exchange
Posted 02 October 2006 † § Deleuze § activism § acts § aesthetics § affect § alternatives § art § biopolitics § capitalism § concepts § desire § multitude § networks § practices § reading group § readings § resistance § subjectivity ‡ Comments Off °

Entangled Territories

download event poster

A Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry event
With/in Adrian Blackwell’s carpool + Republic of Safety
Sunday, August 6, 2006
4:00-8:00pm

Location:
Idomo east parking lot
1100 Sheppard Ave. W.
Near the Downsview Subway station

The gentrification of Toronto’s downtown has displaced low-income residents. New immigrants, often precariously employed, are warehoused in high-density structures within low-density suburbs. City land is rezoned for optimum profit extraction rather than for livability. The costs of using public transit are rising as new programs of surveillance carefully monitor the smog-saturated city.

This neoliberal agenda remains contested by urban social movements committed to the building of a new commons: street protests, squats, community gardens, housing co-ops, public-space interventions, regularization campaigns.

Toronto’s territory is entangled in divergent forces of neoliberal enclosure and public commons. Animating this play of forces is a triad of actors: capitalists, governments, and multitudes. At stake in their balance of power is access to affordable places to live, sources of healthy food, a secure income, mobility, pleasurable forms of life.

+ How is capital capturing urban territories? Which spaces are currently under threat of enclosure?
+ What possibilities exist for the state to protect existing public spaces or initiate new ones, when its role has increasingly become the policing of space?
+ What capacities do we have for escaping existing enclosures, in the name of constructing new urban commons?

Join us for a conversation in and about the city’s entangled territories. We’ll move ourselves through a series of small-group discussions, and then end off the event with a collective conversation.

The event will be held in a parking lot near Downsview Park. This space is entangled, at the end of a subway line, yet in the middle of the city: in the inner suburbs, next to an army base, big boxes, and warehouses, at the confluence of highways, subways, and an airport. Our site is an abstract space of pause within this non-place of circulation.

Guests
Yvonne Bambrick (Streets are for People) + Sue Bunce (Planning Action) + Rob Gill (York) + Heather Haynes (Toronto Free Gallery) + Joe Hermer (UT) + Luis Jacob (artist) + Peter Nyers (McMaster) + Darren O’Donnell (artist) + Jay Pitter (artist) + SYN (artists) + Leah Sandals (Spacing) + Jeff Shantz + Kika Thorne (artist) + Rinaldo Walcott (OISE) + others TBC

About carpool
carpool (apparatus of capture) is a tent that connects four cars to form a larger composition. The cars are caught in fabric, creating a structure as they move apart from one another, temporarily immobilizing them while opening their private interiors to public use.

About Entangled Territories
Entangled Territories is Act 16 of Public Acts 1-29, a network of lines of flight for the experiences and experiments of 29 artists, activists and researchers situated along the Trans-Canada Highway. www.publicacts.ca

Read an article by TSCI inspired by this event.

Posted 02 August 2006 † § acts § aesthetics § affect § alternatives § art § capitalism § commons § concepts § globalization § post-Fordism § squatting § state § urban space ‡ Comments Off °

Readings for Entangled Territories

We’re gathering a growing set of readings related to the Entangled Territories event. These can be accessed from here.

Posted 01 August 2006 † § acts § aesthetics § affect § alternatives § art § capitalism § commons § concepts § globalization § post-Fordism § readings § squatting § state § urban space ‡ Comments Off °

Manifestations of Soft Revolution

by Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry

The energy of the manifesto is drawn from expressions in the here and now of alternate possibilities for life. Music is just one territory of cultural production in which such expressions of the possible manifest, in all their messy contradictions: “Our music foretells our future. Let us lend it an ear.”

This text flows from our listening to – or (shall we admit it?), our fictionalizing of – a strain of contemporary Canadian indie music. We, like many others, have been moved first by the sounds and, soon after, by the concept of a “Soft Revolution” as annunciation by Stars. No single group could, however, stake a proprietary claim on any soft revolution worthy of the name.

Read and listen to the entire manifesto.

Posted 20 July 2006 † § TSCI § aesthetics § affect § alternatives § love § manifestos § music § prefiguration § resistance § soft revolution § writings (tsci) ‡ Comments Off °

Recovery! Re-creation! | ¡Recuperación! ¡Re-creación!

Recovery! Re-creation!
A Conversation about Argentina’s Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement with Eduardo Murúa

Saturday, June 3, 2006
4pm – 7pm
Ideal Coffee
Ossignton Ave., 2 blocks south of Dundas St.

Much of today’s global Left sees in Latin America inspiring instances of creative resistance to the neoliberal emergency. “Recovery! Recreation!” is a public conversation about a living experiment in Laboratory Latin America: Argentina’s movement of worker-recovered enterprises, or ERT (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores).

Since 1998, in response to economic and political crisis in Argentina, the ERT has been reclaiming spaces of production in a struggle against social precarity and humiliating experiences of work. Not limited to the recovery of jobs, recovered enterprises are reconfiguring workplaces along more participatory lines, are developing into a horizontal network, and are often doubling as alternative schools, art galleries, community centres, or free medical clinics.

Join us for a conversation with Eduardo Murúa, president of Argentina’s National Movement of Recovered Enterprises, facilitated by local labour activist Jorge Garcia-Orgales. With Eduardo and Jorge, we ask: What is being recovered? What is being created? What challenges does the ERT movement face? What lessons might the movement yield for struggles to democratize workplaces and communities locally? What lines of affinity exist, or might yet be invented, between Canadian labour groups and Argentina’s newest workers’ movements?

Guests:
Eduardo Murúa: President, Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (Argentina)
Jorge Garcia-Orgales: Researcher, United Steelworkers of America, Toronto, Canada

Posted 22 May 2006 † § Argentina § Latin America § alternatives § capitalism § cooperatives § crisis § economics § finance § globalization § labour § practices § resistance § self-management § squatting ‡ Comments Off °

Entangled Territories | Reading Group

CLASS FULL!

Mondays, 8:30-10:30pm
6 March – 24 April 2006

This 8-week reading group is a component of an (indeterminate) event TSCI is planning for summer 2006, called “Entangled Territories.” Our conversations will inform the design of Entangled Territories, though we by no means wish to confine our conversations to that purpose.

The proposed reading list is a brief survey of the thought of a handful of poststructuralist philosophers and autonomist theorists. TSCI proposes to approach these readings with a sort of conceptual pragmatism. After opening our conversations by exploring the question, ‘what is a concept?’, we will encounter, map, and question a number of conceptual tools, like joyful passions, constituent power, becoming, autonomy, exodus, biopolitics, biopower, event…

Participants probably have varying levels of familiarity with the texts we’ll be reading. We strive to facilitate a space of mutual respect and reciprocal learning, bearing in mind the (thankfully) different backgrounds that we will each bring to this experiment in collective reading.

Reading List

  • Bifo. “What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?” In Republicart.
  • Deleuze and Guattari. “Introduction: The Question Then…” and “What is a Concept?” In What is Philosophy?
  • Deleuze. “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” “On Philosophy,” “Control and Becoming.” In Negotiations.
  • Foucault. “So is it Important to Think?” In Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.
  • Hardt. “Spinozan Practice: Affirmation and Joy (Speculation, Ontological Expression, Power, Practice)” In Deleuze:An Apprenticeship in Philosophy.
  • Lazzarato. “From Biopower to Biopolitics.” In Pli.
  • Lazzarato. “Struggle, Event, Media.”
  • Negri and Guattari. “The Revolution Began in ’68.” Communists Like Us.
  • Thoburn. “Introduction: The Grandeur of Marx.” In Deleuze, Marx, and Politics.
  • Virno. “Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism.” In Grammar of the Multitude.
Posted 02 March 2006 † § Deleuze § Uncategorized § acts § aesthetics § affect § alternatives § art § autonomia § biopolitics § capitalism § commons § concepts § globalization § multitude § post-Fordism § reading group § readings § subjectivity ‡ Comments Off °

Transformative Tactics

Celebrating the launch of Richard Day’s book, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (Pluto Press/Between the Lines)

What strategies and tactics are today’s activists using to achieve social transformation? Are taking over the state or trying to reform its structures the only way to achieve meaningful social change? Or are direct-action tactics, for example, potentially more effective?

Join us for a participant-led conversation and celebration around these questions. Some of our guests include Adrian Blackwell, AnarchistU, Todd Irvine, David McNally, Stuart Vickars, Cynthia Wright, and others to be confirmed. The evening will begin with short video screenings by John Greyson, Rick Palidwor, and Pedestrian Mob. After the forum, everyone is invited to continue the conversation at a party in Toronto Free Gallery!

Supported by Between the Lines: www.btlbooks.com

Posted 16 November 2005 † § activism § affect § affinity § alternatives § anarchism § autonomia § book launch § economics § organization § practices § prefiguration § resistance § subjectivity § transversal ‡ Comments Off °

Here be Dragons: Cartography of Globalization

An exhibition initiated by Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry

12 Nov. – 17 Dec. 2005
Opening reception: Sat. 12 Nov., 8-10pm
Toronto Free Gallery

Centuries ago, map-makers wrote the phrase ‘here be dragons’ on areas that were outside of their known world. Where should this phrase be written on contemporary maps of political and economic territory?

Recently, activists, artists, and researchers have used the form of the map to visually represent the distribution of power, the circulation of information, and the organization of control in the age of capitalist globalization. These critical cartographers make visible the vast networks of national governments, transnational corporations, and international institutions which channel massive flows of people, labour, interests, dollars, and meaning. Making the complexities of our present more graspable, counter-cartography furnishes us with pedagogical tools for cognitively navigating the class-divided, politically administered, and digitally mediated world we live in.

But the point of these maps isn’t to say: ‘Look how trapped we are.’ These networks are contested, and vulnerable. And there exist counter-networks, on whose nodes a multitude of protagonists are searching for and inventing emergency exits. Maps of these powers ‘from below’ give expression to creative resistances and workable alternatives. These are a different type of dragon.

Believing that counter-cartography is a political provocation, the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry is initiating a series of participatory events during the mapping show as forums for the discussion of questions raised by these critical cartographers. Where are the dragons today? How might we navigate a course within, against, and beyond the enclosures of the known world?

The exhibition features maps, texts, audio, and video by:

Posted 11 November 2005 † § alternatives § capitalism § commons § concepts § counter-cartography § economics § exhibitions § globalization § institution § migration § organization § political economy § urban space ‡ Comments Off °

Politics of the Plate

A slow-food dinner conversation about the politics of what we eat

Thursday, October 27, 2005
7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Toronto Free Gallery

Admission – Free if you bring a desire for conviviality and a dish of your choice to share, made from something locally-grown.

Why should we “eat lower on the marketing chain”? Can a politically aware eating experience still be pleasurable? How have processed and packaged foods separated us geographically and psychologically from what we eat, and from each other? Is it realistic to ensure healthy and locally-grown food for all Torontonians all the time? Is it possible for city-dwellers to eat what they grow themselves? Can the fair food, slow food, organic food, and other such movements, help to eradicate the risky ecological footprints caused by our consumerist paradigm and over-consumptive lifestyles? How can we integrate fairer food practices into our everyday lives?

Join us for a slow-food dinner conversation where we will be engaging with these critical questions while partaking of a lively community dinner together.

The conversation around the dinner table will be enriched by the research and experiences of the following Toronto-area food activists:

Posted 30 October 2005 † § activism § alternatives § capitalism § commons § economics § food § political economy § practices § resistance ‡ Comments Off °

Whose University?

Nick Dyer-Witheford and David Noble in Conversation

Monday, September 26, 2005
7:30pm – 9:30pm
Toronto Free Gallery

Back to school special! How are commercial interests reshaping Canadian universities? How is the neoliberal agenda playing out in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences? What is it like to teach and learn in a university in an age of entrepreneurship? Is the university a place of diversity? Relevance? Do students and young academics have just cause to be cynical? Can critics really say that the university today is simply a pawn to profit? What strategies might be used to challenge the corporatization of education? What might the university yet become?

Join us for an intimate conversation around these questions with Nick Dyer-Witheford and David Noble—two of Canada’s foremost analysts of global capitalism, higher education, and social movements. Nick and David will talk for about 45 minutes and then the event will be open to audience discussion.

There will also be a screening of John Greyson’s Motet for Amplified Voices (2004, 5 min.), documenting the recent megaphone choir action at York University.

Nick Dyer-Witheford is a professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario in London, where he coordinates the Media in the Public Interest program. He is author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Dyer-Witheford’s essay on the university in the era of cognitive capitalism will be published in a forthcoming collection, Utopian Pedagogy.

Scholar and activist David Noble teaches at York University. His books America by Design, A World without Women, The Religion of Technology, and Digital Diploma Mills have reshaped our understanding of the evolution of technology, religion, and education. His latest book is Beyond the Promised Land: The Movement and the Myth. Noble has an essay on the contemporary university in the September issue of Canadian Dimension.

Posted 20 September 2005 † § alternatives § autonomia § capitalism § economics § education § institution § political economy § resistance ‡ Comments Off °

Precarity Forum: Discussion + Screening

Undocumented workers. Young chainstore employees. Communication freelancers. Artists with reputation but not rent. Sessional university teachers. Short-term contract holders. These evoke radically different situations, but they share a quality of precariousness: non-guaranteed jobs, insecure incomes, uncertain futures. Work overtakes life. Precarity is becoming a norm in the ‘flexible’ economy. What are its roots? How is it lived? How is it being resisted? Join us for a discussion of these questions. This will be followed by a screening of Precarity (2004), a video which documents anti-precarity struggles that are flaring up around the world.

PANELISTS:
Jean McDonald – No One Is Illegal – Toronto
Sonia Singh – Toronto Organizing for Fair Employment
Kika Thorne – artist
Leah Vosko - Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy, York University

SCREENING: PRECARITY @ 8:30pm
Precarity (2004) is a compilation of videos documenting the rebellion of precarious flexworkers across the continents. From the occupation of abandoned factories in Argentina, to the interruption of French prime time news, to the devotion to Saint Precarious at the May Day Parade in Milan, Precarity is advertising a new brand of labour activism. It is a toolbox to investigate new modes of collective action and an instrument for the radical organization of the consumerized younger generation.

Sponsored by: CMCE / Centre for Media and Culture in Education at OISE/UT

The Precarity Forum is the pilot event of Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry.

Posted 05 April 2005 † § activism § alternatives § autonomia § capitalism § cognitive capital § economics § globalization § immaterial labour § labour § post-Fordism § practices § precarity § resistance § subjectivity § youth ‡ Comments Off °