Gerald Raunig Knihy

'Institutional critique' is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between 'institutions' and 'critique', the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional critique and propose lines of future development. Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.

A philosopher and art theorist extends the poststructuralist theory of revolution to the nexus of art and activism. Gerald Raunig has written an alternative art history of the "long twentieth century," from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the turbulent counter-globalization protests in Genoa in 2001. Meticulously moving from the Situationists and Sergei Eisenstein to Viennese Actionism and the PublixTheatreCaravan, Art and Revolution takes on the history of revolutionary transgressions and optimistically charts an emergence from its tales of tragic failure and unequivocal disaster. By eloquently applying Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the "machine," Raunig extends the poststructuralist theory of revolution through to the explosive nexus of art and activism. As hopeful as it is incisive, Art and Revolution encourages a new generation of artists and thinkers to refuse to participate in the tired prescriptions of marketplace and authority and instead create radical new methods of engagement. Raunig develops an indispensable, contemporary conception of political change--a conception that transcends the outmoded formulations of insurrection and resistance. Too much blood and ink has been shed for the art machines and the revolutionary machines to remain separate. Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theorist who lives in Vienna, Austria.

The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.

This publication brings together the artistic response to contemporary revolution represented by the exhibition and new reflections on the relationship between art and revolution by theorists and art historians. The book includes illustrations and interviews with the artists, and essays that tackle issues such as art and revolution, aesthetics and politics, ecology and anarchism. Gerald Raunig marks out alternatives to the takeover of the state apparatus as the primary goal of revolutionary activity. Benda Hofmeyr locates the significance of revolution in its transformation into a spectacle that provokes fervour in the minds of viewers. Simon Sheikh reviews the divide between aesthetics and politics and Chus Martinez examines Revolution and Garden Party as two opposing cultural idioms. Maja and Reuben Fowkes connect anarchy, ecology and art as factors of contemporary revolution

Dissemblage unfolds a wild abundance of material of unruliness, from the multilingual translation machines of Al-Andalus to the queer mysticism of the High Middle Ages, from the small voices of the falsetto in 20th century jazz and soul to today's disjointures and subjunctures against the smooth city in machinic capitalism. In this volume Gerald Raunig not only develops a conceptual ecology of concepts of joining and jointing, but also undertakes an experiment in theoretical form. Semi-fictional interweaves with meticulously researched historical sources, mystical writings with letters from friends, philosophical fragments with poetic ritornellos. More than a narrative about dissemblages from social surrounds, thing-worlds, and ghost-worlds, the book itself is a dividual multiplicity in form and content, out of joint, in the joints, dissemblage.

In this poetical-philosophical manifesto, Gerald Raunig develops a materialist philosophy of multiplicity. On the basis of seventeen conceptual innovations, from windy kin to transversal intellect, from dissemblage to technecologies, from minor masculinity to condividual revolution, Raunig reformulates the question of revolutionary multiplicity. Always near to contemporary social struggles and movements, the book starts from the contention that we are in need of a storm against identitarian domination, unification and homogeneity. Raunig argues that the conceptual and political experimentations with multiplicity around and after 1968 did not go far enough: today, anti-identitarian, queer and multitudinarian positions should not just be defended but pushed further, over unexpected folds and along the flattest surfaces, beyond previous approaches and previous historical experiences. Making Multiplicity is a conceptual manifesto which sets a new tone in poststructural philosophy. The seventeen concepts developed here form an assemblage that invites us to think, read, write, and indeed, make multiplicity.

With the economy deindustrialized and the working class decentralized, a call for alternative horizons for resistance: the university and the art world. What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig's new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative labor has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of “modulation” as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience.

In seiner „kleinen Philosophie der Maschine“ unternimmt Gerald Raunig eine differenzierende Würdigung und Weiterentwicklung des Begriffs der Maschine, wie er von den französischen Philosophen Félix Guattari und Gilles Deleuze vorgeschlagen wird: die Maschine nicht mehr als technische Anlage, sondern als soziale Zusammensetzung und Verkettung. Über die Untersuchung einer Vielzahl von filmischen, literarischen und performativen Mikropolitiken gelangt Gerald Raunig zur Maschine als sozialer Bewegung, konkret zur Euromayday-Bewegung, die seit 2001 eine transnationale aktivistische und diskursive Praxis zur zunehmenden Prekarisierung von Arbeit und Leben entwickelt.

Die jahrhundertelange Konjunktur des Individuums gerät ins Wanken. Es beginnt das Zeitalter des Dividuellen. Die schlechte Nachricht von Gerald Raunigs Philosophie der Dividualität ist, dass sich das Dividuelle im maschinischen Kapitalismus vor allem als Verschärfung von Ausbeutung und Indienstnahme zeigt: In Algorithmen, Derivaten, Big Data und Social Media wirkt Dividualität als ausufernde Erweiterung von herrschaftlicher Teilung und Selbstzerteilung. Die gute Nachricht: Genau auf dem Terrain des Dividuellen wird auch eine neue Qualität von Widerstand möglich, als kritische Mannigfaltigkeit, molekulare Revolution und Con-division