The Politics and Practice of Militant and Co-Research
Fall 2009 Seminar
Access Seminar Schedule and Readings here.
There is also a seminar group set up at Crabgrass, a free software platform for network organizing in conjunction with Riseup tech collective (website: https://we.riseup.net). In order to access the materials found there, you must first register with Crabgrass and then join the group, which is named Militant/Co-Research Seminar NYC. Among other things, you can download the schedule and reading list as a word document.
Friday 2-4PM (approx. August 28th to December 11th)
Room 3305 (NOTE: Room Change)
CUNY Graduate Center | 365 Fifth Ave
This self-organized seminar will introduce major themes and concepts of the history of political inquiry as they take shape in movements contexts. Whether they have been described as movement research, research militancy, co-research, consciousness-raising, or worker’s inquiry, the tradition is long and varied. Thus the focus of the seminar will be to explore the meaning, methods and examples of militant research and inquiry as political activity in a variety of instances.
What is this unique tradition and what are its contributions to the many ways we might conceive of our own research? How does inquiry understand the politics and practices of the production of knowledge? How are these politics and practices linked to the production of subjectivity? In what ways does ‘militancy’ conceive of the relatedness of research and political self-organization and struggle?
With Engel’s “The Conditions of the Working Class in England” (1844) and Marx’s “Worker’s Inquiry” (1880) into the conditions of the French working class, we begin to see the trace of this tradition. We can follow instances of worker’s self-research in labor struggles in the US in the 1950s (CLR James, Martin Glaberman, Johnson-Forest Tendency), and the Italian inquiries of the 1960s and 1970s Operisti and Autonomia movements (Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, etc.) as well as its counterparts in the US, referred to by Harry Cleaver as Autonomist Marxism (Zerowork, Midnight Notes) since the late 70s. Recent inquiries include research collectives such as Kolinko (Germany), Colectivo Situacciones (Argentina), Precarias a la Deriva (Spain), Edu-Factory (Italy), as well as more local examples such as Counter-Cartography Collective (US), Midnight Notes (US) and Team Colors (US).
The seminar will survey both historical examples of this type of research and contemporary practices across many parts of the world. We will explore the use of writing as a research instrument in this tradition but also point to methods that incorporate photography, film and audio recordings.
Along the way, we might explore various theoretical contributions to this line of thought from the intersections of political and philosophical writings from Italy and France (Guattari, Negri, Badiou, Ranciere, etc.) in the last few decades.
The seminar is open to all. Participants may present their own research in relation to the many issues raised in this course. Participation for credit and grade is available for CUNY students. In this case, registration is required through the Geography Department (EES 79903, 3 credits).
Seminar Books (all available at Bluestockings Bookstore)
David Graeber and Stevphen Shukaitis (eds), Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization, AK Press, 2007
Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, Pluto Press, 2002
Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992, Autonomedia, 1992
Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, AK Press/Antithesis, 2000 (also available online http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/357krcp.html)
Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e), 1980 (also available online http://www.generation-online.org/t/ppp.htm)
Registration for the course otherwise is quite informal. We would appreciate if you contact us first with the following info: