Berardi (Franco) Archives - Public Seminar

Race

Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

December 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

Aimé Césaire called it: the so-called west is a decaying civilization. In both the United States and Europe, where institutions are receding, a base level of race-talk and racial solidarity is revealed as metastasizing beneath them. In such dim times, I turn to the writings of Paul Gilroy as offering ...

Science & Technology

Virno on Human Nature

July 22, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

One of the central arguments of Paolo Virno’s book When Word Becomes Flesh (Semiotext(e), 2015) is that the conditions of possibility of experience can themselves be experienced. There are no transcendental conditions that are ‘out of the frame’ as it were. The transcendental or ontological “are humbly placed within the world ...

Uncategorized

Class, Gender and Creative Industries

June 1, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

The fate of cultural studies in the United States appears to be twofold. On the one hand, it still generates moral panic. Right-wing nut-jobbers think that "cultural Marxism" is some insidious, decadent creed, probably created by Jews and Blacks to destroy America. On the other hand, it has finally become ...

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Imaginal Politics

November 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

To any follower of the news, it may seem these days harder than ever to figure out what is real and what is delusional, and whether the delusional is an individual psychopathology or perhaps something more general. As Chiara Bottici puts it: “We live in a society of spectacles that ...

Theory & Practice

Pasolini: Sexting the World

July 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

His original and perceptive theory of neo-capitalism came from direct engagement with the problems of making a postwar, post-Fascist culture. His commitment to the Grand Old Cause of the people was both moral but also erotic, even carnal. He wanted – needed – to cock-suck the world. Such was his ...

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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

June 6, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Where Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri were born in the 30s, Berardi (1948) belongs with Paolo Virno (1952) and Silvia Federici (1942) to a second wave of Italian Marxist thinkers who grew out of the workerist current that struck out on its own path, diverging from the official Gramscian postures of the ...

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Cognitive Capitalism

February 19, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

The second is able to think more historically. For example the regulation school came up with a convincing portrait of what it called the Fordist regime of regulation. In this version capitalism has stages, each of which are qualitatively different. But it tends to be troubled by the current stage, ...