The Polish government plans to erase Cultural Studies from the list of registered disciplines of science in the country. We publish here a petition by the Polish Association of Cultural Studies (Polskie Towarzystwo Kulturoznawcze, PTK).

We are stunned that the Senator of Culture and the Theatre Director actually called for eviction of the Volksbühne, it shows the deeply authoritarian character of both and of their concept of culture.

On the occasion of the new edition of Gerald Raunig's Kunst und Revolution transversal texts publishes the new preface.

It has been two years that Germany's and Austria's governments opened their borders following the pressure of migration movements. Since then, a lot has changed, and not much for the better. Did the demarcations and enclosures of the nation state win once and for all? How does the present situation differ from the one of 2015? And what has migration got to do with social networks, affect and forms of commons?

One aim of our transnational project Midstream is to do research and attempt to conceptually develop alternative social networks. The generation of activist platforms like n-1 and Facebook-alternatives like diaspora* has been stagnating for several years now, with some projects operating without a chance of reaching a critical mass along with others that have ceased to operate altogether. A new generation of social networking sites has become visible recently. Most of these networks are based on cryptocurrencies and blockchain. But what kind of alternative are they developing?

On May 6, 2017, neighbors filled the building at Calle Gobernador 39 in Madrid in an act of disobedience, following a multitudinous demonstration composed of a great variety of collectives that denounced the process of gentrification endured by the city of Madrid in recent years with the slogan “Madrid is not for sale.” This was the birth of the social center La Ingobernable, The Ungovernable, a territory conquered in the “gold district” of (the) capital in order to reverse the process of expropriation.

Statement of #CityPlaza squat against the threat of eviction.

An interview departing from Stevphen Shukaitis' latest book The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labour After the Avant-Garde.

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and Valiz, Amsterdam are proud to announce the release of Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice). To mark the launch of the publication, the symposium "Once We Were Artists" takes place on Saturday 24 June 2017 from 10.30 till 18.00 hrs at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (Agnietenstraat 1).

Ein Gespräch, ausgehend von „Foucaults Kyniker_innen. Auf dem Weg zu einer kreativen und affirmativen Kritik“, Ruth Sondereggers Beitrag im Band „Foucaults Gegenwart" (http://transversal.at/books/foucaultsgegenwart).

Therefore, we wrote. ’Dear Municipality of Milan, dear Mr Mayor, dear urban planning officer, and dear Sogemi spa, represented by its illustrious President.’ We have used an explicit, bureaucratic, and non construable language to say: ’You do have to sell Macao? Let’s find a way to let the city buy it.’ It would be essential to develope a dialogue with You, illustrious institutions, in order to develope this pathway. A pathway that could become a model, to opening new doors, to transforming Milan into a bold city and a hub for innovation - a key word.

On March 10, 2007, citizens, social and cultural collectives and invisible creatives occupied the building Nosquera 9 and 11 in Málaga to begin an adventure that is celebrating its tenth birthday this month. In a context of touristification and rampant speculation in the city center of Málaga, during the early years of an urban planning model that claimed (and claims) to be cultural, which grants spaces and resources solely to large-scale museum and red-carpet festival operations, La Casa Invisible was born.

Something new is taking shape in the world: in more than 30 countries, people are calling for an international women*s strike on the 8th of March.

Ohne uns! Aufruf zum Publikumsstreik und zum strategischen Desinteresse an der Doppel-Veranstaltung «Die neue Avantgarde» am 10.03. und 17.03.17 in der Zürcher Gessnerallee

Der Krieg ist schon längst eine Frage der Städte geworden, und in diesem Sinne verlagert dieser sich auf neue Territorien. Dabei ist zu berücksichtigen, dass die Räume, in die militärische Apparate intervenieren, immer vorgestellte Räume sind, die in sozialen Prozessen fernab der betreffenden Regionen hervorgebracht werden. Ein wesentliches Element dieser Raumproduktionen ist gegenwärtig die artifizielle Stadt. In nie dagewesenem Maße vermittelt sie sozialräumliche und kulturelle Aspekte desjenigen Territoriums, auf dem der Gegner zu Hause ist. Es zeigt sich jedoch, dass diese Aspekte nicht authentisch oder neutral sind sondern immer schon mit kultureller Bedeutung über die gegnerischen Räume versehen.

In recent years, institutions of education have been transformed through an upsurge of policies and reforms. While such reforms have historically developed along various trajectories, more recent reforms have chiefly been advanced by two major aims. On the one hand, these reforms support the transformation of economies that have suffered from crisis. For instance, the OECD has declared that: “Knowledge is now recognised as the driver of productivity and economic growth” (1996, p. 3). On the other hand, the production of knowledge and research should tackle the “grand challenges” of our time posed by globalization – e.g. the energy crisis, limited resources, or climate change – essentially linking it to sustainability policy.

Les violences policières émergent d’une expérience collective qui ne peut d’abord s’éclairer que par une intelligence collective. C’est pourquoi nous avons voulu écouter débattre avec nous et entre eux des acteurs très différents : des militants et des réfugiés, des racisés et des blancs, des hommes et des femmes, dont le point commun est d’abord d’avoir expérimenté dans leurs corps ces formes de violence. ---- Die Polizeigewalt entspringt einer kollektiven Erfahrung, die nur durch kollektive Intelligenz erhellt werden kann. Darum wollten wir mit sehr unterschiedlichen Akteur_innen sprechen und ihnen zuhören, wenn sie miteinander sprechen: Aktivist_innen und Refugees, Rassisierte und Weiße, Männer und Frauen, die alle Formen der Gewalt an ihren eigenen Körpern zu spüren bekommen haben. ----

Neuf ans sur le territoire français. Neuf ans pour rien. C’est ce qu’il répète souvent. Neuf ans dans l’air, comme les avions. ---- Neun Jahre auf französischem Territorium. Neun Jahre für nichts. Das wiederholt er oft. Neun Jahre verpuffen in der Luft, wie die Flugzeuge. ----

Sind Dreadlocks bei Weißen kulturimperialistisch? Offenbart der Protest gegen die Prekarisierung in Europa bloß die Heuchelei der Protestierenden, die ihre Privilegien nicht reflektieren? In den letzten Jahren sind verschiedentlich Stimmen laut geworden, die aus der Perspektive der postcolonial studies und des Critical Whiteness-Aktivismus Behauptungen dieser Art aufgestellt haben.

Commemorating the first anniversary of the day on which north east Japan was struck by a threefold disaster, “The Wall Street Journal” released an online article on the 10 March 2012 entitled “March 11, One Year On: Occupy METI”. At the beginning, the journalist Obe Mitsuru describes a scene, in which a “shaky tent”, decorated with colorful placards and banners demanding Japan’s withdrawal from the nuclear energy program, stands on the corner in front of the comparatively mighty Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in Kasumigaseki, the administrative district in Tôkyô.

Introducing the Conference on Self-Government and Municipalism in Aragón: following what started at the #MacUno1 meeting, this conference is being planned as a space of movements, of people who, bearing in mind the institutional while not reducing all of politics to it, wish to continue developing and strengthening the #municipalist challenge.

At the end of the year 2008 the global economy collapsed. It’s hard to say what will happen next, but it’s easy to guess that the recession is not going to go away anytime soon. The collapse of the global economy can be read as the comeback of the soul. The perfect machine of neoliberal ideology is falling to bits because it was based on the flawed assumption that soul can be reduced to mere rationality. The dark side of the soul, fear, anxiety, panic and depression has finally surfaced after looming for a decade in the shadow of the much-touted victory and promised eternity of capitalism. In this essay I want to consider two different meanings of the word depression. By this word we mean a special kind of mental suffering, but also the general shape of the global crisis that is darkening the historical horizon of our times. We are not dealing here with a linguistic trick; we are not dealing only with a metaphor, but with the interweaving and interacting of psychic flows and economic processes.

On the early morning of July 21, police evicted “Point Break” in the neighborhood of Pigneto: a student house occupied and self-managed by members of the Roman student movement “l’Onda” that took to the streets of Italy in 2008 against the neoliberal reform and privatization of education.

Dear friends, dreamers, rebels, composers of worlds, cosmopolitan diplomats from below, poets of life, autonomous astronauts, shamans of all sorts, breachers of stupid laws and animators of consensus, dear comrades from antiracist, antifascist, migrant, refugee, feminist groups, collectives, networks … all those that swarm and drill so that freedom of movement for everyone will prevail …

Der Philosoph Jacques Rancière, Denker der Gleichheit, erwägt, was die Bewegung der „Nuit Debout“ und die Mobilisierung gegen das Arbeitsgesetz auszeichnet, was sie trägt, aber auch wo ihre Grenzen sind.

Etwa hundert Intellektuelle prangern die Strategie der französischen Regierung an, „organisierte Gruppen“ zu isolieren und ihre Gewalttaten aufzubauschen, um so den Demonstrationen gegen das Arbeitsgesetz in Rennes und Paris ihre Glaubwürdigkeit zu nehmen.

Sollten die Kouachi-Brüder und Amedy Coulibaly posthum doch noch die Schlacht der Ideen gewonnen haben? Die öffentliche Debatte richtet sich seit dem 7. Jänner 2015 an falschen Alternativen aus.

The autonomous factory Rog is under threat of being evicted and destroyed by the municipal authorities which are pursuing their project of renovating the area into a centre for creative industries.

Networks of protest and dissent, actual and virtual, were understood to have become increasingly centreless and leaderless across the 1990s, and beyond. Even the nature of protest and dissent fell away from previous models, as aligned to pragmatic demands and manifestos, single issues and norms of controlled civil disobedience. Now the masses were understood not to assemble behind any one position, or rally to one slogan, but more to stand in a kind of collective negative correlation to the faltering status quo: a crowd of singularities. This crowd or mass has been identified and explored in various ways as “the multitude” by theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, The Invisible Committee, Mauricio Lazzarato, and Franco Berardi among others.

The first edition of the Performance Biennial will take place on 23 June to 4 July in Greece. Emerging from DIY self-organised cultural practices appearing during these past years in Athens, in a present without a future, this event seeks to critically interrogate the role of performance, historically and in the present, in relation to political and social materialities and imaginaries. Playfully subverting the term ‘biennial’ into a self-organised practice, the event will test self-instituted forms of culture and politics. Under the title “No Future” this guerrilla biennial will bring together forms of artistic, political and theoretical practice and discourse questioning the potential of a collective refusal to a referred futurity.

On the occasion of the new edition of Instituierende Praxen transversal texts publishes the new introduction to the book.

In the morning of April 22nd, activists and refugees joined action to squat an abandoned hotel in the northern center of Athens. The “Hotel Plaza” is supposed to host up to 400 refugees, and hopefully in the upcoming week, they will be able to receive further room requests. Since the occupants have entered the building, the weekend has been a busy one: The rooms have been aired and cleaned, the kitchen cleaned and prepared for cooking, weeds and trash removed from the front entrance, the first meals cooked, assemblies held and plans made.

We, the undersigned, support the struggle to defend the integrity of the art project Park Fiction and to keep the Golden Pudel Club as a part of the park and Gesamtkunstwerk Park Fiction.

On the occasion of publishing the German edition of The Undercommons, transversal texts spoke with the authors about the book’s central concepts.

Semiotext(e) / MIT Press has announced the publication of Gerald Raunig’s new book DIVIDUUM. Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, Part 1: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/dividuum.

The Institute for Democracy and Municipalism (Institute DM) introduced itself this morning in Madrid. The initiative’s objective is "to stimulate the cycle that was started by 15M beyond its current limits, or to work so that the democratic revolution continues its course,” as its promoters point out. The think tank, as one of its founders, the sociologist and historian Emmanuel Rodríguez, describes it, “aims to become a space of reference at the levels of debate, education, research and political discussion.” Ultimately: “to animate and promote the emergence of ideas that stimulate a change in the political cycle.”

Statement des Demobündnisses zum offenen Brief über die Zustände bezüglich der Frauen in der Unterkunft Westerwaldstraße

Late Saturday night, the Golden Pudel Club stood in flames. The roof structure is destroyed. The improvisational shelter of a homeless refugee burned as well, including his papers. The Park Fiction Archive housed on the building’s top floor is drenched in extinguishing water.
Demonstration: Friday, February 19, 8:30 pm, from: FC St. Pauli, South side areaway, to: Golden Pudel Club / Gezi Park Fiction

The inconceivable struggle of refugees and migrants we have been witnessing has resulted in the opening of the corridor of hope across the fortified borders of the European Union. Consequently, European forces started turning the Balkan Route into a detention route, leaving behind their democratic masks. The ruling classes of “Europe without borders” started erecting razor blade fences all over the Balkan Route.

We find out with dismay that a provision of the management of the Municipality of Rome calls for the eviction of the self-managed atelier Esc. We also discover that dozens of other social centres and cultural associations are facing this measure.
All this is a very serious mistake, that hits to the heart of the virtues that still survive in the city of Rome, that has always stood out for an unequalled proliferation of self management, mutualism, and independent cultural production.

Can we conceive of any universal idea of man, or of so-called rights, of man without the anticolonial struggles, without the struggles and resistances of slaves, without the movements of decolonization or of national liberation in the whole world, without the struggles of women, without the antiracism of black or non-occidental women? It is something that generally remains unsaid when people speak of “human rights” in mass political and televised debates. And yet it is something that would help to revise the material and discursive limits of European humanism. In Europe, this deficiency is very pronounced. The thread that unites humanism, racism and colonialism is not clear in public debate... The point is not to perform a mea culpa about the colonial past of Europe, but rather to understand the material legacy of colonialism in the material constitution of postcolonial European social and political space.

An ‚Tagen wie diesen‘ scheint es mir wichtig, die Fähigkeit, zu staunen, sich zu wundern, zu kultivieren. Allzu schnell normalisieren sich unwahrscheinlichste Politikwechsel, wie derjenige der massenhaften Aufnahme muslimischer Flüchtlinge in Deutschland Ende 2015, in veralltäglichte politische Prozesse. Dabei gäbe die Tatsache, dass eine solche Schubumkehr in einem Land möglich ist, das im europäischen Vergleich neben Ungarn und Polen 2011 die höchsten Quoten islamfeindlicher Einstellung aufzuweisen hatte, Anlass zum Überdenken politischer Potenzialitäten. Radikale Transformation ist möglich, auch wenn sie, wie im zu diskutierenden Fall, ‚von oben‘ kommt.

It was this moment of “debordering” that pushed the “crisis” onto a completely new level. What became clear at this moment was that there was indeed a crisis. But this was the crisis of European migration policies.

Seit heute dem 1. Dezember 2015 befinden sich Gefangene in der JVA Butzbach im Hunger- oder Bummelstreik, sie fordern für ihre Arbeit im Gefängnis unter anderem das Recht auf gewerkschaftliche Organisierung, den Mindestlohn und die Einzahlung in die Rentenversicherung.

Europe is in movement, Europe needs to move - Moving Europe!

Es gibt Foucault noch nicht – so der Hinweis von Werkbiograph und Historiker Philipp Sarasin auf die Tatsache, dass noch nicht alles von Foucault publiziert worden ist. So fehlen in der deutschen Übersetzung noch zwei weitere Vorlesungsreihen am Collège de France, im Französischen ist das Werk seit diesem Frühjahr erstmals vollständig verfügbar. Schon die jüngsten Übersetzungen zur Strafgesellschaft und der Regierung der Lebenden eröffnen neue Facetten und Zusammenhänge, aber auch neue Begrifflichkeiten.
Gemessen an den beiden Symposien in Zürich und Wien in diesem Jahr fällt nicht primär ins Auge, dass es «Foucault noch nicht», sondern vielmehr, dass es längst verschiedene Foucaults gibt.

In ganz Europa macht sich die Prognose breit, welche die Kanzlerin Angela Merkel für ihr Land formuliert hatte: „Diese Ereignisse werden unser Land verändern“. Ich meinerseits würde sagen, sie werden Europa verändern. Aber in welchem Sinn?

Schon wieder ein Schiffbruch, Sonntag, also. Montag schließt Deutschland seine Grenzen, die anderen europäischen Länder sollen reagieren, es ist von überlaufen, von überfordert die Rede. 15 Kinder sind am Sonntag ertrunken. Die deutschen Städte sind überfordert. Ungarn und sein Zaun.

Since yesterday, when Hungary attempted to close its borders, by bringing army and heavy police force at the newly built fence, and the new law criminalising migrants has stepped into force, up to 5000 migrants have been stuck at the border. This is a call out to all activists, for an emergency intervention at the border – we need people to show solidarity with those stuck at the Horgoš 2 border crossing.

Auf Initiative Barcelonas mobilisieren sich „empörte“ Städte, um mehr Geflüchtete aufzunehmen, und lancieren Solidaritätskampagnen. Ihre Ziel: Den Druck auf die rechte Regierung von Mariano Rajoy aufzubauen, die sich im Vorfeld der allgemeinen Wahlen in das Thema verbeißt.