Gerald Raunig

I like writing personal review books, ones that maybe aren't so firm in a set perspective of critique. The pre-text to this book it was spring and I was riding my bike around Chicago. I bumped into an old friend who offered to spark a bowl with him. This guy is a megastoner and needless to explain further, I got much higher than I usually smoke weed on my own. I decided to wonder into Myopic books in wicker park. A fantastic used book store. I went their fairly narrow philosophy shelf and picked this one out. I had a great time reading this one. It actually talks about the book the Bicycle thief, and uses the concept of the bicycle many times to explain the social relationship we have with machines. Something I deeply connected to having worked on a bike as a delivery person feeling very much so half-machine, half-person at times. Is this book a literal and concise political theory? Absolutely not. It is fun and exploratory. It is poetic and image driven. It gave me great fantastical and expansive views on life that I appreciated and maybe temporarily relieved my severe anxieties at the time of my life.… (mehr)

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.'

Summary from MIT Press (Cambridge, Mass.) March 2013.… (mehr)