23.06.2012 | 14 - 16 Uhr | Autonome Universität
Brian Holmes: Drei Krisen: DREIßiger-Siebziger-Heute
IN Englisch
Dieses selbstorganisierte Seminar dient dazu, die gegenwärtige politisch-ökonomische Krise zu verstehen und darüber hinaus entgegenwirkende Handlungsmöglichkeiten zu entwickeln. Dabei werden historische Analysen mit militanter Forschung und künstlerischen Ausdrucksformen verbunden.
Die Teilnahme an den frühen Kursen macht die späteren verständlicher.
Eröffnungslesung:
Sonntag, 17. Juni 2012, 18:00
Seminar und Diskussion:
Montag, 18. Juni 2012, 10:00 - 12:00 & 14:00 - 16:00
Seminar und Diskussion:
Mittwoch, 20. Juni 2012, 10:00 - 12:00 & 14:00 - 16:00
Seminar und Diskussion:
Freitag, 22. Juni 2012, 10:00 - 12:00 & 14:00 - 16:00
Schlussbetrachtungen:
Samstag, 23. Juni 2012, 14:00 - 16:00
The Autonomous University is an old dream that finds new expressions in every period of systemic change and political upheaval. This seminar is part of a global constellation of parallel efforts to establish a new basis for militant research, educational experimentation and public political debate. At its heart are lectures and group discussions at the intimate scale of a self-organized classroom, relayed and augmented by the use of Internet resources. The sessions have been planned in collaboration with members of Occupy Berlin. Their aim is to produce useful knowledge about the historical roots and possible futures of the current political-economic crisis.
GOALS: The seminar seeks to develop a framework for understanding the present political-economic crisis and for acting within and beyond it. Historical study is integrated with activist experience and artistic expression. The seminar is part of the autonomous university program developed by Occupy Berlin. It includes Internet resources for sharing research notes and reference materials. All of this builds on a similar experiment at Mess Hall in Chicago (http://messhall.org), with inspiration from the Public School, the Edufactory network and other autonomous education initiatives.
FORMAT: An introduction, six core sessions and a conclusion, compressed into one intensive week (see calendar for dates/times). Readings can be done in advance or later, as desired by each person. The first hour of each session will be a lecture/slideshow by Brian Holmes, an autonomous researcher and cultural critic living in the US. The second hour is a group discussion, seeking to integrate the North American perspective with European historical experiences. The respondent for the first five sessions will be Armin Medosch, a Vienna and London-based researcher with whom the theoretical framework of the seminar was developed. Other respondents will be sought in the course of the event.
CONCEPT: The development of capitalism is marked, every thirty or forty years, by the eruption of extended economic crises that restructure the entire system in organizational, technological, financial and geopolitical terms, while affecting daily life and commonly held values and attitudes. In the course of these crises, conditions of exploitation and domination are challenged by grassroots and anti-systemic movements, with major opportunities for positive change. However, each historical crisis so far has also elicited an elite response, stabilizing the worldwide capitalist system on the basis of a new integration/repression of classes, interest groups, genders and minority populations (whose definition, composition and character also change with the times). In the United States, because of its leading position within twentieth-century capitalism, the domestic resolution of each of the previous two crises has helped to restructure not only national social relations, but also the international political-economic order. Nothing ensures that the same thing will happen again. By examining the crises of the 1930s and the 1970s along with the top-down responses and the resulting hegemonic compromises, we can try to cut through the inherited ideological confusion, gain insight into our own positions within contemporary neoliberal society, identify the elite projects on the horizon and begin to formulate our own possible agency during the continuing period of instability and chaos.
