Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity

by Raunig, Gerald; Negri, Antonio (AFT); Derieg, Aileen

• ISBN13: 9781584351160
• ISBN10: 1584351160
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-03-08
• Publisher: Semiotext

Summary

What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads andthe working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to besought 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 twoarenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on GillesDeleuze's concept of "modulation" as the market-driven imperative for the constanttransformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries ofCreativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Lookingat recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democraciareal YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessmentof the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, heasserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience.

Author Biography

Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theorist. He works at the Zürich University of the Arts, Zürich and the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), Vienna. He is coeditor of the multilingual publishing platform Transversal Texts and the Austrian journal Kamion. He is the author of Art and Revolution, A Thousand Machines, and Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, all published by Semiotext[e].

Antonio Negri is a philosopher, essay writer, and teacher. A political and social activist in the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, he has taught political science for many years and has written numerous books on political philosophy, including Marx beyond Marx, The Savage Anomaly, Insurgencies, The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics (Semiotext(e)), and, in collaboration with Michael Hardt, Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth.