Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life

by Stevphen Shukaitis

All power to the imagination? Over the past forty years to invoke the imagination as a basis for radical politics has become a cliche: a rhetorical utilization of ideas already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process. But what exactly is radical imagination? Drawing from autonomist politics, class composition analysis, and avant-garde arts, Imaginal Machines explores the emergence, functioning, and constant breakdown of the embodied forms of radical imagination. What does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized power through the power of the spectacle? Does any subversive potentiality remain? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally-bounded subversive power. It might be that imaginal machines only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is only possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. By reopening the question of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the power of social insurgency back into the working of capital and the state, we create possibilities for a politics continually reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation: to keep open an antagonism without closure.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (Autonomedia, 2009) and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.

Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Shukaitis became interested in radical politics and art through the punk scene and spent several years putting out DIY albums and organizing shows. He moved to the NYC area to become more involved in the anti-globalization movement. He then become involved in a number of media projects, working with Rise Up Radio on WBAI, Ever Reviled Records, joining the Autonomedia editorial collective, and writing for a number of independent publications.

In 2004 Shukaitis moved to Amsterdam to edit the "Life Beyond the Market" issue of Greenpepper Magazine, subsequently deciding to move to the UK to pursue a PhD through research around issues of class composition, autonomy, and self-organization. In the years since then he has lived between New York and London, and currently coordinates an outpost of Autonomedia operations in the UK. He is the founder and editor of Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose I might be accused of bias, having co-edited a volume with Stevphen myself, and having been a flatmate of his in London during some of the time this was written, but I still think this is a delightful and important book so why not say so? I still remember clearly hearing the author report - this book is actually based on his Ph.D. dissertation - "I just got my committee to agree that I didn't have to write a chapter on methodology but could substitute a chapter on communist space aliens." Good thing, since it's one of the best chapters in the book. All in all, the author is treading notoriously difficult ground, trying to fuse together to subtleties of Italian post-workerist theory, the insights of real world anarchist and anarchist-inspired organizing in the present, popular culture (there are also zombies), and the tradition of artistic subversion since the beginning of the century, to come up with ideas that are both fresh and actually useful to those trying to make sense of, and do something about, the world situation. The author's voice conveys a bemused detachment that never once dips into cynicism, a kind of playfulness with ideas that in its own way serves as the most compelling embodiment of the kind of liberatory imagination that he proposes as a way out of the stubborn political dilemmas of the present day.

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a soft spot for an argument that could connect radical politics with a broad range of art and cultures (from the mass-produced cultural artefact to the avant-garde subversive act) and Shukaitis delivers that argument in a well written, somehow intimate text. This book packed with exciting ideas, from Italian autonomist, the critique of workers' self-management, feminised labour version of dérive, to self-organised space exploration and aesthetic of refusal.

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

don't get me wrong- this is a good book. well researched, points are pretty well made. however...in hindsight i recall getting the feeling reading this that myself, or someone i was three years ago, or my friends or who they were five years ago were being used for a sociological or anthropological study. creepy and flattering at the same time. ah well i know in non-fiction one must write about somebody, in research one must research something...maybe it's good that it was us after all.