Presentation of Mute magazine from London and Serbian translation of Howard Slater's book 'Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings'

  • kuda.org
  • kuda.org

Wednesday 27.03. at 7 pm, Youth Center CK13
Presentation of Mute magazine, London
guests: Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Howard Slater, and Simon Worthington

Thursday 28.03. at 7 pm, Youth Center CK13
Presentation of the translation of the book 'Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings' by Howard Slater, into Serbo-Croatian language, publisher: kuda.org, Novi Sad
English translation: Dušan Đorđević Mileusnić, Đorđe Čolić, kuda.org, The Group for Conceptual Politics (GCP)
Interview participants: Howard Slater, kuda.org, GKP

Mute is an on- and off-line magazine dedicated to researching culture and politics after the net. Mute combines print editions of magazines dedicated to specific topics (precarious work, commons, and knowledge, etc.) with regularly updated articles and reviews of events. The website, www.metamute.org, is material published jointly by songwriters gathered around the magazine and its readers. The printed edition of the magazine (currently) is published twice a year and contains a selection of current topics, together with a selection from online content, specially commissioned texts, and texts from collaborative projects.

Mute magazine was founded in 1994 to discuss the interconnectedness of art and new technologies, at an early stage in the development of the World Wide Web. But as mass participation in computer-mediated communication has become an integral part of modern capitalism, the coverage of topics has expanded to include the consequences of that change. Thus Mute includes research into the social, economic, political, and cultural formations of ‘networked societies’ and emphasizes the relationship between technology and the production of new social relations, to eventually include analyzes of geopolitics, culture, and contemporary work, in relation to technology development. the scope of the topics goes far beyond the original framework.

While Mute emerged from a culture that celebrates the democratizing potential of new media, the need for critical engagement regarding the ways in which new media reproduce and expand capitalist social relations is becoming increasingly apparent. Mute invites his readers and writers to consider new possibilities for opposing hegemony in every place, from socio-economic and technical structure, from codes of representation and expression to the production and articulation of psychic experience and beyond. Finally, Mute hopes to stimulate such approaches to art and politics that pose challenges to the orthodox constitution of both left and ‘critical’ new media culture.

In that sense, Mute magazine, its editorial board, and organization, audience, and 'community of contributors, are in a constant re-examination of its form of action, magazine format, editorial policy, way of financing, in relation to constant changes in the environment (mainstream media, internet, but and the increasing emphasis on participation through ‘do-it-yourself media’, ‘citizen journalism, etc.) within which they operate. The presentation of the magazine Mute will also discuss the practices of this collective (after the abolition of funds by the Arts Council of England) within the latest changes in cultural policies and support for similar organizations in the UK and the European Union.

For more information on Mute and related organizations (Mute Publishing, Mute Books, etc.) see: http://www.metamute.org

About Howard Slater's book, 'Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings'

In this collection of texts, Howard Slater improvises on the theme of what Walter Benjamin might have meant by the phrase ‘affective class’. Beyond the limitations of the academic approach, Slater is inspired by the possible implications of Benjamin’s ‘messianic shards’ and moves towards therapeutic micro-policies, embracing the discourse-regrets of the Labor Movement and the issue of ‘becoming capital’. The essay 'Anomie/Bonhomie' occupies the largest part of this book, which also includes texts and poetry from the past ten years of work. These additional texts include themes and concepts such as exodus, gender being, surrealist precedent, the language of poetry, and the possibility of collective ‘affective’ practices in the fight against capitalist colonization of the psyche.

Publisher: kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2013
ISBN 978-86-88567-06-0

The presentations were realized within the project "Extended Aesthetic Education: Art Experiment and Political Culture in the Age of Networks" (www.aestheticeducation.net), which takes place in cooperation with several organizations: Multimedia Institute from Zagreb, Counterpoint from Skopje, Berliner Gazette, Mute from London and kuda.org from Novi Sad. The project is supported by the Culture Program 2007-13 of the European Commission.

Presentations of the magazine Mute and the book 'Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings' will be held in Zagreb, in the club of mothers of the Multimedia Institute, on Monday, March 25 at 8 p.m.