Back to The Revolution of Everyday Life. XIV: “The Organization of Appearances” and XV: “Roles” are up next.

A final reminder that the 2021 BASTARD Conference will take place this Saturday, November 13th from 12-7pm at The Long Haul Infoshop (3124 Shattuck Ave in Berkeley). We have a day full of provocative and incendiary conversations about anarchy and anarchisms planned, presented by participants in the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group alongside some special guests from out of town. The event is free and open to all, so come out and join us for another day of discussing the beautiful idea. If you are presenting and have yet to send me a short (< one paragraph) blurb summarizing your presentation, please do so asap!

Next week, as per our tradition, we will discuss this weekend’s conference and read the responses to the questionnaires. Instead of a reading to accompany this, we’ll instead watch Guy Debord’s short film Critique of Separation. Feel free to bring snacks and drinks to share while we watch!

Hope to see you Saturday!

Completely forgot to post this week, apologies. Tuesday we’ll be reading the next two sections in The Revolution of Everyday Life, “Sacrifice” and “Separation”, starting on pg. 90. We’ll also be doing some final discussing of next weekend’s BASTARD Conference, so if you’re presenting please try and make it on Tuesday. See you then!

Next time we’ll take a little breather from Vaneigem to consider Peter Lamborn Wilson’s essay “Marx and Proudhon Escape from the Nineteenth Century” (pg. 38). A bit longer piece than those we’ve been trying to limit ourselves to of late, but well worth the extra time. The book’s other essays are also fantastic so be sure to give those a look.

Deadline for proposals for next month’s BASTARD Conference is Friday, November 5th (next week). If you’d like to participate and haven’t already let us know, drop a line to birdsoffire [at] riseup [dot] net

Last week we were apparently so enthused in talking with each other that we completely forgot to resolve on our next reading. Accordingly, we press on with Vaneigem. I’m late posting this week, so let’s keep the reading especially brief and just do the final section of The Impossibility of Communication — “Mediated Abstraction and Abstracted Mediation” (begins on pg. 77 in the PM Press edition). That will set us up nicely to start the next section in subsequent weeks.

Reminder that if you’re planning on participating in next month’s BASTARD Conference (and you should be), presentation descriptions are due by Friday, November 5th. We still need one or two more presentations to fill out the schedule, so seriously consider taking part, even if you’ve not done so in years past. Only you can prevent familiar faces from beating dead horses!

Continuing with Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. We’ll discuss Part VII – The Age of Happiness all the way through Part X – The Reign of Quantity, stopping at Part XI.

The call for presentations for next month’s BASTARD Conference has been published. Check it out by clicking the link in the header menu. Share it around, tell your friends, and do what you can to drum up interest. If you have an idea you’d like to present, the deadline for proposals is Friday, November 5th. If you’ve never presented at BASTARD before, don’t be intimidated. It could be as easy as facilitating a discussion by coming up with some interesting questions you’d like to ask, sharing a skill you think others might find useful, or performing a short piece. Anything goes really, so seriously consider taking part if you’ve not done so before. birdsoffire [at] riseup [dot] net with any questions or ideas.

See ya Tuesday!

We’ll continue with The Revolution of Everyday Life in our gluttonous quest to devour the whole thing. Next time we’ll discuss Part III “Isolation” (pg. 23) all the way through Part VI “Decompression and the Third Force” (ends pg. 47). YUM

Next week we’ll kick off October by beginning what will hopefully end up being a complete reading over the coming months of a true classic: Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. One of the high water marks of Situationism, a profound influence on “second-wave”/type 3 anarchisms, and an under-acknowledged example of egoist thought, this is a reading I’m very stoked to discuss with all of you. Each and every page of this text gives us ample material to unpack, so for this first reading let’s go from the introduction through the first section of “The Impossibility of Participation: Humiliation” — in other words, stopping at the section titled “Isolation”. Looking forward to hearing everybody’s thoughts on this seminal howl of revolt and refusal!

Again with the late post! We never really settled on a reading Tuesday, but it seemed that most folks were interested in reading something on chaos magic. Since I’m sure we all have at least a passing familiarity with the practice, why don’t we eschew introductory texts and instead read Thee Grey Book from Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. It begins on pg 39 of this fantastic anthology of their writings. Enjoy, see ya Tuesday.

Apologies for the late post this week. Was unsure which Italian insurrectionary anarchist texts would best suit the request for writings representative of that tendency which was made last week. I know we discussed selections from Canenero but in trying to select some, none really seemed to fit the bill for introductory material, which hopefully the following pieces will. I think Alfredo Bonanno’s “Why Insurrection?”does a decent job of distilling some of the primarily theoretical and practical moves that are salient here — at least as well as a few other texts of his might do, while being shorter than the other options. As a brief addendum on the organizational question, let’s also read “Informal Organization”. I think together these two do a decent job introducing much that is central to the Italian insurrectionary tendency.

Let’s make those two texts the “official” reading (meaning everything from here on is strictly optional) but for anyone who wants a general historical overview to situate the period of Italian struggles which insurrectionary anarchism and autonomist marxism developed out of, you might also give “A few notes on the revolutionary movement in Italy” and “Armed Struggle in Italy 1976-78”a look. And for our new participants who requested this topic, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include two pivotal texts associated with this flavor of anarchism: “Armed Joy” and “At Daggers Drawn”. We’ve read both in this group many times, but they’re both worth regularly returning to and reconsidering.

See you all Tuesday!