lecture at Boston University

Yanis Varoufakis: The Global Minotaur

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/the-global-minotaur-an-interview-with-yanis-varoufakis.html#xIFgitlW1E4qjFUS.99 

The Global Minotaur: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis

[…]

Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist who currently heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens. From 2004 to 2007 he served as an economic advisor to former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. Yanis writes a popular blog which can be found here. His latest book ‘The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy’ is available from Amazon.

Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington

Philip Pilkington: In your book The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy you lay out the case that this ongoing economic crisis has very deep roots. You claim that while many popular accounts – from greed run rampant to regulatory capture – do explain certain features of the current crisis, they do not deal with the real underlying issue, which is the way in which the current global economy is structured. Could you briefly explain why these popular accounts come up short?

Yanis Varoufakis: It is true that, in the decades preceding the Crash of 2008, greed had become the new creed; that banks and hedge funds were bending the regulatory authorities to their iron will; that financiers believed their own rhetoric and were, thus, convinced that their financial products represented ‘riskless risk’. However, this roll call of pre-2008 era’s phenomena leaves us with the nagging feeling that we are missing something important; that, all these separate truths were mere symptoms, rather than causes, of the juggernaut that was speeding headlong to the 2008 Crash. Greed has been around since time immemorial. Bankers have always tried to bend the rules. Financiers were on the lookout for new forms of deceptive debt since the time of the Pharaohs. Why did the post-1971 era allow greed to dominate and the financial sector to dictate its terms and conditions on the rest of the global social economy? My book begins with an intention to home in on the deeper cause behind all these distinct but intertwined phenomena.

PP: Right, these trends need to be contextalised. What, then, do you find the roots of the crisis to be?

YV: They are to be found in the main ingredients of the second post-war phase that began in 1971 and the way in which these ‘ingredients’ created a major growth drive based on what Paul Volcker had described, shortly after becoming the President of the Federal Reserve, as the ‘controlled disintegration of the world economy’.

It all began when postwar US hegemony could no longer be based on America’s deft recycling of its surpluses to Europe and Asia. Why couldn’t it? Because its surpluses, by the end of the 1960s, had turned into deficits; the famous twin deficits (budget and balance of trade deficits). Around 1971, US authorities were drawn to an audacious strategic move: instead of tackling the nation’s burgeoning twin deficits, America’s top policy makers decided to do the opposite: to boost deficits. And who would pay for them? The rest of the world! How? By means of a permanent transfer of capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to finance America’s twin deficits.

The twin deficits of the US economy, thus, operated for decades like a giant vacuum cleaner, absorbing other people’s surplus goods and capital. While that ‘arrangement’ was the embodiment of the grossest imbalance imaginable at a planetary scale (recall Paul Volcker’s apt expression), nonetheless, it did give rise to something resembling global balance; an international system of rapidly accelerating asymmetrical financial and trade flows capable of putting on a semblance of stability and steady growth.

Powered by America’s twin deficits, the world’s leading surplus economies (e.g. Germany, Japan and, later, China) kept churning out the goods while America absorbed them. Almost 70% of the profits made globally by these countries were then transferred back to the United States, in the form of capital flows to Wall Street. And what did Wall Street do with it? It turned these capital inflows into direct investments, shares, new financial instruments, new and old forms of loans etc.

It is through this prism that we can contextualise the rise of financialisation, the triumph of greed, the retreat of regulators, the domination of the Anglo-Celtic growth model; all these phenomena that typified the era suddenly appear as mere by-products of the massive capital flows necessary to feed the twin deficits of the United States.

PP: You seem to locate the turning point here at the moment when Richard Nixon took the US off the gold standard and dissolved the Bretton Woods system. Why is this to be seen as the turning point? What effect did de-pegging the dollar to gold have?

YV: It was a symbolic moment; the official announcement that the Global Plan of the New Dealers was dead and buried. At the same time it was a highly pragmatic move. For, unlike our European leaders today, who have spectacularly failed to see the writing on the wall (i.e. that the euro-system, as designed in the 1990s, has no future in the post-2008 world), the Nixon administration had the sense to recognise immediately that a Global Plan was history. Why? Because it was predicated upon the simple idea that the world economy would be governed by (a) fixed exchange rates, and (b) a Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM) to be administered by Washington and which would be recycling to Europe and Asia the surpluses of the United States.

What Nixon and his administration recognised was that, once the US had become a deficit country, this GSRM could no longer function as designed. Paul Volcker, who was Henry Kissinger’s under-study at the time (before the latter moved to the State Department), had identified with immense clarity America’s new, stark choice: either it would have to shrink its economic and geopolitical reach (by adopting austerity measures for the purpose of reigning in the US trade deficit) or it would seek to maintain, indeed to expand, its hegemony by expanding its deficits and, at once, creating the circumstances that would allow the United States to remain the West’s Surplus Recycler, only this time it would be recycling the surpluses of the rest of the world (Germany, Japan, the oil producing states and, later, China).

The grand declaration of 15th August 1971, by President Nixon, and the message that US Treasury Secretary John Connally was soon to deliver to European leaders (“It’s our currency but it is your problem.”) was not an admission of failure. Rather, it was the foreshadowing of a new era of US hegemony, based on the reversal of trade and capital surpluses. It is for this reason that I think the Nixon declaration symbolises an important moment in postwar capitalist history.

PP: The old banking proverb: “If you owe a bank thousands, you have a problem; owe a bank millions, the bank has a problem” comes to mind. Was this, then, the end of the hegemony of the US as lender and the beginning of the hegemony of the US as borrower? And if so, does this provide us with any insights into the financial crisis of 2008?

YV: I suppose that Connally’s “It’s our currency but it is your problem” turned out to be the new version of the old banking adage that you mention. Only there is an important twist here: in the case of the banks, when they fail, there is always the Fed or some other Central Bank to stand behind them. In the case of Europe and Japan in 1971, no such support was at hand. The IMF was, let’s not forget, an organisation whose purpose was to fund countries (of the periphery mostly) that faced balance of payments deficits.

Connally’s phrase was aimed at countries that had a balance of payments surplus in relation to the United States. Additionally, when a heavily indebted person or entity tells the bank that it is the one with the problem, and not the indebted, this is usually a bargaining ploy by which to secure better terms from the bank, a partial write down on the debt etc. In the case of Connally’s trip to Europe, shortly after the Nixon announcement, the United States was not asking anything from Europeans. It was simply announcing that the game had changed: energy prices would rise faster in Europe and in Japan than in America, and relative nominal interest rates would play a major role in helping shape capital flows toward the United States.

The new hegemony was thus beginning. The hegemon would, henceforth, be recycling other people’s capital. It would expand its trade deficit and pay for it via the voluntary flows of capital into New York; flows that began in earnest especially after Paul Volcker pushed US interest rates through the roof.

PP: And this new hegemony grew almost organically out of the preeminence of the dollar as a world reserve currency that had grown up in the post-war years, right? Could you say something about this?

YV: The ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the dollar, courtesy of its reserve currency status, was one of the factors that allowed the United States to become the recycler of other people’s capital (while America was busily expanding its trade deficit). While crucial it was not the only factor. Another was the United States’ dominance of the energy sector and its geostrategic might. To attract wave upon wave of capital from Europe, Japan and the oil producing nations, the US had to ensure that the returns to capital moving to New York were superior to capital moving into Frankfurt, Paris or Tokyo. This required a few prerequisites: A lower US inflation rate, lower US price volatility, relatively lower US energy costs and lower remuneration for American workers.

The fact that the dollar was the reserve currency meant that, in a time of crisis, capital flew into Wall Street anyway (as it was to do again years later when, despite Wall Street’s collapse, foreign capital rushed into Wall Street in the Fall of 2008). However, the volume of capital flows that had to flood Wall Street (in order to keep the US trade deficit financed) would not have materialised had it not been for the capacity of the United States to precipitate a surge in the price of oil at a time when (a) US dependence on oil was lower than Japan’s or Germany’s, (b) most oil trades were channeled via US multinationals, (c) the US could suppress inflation by raising interest rates to levels that would destroy German and Japanese industries (without totally killing American companies) and (d) trades unions and social norms that prevented a ruthless suppression of real wages were far ‘softer’ in the US than in Germany or Japan.

PP: You write in the book that US officials were actually not that concerned about the rising oil prices in the 1970s, why do you say this? And do you think that the recent speculative pressures on oil and food prices – emanating from Wall Street itself – have been largely tolerated by US officials for similar reasons?

YV: The reason is in the old joke that has one economics professor asking another “How is your wife?” and receives the reply: “Relative to what?” The whole point about attracting capital and gaining competitiveness over another company or, indeed, another country, is that what matters is not absolute but relative costs and prices. Yes, the US authorities were concerned about inflation and oil prices. They did not like their increases, especially when they could not control them fully. But there was one thing that they feared more: An incapacity to finance the growing US trade deficit (that would result if the returns to capital were not improving relative to similar returns elsewhere). It was in this context that their considered opinion was that a hike in energy prices, to the extent that it boosted German and Japanese costs more than it did US costs, was their optimal choice.

As for the comparison with the recent rise in oil and, primarily, food prices, I think this is quite different. For one, I do not see what US interests are being served by the ways in which derivatives in the Chicago marker are pushing food prices to a level that threaten the Fed’s quantitative easing strategy courtesy of the inflationary pressures they are causing. Additionally, back in the early 1970s, the US government was far more in control of financial flows and speculative drives than it is today. Having allowed the genie of financialisation out of the bottle, US authorities are watching it wreak havoc almost helplessly – especially given the inherent ungovernability of the United States, with Congress and the Administration locked into mortal combat with one another. In sharp contrast, back in 1971-73, the US government had a great deal more authority over the markets now.

PP: I’d like to move on to what I think is the key point of your book: namely, that the rest of the world is funding the US’s twin deficits – that is, the rest of the world is funding both the US trade deficit and the US government deficit.

When the twin deficits began to open up in the US there was a fundamental change in the nature of the US economy. Could you talk about this a little?

YV: The change was earth-shattering for America’s social economy. The strategy of allowing the deficits to expand inexorably came hand-in-hand with a series of strategies whose purpose was, quite simply, to draw into the United States the capital flows, from the rest of the world that would finance these growing deficits. In my book I tried to detail four major strategies that proved crucial in generating the capital tsunami which kept America’s deficits satiated: (1) a global boost in energy prices that would affect disproportionately Japanese and German industries (relatively to US firms), (2) a hike in America’s real interest rate (so as to make New York a more attractive destination for foreign capital), (3) a much cheapened American labour that is, at once, greatly more productive, and (4) a drive toward Wall Street financialisation that created even greater returns for anyone sending capital to New York.

These strategies had a profound effect on American society for a variety of reasons: To keep real interest rates high, the nominal interest rate was pushed upwards at a time that the administration, and the Fed, engineered a reduction in wages. The increasing interest rates shifted capital from local industry to foreign direct investment and transferred income from workers to rentiers. The cheapening of labour, which also necessitated a wholesale attack against the trades unions, meant that American families had to work longer days for less money; a new reality that led to the breakdown of the family unit in ways which had never been experienced before. The more family values were becoming the emerging Right’s mantle, the greater their destruction at the hands of the Global Minotaur that the Right was keenly nourishing.

The loss of wage share meant, moreover, that families had to rely more greatly on their home as a cash cow (using it as collateral in order to secure more loans) thus turning a whole generation away from savings and towards house-bound leverage. A new form of global corporation was created (the Wal-Mart model) which imported everything from abroad, used cheap labour domestically for manning the warehouse like outlets, and propagated a new ideology of cheapness. Meanwhile, Wall Street was using the capital inflows from abroad to go on a frenzy of lucrative take-over and merger activity which was the breeding ground for the financialisation which followed. By combining the domestic hunger for credit (as the working class struggled to make ends meet, even though they worked longer hours and much more productively than before), a link was created between financial flows built upon (i) the humble home of the bottom 60% of society and (ii) the financial inflows of foreign capital into Wall Street. As these two torrents of capital merged, Wall Street’s power over Main Street rose exponentially. With labour losing its value as fast as regulatory authorities were losing their control over the financial sector, the United States was changing fast, losing all the values and ditching all the social conventions that had evolved out of the New Deal. The world’s greatest nation was ready for the Fall.

PP: You mentioned the Wal-Mart model just now. In the book you make a good deal out of this model. Could you explain to the readers why you do and what the significance of it is for the broader economy?

YV: Wal-Mart symbolises a significant change in the nature of oligopolistic capital. Unlike the first large corporations that created wholly new sectors by means of some invention (e.g. Edison with the light bulb, Microsoft with its Windows software, Sony with the Walkman, or Apple with the iPod/iPhone/iTunes package), or other companies that focused on building a particular brand (e.g. Coca Cola or Marlboro), Wal-Mart did something no one had ever thought of before: It packaged a new Ideology of Cheapness into a brand that was meant to appeal to the financially stressed American working and lower-middle classes. In conjunction with its fierce proscription of trades unions, it became a bulwark of keeping prices low and of extending to its long suffering working class customers a sense of satisfaction for having shared in the exploitation of the (mostly foreign) producers of the goods in their shopping basket.

In this sense, the significance of Wal-Mart for the broader economy is that it represents a new type of corporation which evolved in response to the circumstances brought on by the Global Minotaur. It reified cheapness and profited from amplifying the feedback between falling prices and falling purchasing power on the part of the American working class. It imported the Third World into American towns and regions and exported jobs to the Third World (through outsourcing). Wherever we look, even in the most technologically advanced US corporations (e.g. Apple), we cannot fail to recognise the influence of the Wal-Mart model.

PP: Finally, where do you see us headed now as we emerge from the shadow of the Global Minotaur?

YV: The Minotaur is, of course, a metaphor for the strange Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM) that emerged in the 1970s from the ashes of Bretton Woods and succeeded in keeping global capitalism in a rapturous élan; until it broke down in 2008, under the weight of its (and especially Wall Street’s) hubris. Post-2008, the world economy is stumbling around, rudderless, in the absence of a GSRM to replace the Minotaur. The Crisis that began in 2008 mutates and migrates from one sector to another, from one continent to the next. Its legacy is generalised uncertainty, a dearth of aggregate demand, an inability to shift savings into productive investment, a failure of coordination at all levels of socio-economic life.

[…]

No OSHA Inspections plus a Non-Union Workforce equals Workplace Acidents

Bradley Manning

16 years for espionage, life in jail for whistleblowing

http://www.bradleymanning.org/featured/16-years-for-espionage-life-in-jail-for-whistleblowing

By Nathan Fuller, Bradley Manning Support Network. April 17, 2013.

Spc. William Millay, a 25-year-old military policeman, was sentenced yesterday to 19 years in jail, a sentence reduced to 16 years after a plea deal, minus time served, for attempting to commit espionage and for illegally communicating “unclassified national defense information that could be used to the advantage of a foreign nation,” according to an Army press release.

The prosecution of Spc. Millay is strikingly lenient relative to that of Pfc. Bradley Manning, 25-year-old intelligence analyst on trial for passing documents to WikiLeaks. Manning sought to expose documents revealing crimes, abuse, and corruption to the American people, through WikiLeaks, and he faces a potential life sentence. The government charges him with Espionage and with ‘Aiding the Enemy.’

Millay “admitted to trying to pass on classified information to someone he believed was a Russian agent,” according to Reuters’ report. An FBI agent said, “Millay betrayed his nation’s trust by attempting to sell classified national defense information for profit to a foreign nation.”

Contrast that motive with Bradley Manning’s. In chat logs with government informant Adrian Lamo, Manning hypothesized, “what if i were someone more malicious…i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?”

“Why didn’t you?” Lamo asked. 

“[B]ecause it’s public data,” he said. “[I]t belongs in the public domain…information should be free…because another state would just take advantage of the information… try and get some edge…if its out in the open… it should be a public good.”

Manning expounded on his reasons for passing to WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of documents chronicling U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. diplomacy worldwide, in a statement earlier this year,

I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the [Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

That statement accompanied a guilty plea to lesser offenses, including communicating information to someone not entitled to receive it. That plea could have put Manning in jail for up to twenty years. But that wasn’t sufficient for military prosecutors, who immediately succeeded that statement with the announcement that they’ll continue to pursue all 22 charges against Manning, seeking life in jail without parole. 

The military’s message is clear: Admit to illegally communicating national defense information for profit, and you’ll get a plea deal and 16 years in jail. Admit to making information publicly available to expose abuse, and the government will refuse your plea and seek a life sentence.

[…]

The Truth of Plato

“Recall what Marx wrote about Plato’s Republic: the problem is not that it is ‘too utopian,’ but, on the contrary, that it remains the ideal image of the existing politico-economic order.” (Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p. 15)

[by revising Plato in light of Hegel, Marx, Lacan, etc., Badiou shows the Truth of Plato for today]

Why are whistleblowers less popular than war criminals?

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=378ec92c86f70e1518699ea15&id=cd88d2c1c7&e=7c1364d571

[…]

A discussion between Chase Madar and Sarah Leonard

On Tuesday, April 30th at 630pm the New Inquiry, Verso and Brooklyn Voices present a discussion between The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower author Chase Madar and Sarah Leonard, New Inquiry Editor and Associate Editor at Dissent.  The discussion will be part of the Brooklyn Voices series, a program of St. Joseph's College, in partnership with Greenlight Bookstore and theBrooklyn Rail.

In the last three years, Wikileaks has released thousands of classified documents about the Iraq War, the Afghan War and American statecraft in general, the basis for thousands of important stories in major media across the world.  The source? A 22-year-old US Army Intelligence Private First Class from Crescent, Oklahoma by the name of Bradley Manning. After three years of pretrial detention, his court martial will begin June 3rd of this year. He faces 22 charges including espionage and Aiding the Enemy, carrying a possible life term.

[…]

JVE Theory Lives On

http://www.konstnarsnamnden.se/default.aspx?id=15843

Theory Week at Iaspis – On the Question of Theory and Practice

Date: 18-20 April 2013

Place: Iaspis project room, Konstnärsnämnden, Maria skolgata 83, Stockholm

Limited seating, please RSVP by April 12, 2013 

It is with great pleasure that we announce Theory Week at Iaspis, a programme with theoretical seminars, book presentations, film screenings, an artist performance, and a secret exhibition – all devoted to the question of theory and practice. 

The question of theory and practice in contemporary visual art might seem as constitutive as ever-present: in press releases and catalogue texts, in discursive practices and artistic references to theoretical work, in artist writing and in the context of curatorial statements and art criticism. Theory Week at Iaspis will address the question of theory and practice in the contemporary visual art context by way of analogy: by looking at the thematization of theory and practice in other fields, such as psychoanalysis, political theory, philosophy, and film. 

The event takes its name from ”Theory Week” – the one week every month when researchers of the now defunct Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie for art, design and theory reconvened in Maastricht, to give and attend seminars, lectures, and conferences. The unique character of this was perhaps not the steady flow of international guest lecturers and visiting scholars, or the intense and very productive setting, but rather the fact that it was a non-academic theory production: a both scholarly and at times experimental theory production outside the university system and its formal restraints of examination. Following the severe cuts in Dutch public arts funding announced in 2011, the Jan van Eyck Academie (along with The Rijksakademie and de Ateliers) was restructured and the Theory Department along with the Design Department was cancelled by the end of 2012, leaving the formerly interdisciplinary post-academic research institute with a thoroughly reshaped Art Department. 

Theory Week at Iaspis – a miniature version of only three days – is thus an attempt to temporarily host this unique and internationally renowned research structure, to offer it to a Swedish audience, and to see what future it might have outside its own, but now former academy.

In this regard, Theory Week at Iaspis inevitably plays a role of historical representation, or of staging a certain history of the present. But that is not the purpose of the event, nor its main idea. The idea is to discuss the relation between theory and practice, and to set this relation in motion in such a way that many different formats and viewpoints can meet. For this, we have included the core structure of the Van Eyck Theory Week, the seminars of the three so-called advising researchers: Katja Diefenbach's After 1968. On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory, Mladen Dolar's Hegel Seminar, and Dominiek Hoens' Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (CliC). Also, two former researchers have been invited:

Oxana Timofeeva from the theory department will present her book History of Animals, and Dubravka Sekulić will introduce the Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and her work with the book Surfing the Black.

On the second day, Friday 19 April, there will be an off-site exhibition entitled Secret Show, for which the location will be announced the same day.

On the third day, Saturday 20 April, artist Johannes Paul Raether will do his performance Volksbegierden Total Reconstruction, and the whole event will be concluded with an open discussion, moderated by artist Emily Roysdon and writer/critic Fredrik Svensk.

The seminar room will be staged by designer Johan Hjerpe.


Hegel Seminar by Mladen Dolar: ”Interpreting and changing the world”Departing from Marx's thesis eleven from ”Theses On Feuerbach” and some reflections on interpreting vs. changing, we will turn to a Hegelian view of not theory vs. practice, but rather theory as practice. Here, attention will be paid to what is usually taken as the most damaging pronouncement by Hegel, that on the owl of Minerva (at the end of the ”Introduction” to the Philosophy of Right). Through Hegel's portraits and a poem by Heinrich Heine, comments will be made on key passages, to give just a little taste of the work of close reading.

Assigned reading: Hegel, G. W. F., Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraphs 20-27

CLIC Seminar by Dominiek Hoens: ”Duras' Dark Room”
A screening of Marguerite Duras' film Le Camion (1977) will be followed by a discussion of it. Attention will be devoted to the use of the past conditional mode, i.e. the future anterior situated in the past. This paradoxical time (the future of the past) may allow us to understand how one passes from thought to action. Once this 'pass' has been made, thought no longer precedes action, but becomes an inherent part of it.

Assigned reading: Preferably the text of Le Camion (Paris, Minuit, 1977; no English translation available).

After 1968 Seminar by Katja Diefenbach: ”Unemployed positivity, or: The practice of doing nothing”

Modern power mechanisms have been examined by Foucault by distinguishing two strategies of an individualising and totalising type that mutually superimpose and shift in their effects: on one hand the production of docile bodies, on the other hand the reproduction of the population centred around the administration of valorisation and circulation processes. Is there a way to deactivate the modes of capacitating subjectivisation emerging from this field, i.e. these homines oeconomici?

This question has been raised by post-Marxist authors developing existentialist and ontological figures of poverty, indeterminate existence and whatever being to reconceptualise political agency and thus revert Foucault’s perspective of examining the subject as first effect of power. By turning to the divergent ideas of non-economic activity in Agamben and Deleuze, I would like to discuss three questions:

1) Can one think politics in existentialist or ontological terms of poverty?
2) How to conceive of the radically different ways, in which Agamben and Deleuze do so in conceptualising the idea of an activity without work, end or return?
3) What do we learn from their mutual criticisms?

Assigned reading: Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory. For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, (§ 8 »The Archealogy of Glory«), Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 2011, in particular pp. 239-259, 8.22–8.26. 

Giorgio Agamben, »Absolute Immanence«, in Potentialities, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 220–239. 

Both texts and more detailed abstract available at: http://after1968.org/index.php/seminars/view/79

"Comrades, even now I am not embarrassed of my communist past - an introduction to the Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema"

Title of this presentation is the last sentence said in the last film of Yugoslav Black Wave, WR Mysteries of Organism by Dušan Makavejev. Starting maybe at the end, during my presentation I will try to chart the exciting world of Yugoslav Black Wave. The Yugoslavian Black Wave can be considered a unique movement in the history of cinema, interesting both due to its political implication as a critical voice toward bureaucratic Yugoslavian state socialism of the 60s and its aesthetic form with a visual freedom that is nowhere to be found even in the context of European experimental cinema of that decade. Although it is nowadays almost forgotten in the western part of Europe and the United States, from that “new cinema” something completely different emerged that challenged not only the ideological and aesthetic apparatus of the then Yugoslav state but that it is still preserving a challenging stance to our contemporary approach to ways of viewing. The urgency of these films now lies not only in the fact that their topics such as unemployment, homelessness, the impediments of class immobility are, at least, as current now as they were in the 1960s, but also in the fact that they were produced as a highly critical content within the system of controlled funding. This also makes them relevant beyond the limited (post-)Yugoslav context, and the studies of 1960s and 1970s. 

Book Presentation by Oxana Timofeeva: ”Revolution with a non-human face”
The focus of this presentation is a desire for communism in perspective of it's animality. In contrast to the «Socialism with a human face» (a famous slogan for Soviet dissidents) we propose to take into consideration the idea of a (communist) revolution with a non-human face and to make a detour into searching for animal roots of communism – precisely through literary and artistic practice. Timofeeva will draw on her book History of Animals, Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012. 

Artist performance by Johannes Paul Raether: “Volksbegierden Total Reconstruction”
“Volksbegierden Total Reconstruction” is formulated as a fictitious citizens’ initiative that aims to reconstruct national socialist architect Albert Speer’s chancellery as one of the most important architectonic landmarks in German history. At the present moment the Prussian Berlin city castle is being rebuilt on the very same spot.  Protagonists of the Berlin architecture and city planning debate are cited on their positions on reconstruction, their attempt to rehabilitate fascist architecture and their obsession with “rationalist” tradition and “Stone Architecture”.

Participants: 

Katja Diefenbach, theoretician, Berlin. Her research interests are 20th century French philosophy and epistemology, in particular the relationship between post-structuralism, Marxism and deconstruction. Recently, she has co-edited (with G. Kirn, S. Farris, P. Thomas) Encountering Althusser. Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (Continuum 2013). She is currently lecturer at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, and taught at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, the Humboldt University and the University of Arts, Berlin. She is in the editorial board of the publishing house collective b_books and co-directs the book series Materialism and Politics.

Mladen Dolar is Professor at the Department of philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and a former advising researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. His main topics of interest and reasearch are the German Idealism, particularly Hegel, contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalysis, as well as some broader issues in cultural studies and critical theory. He is the author of ten books in Slovene, the publications in English most notably include A voice and nothing more (MIT Press 2006, translated in six languages), some 100 papers in scholarly journals and book chapters etc. He has widely lectured internationally (particularly in the US). Two new books are forthcoming in English next year.

Johan Hjerpe is a designer based in Stockholm, Sweden. For the past decade he has been designing graphics, spaces and strategic frameworks for an array of contexts and industries. The visual side of his design practise resides mainly within the field of arts, and has over the years gained focus on how design helps or interfere with social interaction. The design of frameworks focuses on integrating decision making, policy setting and daily activities within systems where mutual value-in-context emerge. His design has been published in journals like Libération and Artforum as well as Chinese and Japanese books on design.

Dominiek Hoens is a philosopher and ex-advising researcher of the Jan van Eyck Academie, where he was responsible for the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (CLiC) and its activities (seminars, reading groups, invited lectures and conferences). He is also co-editor of S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (see www.lineofbeauty.org). Besides this he published on Lacan, Badiou and Duras, on logical time, love and catastrophe. He currently teaches Philosophy and Psychology of Art at different University Colleges in Belgium.

Karl Lydén is a writer, critic, and member of the editorial board of Site Magazine. He is the Swedish translator of Michel Foucault's Il faut défendre la société (2008) and Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (2013/upcoming), and his writings on art has appeared in Mousse Magazine, OEI, and kunstkritikk.se. He completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2009 and was a researcher at the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie 2011-2012.

Johannes Paul Raether is an artist, author and activist based in Berlin. Raether’s work arise in connection with his performative and collective practice. He investigates models of production of knowledge and the possibilities of emancipatory self-organization. He is co-founder of the artists’ collective Basso in Berlin. In numerous projects, Raether has investigated the concept of nation and the creation of national myths.

Emily Roysdon is a New York and Stockholm based artist and writer. Her working  method is interdisciplinary and recent projects take the form of performance, photographic  installations, print making, text, video, curating and collaborating. Roysdon developed  the concept "ecstatic resistance"and is a founding editor of LTTR. Recent solo projects include new commissions from Performance Room, Tate Modern (London), Visual Art Center (Austin), Art in General (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Konsthall C (Stockholm) and a Matrix commission from the Berkeley Art Museum. Roysdon completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an Interdisciplinary MFA at UCLA in 2006. In 2012 she was a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize.

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect researching transformation of contemporary cities with specific focus on privatization of public sphere and transformation of legal frameworks that precede the production of space. She is the author of the book Glotzt Nicht so Romantisch! On Extra-legal Space in Belgrade. Not limiting her research just to questions of built environment, she co-edited (with Z.Testen and G. Kirn) the book Surfing the Black on  Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and its transgressive moments. Both books were published by Jan van Eyck Academie, where Sekulić was a researcher at the design department 2009-2011. 

Fredrik Svensk is Editor-in-chief of Paletten Art Journal & and holds Lecturer position in Art- and Culture Theory at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. He writes art criticism for Kunstkritikk, Aftonbladet Kultur and Göteborgs-Posten Kultur and essays for journals like Glänta, SITE, Paletten, Sarai, Neue Review, Anarchitecture, Art Monitor, Paris, Res Publica et cetera. 2006-2008 he was a curator at Röda Sten Konsthall. He is a member of OTCOP and in 2012 his research has been published in books from Iaspis/Sternberg Press (Stockholm) and Tropedo Press (Oslo), Archive Books (Berlin).

Rebecka Thor is a writer and critic, based in Stockholm. She is currently writing her PhD in Aesthetics at Södertörn University. For the year 2012-2013 she is serving as a guest teacher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She was a researcher at the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie 2010-2011.

Oxana Timofeeva is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Science and currently a Humboldtian Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is a member of Russian collective "Chto Delat?" ("What is to be Done"?), and the author of books "Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (2009, Moscow, in Russian) and "History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom" (2012, Maastricht).