Tentatively scheduled for Sunday Dec 12 at 2PM– if we decide there is a better time, I’m happy to talk about that.

We will have several kinds of cookie dough, sprinkles, icing, candy, chocolate, candy canes, a tree with lights on it.

Note that Ella, 7, and Henry, 5, will be present and participating.

I also ran across this, a 6 page article about the politics of the common and the role of immaterial labor:
politics-of-the-common-by-michael-hardt

There are some really interesting points in the second article about the reproducibility of immaterial labor– in that immaterial labor needs to reproducible because it is  not usually successful without that quality. So, things like ideas, music and other digital files, etc… are the important commodities, as opposed to maybe my grandparent’s generation where there was a huge importance placed on land, on material.

He also talks about intellectual property concerns, which I think about often as an artist. I do have some questions, to be honest, about art/capitalism/property. I believe in sharing ideas for a better world, but what about when you tell people about your ideas and then see them in other people’s work shortly after a conversation? In these ideas of the commonwealth, ideas are not property, and they are used to benefit the greater good, etc. But my real question is this: If other people are using other people’s ideas in order to capitalize on them (be it social, political, art, monetary capital), isn’t that just as hurtful? Comments?

Japan’s lost generation/ the definition of “freeter” and “grass-eater”

Ed Giardina from The Finishing School an LA based collective. Just posted this Social Practices blog on facebook. Looks pretty interesting. I’m going to see if he’s interested in Skyping into our discussion. Here’s the link: http://suebellyank.com/</a

DC: Provisions Library

Ballmer: Neal McDonald’s (Catonsville) house is one option; so is his office, UMBC FA 219B, though the office is only half as big as the house.

Michael Hardt – “Immaterial Labor and Artistic Production” in Rethinking Marxism, April 2005, 17, 2 pp. 175- 177

p. 176: “What Negri and I call the hegemony of immaterial labor…Let me give the briefest of summaries of this idea. Immaterial labor is labor that produces an immaterial product, such as ideas, images, forms of communication and social relationships (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004). Paolo Virno (1996, 2004) describes this immaterial labor as resembling artistic virtuosity in the sense that it is an act of production with no material product, a performative act.”

Maurizio Lazzarato “Immaterial Labor” in “Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics” eds., Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt (2006)

p. 132:” …an attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working class – can be expressed in the concept of immaterial labor, which is defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.”

p. 132: “…as regards the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’ – in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion.”

We will be reading sections of Hardt and Negri’s book Commonwealth as the main focus for discussion, as well as any other material that is posted in the mean time that pertains to immaterial labor.

Immaterial Labor:

Reading selections from Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth

http://openinvestigations.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/commonwealth-excerpt001.pdf

From the Groundswell Collective blog:

Cultural Geography and Place Based Problem-Solving

and this short project description from the Third Rail website about slow activism:

http://www.thirdrailgroup.org/projects/slow-activism-dialogical-practice-and-environmental-remediation-at-the-inglewood-oil-field/