The maquinics of political art. Another twelve theses on the actualization of Walter Benjamin´s 'The Author as Producer'

The Machinics of Political Art re-invents Walter Benjamin’s essay The Author as Producer as a proto-poststructuralist montage and accumulation of text passages, building blocks, fragments and semi-explicit self-quotations from Benjamin’s text production on a transnational variety of contemporary and historical art practices. Gerald Raunig’s actualization of Benjamin’s main theses conceptualizes political art as adverbial, the tendency of political art as a line of flight, and technique as a machinic mode of conduct and subjectivation. Against the false riches of the creative personality and the wrong question about the place of the intellectual Raunig sets an affirmative notion of the intellectual’s betrayal of his social position, his becoming invisible up to the point that the intellect becomes transversal. In a threefold process of destituting, constituting and instituting the three functions of political art are refunctioning, socializing, organizing.

This workbook forms part of a series of writings that function as footnotes to Walter Benjamin ‘s text The author as producer. A work tool for opening debates around the notion of production in contemporary art, a field that has been widely explored by the producer of art projects consonni. And, specifically, through the research project Bird-cum-ornithologist, since 2010.

Gerald Raunig. Philosopher, art theoretician; works at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste and at the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies); co-ordinator of the transnational eipcp research projects republicart (2002-2005), transform (2005-2008) and Creating Worlds (2009-2012); habilitation and venia docendi at the Institute for Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt/A; member of the editorial board of the multilingual webjournal transversal. His books have been translated into English, Serbian, Spanish, Slovenian, Russian, Italian, and Turkish.

Recent books in English: Art and Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, translated by Aileen Derieg, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2007; Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. Reinventing Institutional Critique, London: mayflybooks 2009 (Ed., with Gene Ray); A Thousand Machines, translated by Aileen Derieg, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2010; Critique of Creativity, London: mayflybooks 2011 (Ed., with Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig); Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, translated by Aileen Derieg, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2013.