Antonio Negri’s research while affiliated with Duke University and other places

The text is a response of authors of Commonwealth to criticism presented by David Harvey. Hard and Negri turn down the primacy of class division over other various identity formations (e.g. race, gender) and they perceive it as field of revolutionary struggle. Then, starting with Spinoza they highlight variety of definitions of singularity and do not agree with the significant role ascribed to the notion of fictitious capital; they point out immaterial aspect of financialization and its role as a “central form of the accumulation of capital.” Finally, they emphasize the importance of recognition of present indignation and revolutionary actions, which could be made only from below.

UNCOVERED NICOSIA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT The UNCOVERED project is a three-year (2010-2013) research based art project, divided into two phases, and its area of investigation are the issues stemming from the prolonged condition of the closed Nicosia International Airport. The project was initiated in 2010, based on Cypriot artist Vicky Pericleous’s idea for an artistic intervention at the Nicosia International Airport, subsequently submitted as a proposal to the UNDP-ACT by Özgül Ezgin and Argyro Toumazou parallel to the peace-negotiations process. Ezgin and Toumazou were providing art works for the conference room in which the peace talks were taking place since 2009. Yet, the airport project was an attempt to widen the art-based interventions to the process. Their aim was to experiment and produce presentations both for the conference rooms of the bi-communal peace talks, as well as site-specific interventions and panel discussions, open to the public. Following the initial state with the UN, two curators as Basak Senova and Pavlina Paraskevaidou have developed the proposal as a long-term research-based art and media project. In this respect, the concept of the project was shaped through their fields of interest and previous areas of research and practice. the concept by Basak Senova and Pavlina Paraskevaidou Lying abandoned inside the buffer zone since July 1974, off limits for the local population, the Nicosia Airport represents a spatial order generated by 36 years of UN control [1]. The airport is a riddle nested within paradoxical questions of protection – Protected. Unprotected. Covered. Uncovered. Protected for whom? Protected from whom? – It is a spatial lapse, an episode of total invisibility. The Nicosia airport once served as the central port of entry and departure from the country. Now empty and protected from view, its former importance exists only in the islanders’ childhood memories. The novelty of its architecture, with its much-hailed new terminal, has acquired a rich patina of forgetting. A monument to a failed modernism, the airport embodies a history that is written only to be erased and re-written all over again. Due to the historical significance of the airport – along with its role in personal histories of division and survival in a state of suspended animation – there is no doubt that the airport – the building, the site, the land it occupies – plays a critical role in the construction of the island’s collective memory. UNCOVERED, then, places key importance on issues of memory and amnesia. The project takes the physical texture and theoretical input of the airport and converts it into the space of the encounter for cultural producers from across the divided island during a critical time in the peace process. Attempting to move beyond the ubiquitous mnemonic to pain while attesting to the psychological and the matter-of-fact fragmentation experienced on either side and through the buffer zone, this encounter re-examines the shattered forms of politics exercised over space, challenges the validity of control mechanisms and seeks to ask those questions that can ultimately reclaim a “commons”.[2] UNCOVERED examines how the airport has been operating as a control mechanism for the island on multiple levels. The project explores how this space, frozen in time, indicates and exposes the operational and organizational logics of control that have evolved on the island over the past decades. One can even see it as an attempt to understand the ways protocols can be customized and complex systems can be manipulated by control mechanisms. The airport has been suspended as a covered architecture in a prolonged state of crisis. In the island, the unresolved political situation has already legitimatized this constant state of crisis. Accordingly, the suspension itself ‘becomes both the subject and object of the conflicts of the political order’. The multiple layers and the complexity of issues appertaining to the Cyprus Problem, have clearly distinguished this conflict from comparable geographies. The protracted division engenders greater problems and hinders the attempts for a peaceful resolution. Adjustments, revisions and concessions are in the daily order in the pursuit of reconciliation. In the same line of thought, the accumulative control mechanisms are customized, while space and power are modified accordingly. With a closer look and research, the airport would manifest distinctive cultural, social, political, and psychological texture of the island. Therefore, we would like to examine how the airport has been operating as a control mechanism for the island in various levels. [1] UNFICYP have been operational in Cyprus since 1964 following intercommunal violence on the island. Nicosia Airport was declared a United Nations Protected Area during the events of the war in July 1974. [2] The “commons” were traditionally defined as the elements of the environment – forests, atmosphere, rivers, fisheries or grazing land – that are shared and used and enjoyed by all.

Uniwersytet znalazł się dziś z pewnością w centrum zainteresowania wielu światowych i lokalnych graczy politycznych i ekonomicznych. Świadczy o tym choćby fakt, że nawet w Polsce, po dwudziestu latach pozostawiania uczelni samym sobie, podjęto szybkie i zdecydowane kroki, by podporządkować go rynkowej logice rentowności, pomiaru efektywności, konkurencji oraz zysku. Od zawsze był on jednak poddawany różnym naciskom. Dziś, kiedy jego znaczenie radykalnie wzrosło, a presja wywierana przez rozmaite podmioty stała się tak duża, nie sposób dłużej nawet łudzić się, że uniwersytet jest jakkolwiek autonomiczną strukturą. Jego autonomię można wypracować i z tego względu z pewnością musi być on dzisiaj polem walki – polem, na którym od kilkunastu lat ruchy społeczne w Polsce ponoszą dotkliwą klęskę. Nieważne czy wymienimy tu ruchy studenckie, pracownicze, czy obywatelskie. Ich klęska jest podwójna: tam, gdzie się pojawiają, nie są w stanie wiele wywalczyć z powodu braku szerszego poparcia w środowisku studentów i wykładowców, a w wielu miejscach i momentach, gdy wyartykułowany powinien zostać głos sprzeciwu, zaobserwować można tylko całkowitą bierność i milczenie. Może to zaskakiwać, bo stawka w tej walce jest tyleż wysoka, co oczywista. W czasach, gdy coraz większe znaczenie dla gospodarki i reprodukcji życia społecznego ma wiedza, walka o równość, wolność i demokrację staje się w coraz większym stopniu również walką o równość i swobodę w dostępie do edukacji oraz wolność i demokratyzację produkcji wiedzy. Czy tym, czym kiedyś dla kapitalizmu przemysłowego była fabryka, dziś dla kapitalizmu kognitywnego jest uniwersytet? Czy możemy zaobserwować podobne mechanizmy wyzysku i kontroli pracy? Czy uniwersytet może być skuteczną przestrzenią organizacji oporu, podobną do tej, jaką stanowiły fabryki ery industrialnej? Te i wiele innych pytań przepuszczonych przez metaforyczną soczewkę „uniwersytetu-fabryki”, pozwoliło na przeprowadzenie dogłębnych, kolektywnych badań, które członkowie Edu-factory przedstawili w Towards a Global Autonomous University. Polska książka Edu-factory. Samoorganizacja i opór w fabrykach wiedzy wychodzi od tamtych rozważań, poszerza ich zakres i próbuje odnieść je do warunków, w których rozwijają się półperyferyjne uniwersytety.

Japanese translation of Le rapport capital-travail dans le capitalisme cognitif, Multitudes, N°32, pp. 39-50