Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity

168 Pages·2013·0.866 MB·English

by  Gerald Raunig

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SEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SERIES
© 2013 by Gerald Raunig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, elec-
tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of the publisher.
Published by Semiotext(e)
2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057
www.semiotexte.com
Thanks to John Ebert, Marc Lowenthal and Noura Weddell.
Design: Hedi El Kholti
ISBN: 978-1-58435-116-0
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
and London, England
Printed in the United States of America
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Gerald Raunig
Translated by Aileen Derieg
semiotext(e)
intervention
series 15
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Contents
Factories of Knowledge: Streaking and Smoothing Space
1. Josephine, or Streaking the Territory 9
2. The University-Factory as a Site of Reterritorialization 17
3. Twenty-Eight Tendencies of the Modulating University 29
4. In Modulation Mode: Factories of Knowledge 40
5. The School of the Missing Teacher 53
6. Inventing the Transversal Intellect 62
7. “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing!” 69
Industries of Creativity: Streaking and Smoothing Time
1. Industrious Mice, or Streaking Time 83
2. Smooth Times, Striated Times 91
3. Seventeen Tendencies of the Modulation of Creativity 105
4. The Industrial Turn 111
5. Island Industry 123
6. Art Strike for All! 137
7. For a Molecular Activism 148
Afterword by Antonio Negri 161
References 166
Acknowledgements 168
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I.
Factories of Knowledge
Streaking and Smoothing Space
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1
JOSEPHINE, OR STREAKING THE TERRITORY
Josephine is one of many, a singularity that can only
emerge in the multitude, and in the end, she will
“happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the
heroes of our people.” Josephine is a singer, and the
multitude out of which she sings is the mouse folk.
Josephine is not a folk singer, she does not sing of the
mouse folk, she does not sing about the folk, and she
does not sing forthe folk either. From out of the mul-
titude, she constitutes an exception. She represents
nothing and no one, and nowhere do we find out
more about the content or the motives of her singing.
Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk”
isnot a tale in the conventional sense. The text, writ-
ten in March 1924 as Kafka’s final work, is free from
any continuous narrative. It is not a fable and has
no linear plot. Instead, it is a treatise on the relation
between multitude and singularity, on the form in
which singularity emerges from the multitude and
how it falls back into the multitude again. This rela-
tion is one that goes beyond that of mice, of animals,
indeed of any living creatures at all. Josephine is the
9
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instituent machine, in whose singing the collective
production of desire for reterritorializing, for gently
striating, for streaking space emerges. This is not a
reterritorialization that invokes an originary commu-
nity of protection, not a return to a territory long
since constituted—but nor is it a reterritorialization
that draws strictly segmented furrows, forms a com-
pletely striated space, generates a state apparatus.
Instead, it is a gentle streaking of the territory, in the
course of which the mouse folk becomes an abstract
machine, fabricating singularities, events, machinic
relations, and gaining its form from this streaking at
the same time.
Kafka explicitly poses the problem of Josephine’s
singing and the desire for it that extends across all the
mouse folk, even to those who oppose Josephine:
“What drives the people to make such exertions for
Josephine’s sake?” There is a strange relationship
between the mouse folk in its multitude and the sin-
gularity of Josephine, between the lack of musical
understanding of the many and her singular virtuosity.
Wholly unmusical, the mouse folk cannot under-
stand Josephine’s singing in its uncommonness;
indeed, they cannot even perceive it. In fact, they
cannot even distinguish between the mouse folk’s
common skill of piping and Josephine’s patently
extraordinary singing.
Piping is the acoustic expression of mouse folk
normality. No one would call it art. The mouse folk
pipe away without attaching importance to it, often
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