A series of four seminars about rent organised by Arianna Bove, Paolo Do and Matteo Pasquinelli at the Queen Mary University of London in 2008.

As part of an ongoing collective project, the organisers of this  seminar series seek to promote a discussion on the rise of rent as a form of capitalist appropriation and the way that new levels of association in the arts and culture, in information and communication have made this rise possible, and from the perspective of private accumulation, necessary.  To this end, the seminar brings together various perspectives on the Art of Rent taking in analysis of cognitive capitalism, of the financialisation of the quotidian and the bodily, of gentrification, of new international division of labour and of governance.

Behind this series is the sense that the Art of Rent is a reaction to a new collective power among bodies assembled to labour and a capacity for ensemble in the social individual, all provoked by the migrations of work into culture, language, and affect and the work of migrations into these registers of life.  For those who work in the university, in the arts, and in politics long seeking to subvert the relationship between innovation and wage, the rise of the relationship between innovation and rent calls not for subversion but sabotage of the creative process.

Seminars will feature presentation from the speakers followed by structured discussion and questions and answers.

All the seminars are free and all are welcome. All seminars (except for February 29th) 16:00-18:00 Room 4.08 FrancisBancroft Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End.

Download: Audio files
Dowloadd: Texts and resources

1. The Art of Rent

Friday February 29th, 2008

Carlo Vercellone, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne

• “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism”, Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 13–36. [PDF]
• “The New Articulation of Wages, Rent Profit in Cognitive Capitalism”, trans. by Arianna Bove. Orig.: “La nuova articolazione salario, rendita, profitto nel capitalismo cognitivo”, in Posse ‘Potere Precario’, 2006. [PDF]

Matteo Pasquinelli, Queen Mary University of London

• “The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage”, Amsterdam, January 2008. [PDF]

2. Crisis and Financialization

Friday March 28th, 2008

Christian Marazzi, University of Southern Switzerland

• “Rules for the Incommensurable”, Substance (Volume 36, Number 1), 2007. [PDF]

Randy Martin, New York University
Costas Lapavitsas, SOAS London

3. New international division of labour

Thursday May 15th, 2008
• Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna
• Xiang Biao, Oxford University

4/ Governance, resistance, production of common

Thursday June 5th, 2008
• Judith Revel, Sorbonne University, Paris
• Stefano Harney, Queen Mary University