Marc Herbst will be presenting a talk titled “Culture Beside Itself: On common sociality and its relation to more law-like cultural and governmental forms,” based on his ongoing research on social movements and eco-social planning and his part in the collective efforts of the 11th issue of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest.

These efforts are to attune creative activist/artistic attention towards the realm where social reproduction necessarily occurs, in order to strengthen ways in which cosmopolitically progressive thought and production (as culture and law) can better inform common life towards its autonomous ends. The work is grounded in Herbst’s research within the Barcelona based-Plataforma De Afectados por La Hipoteca (the PAH) housing rights movement, his recent eco-social work as a teacher/editor for the Berlin based Nachbarschaftsakademie and his current residency at Oakland’s Pro Art and Commons.

The talk will highlight concepts related to the upcoming Issue 11 of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, which looks at common sociality outside and beyond formal being (that is, more concretised cultural and governmental forms) in the light of the related challenges of climate change and resurgent fascism. Besides the particular of the project, the conversation engages autonomist Marxist, queer and de-colonial theory/praxis, either as an expression of ongoing praxis and theoretical work.

Marc Herbst is a co-founder of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, an interdisciplinary journal and weirdo collective founded in Los Angeles in 2001. He recently completed a PhD at Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies in London with a study titled, A cultural policy for the multitude in the time of climate change; with an understanding that the multitude has no policy. Marc’s collective and individual efforts are also interdisciplinary (between engagements with the formal art world, DIY networks and relatively autonomous political projects) and he works between publishing, social practice and illustration. As a publisher/editor, he works with Aesthetics & Protest and also has recently been collaborating with Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, Pluto Press and Canary Press.

With the Aesthetics & Protest editorial collective, he is currently editing an issue working with anti-fascist and avant garde art collectives on situated practice outside of but in awareness of the mediating practices of political and cultural structures. He also helped publish recent books on precarious labor with the UK-based Precarious Workers Brigade, and (related to his PhD) a book on housing rights activism and transversal urban organizing by Ada Colau and Adria Alemany. In addition to other work, he is currently co-editing with Michelle Teran a book based on situated, cosmopolitical and eco-social learning through the coming 99 years of climate based in the Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin.

Issue 11: Culture Beside Itself
Pro-arts and Common Residency
Nachbarschaftsakademie, Growing in the Midst of our Collective Disaster

Presented by: The History of Consciousness Department and the Center for Creative Ecologies