Feminist Duration Reading Group: Sonogram of a Potentiality

Tue 6 Dec, 7pm
SPACE Mare Street
FREE

The Feminist Duration Reading Group focuses on under-known and under-appreciated feminist texts, movements, groups and struggles from outside the Anglo-American feminist tradition. Started at Goldsmiths, University of London, in March 2015, since July 2015 it has met at SPACE in Hackney. The group meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 7pm and is open to all. 

The next Feminist Duration Reading Group will focus on Sonogram of a Potentiality, Tiqqun #2. First published in French as echographie d'une puissance in 2001, this English translation was published by Pétroleuse Press, Brooklyn, in 2011.

Tiqqun propose the concept of ecstatic feminism, a form-of-life as insurrection and struggle against stereotypes and social norms. Starting from the self, in order to depart from the self, it seeks to resist the identity categories that power produces, and is produced within. 

The text is in dialogue with, and inspired by, ideas from autonomist Italian feminisms including those of DEMAU, Carla Lonzi and Rivolta Femminile, Adriana Cavarero, Lia Cigarini and the Milan Women’s Bookshop collective, and Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework.

Here we see the concept of the human strike that Fulvia Carnevale, who participated in Tiqqun, went on to develop in the artist collective Claire Fontaine, and which was a touchstone of the ‘Now You Can Go’ programme in December last year. Resisting the politics of assimilation and parity, this is “a strike of gestures, dialogue, a radical skepticism in the face of all forms of oppression that are taken for granted, including the most unquestioned of emotional blackmail or social conventions […].” Tiqqun write:

Negative preference is above all a political act: “I am not what you see here” gives rise to “Let’s be another possible now.” By no longer believing what other people say about you, by opposing the political intensity of your existence to the mundanities of recognition, above all not wanting any power, because power mutilates, power demands, power makes you mute and then other people will talk for you, will speak within you without you even perceiving it; that is how we escape, that is how we go on human strike.

We will read out loud, together, on the evening.  Please bring copies of the reading with you.

For a copy of this month's reading or if you would like to join the Feminist Duration Reading Group, please email feministduration@gmail.com

Now You Can Go

The Feminist Duration Reading Group on 1st December was the first in the Now You Can Go events series exploring feminist art, theory and activism that took place across The ICA, The Showroom, SPACE and Raven Row in December 2015.

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