Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization - Paperback

by Stevphen Shukaitis (Editor), David Graeber (Editor), Erika Biddle (Contribution by)

What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic authors and engaged intellectuals--including Antonio Negri and Colectivo Situaciones--provide some challenging answers. In the process, they redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself.

The book opens with the editors' provocative history of the academy's inherent limitations and possibilities. The essays that follow cover a broad range: embedded intellectuals in increasingly corporatized universities, research projects in which factory workers and academics work side by side, revolutionary ethnographies of the global justice movement, and meditations on technology from the branches of a tree-sit in Scotland. What links them all is a collective and expansive re--imagining of engaged intellectual work in the service of social change. In a cultural climate where right-wing watchdog groups seem to have radical academics on the run, this unapologetic anthology is a breath of fresh air.

Author Biography

Stevphen Shukaitis is a research fellow at the University of Leicester Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy. He is a member of Ever Reviled Records, the Autonomedia Editorial Collective, and the Planetary Autonomist Network. He seeks to develop non-vanguardist forms of social research as part of the global conspiracy against neoliberalism. David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist who currently teaches at the University of London and has been active in direct-action groups, including the Direct Action Network, People's Global Action, and Anti-Capitalist Convergence. He is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, and Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.