Meeting #1
Tuesday March 27th
7:30 – 9:30 PM
The Public School Los Angeles
951 Chung King Road LA, CA 90012
Assembly Reading and Activity Group
Hardt, Micheal & Antonio Negri, Assembly; Oxford University Press, 2017
“Hardt and Negri’s Assembly is a critical, broad, all-encompassing analysis of contemporary society. It is a major work that turns the trilogy of Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009) into a tetralogy. These four works are organized around a core of concepts (empire, the multitude, the commons, immaterial labour) that has developed over a time of seventeen years in response to capitalism’s struggles, contradictions, and crises. It asks: “Why have the movements, which address the needs and desires of so many, not been able to achieve lasting change and create a new, more democratic and just society?”. For providing an answer, Hardt and Negri analyse recent changes of politics and the economy.[i]“
After its first meeting at the Public School, the Assembly Reading And Activity Group will schedule subsequent monthly meetings at public amphitheaters and spaces throughout the city of Los Angeles. Beyond engaged readings of the text together, we’ll encourage the development of propositions to enact (metaphorically, or in actuality) elements of the book in public space. Knowing comes, by doing together.
The Assembly Reading and Activity Group is developed by the Llano Del Rio Collective, whose Rebel City Los Angeles Guide is partly inspired by the Hardt and Negri text.
The Llano Del Rio Collective’s new guide Rebel City Los Angeles is a guide to the grassroots of Los Angeles. Inspired by Spain’s Municipalist Movement, David Harvey’s Rebel Cities, and the movie Tangerine, the guide helps its user visualize a city from below. It provides details of a developing infrastructure of people centered institutions buttressing human activities, outside the corporate dominion, ranging from electricity, housing, education, medicine, and banking. The Los Angeles born saint Vaginal Davis said “riding on the subway system and buses,,, are the Southland’s true barometer and soul of the city” and this guide hopes to provide the temperature. By knowing the city as it is in reverse, pictured by the people not the businesses, developers, corporations and bureaucracies that claim to control it, the guide offers a view to a city generated by its users, not its profiteers.
[i] http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/931/1069