The Commune Form: A Conversation with Kristin Ross

Please join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 17 at 7pm for a celebration of The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life (Verso, 2024) where author Kristin Ross will be in conversation with e-flux journal associate editor Andreas Petrossiants, followed by a Q&A with the audience. 

Since the publication of her pathbreaking book The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune in 1985, Kristin Ross has continued to release compelling and influential writing on revolutionary activity in the urban context, the relations between artistic and militant creativity, and the politics of everyday life. Her formative May ’68 and Its Afterlives (2002) showed “how the current official memory of May ’68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement’s aspirations.” In Communal Luxury (2015), she delved into the Paris Commune’s Artist’s Federation and its “demand that beauty flourish in spaces shared in common and not just in special privatized preserves,” which “means reconfiguring art to be fully integrated into everyday life.” 

Most recently, Ross has turned to studying “the commune form,” a modality of collective life “anchored in the art and organization of everyday life and in a collective and individual responsibility taken for the means of subsistence.” This term is open enough to encompass forms of struggle as (seemingly) disparate as the decentralized movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta and the ZAD (zone to defend) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France. Ultimately, Ross writes, such struggles “are actually nothing more than an attempt to gain ground in the historic fight against enclosure.” Building upon centuries of struggle and militant theory, radical social geography, and encounters with those devoting their energies to these projects, Ross both investigates and furthers efforts toward collective appropriation based in use, rather than exchange value. 

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility              
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.   
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.            
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.