For the next meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club, scheduled for 5 pm on Sunday, September 1st, 2013 we will cover chapters 8–10 of Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier (2013… read what you can).

Following a sequence of readings on science fiction, utopia, human economies, and value, we turn to the words of “the prophet of Silicon Valley” (Simon & Schuster, publisher) to wonder whether micropayments can redeem the promises of this dystopia we have sunk into. mmm, sounds a little Utopian.

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The next meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club will be held at HomeShop on Sunday June 2nd at 5 pm.

We will discuss the contents of the brief interview After the Event: Rationality and the Politics of Invention; An interview with Alain Badiou by Radical Politics between philosopher Alain Badiou and some students who form the Radical Politics Group at the University of Essex in 2003. From our brief foray into utopian studies, we wondered, can anything happen, does history exist, in utopia? And so the question of the event.

“It is imperative to understand that an event is always relative to a situation; it is an event for the situation, and not above or outside it. Consequently, when I say that an event is beyond calculation, beyond prediction, this is naturally beyond prediction within the situation of which the event is the supplement, or the added singularity. As such, the event is not in itself unintelligible: it is unintelligible in regard to the means of prediction, of forecast, or of continuity that are those of the situation. But the intelligibility of the event is created in the fidelity to the event.” —Alain Badiou

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At the last meeting it was decided to pick through a bit more of Fredric Jameson’s book “Archaeologies of the Future” to better understand what in the Utopian separates the appeal of the deodorant ad from the dream of the egalitarian society, the conservative ideal of perfection from the progressive imagination, and how to explain this diagram?

For those who would like to join, please choose a chapter or two from anywhere in the book that interests you, and see you at the next meeting at HomeShop at 5 pm on April 14th, 2013. If you are lacking a copy of this book, please leave a comment.

For the next meeting of Happy Friends Reading Club, we go on from the tensions between economies of perversion and play in Fourier and Sade, as elaborated by Klossowski, to investigations into varieties of the Utopian, with the first 2 chapters of “Archaeologies of the Future” (2005) by Fredric Jameson. 

The meeting will take place at HomeShop at 5 pm on Sunday, March 31st . If you would like to receive a copy of this book please leave a comment.