In his presentation at RT3 on January 11, Nicolas Bourriaud has been referring to a series of texts by Louis Althusser that are introducing the concept of "aleatory materialism". Written between 1982 and 1986 and published posthumous these short texts seem widely unkown today - at least outside of the french and italian (post-)marxist circles. Here are a few links to interesting sources:

This paper explores different possibilities for considering the role experience plays in political change. We introduce the concept of continuous experience to gain purchase on modes of everyday existence which are fluid, dispersed and never unified. Continuous experience interrupts and tarries with time; things, people and situations are affected by continuous experience not as it is interpreted or represented but as it materialises.

Upon reading it again, this text scanned from Bishop's reader is a good transition between the first and the second days of RT3_0708. In it Guattari describes aesthetic practices as forming a process of 'becoming' and leading to the reinvention of individual and collective subjectivities. It is a partially autonomous zone of activity, but one integrated into the social field. As such it can become a model for new forms of life opposed to banal capitalist rationality and working against disciplinary boundaries.

... that their synthesis itself, their consistency or capture, forms a properly machinic "statement" or "enunciation." The varying relations into which a color, sound, gesture, movement, or position enters in the same species, and in different species, form so many machinic enunciations.

I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is likea rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

Becoming-Music. We have tried to define in the case of Western music (although the other musical traditions confront an analogous problem, under different conditions, to which they find different solutions) a block of becoming at the level ofexpression, or a block ofexpression: this block of becoming rests on transversals that continually escape from the coordinates or punctual systems functioning asmusical codes at a given moment. It is obvious that there is a block of content corresponding to this block of expression.

Memories and Becomings, Points and Blocks. Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becoming-man?

A number of post-Marxist theories of community emerged in the 1980s. French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, writing in a Heideggerian end Derridedn tradition argues for an understdnding of community founded not on the immanence of individuals being-in-common, but on an 'unworking' (desoeuvremenr) of togetherness brought about by that which presents a limit to community - that is death. Nancy's complex text has been referenced by a number of writers on participatory art. (from Claire Bishop (ed.), Participation, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2006)

Relational Aesthetics has come come to be seen as a defining text for a generation of artists who came to prominence in Europe in the early to mid 1990s. The following text is a selection of excerpts from Bourriaud's collection of seven discrete essays originally published in magazines end exhibition catalogues. (from Claire Bishop (ed.), Participation, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2006)

Nicolas Bourriaud:  leading out of 'relational aesthetics' to 'globalization and the radicant'

Presentations: Celine Condorelli, Pip Day