Dear friends of Cabinet,
We hope you can join us for one or both of the following events.
• Friday, 3 May 2013, 7–9 pm: Panel / "In Defense of Forgetting," with Simon Critchley, Barbara Frischmuth, and George Prochnik • Saturday, 4 May 2013, 11 am – 6 pm: Workshop and Presentation / "Creative Destruction Consultancy" See below for details.
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Panel / "In Defense of Forgetting," with Simon Critchley, Barbara Frischmuth, and George Prochnik Date: Friday, 3 May 2013, 7–9 pm
Location: Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, New York (map
here)
$15 ($12 for members of PEN International, tickets
here)
Cabinet is pleased to present "In Defense of Forgetting," a panel organized for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.
In
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera wrote: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." This perspective—one that bears the marks of life under a totalitarian regime in which repression often took the form of enforced forgetting—assumes that remembering is always a virtue and that not doing so is necessarily a failing. But despite dominating much of the debate on cultural memory, this perspective elides the many differences between all the various acts that we cluster under the term "forgetting." Are all acts of forgetting similar enough that we can think of them, always and necessarily, as a failure? Can forgetting in fact even be a virtue? How do we understand the relationship between what needs to be forgotten in order for other things to be remembered? This panel, featuring
Simon Critchley,
Barbara Frischmuth, and
George Prochnik, will explore how the humanities and the sciences engage with the various functions and values of forgetting.
Presented in association with the Public Theater and cosponsored by the Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph's College, Brooklyn, NY. ABOUT THE NINTH ANNUAL PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL OF INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE Writers from across the globe convene in New York City to explore bravery in art, politics and personal life. Chaired by Salman Rushdie, this year's festival examines writers' impact on political transformations in recent global hot spots—Burma, Palestine, South Africa, Haiti, and Guantanamo Bay—as well as honor small acts of bravery displayed in daily life. Join us for a variety of events including panel discussions, one-on-one conversations, participatory workshops and performances at venues crisscrossing the city. PEN will feature several events in association with The Public Theater, a center for culture, arts and ideas, and will partner with The Standard, High Line and The Standard, East Village, which will serve as a Festival hub.
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Workshop and Presentation / "Creative Destruction Consultancy" Date: Saturday, 4 May 2013, 11 am – 6 pm
Location: New Museum StreetFest, corner of park at Houston St and Forsythe St, New York
FREE. NO RSVP required. 
For its project for the New Museum's 2013 IDEAS CITY, Cabinet magazine has offered its booth to representatives from the Institute for Creative Destruction. The institute, which traces its roots to the work of the Cold-War Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, works in various ways to support research, teaching, and innovative thought at the fertile junction of innovation and annihilation. In what ways can disruptive forms of ennervation and excess be assimilated to orderly production? How can unpredictable and destructive insurgencies generate positive ROI? What is the best way to yoke degenerative autolytic processes to dynamic growth? These are the questions that motivate the thinkers associated with the Institute, and these are the problems that guide its diverse range of creative and destructive efforts.
The most significant public face of the Institute is its consulting agency, the Creative Destruction Consultancy ("Where the end is always a means"). This is a unique consultancy, grounded in the ecstatic traditions of the avant-garde, which specializes in delivering carefully aimed blows to complicated organizations, the kind of interventions that can bring out an institution's natural and generative healing processes.
The CDC's dynamic engagement staff has an extensive background in performance art, ludic activism, and parodic mischief, and decades of experience orchestrating subtle and unpredictable insurgencies in companies small and large.
The enormous range of untapped resources for creative destruction represent a vital future resource, as representatives of the IDC will demonstrate at the 2013 IDEAS CITY Streetfest. Come and learn (and even volunteer). Consider bringing documents or other material in need of generative obliteration.
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Cabinet, a non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, receives generous support from the Lambent Foundation, the Orphiflamme Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Katchadourian Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, and the Danielson Foundation.
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Brooklyn NY 11217
cabinetmagazine.org 
