fwd: call - The Future in the Present - deadline: January 27th, 2006

[claudia westermann]

http://www.refusingstructures.net/future.html


The Future in The Present: Occupying the Social Factory
May 2-4, 2006 - Digby House at Oadby, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK



 From everyday insurgencies to global antagonisms recent decades have 
borne witness to multiple and overlapping cycles of social struggle 
as well as attempts to incorporate these sources of social wealth and 
creativity. From transformations in the circuits of global capital to 
the morphing of state structures, border controls, and forms of 
sovereignty, the development of neoliberal governmentality has 
constantly run to catch up with the multiplicitous desires of people 
to create new forms of self-determining community and sociality. 
Multidirectional lines of command attempt to recuperate innovations 
at the level of everyday life while myriad microrevolutions branch 
out, weave together new possibilities, and sometimes directly attack 
the networks of control.

What is the meaning of autonomy today, both as a theoretical category 
and as a practice? And what can the thought of refusal contribute to 
the organization of refusals in our daily lives? How can one create 
forms of antagonism directed against the lines of command that cut 
across the economic and social fabric, and which seek to incorporate 
affective, biological, and symbolic processes into forms of 
production? How can antagonism avoid being subsumed into the working 
of power and turned them against themselves? What would it mean, 
rather than to create overarching concepts that describe a new 
historical epoch, to look at the specific modulations of how 
productive forces and regimes of command are changing in response to 
the social creativity and struggles of political actors? And what 
possibilities for political and social change are contained within 
these transformations? This is to start from the multiple 
inscriptions of power and resistance, from the bare life and bodies 
of the migrant worker to the precarious temp employee, from the 
unwaged to laborers in export processing zone archipelagos.

This gathering will attempt to break down the format and constraints 
of the traditional academic conference as well as forms of theorizing 
divorced from on-going social struggles and organizing. It will seek 
to create a living dialogue and encuentro, a series of collisions of 
bodies and minds, drawing from the history of autonomist politics and 
organizing, to draw out possible directions for the future buried 
beneath the weight of the present. Rather than fixing autonomous 
practices as objects of study it will draw together theorists, 
organizers, and activists considering questions of what class 
composition, insurgent sociality, and autonomous political practice 
could mean today. Possible topics could include but are not limited 
to:



- Immaterial labour and biopolitical production
- The social factory and the metropolitan strike
- The refusal of work and affective economies
- Breaking the new enclosures, creating new commons
- San Precario, the precariat, and open source pop stars
- Digital Media, information flows, and the creative class
- Constituent power, exodus, and non-state democracy            





Proposals for discussions, presentations, and panels of 500 - 1000 
words should be sent to futureinthepresent at refusingstructures.net by 
Friday January 27th, 2006.


There will be an issue of the Commoner released to coincide with the 
encuentro as well as several related print publications that are 
being planned. For more information and for registration details, 
please send a message to futureinthepresent at refusingstructures.net or 
visit http://www.refusingstructures.net/future.html. Registration 
before January 31st is highly encouraged.

A pdf copy of the CFP is available here.
Sponsored by the University of Leicester Management Centre, the 
Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, and Autonomedia