[artinfo] [call] Capturing the Moving Mind

[stevphen shukaitis]

Call for Papers

Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of 
Permanently Temporary War

An ephemera conference on the Trans-Siberian train 
(Moscow-Novosibirsk-Beijing), 10-20 September 2005

www.ephemeraweb.org/conference

In September 2005 a meeting will take place on the Trans-Siberian train
from Moscow via Novosibirsk to Beijing. The purpose of this meeting is a
'cosmological' one. We would like to gather a group of people, researchers,
philosophers, artists and others interested in the changes going on in society
and engaged in changing society as their own moving image, an image of time.
Spatially moving bodies and bodies moving in time (through the different
time zones) could create an event, a meeting that not really 'is' but 
'is going on'.

Today it is impossible to restrict production to the closed time and
place of the 'factory-office'. Production has become spatially boundless and
temporarily endless: the factory-office and its borders have dissolved
into society, into a multitude of productive singularities whose
productivity cannot be reduced to actual production, to any actual mode
of existence, to any historical time. The labour force has rather
increasingly detached from its spatial, physical and biological aspects
and become a 'mental category'. The generic human capacities -intellect,
perception and linguistic-relational abilities - which make human 
beings 'humans', have
replaced machinery and direct labour in the core of value creation. The
mental labour force does not have strict spatial and temporal coordinates;
it rather moves in time and unrolls over the boundaries and hierarchies
of space. To understand the changed dynamics of creation and the social
cooperation at its centre we must perhaps move beyond the borders and
beyond the immediately visible.

Yet the constitutive political problem in today's knowledge society, or
knowledge economy, is not that different from what it was in industrial
capitalism: how to govern, organize and control the labour force. But it
is impossible to organize, control and locate cooperation between minds
through the place it belongs to and through the deeds it does. The new
forms of organization and control, like the permanently temporary war,
arise precisely from the insufficiency of power in a situation where
institutionalized modern forms of power confront 'unclassified' people:
moving people, people in trains, singularities, individuals