[artinfo] CFP The Future in the Present: Occupying the Social factory

[stevphen shukaitis]

Please forward widely
:: Call for Contributions // Presentations // Provocations::

The Future in The Present: Occupying the Social Factory

May 2-4, 2006 - Digby House at Oadby, Leicester, UK
http://www.refusingstructures.net/future.html

>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 our multiplicitous desires 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 we 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 we
prevent our antagonism being subsumed into the working of power and
turned them against us? Rather than to creating overarching concepts that
describe a new historical epoch, what would it mean 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:

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