Fibreculture Journal - issue 5
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/index.html
"Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New
Media Labour"
Edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter
Broadly speaking, this issue of Fibreculture Journal is interested in the
problem of political organisation as it relates to the overlapping spheres
of labour and life within post-Fordist, networked settings. It's becoming
increasingly clear that multiple forms of exclusion and exploitation within
the media and cultural industries run along the lines of gender, ethnicity,
age, and geography. New forms of class division are emerging whose locus of
tension can be attributed to the ownership and control of information.
The mobile capacity of information corresponds, in many instances, with the
flexible nature of work across many sectors of the media and cultural
industries. And it is precisely the informatisation of social relations that
makes political organisation such a difficult - even undesireable -
undertaking for many. Without recourse to traditional institutions such as
the union, new technics of organisation are required if the common
conditions of exploitation are to be addressed and transformed.
Precarious labour practices generate new forms of subjectivity and
connection, organised about networks of communication, cognition, and
affect. These new forms of cooperation and collaboration amongst creative
labourers contribute to the formation of a new socio-technical and
politico-ethical multitude. The contemporary multitude is radically
dissimilar from the unity of "the people" and the coincidence of the citizen
and the state. What kinds of creative organisation are specific to
precarious labour in the era of informatisation? How do they connect (or
disconnect) to existing forms of institutional life? And how can escape from
the subjectification of precarious labour be enacted without nostalgia for
the social state or utopian faith in the spontaneity of auto-organisation?
These are some of the key questions the articles gathered here set out to
addresss.
This issue is launched just months, perhaps, after memes such as the
"multitude" and "precarity" have reached their high point. We find that it
is all the more instructive to be publishing this collection of articles at
such a time, since the urgency to organise is greatest when the novelty of
slogans begins to flat-line, when routine and fatigue perhaps kick in again.
Such occasions mark a transition period of regeneration and imagination, of
working out what works and what doesn't in order to gather resources and
begin the creative composition of living labour.
ARTICLES
"From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable
Networks"
Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter
"On the Life and Deeds of San Precario, Patron Saint of Precarious Workers
and Lives"
Ilaria Vanni and Marcello Tarì
"A Playful Multitude? Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising Immaterial Game
Labour"
Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford
"Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry"
Julian Kücklich
"Postcard from the Edge: Autobiographical Musings on the Dis/organisations
of the Multimedia Industry"
Linda Leung
"Speculations on a Marxist theory of the Virtual Revolution"
Bob Hodge and Gabriela Coronado
"Learning and Insurgency in Creative Organisations"
Paul Newfield and Timothy Rayner
"Dawn of the Organised Networks"
Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/index.html
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