Call for Papers, Presentations, and Interventions ::
The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts
April 29th to May 1st, 2009
Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, University of Leicester
Keynote speakers:
Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples L’orientale
Natalie Jeremijenko, New York University
Nick Dyer-Witheford, University of Western Ontario
In a more wistful moment, Marx asked what commodities would say if they
could speak. Surely, if he listened long enough, they would have announced
the various traumas of their exploitative and violent birthing to him.
Eventually, one imagines, they would have described the nature of the
various forms of labour necessary for their production as the apparitionally
elementary components of the capitalist mode of production.
So would the commodity’s autobiography be the same now, one wonders.
Today we live in a much different state of things: the artifice of artefacts
is evident all around us. A parliament of communication technologies, from
RFIDS to bluetooth devices, constantly exchange information and network all
around and through us. Wireless networks of communication, control, and
cooperation proliferate in mysterious ways, all speaking an infra-language
of organization, inscribing new techniques of governance. But these networks
have become all the more indiscernible by the open secret of their appearance.
Developments in Actor Network Theory and autonomist technoscience studies
have made a turn towards the economic. What does this bode for the field of
organization studies? Will these two movements join in an encompassing view
of posthuman economic institutions? Will ANT provide the definitive answer
to the interrelation of economics, politics and objects? These two yet
separated strands of economy and politics might provide a good opportunity
to revisit the problematics of objects and their commodification, combining
them with more traditional approaches.
This conference therefore proposes a return to the study of objects and
artifacts and the various logics and dispositifs that underlie the formation
of their fields of power, while combining them with modern and more
classical forms of political economy. Themes could include, but are not
limited to:
- Protocols and networked governance
- Diagrams and control
- The return of resistentialism and insubordinate objects
- Army ANTs and the bones left behind
- ANT and the networks of economies
- Imaginary futures and technological dis/utopian visions
- The affective states of machinic interaction
- Anachronous inquiries and steampunk dreams
- P2P commons, conflict, and governance
- Interpretative labor and semantic webs
- Extended minds and their cognitive scaffolding
- Posthuman artificing
- Artefacts, black boxes and governance
- The art of commodifying the artificed Network
- Immaterial politics of networking
- The estrangement of networks
- Marx’s Laboratory Life vs. Engel’s Scallops
Please send proposals to Jenni Hern ([log in to unmask]) of 500 words or less
by November 28th, 2008. Notification of acceptance will be provided by
February 4th.
For more information go to http://www.le.ac.uk/ulsm/research/cppe or e-mail
Simon Lilley ([log in to unmask])
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