Time and Innovation: Making New, Taking Hold, Falling Apart . . . Again
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)
Washington DC, 14-18 April 2010
This degradation, to which things are subject because they can be taxed as commodities, is counterbalanced by the inestimable value of novelty… Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. –Benjamin
[P]olitical economy is entirely directed towards drawing the innovative element that history—in any case—produces into the time of administration. –Negri
From mainstream op-eds citing the crisis-alleviating potential of entrepreneurial creativity to post-Marxist tracts on the radical politics of immanence, ideas of temporality, progress, and innovation in social production appear to be proliferating. In particular, society's seemingly infinite potential to generate ‘the new’—be it in the form of concepts, subjectivities, or the development of novel policies or technological and financial products—has been alternately touted in different circles as both a means of sustaining and dismantling capitalism. These wide-ranging and contradictory invocations highlight an ambiguity that underlies these terms. If Marx’s emphasis on concrete and abstract labor time, E.P. Thompson’s historical work on time and labor discipline, and the above quotes from Benjamin and Negri are any indication, there is much at stake when these concepts and their associated material processes are overlooked and/or undertheorized.
These sessions will explore the palpable geographies and histories that shape the emergence of particular products and processes. We seek wide-ranging contributions that critically explore intersections between spatial-temporality, innovation, and ‘the new’ (or ‘the old’ for that matter) in the context of politics, histories, and other conditions of taking hold (or falling apart). Within what forms of material and social relation is novelty used, valorized, and put to work? How are differential histories and temporalities mobilized, spatialized or reconstituted in and through innovation? What is the link between the past, the becoming present, and the future, and how do we think social change or revolution in this context? What is the relationship between innovation and subjectivity, particularly where the continual production of ‘new’ subjectivities has been posited as a condition of possibility for both consumer capitalism and the revolutionary politics of the future?
We invite empirical or theoretical papers on topics that might include, but are in no way limited to the following:
* Spatial-temporalities of innovation, labor, and surplus
* The political efficacy of the concept of innovation (or lack thereof)
* Down with the old, up with the new; Down with the new, up with the old
* The existing and emergent in performative or iterative practice
* Narratives of catastrophe, utopia, and remaking the world
* Prediction, Prognostication, Preemption
* Innovation and/as endo-colonization
* Engineering (with) the future
* The unexpected / Failures in innovation and engineering
* Innovation and revolution(s) -- cultural, economic, technological, military
* Places and spaces of innovation
* Evolution, Adaptation, Variation, Resilience
* The cyclical
* Spatial-temporal ensembles
* Spacetime, innovation, and subjectivity
Brought to you by Lower48, a collaborative working group of scholars at the CUNY Graduate Center and the University of Minnesota.
Please submit paper titles, abstracts (of not more than 250 words), or expressions of interest to Elizabeth at [log in to unmask] or Christian at [log in to unmask] by *Thursday, 15 October*.
