Forward From: ephemera alerts [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
stevphen shukaitis
Sent: 13 December 2005 19:52
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Subject: CFP Future in the Present: Occupying the Social Factory

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:

- The reception of the immaterial labour and biopolitical production
concepts. - The social
factory and the new forms of metropolitan strike.
- The refusal of work and the rise of cognitive proletariat.
- Constituent power, exodus, and non-state democracy.
- Gender, libidinal economy and affective labour.
- Formats of resistance: class, movement, multitude, network.
- Strategies of resistance: biopolitical weapons and radical imagery. - San
Precario, the
precariat and the Euromayday.
- Digital commons, networked multitudes, knowledge economy.

Proposals for discussions, presentations, and panels of 500 - 1000 words
should be sent to
[log in to unmask] by Friday January 27th, 2006.

There will be an issue of the Commoner (http://www.commononer.org.uk)
released to coincide with
the encuentro as well as several related print publications that are being
planned. For more
information and for registration details, please send a message to
[log in to unmask] or visit
http://www.refusingstructures.net/future.html.
Registration before January 31st is highly encouraged.

Sponsored by the University of Leicester Management Centre
(http://www.le.ac.uk/ulmc) and
Autonomedia (http://www.autonomedia.org)

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