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LEICESTER CONFERENCE 2-4 MAY 2006

Conference: “The Future in The Present: Occupying the Social Factory”

 

2-4 May 2006 - Digby House at Oadby, University of Leicester, 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. Life itself is productive in the unfolding of the social factory that is capitalism. 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 ran to catch up with the multiplicitous desires of people 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 one 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 antagonism avoid being subsumed into the working of power and turned them against themselves? What would it mean, rather than to create overarching concepts that describe a new historical epoch, to look at the specific modulations of how productive forces and regimes are command are changing in responses to the social creativity and struggles of political actors? That 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 zones archipelagos. And what possibilities for political and social change are contained within these transformations?

 

This gathering seeks 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 of 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.

 

Sponsored by the University of Leicester Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy and Autonomedia

 

Some Possible Topics:

 

Prehistory of Autonomism

Labor in the State / Critiquing Democracy

Migration and Exodus

Digital Media and Information Flows

Breaking the New Enclosures, Creating New Commons

The Mass Worker and the State of the Unions

Organizing Precarious Labor

Affective Economies

Reconsidering the Meaning of Self-Management

Intellectual Property rights, Open Source

Collective Enunciations (autonomist publishing & engaged reflection)