[Reader-list] Future in the Present May 2-3 Leicester UK

[Stevphen Shukaitis]

Future in the Present: Occupying the Social Factory

May 2-3, 2006 - Leicester, UK
http://www.refusingstructures.net/future.html

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

>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.

Schedule

Tuesday 2 May
12noon-1pm: Registration (with tea and coffee)

1-4pm Session One: Class Composition, Workers’ Inquiry and Struggle
- ‘Mapping the Burrow: From Worker’s Inquiry to Militant Investigation’ –
Nate Holdren and Steve Wright
- ‘Inchiesta and Global Social Movements: A Renewing?’ – Emiliana Armano
and Raffaele Scortino
- ‘Faredodge.now: Organising Refusal?’ – Tadzio Mueller
- ‘Tomorrow Women: Practical Resistance and Multiple Insurgencies in the
Hybrid Spaces and Border Zones of Globalization’ – J. Zoe Wilson

4-5pm Refreshments

6-7.30pm Session Two: Roundtable on Autonomous/Autonomist Publishing

7.30 Dinner

Wednesday 3 May
9.30-10am: Registration for late-comers (with tea and coffee)

10am-1pm Session Three: Exodus and Non-State Democracy
- ‘Terror and Utopia: Apocalyptic Desire, Resistance and the War on
Terror’ – Stefan Skrimshire
- ‘“Democracy Must Be Defended”: States of Emergency and the World
Tribunal’ – Ayça Çubukçu
- ‘Nations of the Multitude: Antagonistic Struggles and the Political
Basis for a Non-State Democracy’ – Gemma Ubasart i Gonzàlez and Raimundo
Viejo Vinãs
- ‘Movements across the US-Mexico Border: the Sixth, the Other Campaign,
the Border Social Forum and the March against the Wall of Shame’ – Patrick
Cuninghame

1-2.30pm Lunch

2.30-5.30pm Session Four: Weaving Machines of Resistance (The Warp and
Woof of Refusal)
- ‘The Myth of Immaterial Labour’ – George Dafermos
- ‘Craft-Work and Fabriculture: Gender, Technology and Autonomism’ – Heidi
Brush and Jack Bratich
- ‘The Conversation’ – Kirsten Forkert

Registration
The registration form can be obtained from
http://www.refusingstructures.net/futureregistration.html. Space is
limited so individuals are encouraged to register early.

Individuals interested in Future in the Present are encouraged to check
out the Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class
Composition in Cognitive Capitalism
(http://www.geocities.com/ImmaterialLabour) conference that will be held
in Cambridge on April 28th-30th (the weekend before FITP).

For more information and directions:
http://www.refusingstructures.net/future.html or e-mail
future at refusingstructures.net

University of Leicester Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy:
http://www.le.ac.uk/ulmc/cppe

Autonomedia: http://www.autonomedia.org


-- 
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://slash.interactivist.net

"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is
created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political
practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory
cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of
welcoming difference . . . Becoming autonomous is a political position for
it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of
resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these
depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration.
Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and
power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule."
-subRosa Collective