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>CFP: Thinking Network Politics: Methods, Epistemology, Process

November 16, 2009 1 comment

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Call For Papers

Thinking Network Politics: Methods, Epistemology, Process

We invite the submission of abstracts for the first event of the AHRC funded networking project ‘Exploring New Configurations of Network Politics’. The event will combine a series of position papers followed by round table discussions and interventions exploring the issues and challenges raised by those papers.

The attempt to grasp the depth and breadth of network politics demands novel and transdisciplinary approaches not always native to the humanities and social sciences, such as graph theory and the study of code as cultural practice. Thus there is a drive to explore the broad spectrum of practices and discourses to help rethink the articulations of politics in network culture. New modes of political activity that take advantage of new platforms from Twitter to YouTube necessitate new conceptual positions for network culture, counter-power and resistance. The papers should work towards adapting concepts such as, for example but by no means exclusively, the Multitude, free and immaterial labour, emergence, swarms and ‘smart mobs’ and new forms of creation, activism and engagement in civil society. The aim is to rethink what we understand by politics. Further questions which need to be asked include: what kind of epistemologies do we need to incorporate into our analysis? How can we take into account the particularities of networks when approaching the elusive, ephemeral nature of politics of/in networks? These are just examples of the directions into which considerations of “network politics” might lead us. Because this is such a fast developing and challenging arena of research the event will aim to be open and fluid, encouraging engagement, conversation and innovation wherever possible, while focusing on this core problematic of the tools and processes for thinking network politics.

The papers for this event will thus ideally investigate the methods and innovative approaches to mapping and thinking such new network politics. The March event will thus aim elaborate on the nature of the network and forge new routes to thinking about the processual, dynamic nature of networks as well as the particular “objects” such approaches fabricate.

The papers should be in the format of short (10 min) position papers on key concepts or keywords that lead into group work and discussions into the questions of network politics and methods and approaches for analysis. Instead of normal academic papers followed by a short Q&A, we would like the event to encourage collaboration, collective discussions and agenda setting.

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The event takes place in Cambridge, UK, Anglia Ruskin University, on Thursday 25 and Friday 26 March 2010.

Please submit your abstracts and any suggestions (max 300 words) by January 8, 2010 to

joss.hands@anglia.ac.uk and/or jussi.parikka@anglia.ac.uk.

The research project functions under the auspices of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture (ArcDigital )

Categories: arcdigital, Cambridge, network politics

Reality Checkpoint

September 27, 2009 2 comments

Cambridge is the academic Disneyland. It is screaming for its Ballard to write Super-Cambridge that maps the perverse libidinal economies (connected to the monetary economies) which circulate here.

One of the fascinating points, or lines in Cambridge is the so called reality checkpoint.

It has got a long history, partly documented already on Wikipedia as well but it captures so well on an affective level as well the fine divisions found in Cambridge. After crossing Parker’s Piece, heading towards the centre, you are warned of the approaching bubble disconnected from the real world (again: Academic Disneyland). Quite often the original 1970s context for reality checkpoint pointed towards the difference between Cambridge undergrads and the “normal people” of Cambridge, but as apt is the fact that it apparently was first scratched on the lamp post by CCAT — now Anglia Ruskin — student(s).

And I always add that the other university might have their Nobel Prize winners etc. ARU heritage comes with Pink Floyd members (David Gilmour and Syd Barrett studied at our predecessor).

Oh, would that be the day if we had a “David Gilmour chair in sonic media”, or a “Syd Barrett chair in experimental media studies.”

Categories: Cambridge, Pink Floyd

Super-Cambridge

June 20, 2009 2 comments

It’s not the first time I have made the reference to J.G.Ballard while talking about Cambridge (UK). It somehow just seems to share the similar psycho-pathologies of middle-class that Ballard is continuously on about; all the innocent looking fronts, civilized habits, closed communities, and so on. Cambridge is the academic Disneyland that attracts tourists to marvel the 800 years of history of knowledge production — the sublime Western heritage of closed institutions, privileged few and the close link of money with information.

 
In this context, its only natural that the tourist bus ride that I took to accompany my mother and cousins during their visit turned out to be nothing less than the poor-man’s roller coaster ride through Cambridge with head-phones on tuned into a discourse of indoctrination to the marvels of not Cambridge-the-town, but Cambridge-the University. The narrative voice tells the tale of Cambridge, and its one University (hence, forgetting the Other one off the map, Anglia Ruskin that is), and basically framing the whole narrative and the mobile tour around that single theme. The mobility of the bus from the other end of Cambridge to the other is stagnated by the immobility of the discourse. Through a continuous rhetoric of “we” it weaves a success story of a very boring kind, lacking almost any kind of interesting self-reflexive touch (although recognizing e.g. the long term exclusion of women).
 
Naturally this kind of occupation of Cambridge could be seen through ideas of the “creative cities” á la Richard Florida, a clusterization of brains that Cambridge represents. Yet, this creative city is very much branded by a corporatisation of the area also known as Silicon Fen, not by for example an arts led agenda. And then its about the past. In academic humanities, for example, its still the very old-fashioned and hence prestigious disciplines in which the University excels with its Grand Old Men. In terms of the wider “creative industries”, incidentally, even Wikipedia explains the possible reasons for the attractiveness of the Silicon Fen as: “Another explanation is that Cambridge has the academic pre-eminence of Cambridge University, a high standard of living available in the county, good transport links, and a relatively low incidence of social problems such as crime and hard drug use.”
 
Sounds like the setting for a Ballard novel? Is this the novel he should have written next, Super-Cambridge? I have already imagined various juicy plots involving some darker rooms at King’s College, weird sexual rituals, inexplicable violence, the libidinal released from the security of private schools and superior education.
Categories: Ballard, Cambridge

>Butler in Cambridge

May 20, 2009 Leave a comment

>Just back from Judith Butler’s talk that was part of a symposium in honor of Juliet Mitchell’s retirement. First of all, I am not sure whether to be amused or angry of the “theme music” to the session which was Vivaldi’s music softly escorting the audience into what you would not expect to be one focusing on socialist feminism…but then again, that was Cambridge University, and indeed that is one way to just innocently remind the audience of the Prestige and Tradition of the place. I somehow wonder how any seminar so conscious of the roles of cultural practices in creating solidified and stratified notions of culture and relationships can tolerate such an “intro.”?

Well, in the midst of ambivalent feelings, a quick look at Butler’s talk. Focusing on Mitchell’s 1974 classic Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Butler was able to carve out something interesting in terms of psychoanalysis — something that I would label “against the grain” as a Darwinization of psychoanalysis and some notions apparent in some classical interpretations of the structures of the psyche. This Darwinisation refers here mostly to the way Butler insisted on the radical temporality of the notions that are at the centre of psychoanalysis, and that as the key way to keep it lively as a mode of social diagnostics and critique. I agree, wholeheartedly.
The consolidation of sexual difference and other notions that have functioned mostly to stabilize the plethora of practices that are in a way “hidden” under such generalizing notions as “heterosexual” or “homosexual” has happened through a suggestion of the universality of the structures — a critique that Deleuze and Guattari among others raised in the 1970s already. They demanded a careful look at concrete practices and relations through which desire finds its ways — a focus that was later referred to as “assemblages” in Mille Plateaux. And funnily enough, there was much of that spirit of “assembling” present when Butler referred to the actual mess of identifications and misidentifications, placements and misplacements of desire in the variety of kinship relations that are ever more present. Being a heterosexual does not really say much about the ways we desire, Butler argued, and indeed, the modes and objects of desire are much more fluctuating. Hence, the sociological fact of increase of for example gay couples does not automatically give us concrete information about the modes and practices of desire and they relate to the heteronormative.
What Lacanian system missed was the possibility of change and which was still present with Freud through the notion of superego: the level of transmission, passing on. It is through the double-nature of the social that we should understood both through the function of transmission of cultural relations and the forward facing nature of potentialisation (not a word I believe she used though). In terms of law, this means that law is an event; it takes place only through its instances instead of the dual ontology of “law AND its transmission”. If law is only through its instances, it also allows the realization that those actualities can be there to change law. Same goes then for drives; drives are not a stable “archive” of possible reactions, but immanent to the instances in which they take place. This idea has some good ontological and methodological implications.
In such a context, Butler seems to catch quite well a key Marxist idea now transposed into the crucial task of rethinking sexual difference not only as the mode of stabilization of desire into a binary system but a radicalisation of the notion of difference; I am here probably reading this way too much in the direction e.g. Rosi Braidotti sees the issue but nonetheless, its a matter of temporalisation; how we need to keep abreast of the various temporalities storming in the psyche. Some of the references to fluidity and the sea that Butler used should hence be continued to take into account the layering of temporal currents (in the manner that Michel Serres loves to talk about time). So even if we are born into such relations that seem determining our position, there is the potentiality of change especially if we understood those relations not as stemming from an Archive of Law that is itself unchanging but a mode of creation immanent to the cultural expressions. This again is a further transposition of what Butler said but I am wanting to read this stuff in terms of what I have been thinking.
So, instead of Vivaldi, a bit of 1960s “times they are a-changing” would have been more apt theme music as Milla suggested.
Categories: Braidotti, Cambridge, DeleuzeGuattari, Judith Butler, psychoanalysis