In a more wistful moment, Marx asked what
commodities would say if they could speak. Surely, if he
listened long enough, they would have announced the
various traumas of their exploitatative and violent birthing
to him. Eventually, one imagines, they would have described
the nature of the various forms of labour necessary for
their production as the apparitionally elementary
components of the capitalist mode of production.
So would the commodity’s autobiography be the
same now, one wonders.
Today we live in a much different state of things: the artifice of
artefacts is evident all around us. A parliament of communication
technologies, from RFIDS to bluetooth devices, constantly exchange
information and network all around and through us. Wireless networks of
communication, control, and cooperation proliferate in mysterious ways,
all speaking an infra-language of organization, inscribing new
techniques of governance. But these networks have become all the more
indiscernible by the open secret of their appearance.
Developments in Actor Network Theory and autonomist
technoscience studies have made a turn towards the economic. What does
this bode for the field of organization studies? Will these two
movements join in an encompassing view of posthuman economic
institutions? Will ANT provide the definitive answer to the
interrelation of economics, politics and objects? These two yet
separated strands of economy and politics might provide a good
opportunity to revisit the problematics of objects and their
commodification, combining them with more traditional approaches.
This conference therefore proposes a return to the
study of objects and artifacts and the various logics and dispositifs
that underlie the formation of their fields of power, while combining
them with modern and more classical forms of political economy. Themes
could include, but are not limited to:
- Protocols and networked governance
- Diagrams and control
- The return of resistentialism and insubordinate objects
- Army ANTs and the bones left behind
- ANT and the networks of economies
- Imaginary futures and technological dis/utopian visions
- The affective states of machinic interaction
- Anachronous inquiries and steampunk dreams
- P2P commons, conflict, and governance
- Interpretative labor and semantic webs
- Extended minds and their cognitive scaffolding
- Posthuman artificing
- Artefacts, black boxes and governance
- The art of commodifying the artificed Network
- Immaterial politics of networking
- The estrangement of networks
- Marx’s Laboratory Life vs. Engel’s Scallops
Please send proposals to Tanya Dean
(ulsmtemp1@le.ac.uk) of 500 words or less by January 15th, 2009.
Notification of acceptance will be provided by February 4th.
For more information go to http://www.le.ac.uk/ulsm/research/cppe
or e-mail Simon Lilley (s.lilley@le.ac.uk)
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