Ned Rossiter on Wed, 5 Oct 2005 17:48:58 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime-ann> [call] cfp: experience, movement & the creation of new political forms |
CALL FOR PAPERS Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 'Experience, Movement and the Creation of New Political Forms' Editors: Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter How does the contingency of experience relate to the creation of new political forms? The immediate precedent for this special issue of Ephemera is the conference 'Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War', an event held on the trans-Siberian train. Conceived as an experiment in organisation without ends, this moving conference brought together artists, activists and frontline thinkers to discuss the modulations of contemporary power, the putting to work of generic human capacities, and the new collaborative forms of creation and resistance. As an experience, however, what unfolded in this context was something more than a conference. The rhythm of movement, the changing landscapes, the interactions with strangers, the architecture of the carriages, the border controls and currency exchanges: all demanded constant interrogation and shifts of perspective. How does such an experiment move beyond its terminus, when the participants disperse, and experience fades to memory? Furthermore, can this kind of organisation give rise to new ways of being political? And how might such politics relate to notions of action, potentiality, or institution? We invite interventions that reflect on the experience of movement not only as instantiated in the trans-Siberian conference but also in relation to other forms of political experimentation. As a category of political thought, movement is notoriously slippery. Likewise, the physics of moving bodies (from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein) has yielded little certainty beyond expired models of cause and effect. But what does it mean to move a mind as opposed to a body? Why move for the sake of movement? And what happens when experience becomes its own motivation and phenomenal life impinges on our very sense of being? Furthermore, what occurs when the purity of movement enters the messy world of politics and becomes enmeshed in contemporary networks of control? Indeed, where is the scene of politics and what are its qualities when experience fluctuates from the time of the event to the relocation of bodies in routine lives? How do limits and closure relate to the seeming expansive indeterminacy of experience? And might this tension be the locus of 'the political' which conditions new institutional forms? There is now, as perhaps never before, a need to move beyond the lament for the death of politics, to invent new forms of human relation that do not fall back on familiar models of community, collective action or life as art. Can there be, within the experience of moving minds, a form of co-emergence whose fading has resonance - an afterglow that makes it impossible to dream as if nothing happened? How might the sensual, the sensitive, and the aesthetic contribute to the creation of new political forms? And how might feelings of restlessness and boredom (feelings of being without any task or function - the experience of what in means to be 'human' in the most generic sense) be decisively understood not as a weakness but an asset, a political power not to be given up? Through the assemblage of writing, images, sounds and links, this issue of Ephemera will create an archive of experiences without memorialisation - a common resource to enable the invention of new political forms that remain open not only to what has or might happen but to the movement that is always now. We also see the creation of an open archive as important contribution to the process of instituting a network of networks. Finally, please keep in mind that we would like to push the form of the online journal to the max, publishing not only plain text but also hyperlinked texts that draw on the multiplicity of images, sound- bites, etc. that have emerged from the conference. One already existing arc _______________________________________________ nettime-ann mailing list nettime-ann@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ann