[NetBehaviour] Connective Mutations: Autonomy & Subjectivation in the Coming Century

[Olga]

Originally posted in Neural.it

//////  Connective Mutations: Autonomy & Subjectivation in the Coming
Century  //////
SEPT 3-6 2009, NEW YORK

We are pleased to invite you to participate in a seminar with Franco
Berardi (aka Bifo) this September at 16Beaver. Tentatively titled
Connective Mutations: Autonomy & Subjectivation in the Coming Century,
Bifo has suggested that we focus our energies and inquiry for these
four days on questions of subjectivation and autonomy.

The concept of the subject is crucial for radical philosophy of the
second half of the twentieth century. Arguments and debates over the
nature of the subject, the location and nature of the revolutionary
subject, have vastly shaped radical politics and organizing. The work
of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze changes the frame of this
discussion, proposing the concept of subjectivation, or
becoming-subject, as a framework to understand the multiple becomings
and states of social encounters. This concept of subjectivation
overlaps significantly with the concept of class recomposition
developed in the 1960s and 70s by autonomist thinkers such as Sergio
Bologna, Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. Both strains of thought focus on
how forms of social antagonism and resistance give rise to new social
positions and possibilities for collective becomings.

Today we find ourselves in a transformed condition, one created by
techno-anthropological and connective mutations, marked by
overwhelming flows of immaterial labor and information flows that
threaten to exceed the limits of the body. Cyberspace may be infinite,
but cybertime is not. This intensification and expansion of
technological dynamics and automatisms makes problematic the very
possibility of collective subjectivation. Have we reached a state
where the immersive flows of information, affect, and desire act to
dampen or even preempt the emergence of new collective subjects?

We hope this event will be both an opportunity for sharing new and
vital questions, as well as a developing some of the questions we have
pursued in these last years of focused collective research (e.g.,
Continental Drift). We will also be encouraging participants to read
some texts in preparation. So details will be forthcoming as we work
on this site.

http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/

-- 
Olga P Massanet
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