[oberlist] OPEN CALL: THE LABOUR OF THE MULTITUDE? THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL CREATIVITY

[janek sowa]

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE FREE/SLOW UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW  // OPEN 
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

list of confirmed speakers: Luc Boltanski, Neil Cummings, Diedrich 
Diederichsen, Matteo Pasquinelli, John Roberts, Gigi Roggero, Martha 
Rosler, Hito Steyerl

curatorial team of the conference: Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, 
Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski, Kuba Szreder

forms of contribution: a paper delivered in 15-20 minutes during the 
conference's sessions. The language of conference is English. We're 
planning to publish a peer-reviewed, bi-lingual (PL-ENG) summary of the 
conference with selected papers.

deadline for submissions: 15th of September 2011

fees/ scholarships: The conference is free of charge. FSUW is capable of 
providing a limited number of travel (up to 200 Euros) and accommodation 
grants to free lancers, independent artists and theoreticians who are 
not affiliated with Academies or other Institutions. If you are 
interested in receiving a FSUW scholarship, please indicate so in your 
proposal and estimate your travel costs to Warsaw.

contact: please send a short proposal (up to 300 words) with bio to 
Szymon Żydek: szymon[at]funbec.eu, who will also respond to all other 
inquiries.

FREE/SLOW UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW
announces Open Call for Contributions: International conference:  "The 
labour of multitudes? Political economy of social creativity"
Warsaw, 20th - 22nd of October 2011

Addressing the issue of social economy of creativity we seek to enlarge 
the spectrum of creativity’s political economy. Creativity refers to 
many things: it is both a means of production and a fetish of 
consumption, a sheer ideology of the capitalism which calls itself 
post-industrial and an efficient device of social and industrial 
management, it reflects the elitist privilege of the ruling elite as 
well as the aspirations of the underprivileged rabble. If it is true 
that contemporary capitalism has made an decisive shift in its modes of 
producing value then creativity and in particular collective creativity 
becomes a central category for the society as a whole. And artistic and 
cultural modes of production (along with scientific ones) are no longer 
merely supplementary fields of capitalistic social infrastructure. They 
become central sectors of production to which other fields of social 
labour remain subordinated in economical as well as in symbolic way. 
They not only accumulate most of the value but also are laboratories for 
social innovation. Consequently they should also provide a playground 
and battlefield for new social struggles, reemerging capitalistic 
contradictions and new forms of appropriation and exploitation. Or maybe 
the new paradigm is just a humbug that covers up the overall crisis of 
the existing one. Maybe we still linger under the rule of the old law of 
value based rather on living labour then creative networking. In this 
case the new social economy of the creativity would be a powerful 
symptom of a present crisis and it could be analyzed as such. Either of 
the approaches are welcome.

We are calling for theoretical contributions or artistic interventions 
in the five following fields:

1. Ideological appropriations: cognitive capitalism and creative industries.

Although it’s been more than half a century since Horkheimer and Adorno 
diagnosed the rise of culture industries, commodification of cultural 
production seems to be still reaching new territories. Ironically, the 
very term “cultural industries” is being used as a positive description 
of new wave of capitalist expansion. With the recent neoliberal twist in 
cultural management strategies the imperatives of efficiency and profit 
generation have become the guidelines even in the public sector. 
Artistic experiments are, more than anything else, immediately 
appropriated and commodified by creative industries and internal 
mechanisms of art field. Nevertheless experimenting continuously try to 
play the minority game" with creative industries and the rest of the art 
world. So how are we to analyze the famous and much discussed autonomy 
of artistic creation, scientific enquiry and cultural production? Does 
it have any critical and subversive potential? Is it a class privilege 
allowing those who have accumulated enough capital (in its various form) 
to bypass and overcome the demands of the economic power leaving the 
rest as an easy prey to the market forces? Or maybe it offers the last 
and only bastion of defense against ubiquitous commodification? Is there 
an artistic mode of resistance parallel to the artistic mode of 
production that we can see functioning in creative industries or artists 
led gentrification?

2. The future of work: the changing forms of labour and its remuneration.

The transition from a production in a closed, industrial plant to the 
times of dispersed and networked social factory is accompanied not by a 
spread of wealth, but a growing precariousness. More and more work is 
performed by each and every of us – when we browse the Net, when we 
watch commercials, when we share photos on Facebook, when we search on 
Google, visit the galleries or even install software on our computers – 
yet remuneration we get for any kind of work is getting not only smaller 
and smaller but also less and less sure. Is it a manifestation of logic 
of exploitation and alienation impossible to overcome within the 
capitalist mode of production? Or maybe we need to invent and introduce 
new forms of wealth redistribution that would take into the 
consideration the new logic of cognitive capitalism, like guaranteed 
minimum income? What new forms of resistance to exploitation can and 
should accompany the new forms of labour that we see emerging in front 
our eyes?



3.  Property and value.

The question of value production has always been in the heart of 
political economy as well as its critique. How much the new forms of 
production rely on the old ways of producing and appropriating the 
value? What are the new mechanisms of value extraction and how they 
function? How new forms of intellectual property developing parallelly 
in the fields of high technology and culture – like copyleft, creative 
commons, copy-far-left etc. exemplified by such diverse phenomena as 
free software movement and Brazilian  Techno Braga – challenge the very 
mechanisms of accumulation? The mechanisms of the art market and 
cultural industries lead to the exploitation of the general creative 
intellect. They are based on the fetishization and speculation not only 
of the cultural / artistic objects but also seemingly intangible 
processes and ideas.  Does it make contemporary culture a perfect 
laboratory for future surplus value production and appropriation?

4. Peripheries of cognitive capitalism – continuation or redefinition.

One of the basic feature of capitalist world-system has been its 
division into core and periphery. Many contemporary theorists – like 
Antonio Negri or Christian Marazzi – argue that the transition from the 
times of material labour and industrial capitalism to immaterial labour 
and cognitive capitalism has made this distinction obsolete. The 
struggle between capital and labour is now supposed to take place within 
a unified circuit of production in the form of conflict between the 
empire and the multitude. Where does it leave traditional peripheries of 
capitalist economy, like the Central and Eastern Europe that played – 
according to Wallerstein and Braudel – the role of historically first 
Third World? Is there anything specific and particular about this part 
of the world that should make its way into theoretical analysis and 
practical action?

5. Politics in the age of immaterial labour.

If it is true that neither production nor labour nor power are what they 
used to be, one has to devise and implement new forms of political 
organization and struggle. Trade unions and party politics seem to be as 
obsolete as industrial factory and disciplinary power. Some argue that 
the multitudes emerge as already politicized subjects of resistance and 
revolutionary change, but isn’t it a too optimistic vision of future 
politics? And how resistant this resistance can be? With a wave of 
“Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Activism” the Internet has been 
hailed as a new tool of struggle, however the Wikileaks affair showed 
how easy it is to block inconvenient content and pull the plug on free 
communication. On the other hand “the idea of communism” advocated by 
Zizek and Badiou in their two recent books and conferences (2009 London, 
2010 Berlin) may seem like a call to go back to traditional forms and 
ways of struggling with the capital. Is there an alternative?