From everyday insurgencies to global antagonisms recent decades have borne witness to multiple and overlapping cycles of social struggle as well as attempts to incorporate these sources of social wealth and creativity. From transformations in the circuits of global capital to the morphing of state structures, border controls, and forms of sovereignty, the development of neoliberal governmentality has constantly run to catch up with the multiplicitous desires of people to create new forms of self-determining community and sociality. Multidirectional lines of command attempt to recuperate innovations at the level of everyday life while myriad microrevolutions branch out, weave together new possibilities, and sometimes directly attack the networks of control.

What is the meaning of autonomy today, both as a theoretical category and as a practice? And what can the thought of refusal contribute to the organization of refusals in our daily lives? How can one create forms of antagonism directed against the lines of command that cut across the economic and social fabric, and which seek to incorporate affective, biological, and symbolic processes into forms of production? How can antagonism avoid being subsumed into the working of power and turned them against themselves? What would it mean, rather than to create overarching concepts that describe a new historical epoch, to look at the specific modulations of how productive forces and regimes of command are changing in response to the social creativity and struggles of political actors? And what possibilities for political and social change are contained within these transformations? This is to start from the multiple inscriptions of power and resistance, from the bare life and bodies of the migrant worker to the precarious temp employee, from the unwaged to laborers in export processing zone archipelagos.

This gathering will attempt to break down the format and constraints of the traditional academic conference as well as forms of theorizing divorced from on-going social struggles and organizing. It will seek to create a living dialogue and encuentro, a series of collisions of bodies and minds, drawing from the history of autonomist politics and organizing, to draw out possible directions for the future buried beneath the weight of the present. Rather than fixing autonomous practices as objects of study it will draw together theorists, organizers, and activists considering questions of what class composition, insurgent sociality, and autonomous political practice could mean today. Possible topics could include but are not limited to:

Proposals for discussions, presentations, and panels of 500 – 1000 words should be sent to futureinthepresent@refusingstructures.net by Friday January 27th, 2006.

There will be an issue of the Commoner released to coincide with the encuentro as well as several related print publications that are being planned. For more information and for registration details, please send a message to futureinthepresent@refusingstructures.net or visit http://www.refusingstructures.net/future.html. Registration before January 31st is highly encouraged.

A pdf copy of the CFP is available here.