[rohrpost] CfP: Being With … Affinities -- Attachments -- Assemblages

[André Wendler]

*Being With …*

*Affinities—Attachments—Assemblages*



IKKM Annual Conference, 18-20 April 2013, Weimar

Conventionally a place of assembly means a place where people come
together. Town squares, pubs,
stadiums, and parliaments are all examples of places whose physical
construction and layout predetermine the conditions and rules governing who
can assemble there and what activities are possible. If one extends the
capacity for assembly from people to objects, then other places will also
fall within the definition of a place of assembly: a museum, for example,
or a collection of any kind; but likewise, a writer’s desk, or even fictive
places such as a still life paintings. Assemblies are further characterized
by their unique relation to time—they are always based on processes of
synchronization that bring together people, objects and activities, not
merely through the synchronization of temporal present(s), but also by
preserving the past (as in the case of the museum) and by stabilizing the
future (in the case of the parliament).

The conference will examine assemblages and synchronizations of people and
objects. Yet it shifts the focus to the *actions and operations*, which
constitute them in the first place. In this sense, places of assembly do
not precede the activities that occur in them, but are rather produced
through the linking and networking of operations and their synchronization.
This examination of actions and operations inverts the traditional concept
of place by shifting the focus from places of assembly as already
predetermined places to the processes of ‘becoming place.’ Consequently,
notions of place primarily defined by the drawing of boundaries (e.g. the
distinction between inside and outside), are challenged by the (open)
processes of joining, decoupling and rejoining and the various relations to
time they entail.

“Being with” aims to explore the bonding forces of assemblies and their
different stages or intensities of cohesion. The spectrum ranges from an
open, continuously adjustable ‘throwntogetherness’ (Doreen Massey), to the
fragile processes of inclination, affinity, and *attachement* (Antoine
Hennion), to dense structures of affecting, organizing, and distributing
(Nigel Thrift) or force fields of assembly and networks of operations,
which in recent years have been increasingly discussed in terms of *
assemblages* (Jane Bennett, Manuel DeLanda and others, building on
Deleuze/Guattari). Assembly places thus only come into being in the course
of a complex process of negotiation, which complicates the distinction
between human and non-human actors; between active and passive. “Being
with” studies networks of distributed actions and seeks to assess the
potential of places of assembly as open ensembles of couplings, affinities,
and attachments.

The Internet and social networks organize the linkages and boundaries of
globally distributed people and objects, as recently demonstrated by
Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, and the revolutions in North Africa. At the
same time they concentrate the representation of their linkages in the few
places where such relationships are created, calculated, and stored. The
monitoring and representation of these assembly infrastructures, of their
potentials for bonding and dividing, and of their role in radical new
social developments, are all major arenas in and about which the debate on
assembly practices and their infrastructures takes place. These newly
arising mobile assembly places and assemblies also maintain a special
relationship with time: it is here that the formations of present, past,
and future are negotiated, and where the resources are mobilized that will
keep the world round or program it for change.

The IKKM annual conference will examine the processes of formation,
stabilization, and dissolution of assemblies. How can we describe assembly
places as open ensembles of bondings and linkages? How does an
actor-network achieve its (temporary) stabilization? How do operations of
synchronization affect this process? And how is one to define fragile
assembly types that never achieve a state of stability? This raises the
question of how the exploration of the forms and conditions of “Being with”
can be understood as symptoms of our time. In the face of a continual
emergence of new assembly types, the traditional concept of place shifts
towards a mobile, perpetually migrating, and ephemeral infrastructure of
assembly places, asking for a new spatial vocabulary of mutual couplings,
affinities, and attachments.



The conference language is English. Proposals for papers are invited and
should be submitted (2000 characters with spaces maximum), together with a
short CV, by at latest *30 June 2012* to: ikkm-conference at uni-weimar.de

-- 
Diplom-Kulturwissenschaftler (Medien)
André Wendler
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am
Internationalen Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Cranachstraße 47
99421 Weimar

Telefon +49 36 43 58 40 17
www.ikkm-weimar.de/wendler