[spectre] cfp: experience, movement & the creation of new political forms

[Ned Rossiter]

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 archive-in-formation is of course the mobicasting site  
http://www.kiasma.fi/transsiberia/, and we would be keen to see how  
contributors might build this resource into their texts.

However, the archive is not limited to those who attended the event.  
Indeed, since the archive is open, the material can be repurposed to  
create new visual, textual and sonic forms. We are especially keen to  
hear from artists who have ideas on how they might regenerate this  
material, and in turn contribute to the proliferation of experience  
and intelligibility that combines the themes outlined above.

At this stage, we need to get a firm idea about who will contribute  
pieces to this special issue. We thus ask those of you who are  
interested to send us a provisional title and brief abstract by 20  
October 2005. We would hope to receive final versions of the papers  
and artworks by 10 December 2005, and then move to the refereeing and  
revision process, with publication to follow in the early part of  
2006. Submission details for Ephemera are available at:

http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm

Please email your ideas to:

b.neilson at uws.edu.au
n.rossiter at ulster.ac.uk