[spectre] Precarious Labour - Fibreculture Journal

[Ned Rossiter]

Fibreculture Journal - issue 5
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/index.html

"Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of  
New Media Labour"
Edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Broadly speaking, this issue of Fibreculture Journal is interested in  
the problem of political organisation as it relates to the  
overlapping spheres of labour and life within post-Fordist, networked  
settings. It's becoming increasingly clear that multiple forms of  
exclusion and exploitation within the media and cultural industries  
run along the lines of gender, ethnicity, age, and geography. New  
forms of class division are emerging whose locus of tension can be  
attributed to the ownership and control of information.

The mobile capacity of information corresponds, in many instances,  
with the flexible nature of work across many sectors of the media and  
cultural industries. And it is precisely the informatisation of  
social relations that makes political organisation such a difficult -  
even undesireable - undertaking for many. Without recourse to  
traditional institutions such as the union, new technics of  
organisation are required if the common conditions of exploitation  
are to be addressed and transformed.

Precarious labour practices generate new forms of subjectivity and  
connection, organised about networks of communication, cognition, and  
affect. These new forms of cooperation and collaboration amongst  
creative labourers contribute to the formation of a new socio- 
technical and politico-ethical multitude. The contemporary multitude  
is radically dissimilar from the unity of "the people" and the  
coincidence of the citizen and the state. What kinds of creative  
organisation are specific to precarious labour in the era of  
informatisation? How do they connect (or disconnect) to existing  
forms of institutional life? And how can escape from the  
subjectification of precarious labour be enacted without nostalgia  
for the social state or utopian faith in the spontaneity of auto- 
organisation? These are some of the key questions the articles  
gathered here set out to addresss.

This issue is launched just months, perhaps, after memes such as the  
"multitude" and "precarity" have reached their high point. We find  
that it is all the more instructive to be publishing this collection  
of articles at such a time, since the urgency to organise is greatest  
when the novelty of slogans begins to flat-line, when routine and  
fatigue perhaps kick in again. Such occasions mark a transition  
period of regeneration and imagination, of working out what works and  
what doesn't in order to gather resources and begin the creative  
composition of living labour.


ARTICLES

"From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and  
Unstable Networks"
Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

"On the Life and Deeds of San Precario, Patron Saint of Precarious  
Workers and Lives"
Ilaria Vanni and Marcello Tarì

"A Playful Multitude? Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising Immaterial  
Game Labour"
Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford

"Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry"
Julian Kücklich

"Postcard from the Edge: Autobiographical Musings on the Dis/ 
organisations of the Multimedia Industry"
Linda Leung

"Speculations on a Marxist theory of the Virtual Revolution"
Bob Hodge and Gabriela Coronado

"Learning and Insurgency in Creative Organisations"
Paul Newfield and Timothy Rayner

"Dawn of the Organised Networks"
Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter


http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/index.html