Desiring Dissent: Bodies and/of/in Resistance -
Conference Call, 5-6 May 04, Essex, UK
DESIRING DISSENT: BODIES AND/ OF/ IN RESISTANCE
A conference organised by the Essex Management Centre,
University of
Essex, UK, 5-6 May 2004
Call for abstracts
"What are the new types of struggle, which are
transversal and immediate rather than centralized
and mediatized? What are the intellectuals new
functions, which are specific or particular rather
than universal? What are the new modes of
subjectivation,
which tend to have no identity? This is the present
triple root of the question: What can I do, What do
I know, What am I?...What is our light and what is
our
language, that is to say, our truth today? What
powers
must we confront, and what is our capacity for
resistance,
today when we can no longer be content to say that
the
old struggles are no longer worth anything? And do we
not
perhaps above all bear witness to and even
participate in
the production of a new subjectivity? Do not the
changes
in capitalism find an unexpected encounter in the
slow
emergence of a new Self as a centre of resistance?
Each time there is social change, is there not a
movement
of subjective reconversion, with its ambiguities but
also
its potential?" (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault)
One of the key aspects of academic thought is the
analysis and
questioning of the ideological orders of social
reality that have come
to dominate specific times and spaces. The aim of such
an endeavour is
to produce concepts which are able not simply to
describe such orders
but dissent from, interrupt and resist the techniques
and desires that
produce and sustain them. Indeed a focal point of
academic debate over
the past decades has been to conceptualise the
MULTIPLE forms of
resistance that are mobilised against different BODIES
OF ORGANISED
POWER. While the realisation that resistance is a
multiplicity that
takes all sorts of shapes and forms is, without a
doubt, an important
one, it seems that what has been somewhat celebrated
in recent times is
a conception of resistance that can take place simply
everywhere. That
is, what can sometimes be observed is that any
difference or otherness
is fetishised for its PARTICULAR form of resistance
without assessing
its EFFECTIVENESS within larger formations of social
struggle.
Against this we suggest that resistances to bodies of
power operate in
SPECIFIC socio-historical situations. That is, what is
crucial is the
concrete analysis of the specificities of power
relations and the
possibilities of resistance that can be deployed
against them. What
thus
becomes significant are questions of STRATEGY and
TACTICS: resistance
is
not simply something that is everywhere but something
that can be
strategically organised and tactically deployed for
specific political
ends and purposes. This is of particular concern for
large-scale
protest
movements, whose effectiveness is often a question of
how MASSES OF
BODIES are organised and institutionalised into a MASS
BODY across
boundaries of space and time. The anti-globalization/
anti-capitalist
movement/s provide a particularly apposite example of
this set of
issues, given that the participants represent a
disparate collection of
political ideologies and are spread across the world.
In unpicking questions such as these, the specific
intellectual can
be
argued not only to conceptualise such dissent but also
to help to
explore possibilities of its effective organisation
and strategic and
tactical deployment. The academic thus becomes an
ACTIVIST BODY whose
theoretical practice (or practical theory) is to
resist
taken-for-granted realities and dominant forms of
social organisation.
Body here may mean not only the intellectual self
who resorts to
scholarly arguments but also the actual carnal being
that lives in an
embodied world where wants, desires and fantasies are
regulated through
sensory experiences, imagination, and language. For a
LIVING body,
these
are not only sources of control but also bases of
resistance to its
domination and appropriation by another body, ideology
or organisation.
Thus, resistance is by no means deployed from within a
STABLE BODY
characterised by humanist categories. Instead, the
specific
intellectual arguably resists in part in order to
explore his or her
own subjectivity to engage in a critical ontology
of self and an
examination of phenomenological brute being. That
is, resistances by
individual academic bodies are not only directed
against something
external but indeed against the body as such. The
body of the
specific intellectual DESIRES DISSENT against
itself. The activist
academic engages in a deviant act of SELF-SUBVERSION
in order to
produce
a body that is different to todays taken-for-granted
subjectivities.
But are we even asking the right questions? How is
difference possible
in a world that is always already characterised by
relations of power
that seem to be able to INCORPORATE all forms of
resistance? Is the
CAPITALIST BODY not one that continuously desires
dissent in order to
explore new planes of surplus production? Is the
capitalist economy not
a body of organisation that thrives on
DISorganisation: resistance
against its own very organisation in order to expand
its territory?
Does
this axiomatic logic of capital not render all forms
of resistance
FUTILE? Is, in other words, the desire for dissent not
coming from
within the body of capital and therefore always
already co-opted by it?
Is the activist body not always already infiltrated by
the desires of
hegemonic machineries of social organisation? How then
is social change
POSSIBLE?
Obviously these questions have been at the forefront
of theoretical
thought for some time and there are certainly no easy
answers. But we
feel that it is one of the tasks of the intellectual
to ask such
questions again and again, to continuously analyse the
specific
formations and organisations of power and resistance
in order to
critique them and explore possibilities of changing
them. Within this
conference we therefore aim to explore precisely the
CONCEPTUAL
JUNCTURE
between bodies, desire, resistance and organisation.
We would like to
invite scholars from a variety of disciplinary
backgrounds to come to
the University of Essex and present papers that
respond to some of the
conceptual and political problems outlined above.
Authors might want to address some of the following
broad themes (this
is by no means an exhaustive list):
- Can resistance be organised? How is resistance
organised? Is it
possible to talk of bodies of resistance?
- The role of the intellectual in the
conceptualisation/ organisation
of
resistance.
- Academia and activism/ teaching and research as
resistance.
- The productive body and resistance at the workplace.
- Direct action: resistance and/ or desire?
- Strategies and tactics of resistance in times of
Empire.
- Resistance and organisation/ institutionalisation/
co-optation.
- The psychoanalysis of desire and dissent.
- Historical and contemporary forms of resistance.
- Democracy and radical resistance: an oxymoronic
pair?
- Desiring and resisting war.
- The resistant subject/ the resistant body.
- Resistance as art/ the art of resistance.
- Being and body as modes of resistance.
- Re/presentation of resistance in the media
Interested contributors to this conference are asked
to submit an
abstract of around 500 words to Olga Belova
(obelov@???) by
FRIDAY, 26 MARCH 2004. Once selected, they will need
to book their
place
by paying a £20 registration fee. Please note that
attendance will be
LIMITED to a maximum of 25 delegates.
The conference will run over 2 days, starting at
lunchtime on 5 May and
finishing after lunch on 6 May. There will be 2
lunches, one dinner and
refreshments provided during the event. There is a
choice of
guesthouses
in the surrounding area for delegates to stay in, as
well as a hotel
situated on the University campus.
Bursaries will be available for THREE PhD students to
contribute
towards
their accommodation and travel costs, and they will be
charged no
registration fee. Interested PhD students can apply
for a bursary by
submitting a separate two-page document, which
addresses the following
points: What are the theoretical and methodological
themes of the PhD
project?; How would a participation in this conference
be of benefit to
the PhD research project?; What are the travel and
accommodation costs
your conference participation would involve?
We will seek to collect papers presented at this
conference into a
dedicated journal and/ or a book publication. A full
paper will
therefore be required at a later date if presenters
would like to be
considered for this publication.
Conference Organisers:
Olga Belova (obelov@???)
Steffen Böhm
Jo Brewis
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