[ecrea] CFP: Revisiting the Concepts, Politics and Cultures of Multitude

     Revisiting the Concepts, Politics and Cultures of Multitude

deadline:
October 1, 2016
full name / name of organization:
Benjamin Halligan / University of Wolverhampton
contact email:
(b.halligan /at/ wlv.ac.uk) <mailto:(b.halligan /at/ wlv.ac.uk)>

Networks of protest and dissent, actual and virtual, were understood to 
have become increasingly centreless and leaderless across the 1990s, and 
beyond. Even the nature of protest and dissent fell away from previous 
models, as aligned to pragmatic demands and manifestos, single issues 
and norms of controlled civil disobedience. Now the masses were 
understood not to assemble behind any one position, or rally to one 
slogan, but more to stand in a kind of collective negative correlation 
to the faltering status quo: a crowd of singularities. This crowd or 
mass has been identified and explored in various ways as “the multitude” 
by theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, The 
Invisible Committee, Mauricio Lazzarato, and Franco Berardi among others.

The roots of this turn have been related to the political disorientation 
of the “post-ideological” wake of 1989, with the growth of intellectual 
and network-based labour, economic migration and a precarious substrata 
of a “grey collar” workforce, the heightened policing of traveller and 
off-the-grid lifestyles, the coexistence of the Global South and Global 
North in megacities, and the supposed vanishing of the traditional 
working classes in the West. And a neoliberal response to the rise of 
these networks has come in attempts to co-opt grass root strategies of 
change: rainbow revolutions; Black Bloc infiltration and provocations; 
people’s protests as invited and allied to IMF reformism (or even 
cautious support, as with Live8); various forms of middle-class crowd 
funding and crowd sourcing; identity politics calibrations to “liberal 
interventionism” in the name of “freedom” (rather than human rights).

This proposed edited collection will seek to critically engage with the 
body of thought around the concept of multitude in two main respects. 
Firstly, we welcome philosophically-inclined attempts at interrogating 
or rethinking the concept of multitude, taking into account criticisms 
produced by various cohorts on the Left and by its outstanding spokesmen 
(such as Slavoj Zizek, Jodi Dean and Jacques Ranciere, among others), 
over the last two decades. Between the poles of uncritical praising of 
constituent creativity of the “many” and the recent attempts to rethink 
the “one” as a form of mobilising popular authority (in the form of the 
leader or the Party) there is a space for mediation which cannot be 
theoretically and politically ignored. In tracing the trajectory of the 
developing idea of multitude from early political-philosophical 
modernity to the Italian and international debates from the 1990s to the 
present, we encounter the concept of the State, various subcategories of 
the political subject (crowd, mass, people, class, Party) but also new 
concepts and phenomena such as the common, “form of life,” 
individuation, the biopolitical, the Event, the post-national, 
queerness, the migrant, the refugee, as well as the economic and 
political crises in Europe and globally, which broke surface in 2008 and 
continue to reverberate. We maintain that, in spite of being met with 
quick rejections and losing traction in the ephemeral cycle of 
theoretical fashions and jargon in leftist academia and activist 
circles, the idea to which the name ”multitude” gestures can be more 
productively reconsidered as a theoretical framework for the analysis of 
new and coming forms of social and political existence, and struggles 
they imply, as well as of their cultural formations and “codes” already 
established in previous decades. Secondly, we welcome engagements with 
respect to: cultural artefacts (from popular culture to the 
avant-garde); technological enablings of protest; the artefacts of and 
occurrences of protest and civil unrest; mainstream and independent 
reportage of dissent; the structures and organisation of new modes of 
dissent and protest; radical refusal; production of new subjectivities; 
co-option of dissent, and more.

This summative work of revisiting and, potentially, displacing or 
extending the concept of multitude and its applications in theoretical, 
cultural and political praxis now needs to be achieved. We ask: What 
does this contentious concept, the ‘multitude’, stand for? What is the 
inner temporality and historicity of the multitude (if any)? What are 
the real and potential relations between multitude and political 
organisation? Can we identify new forms of organisation, which take into 
account the dimension of the “many”? What is or was the culture of the 
multitude? What are the political applications and meanings of the 
“multitude”, as developed in various geopolitical areas of the globe 
(“the South” and “the North”, and their interzones)? What forms and 
languages of communication were developed? What forms of artistic 
expression and experimentation illuminate this abstract and protean 
idea? (And how does the idea of multitude help us to read otherwise 
difficult artistic texts?) How was political power understood and 
utilised? How are we to account for the churn of protest groupings 
(anti-globalisation; anti-war; anti-austerity, #Occupy and beyond)? How 
does the contemporary 24/7 society of late capitalism affects the nature 
of labour and political mobilisations? What is the impact of 
“algorithmic cooperation” based on Internet and mobile communications? 
How can the new dissident cultures of leaking and security breaches 
contribute to our understanding of the actual political power exerted 
over the masses? What are the precarious dynamics of new activisms, and 
how are we to address and assess the widespread phenomena of “burning 
out” and exhaustion? What is the prehistory of multitude? What is its 
present, and what could be its future? Is the Idea of communism still 
its horizon and can we, perhaps, retroactively recognise the hidden 
features of the multitude in the experiences of the “real communisms” of 
the twentieth century? 20th century? Can we now speak of a 
“post-multitude”, which was partly institutionalised, objectified and 
thus deactivated in the corporations-owned social networks, but may 
possibly still be re-activated again?

Proposals of 600 words maximum should be in a Word document (not a PDF), 
with minimal formatting. Please also include (in the same document), and 
as independent of this word count: name; email and postal address; title 
and affiliation(s); recent publications / creative outputs; any further 
relevant biographical information. Please email Drs Benjamin Halligan 
and Alexei Penzin (atb.halligan /at/ wlv.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(b.halligan /at/ wlv.ac.uk)>(anda.penzin /at/ wlv.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(a.penzin /at/ wlv.ac.uk)>by 1 October 2016. A submission deadline for 
authors is envisaged for 1 July 2017 (with a possible 
conference/symposium a few months prior), with a view to publication in 
2018/19.

Dr Benjamin Halligan is Director of the Doctoral College of the 
University of Wolverhampton. Publications include/Michael 
Reeves/(Manchester UP, 2003),/Desires for Reality: Radicalism and 
Revolution in Western European Film/(Berghahn, 2016), and the co-edited 
collections/Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and 
Politics/(Ashgate, 2010),/Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and 
Politics of Noise/(Continuum, 2012),/Resonances: Noise and Contemporary 
Music/(Bloomsbury Academic, 2013),/The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to 
Electropop/(Routledge, 2013), and/The Arena Concert: Music, Media and 
Mass Entertainment/(Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Dr Alexei Penzin is Reader at the Faculty of Arts of the University of 
Wolverhampton, and Associated Research Fellow at the Institute of 
Philosophy (Moscow). Penzin has written articles for journals such 
as/Rethinking Marxism/,/Mediations/and/South Atlantic Quarterly/as well 
as chapters for many edited collections. He also published the essay/Rex 
Exsomnis/(Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012) as a part of the dOCUMENTA13 series, 
and co-edited and authored prefaces to the Russian translations of books 
by Fredric Jameson and Paolo Virno. Penzin’s/Against the Continuum: 
Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist Modernity/is forthcoming for 
Bloomsbury Academic. Penzin is a member of the group Chto Delat (What is 
to Be Done?) and a member of editorial boards of the 
journal/Stasis/(Saint Petersburg) and the/Moscow//Art Magazine/.
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