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Debates

During these debates, we will look at the modifications being made to the production cycle in which social subjects sell their labour, reproduce their forms of social existence, (re)construct strategies for the production of subjectivity, and invent new forms of anti-system political action in current capitalist societies. This will mean exploring two different lines of analysis:

1. The transformation of the production cycle, through very intense processes of fragmentation, dematerialization, delocalization and financialization, and the rearticulation of these processes through previously unseen structural models for re-ordering domination and exploitation strategies. Such processes have turned a series of social locations, labour dynamics and subjective trajectories (not previously categorized as productive according to the Fordist model) into vectors which are susceptible not only to economic exploitation and capital accumulation, but also to antagonistic political formulation and production of alternative subjectivity. The preponderance of new forms of labour (which we refer to in terms which are always insufficient and provisional, such as “non-material”, “post-Fordist”, “cognitive” etc.) in the production cycle, leads one to think about the transformations which new productive subjects are going through when it comes to defining what their labour consists of, understanding how one works in the modern world, and conceptualizing how processes of accumulation of capital and the reproduction of power take place on a social level.

2. The feminization, sexualization and racialization of the production cycle caused by the massive incorporation of women and migrant workforce onto the labour market, at the very same moment that, on the one hand, there has been a general intensification of the dynamics of exploitation described above and a sexualization and radicalization of the processes of production, and on the other – closely connected with this last – the molecular changes in feminist and post-colonial revolutions are constantly modifying and rebuilding the forms of existence of feminine and social subjects in general, opening up previously unseen processes of experimentation in all aspects of subjective, political, aesthetic, intellectual and sexual behaviour. For this reason there is an urgent need to rethink the complex network of relationships defined by the interweaving of the lines of gender-sex-race-class as essential strategic articulation within the capitalist-patriarchal-colonial mechanisms of control and exploitation which have prevailed in Western societies since the beginning of modernity. That is: to conceptualize the coloniality of power and of really existing relationships of dominance.

This series of debates forms part of the Technologies of Gender. Post-identity Micropolitics workshop (MACBA, March – June 2005) and of the seminar Political Imagination (MACBA, 2005 – 2007).


Programme

FRIDAY 29TH ARRIL

FROM 11 TO 3:30 pm

Economics—the capitalist world, work forces, citizenship and welfare.
Participants: Yann Moulier Boutang, Teresa Torns.
Moderation: Sergio Bologna.

FROM 4:30 TO 9 pm

The second generation of autonomous work, cycle of postfordist production, feminization of the productive circuit.
Participants: Sergio Bologna, Carla Casalini, Lia Cigarini, Christian Marazzi, Adriana Nannicini.
Moderation: Cristina Borderías.

PROGRAM SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.

PARTICIPANTS

Sergio Bologna is the editor of Il laboro autonomo di seconda generazione (Feltrinelli, 1997) and the author of Nazi-ism and the working class 1933-1939 (Akal, 1999).

Cristina Borderías is a professor in the Contemporary History Department of the Geography and History Faculty of the University of Barcelona. She is a part of the work group about the history of work (jobs, institutions and genre). http://www.ub.es/tig

Lia Cigarini is a lawyer and co-founder of the Woman’s bookstore in Milan.

Carla Casalini is a journalist for the Italian periodical Il Manifesto.

Christian Marazzi is the author of El sitio de los calcentines (The Socks’ Place) (Akal, 1999).

Yann Moulier Boutang is the director of the magazine Multitudes. http://multitudes.samizdat.net
Adriana Nannicini is a professor in the Department of Scientific Philosophy and Theory at Ca’Foscari in Venice.

Teresa Torns is a titled professor of the Sociology Department at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.