May 26, 2004 1:51 PM

Guess What: Writers Go Broke A Lot

Fibreculture Journal

http://journal.fibreculture.org

Call for papers

Multitudes, Creative Organisation, and the

Precarious Condition of New Media Labour (2004)

:: fibreculture :: has established itself as Australasia's leading

forum for discussion of internet theory, culture, and research.

The Fibreculture Journal is a peer-reviewed journal that explores the

issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture

network and wider social formations.

Papers are invited for the 'Multitudes, Creative Organisation,

and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour' issue of the

Fibreculture Journal, to be published by the end of 2004. This

issue will be guest edited by Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter and Geert Lovink.

There are guidelines for the format and submission of contributions

at http://journal.fibreculture.org

These guidelines need to be followed in all cases. Contributions

should be sent electronically, as word attachments, to:

Geert Lovink [email protected]

Brett Neilson [email protected]

Ned Rossiter [email protected]

***

Multitudes, Creative Organisation, and

the Precarious Condition of

New Media Labour

Post-Fordist techniques of flexible accumulation coupled with

the widespread use of new communications media

have had a profound impact on the organisation of social relations.

In recent years the "Creative Industries" have emerged across the UK and Ireland, United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and Asia as the new idiom by which governments, the culture industries and the higher education sector engage in the management of populations. The primary mission

of the Creative Industries is to extract an economic value from

a heterogeneous array of cultural practices.

Accompanying the self-valorising rhetoric of the Creative

Industries is an intensification of the precarious situation

of cognitive labourers - a mode of engagement that is

common to those working in both symbolic production

and the more menial tasks associated with the service industries.

While the specific forms of exploitation of labour-power

vary across industries and along the lines of class,

gender, ethnicity, age and geography, all precarious labour

practices generate new forms of subjectivity and connection,

organised about networks of communication, cognition,

and affect.

These new forms of co-operation 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?

This issue of the Fibreculture Journal is interested in receiving

individually and multi-authored contributions that may adopt

the following expressive forms:

* theoretical interventions

* reflexive empirical studies of precarious labourers

* personal accounts by those working in new media and related industries

The editors will not be privileging one genre over the other,

and all will be subject to peer review. Contributions may

range from short meditations to longer studies. See

the journal's submission