"Movements and Technologies of the Common:

Neuro -- Networking Europe"
Muffathalle, Munich Germany, February 26-29, 2004

SYNOPSIS

A new generation of media and network initiatives from all over Europe and
different parts of the world present and work on their projects in a broad
interactive framework that explores the different conceptual and practical
idioms used to articulate and create new social, political and artistic
practices.Originating within the networking culture of open communications and free
exchange the event aims to connect contemporary debates on mobility, migration
and social movements with new media instruments, information and communication
technologies.

WHAT'S NEW?

The new is emerging in unknown and multiple ways. It is emerging from the
exhaustion and crisis of conventional political concepts that are no longer
adequate to the unstable, informatic and immaterial dimensions of the emerging
division of labour. The new technologies of the common are not universal
hierarchies of political right but small scale and intimate practices of
constitution. The new involves those who see the limitations of individual
social practices of self-realisation and desire to turn them into general and
transferable social technologies of emancipation.

BACKGROUND

It is time for intellectual and political debates to merge with technology.
Both to evaluate the current state of social movements and to build on those
orientations that are pushing the limits of what are individually considered
possible. NEURO sets out to create and map a new discursive terrain and
practical horizon: the ideas of 'freedom of movement' and 'technologies of the
common' draws into a synergetic perspective the range of irreducibly
conflictual practices whereby society is reproduced.

Without losing sight of the (translocal) constitution of the local as
indispensable site of intervention, NEURO seeks to review and research
practices of networking that are already redefining the political geography of
Europe. In the ongoing diversification of the social, processes of integration
can no longer be clearly separated from mechanisms of exclusion. The working
out of these tensions at a political and economic level is producing new
levels of complexity as well as new opportunities for provocative and
experimental projects that challenge orthodoxy and convention.

The focus on social reproduction is an acknowledgment that its various modes
are proliferating across an ever-expanding terrain in a process that suggests
that collective responses will themselves have to explore some of the idioms
and tools of the network in each of the subjects under discussion, whether
human rights and citizenship, Empire and Europe, free software and
intellectual property regimes, the spectacle of civil society, or the
institutional and bureaucratic mentalities present within post-governmental
environments.

Beyond the juridical parcelisation of people into discrete, sovereign and
rights-bearing subjects, the present offers a unique chance to express and
form solidarities that catch up in political terms with the sociality of our
being. For these struggles, networks and intercommunicative agency are not
goals but their very conditions of possibility. Thus the new sits in
opposition to the current forms of exclusion because the appropriation of
subjective freedoms within Europe and beyond it are part of the foundations on
which these political edifices themselves rest.

TASKS

After the thin promises of new markets and new media, what aspirations remain
for evolving struggles for information, knowledge and communication? What is
the role of civil society in the framework of global governing practices of
political mediation today? What is the impact of immaterial and affective
labour for practices of migration and the reconfiguration of the global
economy of biopolitical production? What projects of self constitution emerge
from practices of refusal and exodus? How has the movement reposed the
question of the autonomy of the political in the midst of a crisis of
representation? Is mapping the only way to express horizontal structures of
cooperation and technologies of the common?

neuro.kein.org