Fibreculture Journal - issue 5

"Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour"

Edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Broadly speaking, this issue of Fibreculture Journal is interested in the problem of
political organisation as it relates to the overlapping spheres of labour and life
within post-Fordist, networked settings. It's becoming increasingly clear that
multiple forms of exclusion and exploitation within the media and cultural
industries run along the lines of gender, ethnicity, age, and geography. New forms
of class division are emerging whose locus of tension can be attributed to the
ownership and control of information.

The mobile capacity of information corresponds, in many instances, with the flexible
nature of work across many sectors of the media and cultural industries. And it is
precisely the informatisation of social relations that makes political organisation
such a difficult - even undesireable - undertaking for many. Without recourse to
traditional institutions such as the union, new technics of organisation are
required if the common conditions of exploitation are to be addressed and
transformed.Precarious labour practices generate new forms of subjectivity and connection,
organised about networks of communication, cognition, and affect. These new forms of
cooperation 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? These are some of
the key questions the articles gathered here set out to addresss.

This issue is launched just months, perhaps, after memes such as the "multitude" and
"precarity" have reached their high point. We find that it is all the more
instructive to be publishing this collection of articles at such a time, since the
urgency to organise is greatest when the novelty of slogans begins to flat-line,
when routine and fatigue perhaps kick in again. Such occasions mark a transition
period of regeneration and imagination, of working out what works and what doesn't
in order to gather resources and begin the creative composition of living labour.

ARTICLES

"From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks"

Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

"On the Life and Deeds of San Precario, Patron Saint of Precarious Workers and Lives"

Ilaria Vanni and Marcello Tarì

"A Playful Multitude? Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising Immaterial Game Labour"

Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford

"Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry"

Julian Kücklich

"Postcard from the Edge: Autobiographical Musings on the Dis/organisations of the
Multimedia Industry"

Linda Leung

"Speculations on a Marxist theory of the Virtual Revolution"

Bob Hodge and Gabriela Coronado

"Learning and Insurgency in Creative Organisations"

Paul Newfield and Timothy Rayner

"Dawn of the Organised Networks"

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/index.html