"Multitudes, Creative Organisation, and the Precarious Condition of
New Media Labour"
Fibreculture Journal
Call for Papers
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
