CFP: POSTPONED: Many Regimes of Capital in the Postdigital Age

We are delighted to announce the return of the Technology and Socialization conference series.

Due to Covid-19 situation we decided that the conference Many Regimes of Capital in the Postdigital Age will be held fully online. New date for the conference is 21-22 October 2021, with abstracts due May 31 2021.

We are also glad to inform you that new keynote speakers confirmed their attendance in our conference. All details and the full Call for Papers can be found on website of Technology and Socialization project: https://technologyandsocialization.al.uw.edu.pl/

We are waiting for your submissions and hope to see you again soon!

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers and panels are invited for an interdisciplinary conference ‘Many Regimes of Capital in The Postdigital Age’, which will take place in Warsaw, 21-22 October 2021. The conference is organized by the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw (Poland) in collaboration with the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University. This conference is part of the project Technology and Socialization.

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

GREGG LAMBERT (Dean’s Professor of Humanities, Principal Investigator, The CNY Humanities Corridor, Humanities Center, Syracuse University)

ADAM NOCEK (Professor in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering and the Design School, Arizona State University)

A. KIARINA KORDELA (Professor of German Studies and Director of the Critical Theory Program, at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota)

KRZYSZTOF ZIAREK (Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo)

EWA MAZIERSKA (Professor of Contemporary Cinema, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, UK)

EWA PŁONOWSKA ZIAREK (Professor of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, State University of New York at Buffalo)

ALEX TAEK-GWANG LEE (Professor of British and American Cultural Studies, Kyung Hee University)

TOM TAYLER (Lecturer in Digital Culture, School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds)

Capitalism today is gaining new meaning and looking for a new name, new theorethical and practical approaches. In recent decades, philosophers and critical theorists have taken to reconceptualizing the many appearances of Capital: from cognitive, affective, and neoliberal capitalism to computational, surveillance, necro-, and anarcho-capitalism. These are just several of the ways to name an era marked by the capitalization of nearly everything—work, attention, affect, and even life itself. Along with these attempts to characterize our epoch, new modes of resistance have also been imagined: from alternative modalities of negation and accelerationist pleas for Promeathan transformations of the logic of production to new forms of immanent resistance through situated counter-conduct.

This conference wishes to address not only the varieties of capitalist production today but also whether and to what extent the different manifestations of capitalism are only different types of capital. In other words, is mental and emotional health a commodity in the same sense as the products of our hands and brains are commodities? Does capital therefore have an essence with many different appearances—as suggested, for example, by MacKenzie Wark in Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse? (2019)? And if capitalism does have an essence, then is it reducible to the permanent expansion of economic transactions to every domain of human and nonhuman activity?

This conference wishes to draw on a wide range of voices—from philosophy and critical theory to experimental arts and design— to interrogate, critique, and reimagine the many regimes of capitalist and post-capitalist production today and in the future.
Proposals are welcome on, but not limited to, the following topics:
• What are the differences between the various regimes of capital? Do we find the difference between the model of production (used technology, type of work, division of work, etc.), the regime of accumulation (system of dividing the value into wages, investments, savings, insurance) and the system of regulation of a given capital in these different regimes?
• What is the relationship between “emotional capital” and “cognitive capital”? How do cognitive, affective and symbolic elements of capital relate to each-other?
• Does each type of capital develop specific new accumulation mechanisms? What is the accumulation of value today and in what sense do all types of capital come together in Exchange Value?
• What does exploitation mean today? What is the main domain of exploitation – innovation, ideas, time, energy, attention devoted to various products?
• Innovation can be labour-saving, capital-saving, or neutral depending on its impact on the distribution of income between capital and labour. For Marx, innovation might create a febrile prosperity in short-run, but it would be at the expense of long-run degradation. Innovation and mechanisation depresses the average rate of profit; restoration of the rate of profit requires an increasingly large “reserve army of the unemployed” (redundant population). Does this mean a need to rebel against innovation?
• If social and political criticism can no longer be a comfortable and safe occupation of a total point of view, what is critique at all? What is criticism in the field of immanence? Is it just an affirmation of an existing constellation or situation? Is the very imaging of life still capable of an act of resistance?

Presentations are expected to be between 20 and 30 minutes.

Please send abstracts of max 300 words, attached in a word-document, with a short bio, to [email protected] by 31 May 2021.

Should you need any further information, do not hesitate to contact us at the same e-mail address. All information related to the conference and the Technology and Socialization project can be found here.

All the participants will be cordially invited to participate in a guided tour, tentatively entitled “Regimes of capital in Warsaw”, focussing on the historical, cultural and geographical imprints that Poland’s troubled relationship with capital (before and after ‘89) have left on the city.

We are looking forward to your participation and to hosting you in Warsaw.

OrganisingCommittee:
Professor Szymon Wróbel
Dr Krzysztof Skonieczny
Dr Katarzyna Szafranowska
Mgr Adam Cichoń