CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE UNDERCOMMONS AND DESTITUENT POWER
Indiana University’s 2020 Critical Ethnic Studies Symposium, March 26-28th, 2020.
Organizers: Micol Seigel, Bella Bravo, Kieran Aarons, Mia Beach, Ross Gay, Rosie Stockton, J. Cameron Karter
Confirmed Speakers: Fred Moten, Frederic Neyrat, Laura Harris, Mikkel Bolt-Rasmussen, Adam Kotsko, Dylan Rodriquez, Jaime Alves, Daniel Nemser, Jackie Wang
Deadline for Proposals: February 1, 2020
We are pleased to invite submissions for the international conference, “The Undercommons and Destituent Power,” to be held in Bloomington, IN, March 26th-28th, 2020. Amidst an unprecedented wave of global unrest, this international and interdisciplinary conference aims to (re)launch critical debate and exchange around the means, methods, and imagination of revolutionary community in the 21st century.
Responding to our tumultuous times, “The Undercommons and Destituent Power” draws inspiration from two renegade currents in North American and European thought that seek to dismantle and refashion the central categories of Western politics. In Moten and Harney’s call for a joyfully indocile social life that evades the capture of classical politics, in Agamben’s call to rethink emancipatory violence through the growth of a ‘destituent power’ that cancels relations of domination without replacing them, we see convergent efforts to exit the disastrous course of modernity. Is it not in undercommons, i.e. in the interstices of an imperfect captivity, in the festivity of fugitivity and exile that our shared power first comes to be felt? Is it not through our de-stituent capacity to desert and refuse the identities and vocations offered to us that we gain contact with our true collective capacities, that community becomes thinkable beyond any subjective ‘standpoint’?
We are interested in “destituent power” and the “undercommons” not only for their power as analytic tools through which to think, perceive, and critique our present, but as ethical and political orientations in practice. We envision this conference as a hybrid space of encounter, an opportunity for the stowaways in and outside the University to conspire and explore forms of collective life that evade the political constraints of citizenship, sovereignty, and governance. Proposals should engage with the two traditions, the undercommons and destituent power—preferably both, but at least one. We urge participants to read both core texts, available on our conference website. Below are some questions we hope might inform your proposals:
-How do Agamben’s call to think a ‘destituent power’ and the unconquered sociality of Moten and Harney’s ‘undercommons’ allow us to dismantle the ruling fictions of our time? What convergences and divergences exist between them? What do categories such as ‘use’, ‘inoperativity’, ‘desertion’, ‘exile’, ‘fugitivity’, ‘planning’, and ‘hapticality’ allow us to rethink?
-How can we dismantle sovereignty without paving the way for its reconstitution in new forms? What sort of thinking and acting cancels and deactivates juridical and social norms and roles without seeking to replace them with ‘better’ ones?
-What does it do to the notion of the “undercommons” to look at it from the vantage point of European autonomous thinking? What does it do to the notion of “destituent power” to approach from the Americas-centered Black radical tradition? Does destituent power take race sufficiently into account? Does the undercommons do enough to imagine revolution?
-How can we leap over the ingrained truism according to which governance forms the unassailable destiny of all social organization? Can we imagine a revolutionary movement developing in the absence of either a historical subject or a guiding program or ideology? How, beginning from a heterogeneity of singular and divergent perspectives and experiences, can a common strategic sensibility emerge, without cancelling the generative differences within it?
-How do we identify the apparatuses that govern and suspend our lived contact with the world, detaching us from the relations that everywhere constitute our existence? How can we overcome our habit of living as if we did not belong to this world, as if we were not party to our situation?
-How can we think a sociality that both precedes and exceeds the institutions of economic and governmental administration? How can we articulate the relationship to ourselves, to one another, and to the world in ways that do not proceed from, nor measure themselves against, a law, origin, or foundation? How does our commitment to social life in common require us to do war with the idea of society itself? If bare lives turn out to be bare only insofar as no attention is paid to them, which forms of collective attention and care making us unfit for subjection?
-How can we reactivate the memory of the refugees, fugitives, renegades and castaways that have always ensured that the West remained an ‘unsafe neighborhood’ for our oppressors? If “knowledge of freedom is the invention of escape,” how can we push beyond the critiques of the present disaster toward the creative procedures that unravel and deactivate it?
-Can we think a process of collective self-organization and struggle that would not have recourse to what Jackie Wang and Frank Wilderson have identified as the logics of ‘innocence’ or ‘Humanity’, i.e., the impulse to lay claim to a right deduced from a qualitative ‘humanity’ grounded in reason and deserving of expression? Can we think a form of political agency that neither deduces itself from, nor creates a new title to, a basis, ground, or inner legitimacy conferring authority upon itself?
-How can we search out the vanishing point between Blackness’ refusal of standpoint and the desertions of Humanism from within its own ranks? What art of distance and proximity, what forms of political and poetic resonance allows the different lines of flight to coalesce?
-What would it mean to rethink the social and the political problem through the figure of the refugee, the fugitive, the renegade, the castaway? What if groundlessness, inoperativity, and exile were seen not merely as privations, but as the very paradigms allowing us to rethink political action, the theory of the subject, and the nature of the revolutionary voyage?
Abstracts, proposals, or full papers may be submitted by email: destituentcommons@gmail.com.
For updated information on the conference, visit our website: http://www.destituentcommons.com