processes of social recomposition
Contemporary societies are undergoing profound transformations both at the level of developments related to migration processes and at the level of general life conditions (work, modes of production, forms of social exchange, public spheres, etc.). Neither old models of describing social stratification nor identitary - or even post-identitary - ideas of "cultural" differences or diversities provide a sufficient understanding of these processes. It therefore appears necessary to develop new analyses of the complexities of social recomposition, which take into account such different - and yet intertwined - aspects as (international) labor division, ethnicized work, gender-specific forms of discrimination and exploitation, physical and social mobility, new forms of social interaction and organization, as well as the concrete impact of legal regimes and frameworks. Against this background, the term "social recomposition" aims particularly at highlighting new modes of social and political agency, new possible subjectivities and articulations that emerge from the experience of these changes.
Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis Tsianos
The Animals of Undocumented Mobility
The concept of becoming seeks to articulate a political practice in which social actors escape their normalized representations and reconstitute themselves in the course of participating and changing the conditions of their material existence. Becoming is not only a force against something but also a force which enables desire and escape. Every becoming is a transformation of multiplicity to another, write Deleuze & Guattari; every becoming radicalizes desire and creates new individuations, new affections, new diversifications. But, interestingly enough, the end of all becomings is not the proliferation of diversity and difference, it is its disappearance. Becoming imperceptible is the immanent end of all becomings, it is a process of becoming everybody/everything by eliminating the use of names to describe what exceeds the moment. We will show how migrants transform themselves and change constantly their practices and alliances in order to sustain their own subjective paths of mobility: the autonomy of migration! In this part we want to show that becoming becomes the rule when the spaces of existence cease to be pure and emerge as transit spaces of mobility. Becoming animal, becoming woman, becoming child is essential to mobility, and becoming mobile is essential to labour, and labour as their biopolitical sphere of activity is essential to the acceleration and multiplication of desire.
Rutvica Andrijašević / Rosi Braidotti
An interview with Rosi Braidotti by Rutvica Andrijašević
Rosi Braidotti recovers (in this interview with Rutvica Andrijašević published in 2002) the imaginary of a postnational Europe (daughter to the Jewish diaspora and Western European anti-fascism), opposing it to the hypernationalistic one of an Europe of regions. Her idea seems to be fully contemporary today, when transposed to the Europe of Berlusconi, Sarkozy, and Merkel, when one is forced to ask: why does Europe not make us dream?
Gerald Raunig
In his text on new modes of social recomposition, Gerald Raunig aims for a specific form of composition that flees, eludes, betrays the concepts not only of the state apparatus, but also of the community. He elaborates this "composition without a composer" with Gilles Deleuze' and Félix Guattari's concept of "abstract machines".
Katja Diefenbach
The power of exception in Agamben, the power of potentiality in Negri
In recent decades Toni Negri and Giorgio Agamben have developed a thinking of potentiality, with which they oppose the effects of imperial sovereignty and biopolitical discipline in radically different ways. At the same time, both authors work with theoretical reductions that block their promise to develop a new way of thinking the political.
Peter Spillmann
Beim Versuch, aktuelle Entwicklungen der Migration anschaulich und die darauf reagierende Politik plausibel zu machen, spielen Karten und Diagramme eine entscheidende Rolle. In der Forschung, in politischen Aushandlungssprozessen und in der medialen Berichterstattung dienen sie der Repräsentation angeblich objektiver Verhältnisse. Im Rahmen des Projektes MigMap wurden gängige Kartierungsverfahren kritisch reflektiert und ein eigenes Mapping des aktuellen Europäischen Migrationsregimes entwickelt.
Gerald Raunig
Contrary to widespread condemnation in the German mainstream press, the term precariat does not designate a dissociated lower class (“abgehängte Unterschicht”), but rather a striving for new forms of organizing in dispersion. Precariat is neither a state that empirically describes a class, nor a function of the teleology of a class in itself. Instead it is a becoming, a struggle, a question.
Manuela Bojadžijev
A current analysis of the conjunctures of racism today must understand the shifts in its forms of organisation and its articulations. Therefore we need to develop a relational theory of racism, which takes as its base the struggles against it, and not the subjects that have been constructed by racism.
John Hutnyk
Hybridity and Diaspora
Appearing as a convenient category in describing cultural mixture where the diasporized meets the host in the scene of migration, the notion of hybridity and its career as a new cultural politics should be examined carefully.

thematic strands

critique of culturalisation processes of social recomposition beyond postcolonialism: the production of the global common practices of multilinguality vs. national language-policies all texts...

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