Autonomism, Class Composition, and Cultural Studies

Berkeley, CA - March 18th (as part of the Cultural Studies Association conference)
Organized by Stevphen Shukaitis & Jack Z. Bratich

How do cultural studies and autonomism converge and diverge over matters of power, the state, and subjectivity? Come join us for a series of  panels (organized by Stevphen Shukaitis and Jack Bratich)  planned as part of the annual Cultural Studies Association conference. They will explore the future behind our backs, focusing on how autonomist politics and analysis can inform cultural analysis and vice versa.

Autonomist political analysis involves something very much like a form of cultural studies, exploring how the grounds for radical politics are constantly shifting in response to how capital and the state utilize social insurgencies and movements against themselves. For instance, the concept of class composition, or the ways in which class formations emerge from social contestation, and the primacy and determining role of social resistance, shares much in common with various strains of thought in cultural studies. Similarly, workers’ inquiry as a method of investigating into the conditions of working class life to rethinking its ongoing subversive political potentiality, functions in similar ways to how early cultural studies shifted to an analysis of the everyday based on renewing and deepening radical politics.

Panels

1. Antagonism & the Plurality of Social Struggles
Participants: Ben Trott, Tadzio Mueller, Fiona Jeffries, Chris Hurl 

2. Rekombinant Culture & Distributed Subjectivities
Participants: Marco Deseriis, Annette Wachholtz-Maguire, John Duda, Dalton Anthony Jones

3. Autonomism & Cognitive Labor
Participants: Verity Burgmann, Brian Brown, Michael Goddard

Abstracts for the panels available here.