Globalized Capital: Subjects, Spaces, and Critical Responses
April 10th & 11th, 2010
Keynote Speaker: Bruno Bosteels
Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University
Questioning capitalism is no easy enterprise. Discourses interrogating capitalism have mirrored the trajectory of capitalism itself, proliferating in a variety of directions and spawning new conceptual and historical problems with each new decade of confrontation. This conference aims to open up a space of convergence and dialogue for disparate trajectories of critical reflection and practical response. Its title aims to emphasize not only capitalism’s global character—its relentless expansion beyond various geographical, cultural, and political “limits”—but at the same time its particularized and often discontinuous local effects—the subjects, practices, and increasingly micro-managed spaces it carves out en route.
We would like to solicit papers dealing with a broad range of topics including, but not limited to:
Legacies and Boundaries of Expansion: Inside, outside, and beyond the capitalist Nation-State. Alterity, subalternity, and critiques from the margins. Postcolonialism, decolonization, and anti-colonial resistance. The metropolis and the collapse of the city/countryside dialectic. Historical and conceptual origins of capitalist economic thought.
Collectivities and Communes in Resistance: Communism. From parties to groups, from crowds to constituent power. Capitalism and Internationalism. Partisanship and/or universalism. Spaces of work and labors of thought: “immaterial labor”, intellectual culture, and the marketplace of ideas.
Subjects, Selfhood and Culture: Entrepreneurialist cultures of selfhood. Consumerist ethics and the conscience market. Neo-archaisms: the role of tradition and faith under capitalism. Counter-conducts, indocility, and strategies for “de-individualizing” and “decapitalizing” the self.
Images, Representations, and Symbols: Ideology and ‘ideology critique’. Narratives and mythologies of capitalism in cinema, art, architecture, and literature. The semiotics of capital.
Power and Neoliberal Governmentality: Biopower and biopolitical economy. Marxist critique in a paradigm of perpetual crisis management. “Total Governance”: from managerial rationalities to the management of life itself. Counter-insurgency, preventative war, and the securitization of liberty.
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2009
December 14th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I love nice “capitalism,” which to me means individual freedom and its resulting free market, as experienced in America. But, it does not include scheming bankers who claim to be “capitalists” creating new money out of thin air to buy tangibles of value. Capitalism was Marx’s term describing European mercantilism where the politician, business leader and banker schemed together to be the few elite who rule the many. He never really experienced America. claysamerica.com