Ned Rossiter

Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception

In 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would spread across the space of Europe. Four years later, almost as suddenly as the precarity movement appeared, so it would enter into crisis. To understand precarity as a political concept it is necessary to go beyond economistic approaches that see social conditions as determined by the mode of production. Such a move requires us to see Fordism as exception and precarity as the norm. The political concept and practice of translation enables us to frame the precarity of creative labour in a broader historical and geographical perspective, shedding light on its contestation and relation to the concept of the common. Our interest is in the potential for novel forms of connection, subjectivization and political organization. Such processes of translation are themselves inherently precarious, transborder undertakings.

Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial Thoughts

ABSTRACT This article reports on current developments within creative industries in Beijing. The article discusses Dashanzi Art District and the Created in China Industrial Alliance in relation to such issues as labor, intellectual-property regimes, real-estate speculation, high-tech development zones, promotional cultures and the global variability of neoliberal capitalism. The article maintains that creative industries, as realizations of a policy concept undergoing international dissemination, are most accurately understood as cultural practices in trans-local settings that overlap with larger national and geopolitical forces.

What is a research platform? Mapping methods, mobilities and subjectivities

This article provides an account of the question of method as it relates to collective modes of research organised, conceived and produced through the interplay between digital technologies of communication and offline strategies of investigation. It does so by exploring the orchestration of research platforms, which are mediating devices that constitute the production of knowledge across a range of geocultural settings. In the context of a project entitled Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, the article maintains that research methods must contend with the ideological, technological and economic instruments that condition knowledge production at the current conjuncture. The platform, we argue, operates as a medium through which research, labour, subjectivity and knowledge are shaped in ways specific to hardware settings, software dynamics and the materialities of labour and life.

From flows of culture to the circuits of logistics : borders, regions, labour in transit

PAGE 1 When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural.

Organizing networks : notes on collaborative constitution, translation and the work of organization

The return of political ontology and its critique of representation contributes to a retrieval of the antagonistic registers of “the political.” A corresponding interest in processes of collaborative constitution has explored alternative modalities of the (conflictual) production of (political) subjectivity. Because such efforts necessarily attend to the status of a principle of the actionable, this essay suggests that the question of a “beyond” as it relates to a politics of the actionable calls for a conceptual elaboration of “organized networks.” The essay argues that a broader analytical perspective is opened by reengaging the practice of translation.

Making Logistical Worlds

This chapter describes the main contribution of the volume in rethinking the changing economic and political parameters of Asian regionalism through the analytical lens of logistics. Within the nexus of logistics, society, and history, it becomes possible to understand the political imperatives within which logistics functions as well as the organization of dissent, resistance, and violence that it often occasions. We investigate how an approach to Asian regionalism through logistics intersects policy visions such as China’s Belt and Road initiative and critical perspectives such as those associated with the concept of postcolonial capitalism. In this way, the chapter asks how logistics provides a background for questioning the established borders of Asia and the relations between its traditionally conceived subregions.

El supuesto digital: 10 Tesis

As he developed precedently with the phenomenon of Wikileaks professor Lovink and their colleagues present us 10 fundamental thesis about the new digital media, discussing their importance and the features of their progress, from a critical and polemical perspective, analyzing the hidden aspects as well as the potential undeveloped of socio-political possibilities that were implied in them.

Materialities of Software

In this chapter I bring digital humanities research into the domain of logistical industries. The primary task of the global logistics industry is to manage the movement of people and things in the interests of communication, transport, and economic efficiencies. The software applications special to logistics visualize and organize these mobilities, producing knowledge about the world in transit. Yet for the most part the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software remains a black box for those not directly using these systems as a matter of routine in their daily work across a range of industries, which include but are not limited to logistical industries. The health care, medical insurance, education, mining, and energy industries, along with retail and service sectors, also adopt ERP systems to manage organizational activities. One key reason for the scarce critical attention to ERP systems is related to the prohibitive price of obtaining proprietary software, which often costs millions of dollars for companies to implement. The aesthetics of ERP software are also notoriously unattractive, and the design is frequently not conducive to ease or pleasure of use.