Colloque organisé par TEM, U. of Leicetser et AgroParisTech au Centre à Paris de 'U. of Chicago. 9 et 10 avril 2018.
Communications en français et anglais.
Does the academic terrain of organizational studies force rationalization upon us? Can we professionally think where we come from, where we work, and where we live? Can we think situated – rooted to persons, places and events of immediacy; and to circumstances of direct affect and solidarity? Has the networked cybernetic world alienated us even further from lived circumstance, the Other and everything concrete? Does the metaphor of the network recast existence into mediated market transience? Are we indeed dominated by business, commercial, economic and electronic networks – by constant inter-relationships that are no-one and no-where, but are always on-going and economically driven? Has not the network become the all-consuming metaphor that flattens everything into its sameness – and does this not tend to a sameness of relentless commercial striving? Theoretically, from Latour to Deleuze, is network hegemony in danger of leading to a vision of a universe of no-difference, with no real distinctions, characterized by total flow and process; and thus to placeless-ness.
Affect entails a logic of relatedness and requires substantive engagement. The discovery of space and place are thus a prerequisite to the valuing of affect. Can we, will we, and do we want, to reterritorialize our theories and make our research site-bound? ‘Non-Representational Research’ (Thrift, 2008) has problematized the academic diet of: knowledge discourses, social constructions and power structures. ‘Non-rep’ has set out to be ‘in-between’, open to place, event, circumstance and affect; and attuned to worlding; and to study: … modes of existence [that] accrue, circulate, sediment, unfold, and go flat ... what happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects of distant systems but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields …? (K. Stewart, 2011) Does eventful groundedness (as ‘Non-Rep’) become (in our hands) a radical idea, and a potential strategy for de-proletariatization and affective engagement?
We invite experimental research contributions to this colloquium that explore ‘atmospheric attunements’, which capture the ‘onflow’ of existence, and that are evocative.
>> Programme (pdf) |