Hostile Intelligences and The General Antagonism
CALL FOR PAPERS

"Collective intelligence has to organise itself into a hostile intelligence — also in the sense of inoculating the host as a malignant parasite. An alien intelligence is not concerned with any orthodoxy, it proliferates and organises its own heresies".
–Matteo Pasquinelli

The purpose of this conference is to organize and proliferate the material heresies that are the basis for what Matteo Pasquinelli has called "hostile intelligences" and what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as "the general antagonism." Pasquinelli writes, in "The Labour of Abstraction," "Marx's tendency of the rate of profit to fall has to find eventually its epistemic twin." For him, forms of knowledge and subjectivity play a prominent role in his theory of anti-capitalist revolution. Hostile intelligence is one imaginary in which the recently formed Accelerationists conceive such an epistemic twin. Moten and Harney's category, "the general antagonism," is no doubt the epistemic twin of "the general intellect", and powerfully indicates a generalized disidentification with white-supremacist, capitalist culture that is an extant part of the fugitive practices of what they eloquently call "The Undercommons."

According to Marx, the articulation of social form in and through the medium of history is a necessary result of capital: "The production of capitalists and wage workers is…a major product of the valorization process of capital." A hostile intelligence is specific in its opposition to this valorization, 'inoculating' its host from subjective inscription into capital and its estranged imaginary. The general antagonism suggests that hostility is already generalized and we want to think and, to think dangerously here, about how to intensify these relations.

To these ends this conference seeks to examine the formation or movement of alternatives to subjectivity, along with opening a dialogue about how, why, when, where, in short, in what forms, this Other to capital exists. What are the grounds for a hostile intelligence? How do we antagonize and exacerbate hostile relations? How might hostile intelligences alter existing relation to private property, racism, imperialism, or gender-normativity? And what material hostilities to capital already exist that demand consideration and/or affinity? We are also interested in the ways in which such hostilities are the weaponized side of experiences that are sometimes known by a cluster of terms including dignity, solidarity, and love.

In addition to traditional written scholarship, we also welcome studio-based or artistic practices that are critically engaged in these lines of inquiry. We will review/accept abstracts of 500 words or less by January 5th, 2015. Please send abstracts to Sara Collins at scollin4@pratt.edu.

Topic areas for the conference can include, but are not limited to:

• black and subaltern studies
• fugitivity
• marginalization of race/gender/ableist violence within capitalist mediation
• feminist and Marxist materialisms
• queer/trans studies
• guerilla warfare and terrorism
• agency, ownership, personhood
• distribution/redistribution of the sensible
• re-appropriation of the means of production
• aesthetic/visual/subjective investigations in consumer culture
• production/creation/conceptualization of value form(s)
• sense colonization: discourse and cognition
• schizophrenia from Deleuze to Berardi
• alternative, counterfeit, or digital currencies
• art markets
• all other topics that might concatenate a hostility to commodification and dispossession