Intellectual Properties, or
The Materialities of Communicative Production: Archive, Canon, Clone, Copy
EXTENDED DEADLINE: JULY 20, 2014
The 3rd Annual Cultural
Studies and Comparative Literature Conference at the University of Minnesota
Dates:
September 26-27, 2014
Keynote Speakers: Jane Gaines, Columbia University
Peter Goodrich,
Cardozo School of Law
Let us suppose that the
meaning of “intellectual property” were not limited to its common juridical
usage. What if, rather than referring narrowly to the legalized ownership of mental
creations it evokes the conditions, both mental and manual, under which
knowledge is rendered inseparable from social production (along the lines of
what Marx called the “general intellect”)? Our conference takes the notion of
“intellectual properties” as a launching pad for diverse inquiries into the
production, reproduction and ordering of knowledge, bodies, and affects. We
invite papers that critically examine the concepts and histories of intellectual
property; we also encourage submissions that deal with related questions
concerning authorship, ownership, identity, communicative labor, technological
reproducibility, tradition, biopolitics--formations that relate human beings to
things both of and not of their own making. More fundamentally, the conference
asks how the changing status of “the intellect” under contemporary conditions
affects our own work as thinkers, scholars, and teachers in the humanities and
social sciences.
Archive, canon, clone and copy
are four ways in which the materialities of communicative production may be mapped
onto the terrain of contemporary humanities and social sciences research. The
terms are sites that determine the consistency of the intellect and its
properties; they also provide models by which the intellect can be owned as
“property.” To whom do archives,
broadly understood to include the spectrum from books to genes, belong? How do
contemporary canonical formations (e.g. “world cinema,” “literature in global
English,” “world music,” “French theory”) challenge and reinstitute the
relations of property and propriety that were once called “tradition”? What is
the relationship between media of technical reproducibility and increasingly
elaborate regimes of intellectual property rights deployed in the sciences,
humanities, and the public sphere? How does technical reproducibility work as a
mode of biological and social reproduction in the age of digital convergence,
cloning, and the proliferation of prostheses?
We are interested in work
that addresses the above concerns and related work, listed below are more
possible topics.
• Theoretical and historical perspectives on
property and intellectuality
• Communicative labor and general intellect
• Materiality and embodiment of knowledge
• Film, literature, music, their properties
and property relations
• Intersections between “local” “national”
and “global” literatures, cinemas, and music.
• The relationship between affect and
intellect
• Artificial Intelligence, cybernetics,
self-organizing knowledge systems
•
Regimes of documentary
evidence and the archive
•
Archive fever/desire for
archives/the archival turn in film and literary studies
•
The politics of collective
memory, institutional memory, and state memory
•
Subaltern and alternative
archives
•
Virtual publics and virtual
privacies
•
Cognitive mining and
indigenous claims to knowledge
•
Exploitation of knowledge,
knowledge as exploitative
•
Digital archivization and
technologies of piracy
•
Intellectual prostheses in
their technological, mechanical, or pharmacological modes
•
Hacking, culture-jamming,
and graffiti
•
Institutional histories of
intellectual property
•
Teaching, maieutics, the
university under neoliberal restructuring
•
Politics of vernacular
languages
•
Rights to digital
commodities and virtual territory, concepts of virtual ownership
•
Mash-ups, slashes, re-mixes,
parodies and communal repurposing
•
Economies and ecologies of
social and biological reproduction
•
Intellectuals as a class
and the role of the intellectual
•
Disciplinary history and
genealogies of knowledge
Please submit your abstract
of no more than 300 words to UMNCSCLconference@gmail.com by July
20. Include your name, e-mail address, brief bio (including school
affiliation, position, and research interests), and any audio-visual
requirements. Papers should be in English and no more than 20 minutes in
length. We are also interested in panel submissions, which should consist of at
least three participants and which should include the above information about
each participant and a tentative title indicating the theme.
