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03.03.2002
Cultural Work and Critique of Globalisation
 Deutschsprachige Version
A conference organised by IG Kultur Österreich in cooperation with  eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies)
The conference will be held in German.
“... a particular form of local, specific struggles, whose relationships and necessary unity could no longer be the result of totalization and centralization, but, as Guattari stated, of a transversality.” (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault)
The conference attempts to describe and analyze the phenomena of a new form of a-hierarchical networking by drawing on the concept of “transversality”, which occurs in the conceptual repertoire of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and particularly of Félix Guattari. It will bring together activists and theoreticians who represent a loosely defined and heterogeneous political movement that emerged in the wake of the protests of Seattle, Gothenburg and Genoa and border camp protests, and may have entered into a crisis following the events of 11 September, 2001.
The conference participants, ideally “activist scholars” or “activist artists”, will discuss the range of meanings and contradictions within different concepts of globalization and anti-globalization. TRANSVERSAL will address new networking practices that have surfaced at the intersections of different fields of knowledge normally held in separation (e.g. “culture”, “politics”, and “science”), and will discuss networking techniques which could, in a similar fashion as the economic globalization against which they are directed, become effective across national boundaries.
The results of such transversality are transversal structures that do not represent a particular, isolated subculture, but instead traverse many different situations within a patchwork of minorities (e.g. independent media, nomadic groups such as the VolxTheaterKarawane, transnational and anti racist movements such as the NoBorder network).
On the other hand, transversality has brought about its own modes of subjectivization, particularly in the cultural field. Activist scholars and activist artists no longer understand themselves as citoyens, whose political activism exists independently of their work as theoreticians or artists; instead, they weave their competences and activities into networks that render a clear separation between activism on the one hand, and science or art on the other difficult. As a consequence, the traditional separation between theory and practice, between intellectual everyday life and political exception has become obsolete and has given way to multiple interactions and superimpositions within the subjects themselves.
Following Foucault, transversal cooperation indicates the networking of specific competences, i.e. the cooperation of individuals that does not result in the holistic synthesis of the collective. It is no longer the universalistic intellectual who reflects on history from a certain distance, neither is it the “media intellectual” (Bourdieu) whose comments on the world appear in the main-stream media; instead, we are witnessing the appearance of specific intellectuals (Foucault) who cooperate within new forms of collectives, platforms and labels. The conference seeks to bring together and discuss “examples” of such practices and modes of subjectivization.
In a lose association with a concept developed by Deleuze, the overall subject of the conference will be divided into three different sections: (1) the “molar line” of economic globalization; (2) the “molecular line” of the relative deterritorialization of migrant cultural work; (3) the “nomadic line of flight or friction” of anti-globalist resistance.
2002, April 30 - May 2
Kunsthalle Exnergasse / WUK, A - 1090 Vienna
For further informations please contact:
 transversal@igkultur.at
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