In A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno asks how we might overcome the twenty-first century’s crises of politics, the systematic paralysis into which political action is continually falling. He also asks how we might find refuge in a world characterized by ubiquitous fear, by the experience of ‘not feeling at home.’ What might strategies of unconditional refuge be in the face of failing security? What are the choreopolitical paths of disobedience? Virno points towards defection as a modality of disobedience that ‘alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary off balance’: ‘Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon […]. In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention.’ (Virno 2004, 70) But what has to be constituted – or reconstituted – is the subject who is fleeing, exiting; to find strength and solidarity in this radical act. To find – perhaps to make – in this action another home. In short, to articulate ways of being away from anxiety and fear – what Kant in his thinking described as Furcht.Virno draws on Kant (see esp. Critique of Judgment) in discussing the dialectic of dread and refuge: ‘Where is it that one can find unconditional refuge? Kant answers: in the moral “I,” since it is precisely there that one finds something of the non-contingent, of the realm above the mundane.’ (Virno 2004, 31) Virno discriminates between the Kantian view of the dialectic of dread and refuge, which is based on a distinction between particular danger and absolute danger (also articulated by Heidegger through the distinction between fear and anguish) and the collapse of this distinction in the post-Fordist world, in which ‘the dividing line between fear and anguish, between relative dread and absolute dread, is precisely what has failed.’ (Virno 2004, 32) If post-Fordist institutions rely on a culture of pervasive dread – manifest as fear and anxiety – how do we resist this nearly intangible culture today? Arguably, we are moving beyond the sort of entrenched paralysis Virno speaks of, towards a new sort of political breakthrough, a manner of imagining life not determined by institutional cultures of fear and anxiety. Yet much thinking needs still to be done around the ways in which we engage in concerted resistance: do we fight within institutional walls – and if so, how do we resist systems of perpetual visibilisation – the gaze of securitization that renders us so exposed? What does this fight look like? Do we exit – and if so, where to? Is there a new underground? 

Topics which might be covered include, but are not limited to:

Dramaturgies of appearance and disappearance - Flight, escape, exi - Undergrounds and undercommons - Institutions, ‘homes’ and politics of control and of care - Dread, fear, anxiety and anguish  - Solidarity, refuge - Choreographies and choreopolitics of migration - Theatres of stasis and movement - Dialectics and cultures of resistance - Exposure and enclosure - Disobedience, disavowal, dissent - Languages of kinship: sisterhood and the gendering of revolt - Divide and rule: politics of segregation - Borders, walls, bridges and tunnels - Compounds, asylums, pastures and fields: dramaturgies and dramas of ‘freedom’ 

Please email 300-word abstract + biog to Kélina Gotman (kelina.gotman@kcl.ac.uk), Daniela Perazzo Domm (D.Perazzodomm@kingston.ac.uk) and Fred Dalmasso (f.t.j.dalmasso@lboro.ac.uk).