Florian Schneider

Presentation
Imaginary Property

At the end of the 20th century new masses and migrant populations have become visible by claiming a right to access europe and to participate in globalization. At the same time information and communication technologies have generated and articulated new networks of information and knowledge distribution, but also entirely changed the ways in which we imagine access to information and knowledge.

Like the car and the assembly line for Fordism, post-fordist production can be emblematized by mobile phones and increasingly advanced portable communication devices. Mobility is not any longer limited to the arrival and departure at the workplace -- plus maybe some weeks of paid vacation. In times of biopower and biopolitical production it is all about the mobilisation of the entire life as such and in the broadest sense.

Far from being confined to another well-meaning gesture or a moral standard, freedom of movement appears as the precondition for both, autonomy and control, amidst ever convoluted regimes of information and migration. Cultural, social and political rights are by no means guaranteed but subject to management: Temporarily granted in real time they can get revoked as quickly as they got accorded without any need
for further mediation.

What could then characterize up-to-date strategies of refusal, self-determination and resistance against these new forms of power? Which scopes and potentials are arising for new forms of communication, cooperation and collaboration? What is the political impact of
spontaneous networking and ad-hoc-organizing?

In order to start to understand the new trajectories of networked power in the contemporary societies of control this project tries to analyze the emerging correspondances between migration regimes and information regimes: postmodern border management as the ongoing attempt to control migrations and freedom of movement on one hand, and on the other: digital rights management as the attempt to support and regulate new regimes of accumulation based on "imaginary property".

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