Circuits, Regions, Borders

构想，区域，边界

 

Transit-labour investigates changing patterns of labour and mobility in the whirlwind of Asian capitalist transformation. Mindful of the view of Asia as the world's factory, this three year research project examines the role of creativity, invention and knowledge production in the new economic order being forged from the region's capitalist centres. Particular attention is given to changing relations of culture and economy in this transition and their entanglement with the production of new subjectivities and modalities of labour.

 

在亚洲资本市场转变的旋风中，对劳动力市场的流动模式的认知，随着相关调研的深入而不断变化着。亚洲因成为“世界工厂”而被世人所关注,而这个为期3年的研究项目为此探讨了创意、发明和学术领域在区域资本中心逐步形成的新经济秩序中所起的生产力作用。尤其是在这一转变时期，文化和经济之间关系的转型，以及他们与新的主观性劳动力市场模式之间所产生的关联。

 

The research focuses on the precariousness and mobility of creative labour across three cities: Shanghai (2010), Kolkata (2011) and Sydney (2012). Each of these cities is the site of a research platform that combines online and offline methods to map conceptual and material linkages between labour, mobility and subjectivity. Based on previous research conducted in Beijing (http://orgnets.net), these platforms gather researchers from across the world bringing them into collaborative relations with local participants through workshops, field trips, symposia, exhibitions, mailing lists, website documentation and the preparation of publications.

 

该研究项目聚焦在三大城市：上海（2010年），加尔各答（2011年）和悉尼（2012年），调研的重点是创意劳动力市场的流动性和不稳定性。在这些城市中将各设立一个研究平台，结合网上在线与离线的方式，从理性与客观的角度，来描绘劳动力、流动性和主观性之间关联。根据过去在北京进行的调研（http://orgnets.net)，这些网络平台汇聚了来自世界各地的专业研究人员。这些专业研究人员与当地的参与者共同协作，完成了工作室、实地考察、专题讨论、展览展示、邮件列表、网站编辑和出版刊物等前期准备的一系列工作。

 

The project's interest is not merely in the transition of labour and culture in each individual city. Recognizing that the regional scale has become decisive in the world today, it places methodological emphasis on processes of inter-referencing between the research sites. This website is a principal research instrument for such inter-referencing. Fleeing the self-referential universe of social networking, it provides an environment for collaborative invention and the common production of knowledge. It is at once an open archive of research activities and a means of organizing them.

 

该项目不仅仅关注劳动力市场和文化领域在各个城市中的变化，更注重在整个研究过程中调研地点之间的相互参照性。在当今世界，对区域范围内的劳动力市场和文化领域之间转变的进一步认知已成为举足轻重的研究课题，该网站正是为研究此类参照关系所设立的。由于避开了社会网络中的自我参照体系，网站本身不仅提供了一个用于共同认知和协作创造的良好环境，同时也成为了各种研究活动和组织的档案库。

 

Creative labour refers not only to work in the creative and cultural sectors: music and performing arts; film, television and radio; software development and multimedia; writing, publishing and print media; architecture, design and visual arts. It also encompasses the various forms of service labour that feed into and enable work in these fields. Transit-labour conducts research that tests the boundaries between these forms of work. By tracing conceptual interconnections between the conditions of creative labour in Shanghai, Kolkata and Sydney, the project also aims to rethink how global regions are configured under current economic and social circumstances.

 

创意领域的劳动力市场不仅仅涉及创新领域和文化领域，如：音乐和表演艺术，电影、电视和广播，软件开发和多媒体，写作，出版、印刷媒体，建筑、设计和视觉艺术，它还包含了在这些领域中以各种形式提供服务的劳动者。劳动力市场变迁研究项目的内容之一，就是考察如何对这些工作形态进行界定。与此同时，通过观察这些创意劳动者在上海、加尔各答和悉尼的现实境况和其之间的内在联系，这个项目也帮助我们重新思考了如何根据目前的经济状态和社会情况，在全球范围内对其进行合理的配置。

 

At a time when market rights interfere with territorially-based forms of citizenship, the effects of national creative enterprises are by no means confined by national borders. The project explores how changing patterns of economic, geographic and social flexibility (including labour migrations) are generating new forms and practices of governance in the Asian region (and how regionalism is redefined through such transformations). The role of borders, both those that traverse political spaces and those that define their edges, is crucial to understanding the theoretical and practical linkages between labour, mobility and subjectivity.

 

当市场权一步步影响着那些以地域为基础的公民权时，国家的创新企业并不应被地域所局限。为此，项目探讨了经济、地理和社会的灵活性（包括劳动力迁移模式）的变化模式为亚洲地区政权所带来的新的管理方法（以及在转变中产生的新的区域划分）。无论是跨越的政治空间还是那些已被划分的边界，在帮助我们理解劳动者、流动性和主观性的理论上和实际中的关联时都是至关重要的。

 

At the regional scale, it is possible to observe the emergence of production regimes that exploit differences between labour conditions in various territorial zones, leading to hierarchically organized regimes of labour mobility and attempts to coordinate and manage these mobilities through market, border and zoning technologies. The analysis of such differentially organized systems of inclusion and mobility is also a part of the project. Set against the rapid expansion of communication and information technologies, the re-ordering of intellectual property and conflicts in the production of knowledge, transit-labour probes these transformations to discern future tendencies of social, economic and political organization.

 

在区域范围内，通过观察因各个区域劳动条件差异所导致的劳动者流动，以及通过市场、国界和分区技术来协调和管理这些流动所出现的等级差异的体制，来对这种差异性组织的包容性和流动性进行分析，这也正是该项目的一个组成部分。项目同时也致力通过研究时下迅速增长的通讯和信息技术、知识产权的再规划以及其间的分歧，来深入了解未来世界各国的社会、经济和政治组织的发展趋势。

 

Translation (English > Mandarin) Vivian Yu and Yanchuan Li

CONCEPTS

概念

 

Transit

 

In transit there is neither departure nor arrival. Transit gives the illusion of joining the past to the future. It elongates the present so that one lives within the passage of displacement. Transit is not without its special border devices and rules of movement. Nonetheless it can move history beyond the linear time of the state and progress. The resonance of transition multiplies the possibility of politics today.

 

流动

 

这里的“流动”不只是简单的“来”和“去”。“流动”的涵义可以是追述过去，参与未来，延伸至个体此时此刻流离失所的生活状态。它是有其特殊的运动规律和界限划分的。然而，它可以超越时间前行的线性状态，推动历史的前进。甚至它的共鸣也增加了当今政治的无限可能。

 

Labour

 

Labour is not simply work. It is the name of subjectivity under the domination of the state and capital. Labour is living and thus animated by energy, unrest and movement. Ever more it inheres in bodily and cognitive relations. But it is also subject to processes of abstraction that seek to reduce it to temporal measure. The tension between abstract and living labour is constitutive of political struggle. This tension not only crosses human bodies and souls. It also shapes the heterogenous domain of global space. 

 

劳动

 

劳动不仅仅只是单纯的工作。它是在国家和资本的统治下所产生的主观性。劳动是动态的，其生存方式受到能力，不稳定性和行动的驱动。更多的是受到来自于其所固有的物质和认知之间关系的驱动，但同时也受到那些幻想能够降低世俗标准对其影响的支配。而不切实际的幻想和为了生存而劳动之间的拉力构成了政治纷争。这种拉力不仅涉及人们的身心，而且也决定了全球范围都朝着异质域的方向发展。

 

Circuits

 

The circulation of bodies and brains comprises the space of politics today. Circuits do not necessarily lead back to where they began. As technologies of control and freedom, they maintain the movement of labour, life, finance and things. 'Circulation sweats money from every pore' (Marx). Contrary to the libertarian cult of openness and infinite freedom, circuits can trigger resistances with explosive potential. When time is captured by new logics of accumulation, the political task is to short-circuit capital.

 

循环

 

生命体和其智慧之间的循环孕育了当今的政治空间。而循环也并不一定要与初始之处相连。随着控制技术和相关自由的不断提升，循环维持着日常的劳动，生活，金融等事物的运转。马克思曾说过，“流通使得每个毛孔都能渗出钱来”。与自由主义者们对开放和无限自由的狂热崇拜相反，循环会引爆潜在的阻力。当新的累积逻辑掳获了时间，政治性任务就会成为急功近利的资本主义。

 

Regions

 

Cognition and culture today subsist in the space of regions. Whether regulated through protocols of distributed knowledge production or integrated within national webs and trading blocs, regions are at once stubborn civilizational constructs and provisional assemblages of markets and states. Regions hold internal differentiations that refuse the logic of unification. Stretching across linguistic, temporal and territorial borders, their footprints shift with relays, compressions and traffic in cognition and culture.

 

区域

 

文化认知度维持着当今各个区域的生存。无论是通过协议分配知识生产，还是以纳入国家综合网络和贸易集团的方式对区域进行调配，区域都意味着坚固的的文化结构，临时性的市场和国家组合。区域的内部差异使其拒绝接受统一的逻辑，这种差异性随着文化认知的接替、挤压和买卖而转变，延伸至语言、时间和领土的边界。

 

Borders

 

Borders are instituted through social, technical and political practices. There are two sides to every border: connection and division. This tension underscores labour in transit. Far from the myth of a borderless world, globalization is characterized by a proliferation of borders. Not limited to marking the edge of territory, borders have moved 'into the middle of political space' (Balibar). They supply an analytical rubric through which to investigate the modulations of labour and capital across different geographical scales, affective registers and institutional settings.

 

边界

 

边界是通过建立社会，技术和政治活动而建立的。每一个边界都具有双面性：连接和分工，这种对立强调劳动力的流通。全球化的特征之一是边界的扩散，但并不等于是无国界的神话。边界已经涉足到了“政治空间中”（巴里巴尔），而不仅局限于标明领土边缘的作用。通过跨区域的机构设置，边界为劳动力和资本的调配提供了一个新的课题。

 

METHOD

 

方法

 

Platforms

 

Platforms organize. They bring bodies and brains into relation. While they require highly distributed formats of digital communication and translation, platforms must connect with off-line worlds. Platforms bring a strategic logic to network cultures that otherwise tend toward tactical short-termism. Practices of collaborative constitution hold generative capacities that invent new institutional forms. When multiplied across time and space, platforms connect seemingly disparate events along circuits of experience and experimentation. The work of platforms at once tests and produces concepts. Platforms address contingency and movements as constitutive methods of analysis and organization.

 

平台

 

平台的创办使群体和智慧互相关联。平台必须连接离线世界，虽然这需要高密度分布的数字通信和翻译为基础。平台也为网络文化带来了战略逻辑，否则它将只是个短期行为。合作性章程的实践具有生成新形式体制的能力。当平台跨越时间和空间成倍增加时，平台与经验和实验的循环一起，链接起了看上去迥然不同的事件。平台的运作是对概念的一次测试和扩展。平台作为分析和组织的构成方式设法解决偶发事件和活动。

 

Logistics

 

Logistical methods of organization apply to contemporary production and patterns of mobility. The global logistics industry is the key to understanding emerging configurations of the social as well as their implied technologies and labour regimes. The primary task of logistics is to manage the movement of people and things in the interests of communication, transport and economic efficiencies. Central to logistics is the question and scope of governance – both of labouring subjects and the treatment of objects or things. When connected to the multiplication of borders, the informatization of subjectivity and the capitilization of culture, logistics holds broader implications around the governance of transnational worlds.

 

物流

 

有组织的物流方法适用于当代生产以及流动性的生产模式。全球化物流管理更是了解隐性的科技和劳动力体制，以及新兴社会形态的关键。物流的主要任务是从通讯、运输和经济效率的利益的角度出发，管理人员和物品的流动。物流的核心问题是其统筹范围 – 包括对劳动对象的统筹，以及对象和事物的处理。随着边界成倍地增长，主观的信息化和文化的资本化，物流在跨国性统筹的基础上，将拥有更广泛的影响。

 

Orgnets

 

Organized networks are best understood as new institutional forms whose social-technical dynamics are immanent to the culture of networks. Orgnets are partly conditioned by the crisis and, in many instances, failure of primary institutions of modernity (unions, firms, universities, the state) to address contemporary social, political and economic problems in a post-broadcast era of digital culture and society. They are characterized by practices of openness, sharing and project-based forms of activity. Networks become organized as a response to the challenges of governance and sustainability experienced in online environments prone to weak social ties and ephemeral relations between participants.

 

组织化网络

 

组织化网络以崭新的文化网络所固有的动态性科技社会体制形式为世人所了解。在如今的后数字化社会文化传播时代，组织化网络在许多情况下会受到某些危机的制约，以及为解决当今社会、政治经济问题却较为失败的现代主流体制（如工会，公司，大学，国家等）的影响。开放性共享性的实践活动和以项目为基础的活动形式是组织化网络的特征。组织化网络成为了持续性在线环境体验和其管理方式中可能出现薄弱的社会关系和参与者之间的短暂关系的挑战性回应。

 

Translation (English > Mandarin) Vivian Yu and Yanchuan Li