An AESA/Rethinking Marxism Conference: SURPLUS EXCESS

NEW! A visual report on the conference!

April 4 + 5, University of California, Riverside

Conference Theme:

The edge separating necessary from its beyond, surplus is simultaneously an excess requisite for a functioning and continually circulating economy. Within Marxian theory, surplus is the profit created when workers produce value above and beyond what they receive in the form of wages. The relations generating surplus labor and value overspill capitalism: materialist analyses trace surplus back to the formation of the social, the very lifeblood allowing a social division of labor. In psychoanalytic theory, the excess of pleasure, jouissance, is also that which drives the libidinal economy. Yet this brings us to a series of crucial questions: if surplus is required, what distinguishes and marks surplus/excess? What is the ontological status of surplus? What are the differences between surplus labor, surplus meaning, and surplus jouissance?

During three days in April, 2008, we will be bringing together scholars and students to investigate the theoretical and material impact of surplus or excess (or both) in the world today. In our discussions we will examine carefully what it means to speak, and act, informed by a discourse of surplus/excess. Is it possible or fruitful to consider surplus/excess as value-neutral, or even as a negation? Is it an avenue to the abject or the Lacanian “real?” Must we always think of surplus/excess in relation to its binary “lack?” Can a notion of surplus/excess even function discursively or materially without the possibility of “dearth” always attendant upon it as its own “excessive” supplement? At what point does surplus/excess morph simply into “waste?” What is the relation of abstract labor to such broadened notions of surplus/excess? What are the concrete forms in which surplus/excess is performed, appropriated, and distributed in contemporary global social formations? How could we rethink our relation to social surplus/excess? Is it possible to have a stabilized social relation to surplus/excess; or, is surplus, by definition, something that is beyond necessary and therefore also produces an excess of ontological possibilities?

Sponsored by:
The Association for Social and Economic Analysis (AESA),
RETHINKING MARXISM, and the
University of California, Riverside, Center for Ideas and Society.