Thoughts, antagonisms, innovations, demonstrations, elaborations, expectations and refutations. This is all to say, field-notes, from an array of politically engaged, non-objectifying theoretical work projects. Behold, the current issue of ephemera! Foolish is s/he who would seek to encapsulate a supposedly complete or somehow representative spectrum of such concerns within this, or indeed any format. Foolish also are those who would hope to find herein a necessary ‘image of thought’ (Deleuze, 1995).

This special issue of ephemera focuses particularly on the close relationship between the organisation and politics of Social Forum spaces. That is, since many people regard Social Forums as important political spaces, with the potential to radically transform politics – and therefore society itself – we feel it is important to consider the way these events are organised as a window into the politics, i.e. the power relations, they produce.

In 1931 two friends, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, planned to launch a journal named Krisis und Kritik, thus linking ‘crisis’ directly to ‘critique’ in a manner that would become emblematic of the very idea of societal crisis in Europe during this decade. Spreading to Europe, a financial crisis in the US reinforced the dominant crisis of the Old World: a political crisis in the form of a fascist upsurge. Whereas fascism blossomed to its fullest in total annihilation, however, Benjamin and Brecht’s journal was never realized. The first victim of war is critique.

In this issue of ephemera we publish a range of papers that engage with theory and politics in the organisation of global conflicts. Across these works, time – the time of their objects, and the time of their objects’ having been thought as such – are rendered salient. Here, conflict – as itself a site of object and of subject – theory, episteme, practical life – is revealed, intimately, emergent as the organisation of these.

Business and management theorists have so far responded to the financial crisis by centring on the notion of finance as an object of study. The questions raised in this special issue attempt to push the debate within the university in general, and the business school in particular, on from this concern with finance as an object of study and on towards a concern with finance as a condition of study.

The breeze blowing from Seattle and Genova broke the immovable air of the desert that, like a television screen, was suffocating sense of life. It gave a voice to the life that was lying underneath: muttering, groaning and complaining, but also living, working and producing new forms of life which before these events seemed unattainable. The voice was that of a new kind of subjectivity, the multitude. As a word multitude is both old and young. It was cast out in the dawn of modernity but it never ceased to haunt its political and economic organization.

Despite a conspicuous absence of solid evidence, it is repeatedly claimed that the use of projects as a form of work has been on the increase for decades (Ekstedt et al., 1999 Morris and Pinto, 2004). Projects, i.e. the handling of unique, complex tasks through temporary, decoupled activities, have always had a place in the history of mankind. For thousands of years, participation in various kinds of project has been a complement to the eternal struggle for food and a roof over one’s head.

This issue of ephemera is concerned with texts, discourse and organization; how discourse organizes and the organization of discourse. Without wanting to speak for the various contributors, what we, as the editors of ephemera 4(4), want to do is focus on the quotation above in relation to new forms of writing.

What is the structure of the social? If we accept organismic metaphors, the social is analogous to the body, usually the human body. The foot/shoe is the most basic foundation, the ground upon which the rest of the socialbody rests. By standing on two feet, the hands are freed to become tool making and using appendages, and the mouth is thereby freed from carrying to bear words instead. In structural terms, the foot/shoe functions as base to the face’s superstructure. But when a shoe is thrown at the face of power, a double inversion comes into play.

In the opening pages of The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille introduces a distinction between restrictive economy and general economy. The charge is clear: while economics has concerned itself with economic life, this concern has been manifest in relation to a restrictive economy which encompasses only a fraction of life.