Critical Matter Call for Papers

Critical Matter Critical Matter Matter everywhere! We breathe, eat and die… Things surround and affect us until it becomes unclear who “we” are and what “we” can become. The question of materiality imposes itself. Accordingly, materialities and materialisms gain popularity in social and cultural studies. Recently, scholars of diverse disciplines have increasingly stressed the importance of posing questions concerning the social life of things; the materiality of affects, emotions and the psyche; the material preconditions of the production of knowledge, the independent existence of epistemic things; the materiality of signifiers, signs and media, communication and information; the performative production of materiality in the arts and in literature; vitality and materiality of life in the age of biotechnology; the potentiality of bodies beyond anthropocentrism; the materiality of space; new materialist ontology; lastly, Marx-based historical materialism and new materialist approaches to the economy testify their relevancy in times of never-ending crisis and social distortions. These approaches have one thing in common. They no longer refer to matter as a passive carrier of meaning or human manipulation. The world of the material is not considered as a sphere of linear causality and determination; emphasis is rather put on the obstinacy and contingency of matter. What is interesting in these debates is not so much what they turn away from (linguistic turn) or what they turn to (material turn), but rather which encounters they enable. “Matter” offers a flexible and pulsating point of reference for the concurrence of diverse materialisms, critical theories and radical politics. This encounter of critical materialistic approaches ranging from new to old, from feminist to postcolonial, from Marxist to post-structuralist, from the (social) sciences to the humanities raise questions such as: What forms of collective action emerge from assemblages of humans and non-humans? How considerable is the threat of exclusions, dependences and exploitation within these networks? Has a re-thinking of the classical conception of “reification” become necessary and how can the danger of essentialism be approached? What is critical in matter? Abstracts for lectures can be handed in regarding the following and adjoined topics as well as the topic of the conference in general. Please indicate the preferred panel. ___Body and Affectivity Is the affective material (emotions, the unconscious, critical neurosciences) and to what degree is the material affective (drive-nature, symbols, affective work)? What are the consequences of the embodiment of the affects and the psychologization of the body (newer psychopathologies, medicalization, responsibilization, narcissism)? ___Life In what ways do life sciences contrive life (visualization, synthetical biology, bio- and reproduction technologies) and how does life contrive itself (evolution, élan vital, resilience)? Which borders, exclusions and hierarchies are either produced or questioned by that (human-animal, life-death, mechanical-vital, organic-anorganic, male-female)? ___Ontology and Epistemology Which challenges are imposed to a (philosophical) understanding of matter by newer academic and scientific approaches (quantum physics, complexity theories)? What does that mean for extremes such as reason-sensual, mind-nature, etc.? How may the independent existence and contingency of the material be theorized and conceptualized without fixating it? What about the materiality of epistemic techniques and dispositives? Source : Call for Papers Portal