Infrastructuralism
This special issue is dedicated to thinking about the centrality of infrastructure to the humanities. We define infrastructure broadly to include economic structures and systems, ecosystems, material state formations, institutions, computational and web-based materialities (including servers, fiber-optic cables and code), various forms of labor, forms of textuality that exceed representation, as well as all that more regularly goes under the name of infrastructure.
Call for papers
Critical Environments
Vol. 32, No. 1-2 [2024]
Focus Editors: Aaron Jaffe and Robin Truth Goodman
This issue conveys two urgent and co-articulated thematic orientations: first, from philosophy and critical theory, the necessity of sustaining criticality for concepts within specific, if provisional and pragmatic, contexts, structures, organization and systems; and second, from environmentalism, the program both for making sense of and contesting unfolding ecological crises and ecocide. The two words together encompass environment in an ecological sense and also call attention to how thinking itself exists in immanent and material ways integral to nature. Presuming a built world in a profound sense means addressing entanglements of culture and nature in critical concepts like ecology, infrastructure, contagion, infection, contamination, deep time, and, indeed, the very language of critical theory itself. Further, they entail a future orientation to systems and environments that the old humanist legacies and doxas have repeatedly failed. In Critical Environments (1998), Cary Wolfe challenged theory “to renew its commitment to theoretical heterodoxy by confronting its own orthodoxy with . . . the problem of the ‘outside’ of theory”: “What started out as a revisionist theoretical program devoted to breaking down logocentrism and the last vestiges of humanism has instead wound up reinstating ‘a rigid divide between the human and the nonhuman’ that leads to a pervasive ‘cultural solipsism.’” Papers will pursue such questions as the following: What might commitment to a critical environment of theoretical heterodoxy look like? How can we discern an “outside” of theory already inside nature? How might theorizing impasses in humanism think through and contest environmental crises and ecocide without nihilism or quietism or without reinscribing anthropomorphism as a last breath for—or last gasp of—human hubris?
Submissions closed.
Transparency
Vol. 33, No. 1-2 [2025]
Focus Editors: Jeremy Hamers, Ingrid Mayeur, François Provenzano, Élise Schürgers, and Jan Teurlings
Transparency is one of the buzzwords of today’s political and organizational discourse. At heart an aesthetics of the becoming-visible, transparency is at once an injunction to communicate, as well as a moral imperative. It posits itself as the necessary but also sufficient condition of a number of mediatic and political virtues that are ardently pursued but rarely questioned. This special issue explores the notion of transparency using the tools of the Humanities, following three axes of critical inquiry. The first considers transparency as an epistemic scenography, a carefully crafted mise-en-scène that is supposed to guide us to the truth. The second considers transparency as a rhetorical device, aimed at effectively settling controversies, and establishing consensus. The third considers transparency as a media affordance, by which technical devices cultivate the illusion of a complete grasp of their representational objects and the signifying dispositifs involved. These three axes – transparency as truth, settler of controversies, and media affordance – are in practice regularly combined, so we invite submissions that explore overlaps between the three lines of inquiry, and shed light on the ways transparency shapes multiple relationships to knowledge.
Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2024.
Learn more about the submissions process.
Book series: Anthem Symplokē Studies in Theory.
Winner of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement