The Editorial Board of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies is inviting all potential contributors to send their proposals for issue No.23/October 2020. AM Journal is structured in four sections: Main Topic, Beyond the Main Topic, Artist Portfolio, and Book Reviews. Only the first section, which is also the central one, is predefined by the main topic of the issue. The main topic of issue No.23/October 2020 is: How to do things with speculative pragmatism? “A thing is when it isn’t doing”, writes Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002: 6). But the thing is always doing, so much so that the thing, any-thing, is constituted through the doing. Every-thing is fundamentally relational. Given this starting point, the key terms of the onto-politico-aesthetic debate change; they are: affect, immanence, movement, intensity, emergence, becoming, event, virtual, nature-culture, space-time. Speculative pragmatism, a term Massumi introduces in Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts (2011), points to the fact that the processual nature of event is always already immanent, so instead of binary oppositions there are disjunctive syntheses: speculative-pragmatic, aesthetico-political, thinking-feeling. Each process in its becoming is both political and aesthetic at the same time, where political is defined as ‘relational/participatory’ and aesthetic as ‘qualitative/creatively-self-enjoying’. How can we, then, start understanding what is happening in/with the more-than-human, as Erin Manning puts it, world today? Massumi writes that it is about ‘finding ways to understand any given mode of activity in these experiential terms, starting from an ontological primacy of the relational-qualitative and respecting the singularity of the activity’s unfolding’ (2011: 13). This is a call to enter into a critical dialogue with the speculative pragmatism, its ontology, politics and aesthetics, along the multiplicity of lines of with, and see what kind of new material-semiotic reconfigurations might emerge. We offer here a few broad suggestions for possible thinking-feeling encounters, but we are not limited to them: - Speculative pragmatism and the Anthropocene/Chthulucene/Capitalocene, etc. - Speculative pragmatism and queer/trans theory - Speculative pragmatism and the new media/contemporary art - Speculative pragmatism and the indigenous/critical race studies - Speculative pragmatism and bio/zoe/necro-politics - Speculative pragmatism and new materialism/speculative realism/OOO
Please see Author Guidelines and submit your proposal to amjournal@outlook.com. Deadline for abstracts (Main Topic and Beyond the Main Topic): December 31, 2019. Deadline for finalized contributions (Main Topic and Beyond the Main Topic): March 31, 2020. Deadline for Artist Portfolios: February 28, 2020. Deadline for Book Reviews: February 28, 2020. You will be notified by January 15, 2020 whether your proposal has been accepted.
Looking forward to working with you, Dr Andrija Filipović Marija Bulatović |