Somatechnics 4.1, Special Issue on the Somatechnics of Movement

The folks at BiM are brimming over with excitement as we announce the launch of Somatechnics 4.1, a special issue on the Somatechnics of Movement. A long time coming, we're finally able to bring into print a selection of authors who may be familiar to some as participants at our Bodies in Movement conference in 2011. The line-up includes: an evocative extension by Michael O'Rourke of his original keynote with response; ghostly musings by Line Henriksen; Peta Hinton on cyberfeminist politics; Rebecca Coleman discussing 5:2 urge; Karin Sellberg's meditations on "the gap"; Gavin MacDonald charting affectively; Johanna Hällsten's situated sound-spaces, and interval and creativity by Anne Douglas and Kathleen Coessens.

 

We would like to thank all the contributors for making this possible, right from the very beginning in a few conference rooms in Edinburgh almost three years ago right through to now. Thanks for the wonderful support and patience - and we hope that everyone enjoys reading the journal as much as we enjoyed working on it.

Article: Bojana Cvejić, Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanović and Bruno Latour, "A Conversation with Bruno Latour"

Making Things Public exhibition. Photo by Franz Wamhof.

Interviewers Bojana Cvejić, Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović delve into performance theory, politics and the public in this short interview with Bruno Latour, conducted at the end of 2011 and published in the most recent number of open-access TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory (No. 20, 2012), devoted to the theme of Art and the Public Good.

Springboarding off the theoretical conceptions of the public posited by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, Latour, Cvejić, Popivoda and Vujanović explore the difficulties of performing (in) a political moment, the disappearance of politics and fumbling in the dark, with a fleeting touch upon Latour's co-curated exhibition Making Things Public from 2005 (in the catalogue for which he produced the call-to-arms for an object-oriented democracy, "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik"). Departing from a public/private divide in favour of recognising politics as located at that place of exception "where experts fail, where ... there is no procedure in place", Latour examines the sensitivities implicit in public and political actions.

"I can name the exact moment when it happened, when I started doing this ephemeral work of building a strange circle whereby you obtain something that is absolutely imposible: to speak in the name of several different people who say different things. And no habit can accomplish that. That's exceptional and if the principle of exception has an ephemeral quality to it, that's also what makes political activities hard."

No. 20 of ThK also includes a piece by Nina Power, which explores the London riots, the "public" and the legal status of art (this works through themes brought up in her public lecture of May 2012 blogged here) and a biting inquisition by Mario Kikaš into the failures of the critical theory sanctioned by the university, along with other short pieces exploring the various intricacies of performance theory, politics and the public. The next issue should be published soon this year.

Journal: Parallax, Issue 66 (call for papers)

Interdisciplinary journal Parallax has announced a call for papers for forthcoming issue 66, "bon appetit" in 2013, guest edited by Lynn Turner and Lindsay Kelley. Focusing on eating in order to interrogate the limits, porousness and regulation of the body, the journal's proposed theme raises ample scope for reading the alimentary as a practice which is fraught and problematic. Possible subjects include "eating well" (Derrida) and "killing well" (Haraway), "mess mates at table" (Haraway), survivalist eating in cultures of global war, cannibalism, abjection, totemism, orality and/as sexuality, animal and sexual differences, multispecies ethnography, speculative food futures and meal time.

"Far from an elementary basic need, the alimentary addresses a range of pressures, politics and phantasies regarding who, what and how we eat. Indeed, when the mouth is as invested in expression as ingestion, and when ingestion takes in identifications as readily as proteins we might further ask after what is called eating. ... [T]his issue of parallax opens up the alimentary and its nourishing, disgusting, and beastly capacities. We seek work that critically or experimentally illuminates how biopolitics and food science, the mouth and the oral, and the contributions of plants and animals come together to redefine what it means to eat."

Abstracts should be submitted by 1 October 2011. Visit the journal's general website to see a list of current and other forthcoming issues of Parallax.

Journal: Helvete, a Journal of Black Metal Theory, Issue 1 (call for papers)

The 2009 Black Metal Theory Symposium in London, "Hideous Gnosis", was variously lauded and scorned by academics and black metal enthusiasts for being, firstly, an academic conference about black metal theory, and secondly, an academic conference about black metal theory. However, following the successes of both the first and second symposium, which took place in January 2011, the gap in academic support for critical engagement in black metal theory has inspired the formation of the new open-access, electronic and print journal, Helvete.

In the intimate relations of body and sound and its endless combinatorics, Helvete might be said to celebrate and interrogate the intimacies of music and, inter alia, life (as well as the decay thereof into death), thinking and becoming. Its editors are currently inviting submissions for its inaugural issue - to be published in Spring 2012 - on the broad theme of "incipit: open" and are seeking pieces (of an equally open description: articles as well as non-, para- and protoacedmic works, including commentaries, fragments and visuals) that address the problematics of "beginnings and genesis - or of openings, apertures, holes, etc. - at the conjunction of black metal and theory".

"Not to be confused with a metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, black metal theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that 'count' as black metal events—and, indeed, to see how black metal might count as thinking. Theory of black metal, and black metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Therefore, we eschew with any approach that treats theory and metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo."

Proposals are due on 1 June 2011. Those interested may also be interested in perusing the published proceedings of the first symposium, Hideous Gnosis.