current calls for papers
Edited Collection: The Face Reader — Submissions OPEN.
Issue 17: Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics — Submissions OPEN.
CFP
Edited Collection: The Face Reader
The Transformations Journal Editorial Collective invites submissions for an edited collection focusing on questions of the face and technology, provisionally titled “The Face Reader: Contemporary Writings on the Face and Technology.”
The face is a vital element in the grand narratives of being for contemporary Western culture. It is the face that appears first when the human is examined; it is the face that we peer into, that we search for, and project signs upon. We greet each other, as human beings, and we look into each other's face. We read what is written there, and perhaps even what has been erased. Yet, simultaneously, the face is also a kind of public relations exercise for clandestine technological becomings, for it is through an ever-complexifying system of technological and pharmacological 'cures' that the perfected, cosmetic, clear image of the human face is achieved and represented. The face is everywhere in the media, on stage, on screen; it sits at the centre of a vast apparatus encompassing lights, cameras, action, mirrors, make-up artists and white-coated lab-technicians furtively grinding foetuses into expensive white paste. The face is the 'display home' for the future of the human, it is the 'appearance' of the human, the visage, the seen, the screen; the face is where appearance starts, or takes hold. And as we all know, appearances can be deceiving.
For this collection, we invite proposals for papers that will examine the status of the face in contemporary culture, especially as it relates to technology. Papers could address (but would need not be limited to) any aspect of the following topics:
- The face in cosmetic culture: Botox, Restylane, anti-aging technologies, and make-over culture
- The close-up in film and the face in the media; the face of the star and celebrity
- Reconstructive facial surgery; face transplants
- Facial recognition software; technologies of surveillance
- The face in new media; Second Life, virtual faces and the avatar
- Hiding the face; facelessness and the burqa
Enquiries about related topics are welcome.
CFP: Issue 17
Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics
"What has been neglected and repressed by cognitivism, as well as by philosophy as a whole, going back to Plato's first gesture of thought, is the place of technics in general in life, technics as the condition of life that knows".Bernard Stiegler's concept of technics has emerged recently as an important contribution to studies of the relation between technology, time and the human. Technics, or the prosthetic supplementation of the human in "default" of the origin, is the condition of "life that knows." Drawing from and critiquing various sources, including the work on evolutionary biology by Gilbert Simondon, on palaoanthropology by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, on Martin Heidegger's existential analysis of Dasein and Jacques Derrida's différance as the logic of the supplement, Stiegler has proposed arguments about technology and its relation to the human that suggest a formulation of human life as "epiphylogenetic", that is, evolving according to the logic of prosthetic supplementation. Transformations invites submissions of abstracts for articles to be considered for publication in late 2008 on the topic of "Stiegler and the question of technics."- Bernard Stiegler, "Desire and Knowledge: the Dead Seize the Living"
Some possible themes include:
- Steigler and Heidegger
- Steigler and différance: encounters with Derrida
- Technics and art
- Steigler and the Greeks
- Technics and technology
- Technics and power
- Technics and memory: epigenesis and epiphylogenesis
- Technics and the culture industries
Abstracts (500 words): due 15 September With a view to submit articles by 12th December
Abstracts to be forwarded to Warwick Mules, general editor at w.mules@bigpond.com