[ecrea] CFP - Bodies of Failure

*Somatechnics Journal*

Edinburgh University Press

**

*Bodies of Failure -- Call for Contributors*

Issue Editors: Eve Katsouraki and Dan Watt

By 'bodies of failure' we refer to any notions of embodied experience 
that entail restriction, limit, accident, or obstruction, and which bind 
corporeality to labour, value and representation from a wide social, 
political and cultural context. Taking Beckett's famous lines, "fail 
again, fail better," the aim of this edition is to explore the radical 
properties of failure and invite a rethink of 'failure' as a trope or 
mode of human embodied activity.

In western culture, the discourse of failure stands as the counter part 
to the ideas of progress and victory which simultaneously dominate the 
narratives of this history. Failure implies disapproval, 
dissatisfaction, rejection. As an evaluative judgement of an outcome, 
failure invites disappointment, at worst, becomes stigma. The body 
perceived as a failed corporeality reduced of any value is at the centre 
of a series of traumatic events reaching its climax with the Holocaust 
and continuing to today through any type of imposed physical torture in 
a political or social setting. But failure also exerts an existential 
dimension that reshapes and redefines lived experience through its 
difference. Its representation or experience through artistic and 
sociopolitical settings violates normative conventions of the production 
of meaning (e.g. hegemonic ideology and its system of value) and asserts 
an anti-conformist ideology, a poetics of upheaval through difference. 
Failure indexes, in other words, a moment in which the other, or 
otherness, is present and brings meaning to be viewed as contingent, a 
thing to be made or arranged, "posited," but as easily abandoned, 
revised, or renegotiated. Thus as an embodied experience, failure, as 
Sara Jane Bailes points out, can be seen to challenge the cultural 
dominance of instrumental rationality and the fictions of continuity 
that connect the way we imagine and manufacture the world.

This special edition on 'Bodies of failure' will focus, in particular, 
in exploring failure in artistic and cultural practices as a function of 
doing. When we /do/ we also invent the horizon for the capacity to fail. 
But if the capacity to fail also entails the capacity to sustain desire 
even as it thwarts it, the aspect of 'hope,' as Ernst Bloch suggests, 
exposes embodied failure as the economy of value and exchange through 
which new conceptions of virtuosity and mastery become possible. Can 
failure, therefore, as a performative technique within the context of an 
economy of representation, function as a socially transformative mode of 
production intrinsically linked to ideology, politics, and to the 
production of value through meaning? And would it be possible to find a 
poetics of failure as a practice of resistance or, perhaps, as Adorno 
puts it, as a negative aesthetic -- a technique of negation that 
functions as a critical interstice in an otherwise instrumental world? 
What is failure after all? Can it function as an alternative to 
counteract against the prevalence of notions of dominance and progress?

On this basis we will seek to question failure as an /activity/ or 
/praxis/ of involving "bodies" as fundamentally inter-corporeal, 
(trans)formative and ethico-political. By "bodies" we mean the ontic, 
physical corporality as well as the bodies as "dominant narratives" 
whose failure renegotiates the relation of the ontic body to the 
embodiment of spaces we inhabit, our political and cultural practices.

Some questions (but not only) that might be addressed:

· What kind of social and political implications does the condition of 
failure as a performative and cultural technique involve?

· Can failure provide a way of testing the terms and edges of 
established cultural and political meaning and its limitations?

· Can failure actually /work/ and act as a generative event that 
/produces/ in a roguish, subversive manner?

· What are the social and political implications that the condition of 
failure (and accident) evidence?

· Can failure indicate the disillusionment of the subject matter 
conveyed by a fictional or factual embodied narrative?

· How does failure in artistic practices challenge or even oppose the 
stability or fulfilment of agreed principles and conventions?

· How can failure act as a calculated shift of embodied intention and 
operate as a confrontational stand or even political activism?

· How radical can failure become as an embodied practice?* *

· What happens when grand narratives reflected through artistic 
practices that act as "bodies" fail to take material shape or re-shape 
into an undesired "soma" or anomaly?

· What happens to the subject and its somatic entity that embodies such 
failures?

· The symbolic failure of democracy and the more tangible failures of 
the communist political regimes are only two such examples, yet in what 
ways can such embodiment of failure challenge the boundaries with which 
we perceive and understand ourselves as individuals?

Deadlines are as follows:**

Proposals: 25 March 2012**

Completed articles: September 2012

Publication date: February 2013

ALL proposals and general enquiries should be sent direct to:

Eve Katsouraki: (e.katsouraki /at/ uel.ac.uk) <mailto:(e.katsouraki /at/ uel.ac.uk)> 
and/or Dan Watt: (D.P.Watt /at/ lboro.ac.uk) <mailto:(D.P.Watt /at/ lboro.ac.uk)>

Proposal will be accepted by email and should not exceed one A4 side.

Eve Katsouraki

Acting Programme Leader MA Acting & MA Directing

Senior Lecturer, Theatre Studies

University of East London

EB 1.12, Docklands Campus

University Way, London E16 2RD