[ecrea] CFP: Special Issue of Open Cultural Studies: "Capitalist Aesthetics"

Capitalist Aesthetics

A Special Issue of Open Cultural Studies

Deadline for submission is *March 1, 2018.*

Issue Editors: Dr Pansy Duncan and Dr Nicholas Holm

In 1989, surveying the hyper-commodified, performance-driven and 
information-saturated conditions of what he called “late capitalism,” 
Fredric Jameson diagnosed the rise of a world-system that, as he put it, 
“assign[ed] an increasingly structural function and position to 
aesthetic innovation” and aesthetic judgment. Today, in what’s variously 
dubbed “networked,” “neoliberal,” “communicative” or “platform” 
capitalism, Jameson’s appraisal seems more pertinent than ever. 
Aesthetic objects, from holiday selfies to “lolcatz” memes, are the 
bread and butter of our everyday online social exchanges. Aesthetic 
debate on the merits of Melania Trump’s sartorial choices has become a 
proxy for popular political deliberation. And aesthetic criteria, from 
“streamlining” and “flexibility” to “excellence,” serve as the alibis of 
fiscally-driven restructuring across the public and private sectors. In 
fact, while the aesthetic practices that preoccupied Jameson in 1989 
remain sealed in the realm of “culture” (whether high or low, elite or 
popular), the rise of the so-called creative economy, the data-fication 
of cultural production and distribution, the increasingly intimate 
imbrication between culture and techno-science, and the apparent 
“democratization” of design, mean that, today, what Jan Mukarovsky calls 
the “aesthetic function” extends into spaces as diverse as the 
workplace, the body, the bedroom, the social media-sphere, and the 
environmental or extra-planetary imaginary.

“Capitalist Aesthetics,” then, will build on Jameson’s attention to the 
rich seam between aesthetics, ideology and political economy in light of 
the above developments. Assessing a world marked by what Hal Foster, 
bleakly, calls “total design” and by what Jacques Ranciere, more 
optimistically, calls the “aestheticization of common life,” this 
special issue of Open Cultural Studies welcomes articles that explore 
the aesthetic configurations—from the cute to the comfortable, from the 
no-brow to the fringe—through which the economic logics of late 
capitalism come to crystallize today. It invites work that treats the 
stylistic and formal dimension of cultural objects, and the verdictive 
and affective dimensions of cultural discourse/experience, as valuable 
“cryptograms” of contemporary ideological formations and the economic 
relations they sustain. In the process, it will foreground the fact 
that—despite widespread suspicion, post-Bourdieu, of the discourse of 
the aesthetic—scholars associated with cultural studies, from Raymond 
Williams to Rosalind Gill, have developed a powerful set of critical 
tools for analysing aesthetic configurations, both as vehicles of 
ideological and economic domination, and as sources of subversion, 
pleasure, critique, and renewal.

We welcome essays on any topic related to the intersection of capitalism 
and aesthetics, including:

·Aesthetic manifestations of capitalism;

·Capitalist mediations and expressions, genres and forms;

·“Post-Capitalist” aesthetics: designing the future;

·White collar aesthetics: corporate aesthetics, from the bank to the 
boardroom;

·Aesthetic subversion or critique of/as capitalism;

·Aesthetics and techno-science: datafication of/as aesthetics;

·Aesthetics as domination and/or liberation: between autonomy and 
heteronomy;

·Digital aesthetics and “platform capitalism”;

·Beyond “zany,” “cute” and “interesting”: late capitalism’s (other) 
aesthetic categories;

·The aesthetics of the Capitalocene: eco-catastrophe and environmental 
activism as late capitalist spectacle;

·Capitalist structures of feeling, capitalist affects;

·Neoliberal aesthetics;

·Representations of capitalism;

·Late capitalist temporal aesthetics, from speed to slowness;

·The “creative industries” and the “cultural economy” as late capitalist 
aesthetic formations;

·The fate of “political aesthetics” in cultural studies;

·New aesthetic currencies, from the corporeal to the celestial;

·Aesthetics and/of class.

Please submit your *proposals* to (izabella.penier /at/ degruyteropen.com) 
<mailto:(izabella.penier /at/ degruyteropen.com)>  by *March 1, 2018*. The 
deadline for submissions of*full papers *is *June 1, 2018*.  The issue 
will be published in 2018. There are no Article Publishing Charges.


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