[ecrea] ASCA Workshop 2019: Realities & Fantasies

*ASCA Workshop 2019: Realities and Fantasies: Relations, 
Transformations, Discontinuities*

10-12 April 2018, University of Amsterdam

Organized by Divya Nadkarni, Alex Thinius, and Nadia de Vries

Keynotes: Nkiru Nzegwu (SUNY Binghamton), Susanna Paasonen (University 
of Turku), more TBA

“Fantasy is precisely what reality can be confused with. It is through 
fantasy that our conviction of the worth of reality is established; to 
forgo our fantasies would be to forgo our touch with the world.” 
(Stanley Cavell)

The world of fantasy often serves as an escape from reality, its 
limitations, and its many social, economic, and corporeal restrictions. 
Reality, in turn, is often desired amidst the delusions of the 
fantastic. However, the two are not always separate. For instance, while 
social (trans)formations increasingly look like fantasy in more than one 
sense, a serious turn towards fantasy seems to be ambivalent. A central 
notion in earlier psycho-analytical culture critique, after being hyped 
in Fantastic, Futurist and Utopist literature, today, fantasy as a 
political means of critique seems to have become a delusionary 
distraction. Yet, fantasy also seems to remain a booming aspect of 
reality. Creative forms of protest, ideas of aesthetic resistances and 
critiques are proliferating, and fantasies fomented by magical-realist 
literatures, blockbusters, serials, pornography, and gaming in the 
creative industries and digital media seem to be increasingly 
intertwined with reality.

Some of the conceptual sites where reality and fantasy meet are 
idealizations, utopias, phantasms, self-deceptions, anxieties, 
self-fulfilling prophecies, and implicit biases realizing or enacting 
themselves in reality; fantasies made real and realities made fantasy. 
The boundaries between what is desired or feared and what is lived, what 
is oneiric and what is substantial, what is true, and what is realistic 
and unreachable are often blurred.

In critical and cultural theory, a continuous ambivalent desire for 
reality appears, for example, in the discussions of New and Speculative 
Realisms (Gabriel, Meillassoux), Agential Realism (Barad), political and 
metaphysical Non-Ideal Theory, Critical Race Realism, or Gender 
Neo-Realism (Mills, Alcoff, Haslanger, Mikkola), in the Ontological Turn 
in anthropology (Viveiros de Castro, Venkatesan et al., Holbraad et 
al.), and in the turn towards Authenticity and New Sincerity in 
contemporary literary theory (Rutten, Vaessens and Van Dijk, Trilling).

In this workshop, we take on the continuous and renewed interest in the 
real in its relation to fantasy, illusion, and imagination. Whereas 
typically, debates on realism are focused on its contrast to idealism or 
nominalism, we ask: What are the contemporary relations between 
realities and fantasies? How do reality and fantasy speak to 
intellectual imaginings and possible futures? What role can or should 
fictions, fantasies, and idealizations play in social, political, 
individual, and metaphysical change? We are interested in presentations 
that take on the ways in which reality and fantasy relate, how they may 
contrast, and how, and under what conditions, the one may transform into 
the other.

The workshop addresses the kinship between realities and fantasies in 
the following three respects: relations, transformations, and 
discontinuities.

RELATIONS

How do realities and fantasies relate, and how are their relations 
structured? Does one shape the other, or are they shaped by each other? 
Is one more valuable than the other? What kinds of relations do they 
enable? What are the relations between fantasies and the realities they 
shape, affect, create, envision, or hide? The way we seek to influence, 
manipulate, change or defy our present pertains to what kinds of 
relations we envision between both ourselves, as humans, as well as 
non-human beings. This, in turn, asks for the conditions that make 
relations possible or impossible, satisfactory or unsatisfactory, 
utilitarian or utopian, and for the hierarchies, power structures, 
intentions and capacities that enable and delimit ways of relating.

Moreover, we are interested in examining conceptual, normative, 
empirical, literary and artistic ways to address the relations between 
and within fantasies and realities: how are social bonds and 
interpersonal relations constructed and what are the interrelationships 
between power, fantasy, actors, action, and forms of socio-political 
embodiment?

TRANSFORMATIONS

We are interested in how transformations work, in socio-cultural, 
political, theoretical and philosophical terms, and in the role that 
realities and fantasies play in them. What are the transformations 
within and between realities and fantasies? How does (or can) the one 
transform into the other? What are the characteristics of the real and 
the fantastical, and what concrete entanglements, interactions, and 
interdependencies exist between them?

Transformations are happening everywhere, all the time. We can, for 
example, see the transformative effects of gentrification, of modernity, 
of reproduction, of colonialism, of aging, of war, of violence, of 
translation, and of censorship. We can also see how resistance movements 
and certain social practices actively transform the ways in which we 
embody and experience. However, insofar as processes and acts of 
transformation are about changing and giving rise to new forms, they 
also seem to imply moments of direction and division, exclusion, or 
rejection in order to define, group, or associate what can be 
meaningful. We welcome presentations that analyze (both descriptively 
and normatively) such transformations, or think about how to approach 
transformative action, and confront the in-between spaces, possible 
exclusions and hierarchies wrought by envisioned social, political, and 
cultural transformations.

DIS/CONTINUITIES

What continuities and discontinuities are there between realities and 
fantasies? How would rupturing the patterns of dominance (or the 
sundering of continuity) become a means of effective transformation? How 
can (un)productive collisions between reality and fantasy foster 
socio-political, artistic, and/or cultural change? How do fantasies of 
change and discontinuity hide or produce real continuities? And how can 
existing continuities between reality and fantasy be rethought?

We are interested in presentations that (re)consider the role of 
existing structures, practices, traditions, and forms in likely, 
potential, or imagined transformations. From the perspective of 
dis/continuity, we are particularly interested in the question of what 
constitutes a continuum (for example, in a given tradition) and how such 
continuums can be either broken or sustained.

We welcome papers from the fields of literary studies, media studies, 
philosophy, arts, anthropology, sociology, and political theory that 
speak to, but are not limited to:

The conceptual, normative, de facto, and/or imagined interrelations of 
fantasies with realities

Ideal, non-ideal, materialist, or realist theories in their pragmatic or 
socio-cultural environments

The role of realities and fantasies in socio-cultural critique, social 
construction, and enactment

The dynamics of translation, e.g. in literature, media, material 
culture, or theory

relations, transformations, and dis/continuities in artistic, literary, 
poetic, theoretical, or musical forms

The body in the field of reality and fantasy

Interrelationships between power, fantasy, actors, action, forms, and 
reality

How political fantasies (e.g. nationalisms) influence 
social/interpersonal relations

How cultural fantasies give shape to new modes of expression, 
understanding, institutionalizing, bonding, and resisting.

Fantasy as a political vehicle of real, unwanted, feared, or desired 
social transformation

PRACTICAL DETAILS

We welcome proposals for academic and artistic contributions that speak 
to the concerns of the workshop as outlined above. Abstracts (max. 300 
words) and a short bio (max. 100 words) should be submitted to 
(realitiesfantasies2019 /at/ gmail.com) before 15 October 2018. Submissions 
will be responded to before 15 November.

Written versions of all papers will be circulated to all participants 
before the workshop. All accepted speakers are required to submit a 
3000-word paper before 15 February 2019. We kindly ask all prospective 
participants to bear this in mind before submitting an abstract.

All questions about the workshop can be directed at the email address 
mentioned above. More information will soon be announced on the 
workshop’s official website: http://realitiesfantasies.wordpress.com 
<http://realitiesfantasies.wordpress.com/>

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