[Commlist] cfp: (Im)Possibility

CALL FOR PAPERS: (IM)POSSIBILITY

Graduate Student Conference
Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies
Harvard University
April 9–10, 2020

(Im)possibility marks a limit of available information, a threshold of 
representation, a cessation of action. Thinking at the limits of the 
possible gives rise to a specific set of issues: how might we articulate 
that which cannot be said? How might we orient ourselves toward that for 
which no available theory or representation is adequate?

While it is primarily thought of as an exception, impossibility is in 
fact ubiquitous and our relationship to it intimate. To demonstrate the 
omnipresence of the impossible, some might look toward contemporary 
political crises, saying that current conditions are untenable. Others 
might point to ecological destruction, noting that human life itself may 
soon become an impossibility. So integrated is this limit into the 
fabric of daily life that it has become commonplace in contemporary 
discourse to claim that the impossible can no longer be called—at least 
in any straightforward sense—unlivable.

Indeed, Black studies theorist Frank B. Wilderson III would respond that 
the category of “humanity” has always rendered some lives 
impossible—that the very concept of the human constructs Blackness as a 
site of nonbeing subject to, and of, perpetual extraction, gratuitous 
violence, and social death.

Alexander Kluge writes that cinema is the single medium capable of 
capturing “the impossible moment”—a moment that couldn’t be imagined 
beforehand, and which can never be repeated again. Cinema and digital 
media enable us to glimpse other realms of (im)possibility—realms in 
which the impossible can manifest as fiction, simulation, speculation, 
or absurdity. Outside the bounds of continuous space and time, the 
(im)possible might circulate here: not the world as it is, but the world 
as we might make it.

Or, perhaps cinema and digital media—despite all their promises to 
collapse traditional hierarchies and think otherwise—give rise to new 
structural, technological, and epistemological impossibilities. Digital 
media rely on that which is impossible to comprehend: data made 
illegible in code, information flows too large or too fast to grasp. No 
single spectator can configure themselves as the subject of such 
information.

We don’t have to choose: (im)possibility is given in the shared 
periphery of a futural, idealized dimension and a present, negative 
dimension. It lays waste to current frameworks, concepts, and worlds 
while offering insight from beyond the break. (Im)possibility beckons as 
a radical promise because it endures as an impassive present, and one of 
the challenges of the contemporary moment might be to hold those two 
modalities together. How might we consider the impossible itself as 
anything other than a negative concept—an index of failure? What might 
we articulate about (im)possibility without, for all that, rendering it 
(as another) possible?

This conference aims to foster an environment of exchange and discussion 
amongst a diverse set of participants across fields that include, but 
are not limited to, film and media studies; the histories of science, 
technology, and computing; the history of art and architecture; and 
visual culture. We invite proposals for scholarly papers, audio-visual 
presentations, aural installations, exploratory writing, and 
performances that engage with, as well as extend beyond, the areas 
listed below. Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words), 
together with a short biographical note, to (fvsconference /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(fvsconference /at/ gmail.com)> by January 15, 2020. Presenters will be 
notified in late February 2020.

Afro-pessimism
Anthropocene
Anaxagora
Apocalypse
Apophatic theology
Atmosphere
Being (of Nothingness)
Black cinema
Blackness
Borders
Climate change
Colonialism
Conspiracy
Crisis
Deep time
Ecology
Epistemological limits
Fiction
Fugitivity
Gnosis
Hidden infrastructures
(Im)possibility
(In)visibility
Migration
Negation
Negativity
Non-anthropocentric intensities
Non-philosophy
(Non)sensuousness
Opacity
Pessimism
Queer (non)sociality
Representation and its limits
Sabotage
States of exception
Surveillance
Terra Nullius
The end of Galileo’s visibility postulate
Thirdness/the neutral
Unintelligibility
Utopia


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