[ecrea] CFP: "Medium, Immediacy, Intermediality" (_Postmodern Culture_, June 1, 2012)

Dear all,

here a quick reminder for an upcoming CFP for a proposed special issue 
of /Postmodern Culture/ entitled "Medium, Immediacy, Intermediality." I 
am also pasting the text of the CFP below. Feel free to circulate widely.


http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v021/21.3.article.html


best,

Mathias

--


CFP: “Medium, Immediacy, Intermediality”


 A proposed special issue of Postmodern Culture

We invite submissions for a proposed special issue of Postmodern 
Culture entitled “Medium, Immediacy, Intermediality.” The issue aims to 
gather ways of seeing the term “medium” beyond current disciplinary 
frames. Rather than take the routes of literary or film studies, art 
history or communication theory—and rather than see media as discrete, 
pre-constituted categories of aesthetics or mechanics—we seek to put the 
category of medium into question, and in doing so, to facilitate 
approaches to the various mutually dependent media whose boundaries and 
frames might now seem less conclusive.

What is this thing we call a medium? Is it an innate quality of 
technology or art? Is it instead a function of knowledge, a tool by 
which users, industries, or critics learn to categorize, show, or see 
culture? Moreover, when does a medium become political? Is it political 
when it identifies itself with a tradition of art or a timeline of 
technological development? Is it political by virtue of its setting, its 
audience, or its purported content? The simplest answer to these 
questions would resolve itself through a medial ontology (like any of 
those drawn from Heidegger or McLuhan, Lessing or Mumford, Kittler or 
Habermas, Greenberg, Krauss, or Fried). We aim instead to expose the 
risk of our own implication in the order of mediatic things; and to ask 
whether a medium might be political, not in its application, but rather 
from the very instant of its invention, as a composite of institutional 
knowledges, objective materials, and subjective practices. “New media” 
cannot just be the most recent entry in the narrative of technological 
development. Rather, newness and development are mere mechanisms of myth 
and control in a technophilic and technocratic culture, from which even 
digital objects (such as gaming or computing) must be guarded. We 
therefore seek contributions to a “media studies” that would not fully 
coincide with “new media studies,” and that might consequently multiply 
and undercut our concepts of medium.

We invite contributors to consider: what approach to media might 
reinvent itself through its objects, rather than simply describe those 
objects? What if the crisis in media studies were to occur not in the 
interruption of media histories, but instead in the historical process 
by which any medium comes to uphold a mediatic order of culture and art? 
What if intermediality were not the periodically necessary joining of 
one discrete medium with another one, but instead the moment in which 
nothing joins? What if immediacy were not the fantasy of unimpeded 
access to material reality, but instead the moment of critical clarity 
that occurs when historical objects encounter regimes of thought under 
which they don't quite cohere? What if a medium were not the name of 
aesthetic distance or temporal lag but instead the condition by which 
temporal and spatial categories become known? What kind of media studies 
might survive the negation of inherited categories, and still identify 
as a materialism of reading? What kind of reading might be possible if 
medium specificity and medium ontology could be bracketed or swept 
aside? What immanent knowledges might become legible, but only in the 
suspension or exhaustion of extant disciplines? What methods might 
foreground the political and epistemological factors that guide the 
historical encounter between critic and object? And what theoretical 
ligaments might tie the technological composition of media to their 
social worlds and aesthetic effects?

Please send 500-word abstracts along with a brief bio sketch and contact 
information by June 1, 2012 to Matt Tierney ((matthew_tierney /at/ brown.edu) 
<mailto:(matthew_tierney /at/ brown.edu)>) and Mathias Nilges ((mnilges /at/ stfx.ca) 
<mailto:(mnilges /at/ stfx.ca)>). Following initial acceptance, complete essays 
should be submitted for review by November 1, 2012. The final decision 
regarding the publication of all essays lies with the editors of 
Postmodern Culture.

For further information on Postmodern Culture please see: 
http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/ 
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture>


--
Mathias Nilges, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
St. Francis Xavier University
PO Box 5000
Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Canada, B2G 2W5