STREAM ORGANISER: SUBHAM MUKHERJEE AND CRAIG LUNDY

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT (250 WORDS) SUBMISSION: MARCH 13, 2023

Apocalyptic spaces are heterotopic thinking-spaces which offer us the possibility to re-imagine planetary futures along with an imperative to re-think alternative configurations of being human. Catastrophic encounters tend to subvert the fixed designations of the human and the planetary, thereby becoming a crucial spatio-temporal opening that resist the constant reinforcement of the dynamics of conformity. In the wake of re-thinking new planetary dimensionalities, catastrophic encounters, despite of their excruciating problematics, are events of alterity occurring as sites of difference, in the Deleuzian sense, and différance, in Derrida’s sense, that initiate a radical (un)becoming of the human, producing new environments, new relations and new subjectivities.
Thinking through the concept of planetarity and the Stieglerian pharmakon, this stream seeks to explore apocalyptic spaces as open and possibility spaces, creating new models of co-existence, reinvent models of care – not merely as emancipation but also in praxis. Through our discussions, we shall attempt to recognise apocalyptic spaces as an open portal of living knowledge – a pharmacological and organological aperture that thwarts epistemic uniformity and neo-expansionist representations of globality and totality, and encounter collective inhabitations and response-ability by re-imagining the planetary and by reworking the praxis of being human. As an assemblage of indeterminacy harbouring, what Spivak said, an ‘inexhaustible diversity of epistemes’, we shall try to locate the idea of apocalypse in the diverse works of literature, art and architecture and discuss how catastrophic events shapes and conditions the possibility and impossibility of existence by changing our collective and individual percepts, affects and experiences. In a world riven by accelerated exosomatisation inevitably leading to what Han Byung-Chul appropriately called a burnt-out syndrome, we intend to encounter the apocalypse as a caesura – of historical discontinuity; a break from conformity; a necessary breathing rift in a compressed world from which we bleed together, blend together – a space for expunction and reassembling.
Apocalyptic spaces eschew bifurcations and embeddedness and is characterised by a conceptual openness to multiplicities, collectivities, transversalities and haecceities. In other words, it is a metamorphosis machine that produces new lines of flight and new permutations of becoming. It is, what Deleuze and Guattari call, a fibroproliferative unground – a processual exercise of molecular becoming and becoming-other. In this Deleuzo-Guattarian vein and through our discussions, we shall challenge the conventional mode of apocalyptic thinking, as a demarcation problem, that ontologises a nihilistic end-of-the-world thought, without questioning its socio-political agenda. Our idea is to liberate the apocalypse from the topographical ensnarement of our constructed mapping and fractalise apocalyptic thinking – identifying the apocalypse as a fractal-scape characterised by an affirmative schizoid plurality of thought administering a radical reshaping of planetary futures.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Apocalypse, worldmaking and planetary futures
• Anthropocene and the ecological turn
• Apocalyptic thought and Deleuze/Guattari
• Landscape, Architecture and Spatialisation (also includes immigration, border politics and segmentarity)
• Dark Enlightenment (Nick Land, NRx, etc.)
• Digital catastrophism (accelerationism, multi-tasking cyber-cattle, smart cities, disappearance of desire, sexless pornography, hyperviolence, etc.)
• Necropolitics, petrocultures, technocolonialism, militarisation, zombie capitalism and geo-trauma
• Transgenic and experimental art (eroticism, surrealism, pitiless art, multimedia democracy, disappearance of sensation, fear, theatre of cruelty, etc.)
• Apocalyptic sensibilities in prehistoric, tribal, indigenous, esoteric cultures and religions (apophatic theologies, ritualistic sacrifice, demonology, de/colonial apocalypse, cannibalism, barbarism, anti-rational primitivism, tribal feud, voodooism, occultism, etc.)
• Sexuality and tracing the end of bodies

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON CONFERENCE. 

For more information, including guidance on presentation formats and accessibility, please go to:
http://londoncritical.org

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS:

The Call for Presentations is now open for the 10th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted and supported by the School of Social Sciences and Professions at London Metropolitan University. This will be an IN-PERSON conference, occurring at the Holloway Road (North) campus of London Metropolitan University.

The LCCT is an annual interdisciplinary conference that provides a forum for emergent critical scholarship, broadly construed. The event is always FREE for all to attend and follows a non-hierarchical model that seeks to foster opportunities for intellectual critical exchanges where all are treated equally regardless of affiliation or seniority. There are no keynotes and the conference is envisaged as a space for those who share intellectual approaches and interests but may find themselves on the margins of their academic department or discipline. There is no pre-determined theme for each iteration of the conference, with the intellectual content and thematic foci of the conference determined by the streams that are accepted for inclusion in response to the Call for Stream Proposals (now closed).

The streams for #LCCT2023 are:

• Affects & Collective Practices of the Undercommons
• Critical Spatial Action for an Earth in Crisis: Shuffling the Narrations
• Empirical Philosophies: Mediating Theory & Practice in Critical Thought
• Epistemic Challenges to Democratic Institutions
• Gentle Gestures
• Horrors of Philosophy
• Madness and Capitalism
• Planetarity and Apocalyptic Spaces: Literature, Art and Architecture
• Previsualisations: what’s it going to be like?
• Radical Repetition: Repetition as Creative Subversion and Liberation
• Reimagining Data Visualisations: Critical Questions, Expanded Practices
• Representing the Non-normative: Othered groups in the (human) rights Imaginary
• Rethinking Work and Career: Resisting the Neoliberal Order
• Thinking-Feeling Desire in the Now: Post-Capitalist Desire and Creative Practices of the Body

If you would like to participate in one of them, please send an abstract for a proposed presentation to londoncritical@gmail.com with the relevant stream title indicated in the subject line. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words and must be received by Monday March 13th 2023.