Is the ‘culture war’ a distraction from ‘real’ issues? Conventionally, ‘culture-warring’ has been conceptualised as a cynical political technique to divide people according to mere ‘cultural’ differences rather than material interests. Yet, as Judith Butler once remarked in a 1998 essay, this framing of certain issues as part of a ‘culture war’ presumes that “the distinction between material and cultural life is a stable one.” Other writers, such as Amardeep Singh Dillion, have also challenged this common-sense distinction between ‘culture wars’ and ‘class struggle.’ In the field of cultural studies, scholars have repeatedly stressed that the realm of culture is central to the political and material life of post-industrial societies. According to the cultural theorist Janet Newman, we must always avoid the problem of divorcing a critique of the ‘culture wars’ from a wider social and economic analysis. We must, in other words, see the ‘material’ in the ‘merely cultural.’ 

This stream invites proposals that investigate and interrogate the relationship between the material and the cultural in the discourses and practices of the ‘culture war.’  This stream welcomes critical approaches to the concepts of “culture,” “cultural politics,” and “cultural production.” What does it mean to carry out a materialist analysis of culture? Is a materialist conception of the culture war even possible or desirable? Which other theoretical traditions might help us to successfully think through the antagonisms of the culture wars? How is Theory itself implicated within the ‘culture war’ (demonisations of “Cultural Marxism,” “CRT, “postmodern neo-Marxism,” “gender ideology,” etc.)? How might we defuse and disengage these reactionary discursive logics and, as Sven Lütticken puts it, “desert positively” from the mediatised spectacle of the ‘culture wars’ to fabricate alternative models of cultural life?

This stream welcomes proposals that engage with, but are not limited to: 

• Debates about the materialist/culturalist divide in Marxian theory
• Race, racialisation, and moral panics (‘mugging,’ Drill music, etc.)
• The Frankfurt School on the relationship between the culture industry and the social totality
• Gender, sexuality, and “gender ideology”
• Theorisations and critiques of the base/superstructure metaphor
• The “War on Woke”
• The relationship between production and reproduction
• Understandings of ‘culture’ in the culture wars
• The aestheticization of politics and the politization of aesthetics (Walter Benjamin)
• Colonialism and decolonisation (Rhodes Must Fall, etc.)
• Cultural materialism 

Suggested Readings:

-       Judith Butler, 1998, “Merely Cultural,” New Left Review, No. 227, January-February: 33-44.

-       Stuart Hall, 1994, “Some ‘Politically Incorrect’ Pathways Through PC,” in The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, edited by Sarah Dunant (London: Virago): 164-183.

-       Sean Phelan, 2023, “Seven theses about the so-called culture war(s) (or some fragmentary notes on ‘cancel culture’),” Cultural Studies, 1-26

-       Janet Newman and John Clarke, 2022, “What’s at Stake in the Culture Wars?,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, No. 81, 13-22.

-       Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken (eds), 2020, Deserting from the Culture Wars (BAK: Utrecht).

-       Amardeep Singh Dillion, 2023, “The Culture War Doesn’t Exist,” Novara Media, April 19, 2023.

LCCT 2024

The Call for Presentations is now open for the 11th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted and supported by the University of Greenwich.

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 nonhierarchical 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 LCCT 2024 are:

• Abolition, Carcerality, and Care

• Body Folds and Booty Shots

• Collaboration and Collectivising: Potentials and Intersections

• Convivial Spaces: Forms and Figures of Encounter in Writing and Architecture

• Detail as a Creative-Critical Gateway in Literature, Art, and Architecture

• Exploring and Mapping, Littoral Zones and Liminal Realms: Manifesting Insights and Perspectives on Creative Practice

• Low Theory/Radical Praxis

• Mediating Cultural Heritage: Narrative Strategies and Tactics

• Radical Aesthetics: Imagining, Organising, Enacting Democratic Futures

• The Challenge of Scarcity: Politics, Ecology, and Beyond

• Transforming Vocology Through Interdisciplinary Perspectives

• Trans Theologies

• Use and Abuse of Passion in the Precarious Labour Market

• Violent Delights: Joy, Pleasure, Ecstasies, the Political, and the Promise of Violent Ends

• Watery Speculations

• What’s the Matter with the Culture Wars?

Please read the stream descriptions in the full CFP. 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 submitted as Word documents of no more than 250 words and must be received by Thursday 29th February 2024. Please note that LCCT is an in-person conference.

For more information about other streams, please see the LCCT website: https://www.londoncritical.co.uk/