Keynote speaker: Dr. Nick Davis - Northwestern University 

Submission form: https://forms.gle/NseVDG44o6pggdao7

If you face any difficulties in the submission process or have questions about the conference, please email aberrations@tft.ucla.edu 

• Submission deadline: March 9th at 11:59PM PST
• Acceptance notifications: Decisions will be released at the end of March at the latest
• Conference date: May 23rd, in person only at UCLA TFT, Los Angeles

What does it mean to be outdated in a society that is economically driven by the perpetual consumption of the new: new trends, technologies, and subcultures? To be outdated is to have lost a sense of usefulness, functionality, or commercial viability—in other words, to become redundant. But redundancy cannot explain how or why something passes out of common usage or is deemed no longer useful. While what motivates this process is unclear, the outdated is clearly a pejorative term suggesting objects, styles, places and intellectual frameworks, can be out-of-sync with contemporary time; that they are tied to a past that has outlived its usefulness. The outdated is often slotted for oblivion, quietly and rapidly receding into the background and accumulating in dusty, long-forgotten boxes of cassette tapes, cockeyed Furbies, and “Live, Laugh, Love” signs. Ranging from obsolete technologies (celluloid film reels, typewriters, adding machines, VHS tapes, reel-to-reel recorders, and buttoned iphones) to passé interior design styles (farmhouse and all-white minimalism), the outdated is everything that has been deemed redundant, antiquated—in short, uncool. 

The risk of becoming outdated both haunts and drives the cycle of production, consumption and disposal. “Planned obsolescence”—a manufacturing model that encourages customers to repeatedly purchase newer upgraded items by deliberately limiting a product’s lifespan—has spawned numerous lawsuits, with Apple operating systems perhaps being the most high-profile culprit. But unplanned obsolescence in surveillance modalities, social media platforms, and artificial intelligence technologies are constantly evolving, blurring the boundary between the outdated and the current. As Jean Baudrillard warned, neoliberal "norms of accelerated renewal" outpace their legal, political and ethical assessments, incessantly supplanting them with new dispositifs. ChatGPT, for example, evolves at such a rapid rate that plagiarism detection software become obsolete as soon as they are introduced to the market, requiring more labor from teaching assistants who must now police homework for any signs of artificial interference. 

Critical theory appears especially vulnerable today, struggling to maintain relevance both within and outside of academia. In contrast to the 20th century, when theory traveled beyond academic circles, often infiltrating mainstream media and inspiring political movements, today theory lacks the institutional power it once held. Cuts in state funding, coupled by accusations that colleges fail to prepare students for the “real world,” have forced universities to value professionalization and quantitative research that can be measured in economic terms over contemplative and speculative scholarship. Conversely, with a dearth of tenure-track jobs, researchers turned towards specialization and branding to stay competitive in the academic marketplace. As Theodor Adorno observed nearly 60 years ago, “no theory escapes the marketplace…all are put up for choice; all are swallowed,” positioning theory and commodity culture in unsettling proximity. Amidst the increasing precarity of academia and emphasis on data-driven research, it appears that theory has been stripped of its home.

However, critiques of theory suggest that the backlash is justified—an inevitable consequence of theory’s relentless abstraction and failure to address lived experience and marginalized subjects. In his polemic After Theory, Terry Eagleton slams postmodernism for its rejection of absolute truth and grand narratives that once motivated political movements like Marxism. Paul Gilroy and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, by contrast, have argued that much of Western philosophy tends towards Eurocentrism, foregrounding its inability to address global subaltern conditions. This conference seeks to critically interrogate these issues: why might there be a need to return to theory today? Has theory run its course, or does it still offer effective instruments for assessing and critiquing the status quo? Theory—which is not a form of “luxury or indulgence,” in Fredric Jameson’s terms—now more than ever seems indispensable for assessing the complexity of the present, whose trajectories unfold at an unprecedented rate and proliferate into unprecedented territories. Without rigorous theoretical frameworks to form the basis for critical thinking, we risk becoming passive spectators, incapable of envisioning alternative configurations outside of the current neoliberal moment. We are looking for papers that theorize, assess, complicate or rethink what it means to be redundant, obsolescent or outdated. We encourage submissions from a wide range of disciplines, fields, approaches and methodologies.

Possible topics might include but are not limited to:

• The “death of theory,” high versus low theory, the return to critical theory

• Analog and digital

• Technological determinism, neo-luddism

• Vintage and retro-tech

• Formalism, structuralism, new criticism

• Spectralities, haunted histories and media

• Occultism, mysticism, magick 

• Misremembered or foreclosed modes of protest and resistance

• Psychoanalysis, second wave feminism, feminist film theory