REPLACEMENT AND REPLACEABILITY

6–7 December 2018 | Universidade Católica Portuguesa – Lisbon

Deadline Extension

We are happy to announce that the deadline for handing in abstracts concerning the call below has been extended. The earlier deadline was June 15^th 2018. This has now been changed to June 30^th 2018. We are looking forward to your proposals, and would still like to encourage you to hand in your abstracts as soon as possible because that would help us with some of the logistics. For more information concerning the event, go to replacementconference.wordpress.com. Should any questions arise, you can reach us at  replacementconference2018@gmail.com.

Call for Papers

We call for papers for the 8th Graduate Conference in Culture Studies. This edition will be on the theme of Replacement and Replaceability and takes place in Lisbon on the 6th and 7th of December 2018. The conference is organized by The Lisbon Consortium in conjunction with the Research Centre for Communication and Culture at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

We aim to discuss the ways in which the concept of ‘replacement’ can be understood and productively used for the study of contemporary culture. Replacement has been one of the central concepts in the study of culture for quite some time, and, at the risk of overstating this claim, one could say that replacement is a concern in all fields of knowledge dealing with the study of culture today. It is, however, rarely the central focus in academic discussion and this event aims to contribute to a more detailed analysis of the uses, misuses, and usefulness of this particular concept for the study of cultural objects.

Hearing the words replacement and replaceability, one naturally wonders: Who or what is being replaced? Who is doing the replacing? What counts as replaceable? Is there a logic of replacement? What happens when bodies are deemed replaceable for other bodies? Or for machines? How does replacement communicate with other, related, concepts, such as translation, repetition, reiteration, quotation, citation, metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, and displacement? And how does it acquire meaning in connection to other concepts like false-consciousness, workforce, precariousness, simulacrum, spectacle, and ideology? How can replacement or replaceability be made useful for the study of cultural objects? Which objects warrant their use? It is on these and related questions that we invite abstracts to be presented at our conference.

Ideas for proposals

Background

Theoretical understandings of power tend to highlight the importance of controlled reproduction of human beings, or subjects, in order for power to function. One may think of a wide-ranging number of theorists here, from Karl Marx, through Louis Althusser, and on to Michel Foucault. In the study of bureaucratic modes of power exertion, documents can function as the irreplaceable expression of an identity or a right, as in the cases of identity cards, passports, and diplomas.

In translation studies, the notion of translation as a specific act of replacement is of central concern. In media theory and the study of visual culture, the notion of representation can be understood as a moment in which the image replaces the ‘original.’ In literary studies, concepts such as metaphor and metonymy are examples of replacing one word for another, a procedure considered essential to the production of meaning through language.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the mirror-stage functions as a scene in which the physical body is temporarily replaced by an imaginary double. Feminist- and queer theorists have often critiqued heterosexist and heteronormative approaches to otherness as failed, or attempted copies of heterosexual male life. In posthumanist discourses, the very notion of the human undergoes a moment of replacement by some kind of being that is no longer fully human and all too often celebrated as beyond the human in a teleological way. And post- and de-colonial theorists have read colonial activities of ‘Western powers’ as forced replacements of one culture for another.

Diffractions is an online, peer reviewed and open access graduate journal for the study of culture. The journal is published bi-annually under the editorial direction of graduate students in the doctoral program in Culture Studies at The Lisbon Consortium – Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

After a short hiatus, Diffractions returns with this second series. If you are interested in the first series of Diffractions, which is discontinued, you can visit the old website at diffractions.net. From now on, all information on Diffractions can be found here. The old website will no longer be updated.

Check our Call for Papers section to find out about our next issue.

Find us online at https://diffractions.fch.lisboa.ucp.pt/Series2

Call for Papers

DIFFRACTIONS – Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture

Suspicion

(NEW) Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2018

Are we trapped in suspicion? This issue of Diffractions – Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture intends to open a discussion around the deep and pervasive sense of suspicion that has been planted in our society from its inception alongside claims for veracity, truth, surveillance, detection, semblance, expectation, risk, guesswork, discrimination, etc.. Paul Ricoeur already used the notion of suspicion to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argues these thinkers jointly constitute a “school of suspicion”, sharing a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness”. They create a distinctive modern style of interpretation that avoids classic categorizations or self-evident meaning in order to draw out less visible and less satisfying truths. Ricouer’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” had a great impact on literary studies, linking it to a larger history of suspicious interpretation, whereas more recently, in her book “The Limits of Critique”, Rita Felski highlights the difference between critique and suspicion, arguing in favour of the “unreliability of signs that secures the permanence of suspicion” (2015, 36).

Suspicion is said to lead truth into crisis. But what is truth and who are the truth-tellers of our days? We have learned to be suspicious of the tendency to transform fact into opinion and of the blurry line that divides them. In visual culture, the realist access to the world, the ability to provide persuasive evidence, the possibility of indisputable proof, and the indexical bond between an image and what it represents, are notions that have come under suspicion. Some critique of representation was driven by the suspicion that there must be something ugly and terrifying behind the surface of the conventional idealized image. Ariella Azoulay called our attention to the “ritualistic dimension” of constantly having to reveal the existence of convention, changing the act of storytelling into a “critical position” of suspicion of any photographic image. If our worst suspicion is confirmed, and the hidden reality behind the image is shown to us, has our critical journey come to an end? While a suspicious reading may be helpful for critical analysis as a method, this is not to say that any suspicious reading is a good reading. Suspicion may also be cause for conspiracy theories that fail to bear witness to their objects of analysis.

Suspicion can be read, on the one hand, as a modality of thinking the other as dangerous, suspicious, almost, or most probably, guilty. This mode of thinking suspicion means to turn it into an obstacle for change to come about, a mode of always already determining what the risks are, a mode of thinking that opens onto a logic of pre-emptive violence when taken to its limit. On the other hand, suspicion can allow for otherness as a site where something might occur, could happen, is as-of-yet undetermined. The latter is a prerequisite for change to come about, or rupture to take place.

For this issue, we invite articles that question the usefulness of the concept of suspicion for the study of cultural objects. We also welcome work that considers how these cultural objects may scrutinize the very notion of suspicion.

Contributions and original research might address but are not limited to the following topics:

• History and archaeology of suspicion
• Cultural representations of suspicion
• Suspicion and visual culture
• Suspicion and art
• Suspicion and politics
• Suspicion and media
• Suspicion and conflict
• Suspicion and identity
• Suspicion and modes of reading
• Suspicious bodies
• Suspicion and critical thinking
• Suspicion, paranoia and theories of conspiracy
• Suspicion producing machines

We look forward to receiving proposals of 5.000 to 9.000 words (not including bibliography) and a short bio of about 150 words by July 31, 2018 at the following address: info.diffractions@gmail.com

DIFRRACTIONS also accepts book reviews related to the issue’s topic. If you wish to write a book review, please contact us.

Editorial Team
Ilios Willemars
Sara Magno
Vera Herold
Sónia Pereira
Ekaterina Smirnova
Sophie Pinto

The workshop organized by PhD students from the Lisbon Consortium titled “Donald Trump’s Political Reality: The Politics of Fakery and the Fakery of Politics” will place from 10:00 to 18:00 on April 30, 2018 at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. And continues from 21:00-22:00 in Anjos 70.

The program is now available. 

Reuben Ross, Phd student of the Lisbon Consortium, published a photo essay on Rua do Benformoso, in Lisbon, on Public Books, a site  founded in 2012 by Sharon Marcus , a literary critic, and Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropologist, “to create a diverse new home for intellectual debate online”

Check the photo essay here:

The Street and the World: Rua do Benformoso, Lisbon