Critical Environments
Vol. 32, Nos. 1-2 [2024]
Focus Editors Aaron Jaffe and Robin Truth Goodman
This issue conveys two urgent and co-articulated thematic orientations. First, from environmentalism: the program both for making sense of and contesting unfolding ecological crises and ecocide. Second, from philosophy and critical theory: the necessity of sustaining criticality for concepts within specific, if provisional and pragmatic, contexts, structures, organization and systems.
“Critical Environments” as a term encompasses environment in an ecological sense and also calls attention to how thinking itself exists in immanent and material ways integral to nature. Presuming a built world in a profound sense means addressing entanglements of culture and nature in critical concepts like ecology, infrastructure, contagion, infection, contamination, deep time, and, indeed, the very language of critical theory itself. Further, they entail a future orientation to systems and environments that the old humanist legacies and doxas have repeatedly failed.
In Critical Environments (1998), Cary Wolfe challenged theory “to renew its commitment to theoretical heterodoxy by confronting its own orthodoxy with … the problem of the ‘outside’ of theory.” “What started out as a revisionist theoretical program devoted to breaking down logocentrism and the last vestiges of humanism has instead wound up reinstating ‘a rigid divide between the human and the nonhuman’ that leads to a pervasive ‘cultural solipsism.’”
Papers will pursue such questions as: what might commitment to a critical environment of theoretical heterodoxy look like? How to discern an “outside” of theory already inside nature? How theorizing impasses in humanism might think through and contest environmental crises and ecocide without nihilism or quietism or without re-inscribing anthropomorphism as a last breath for—or last gasp— of human hubris?
Deadline for submissions: 1 August 2023.
Infrastructuralism
Vol. 31, No. 1-2
Focus Editors: Christopher Breu, Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Over the past forty years or so, the humanities have largely been concerned with issues of representation. Such a focus is not surprising, given that the textual, broadly conceived, sits at the center of humanistic endeavor. Much contemporary online discourse has a similar focus. As our lives become more virtually mediated, questions of representation appear to become ever more central. Yet what is obscured by our investments in the computer screen and avatar culture? The singular focus on representation has worked to mystify the systems, structures, and forms of labor that enable representation to take place and life and ecosystems to flourish. In an era defined by climate emergency, pandemics, and massive inequality, the issue of infrastructure becomes ever more pressing. This special issue, Infastructuralism, is dedicated to thinking about the centrality of infrastructure to the humanities and to the most pressing political questions of our moment. We define infrastructure broadly to include economic structures and systems, ecosystems, material state formations, institutions, computational and web-based materialities (including servers, fiber-optic cables and code), various forms of labor, forms of textuality that exceed representation, as well as all that more regularly goes under the name of infrastructure. As people working in the humanities, we are interested in how cultural objects and forms of theory engage with the question of infrastructure. How does representation engage with that which exceeds and enables it?
Deadline for submissions: closed.