Call for Submissions

Materialities of Thinking

In recent years, Affect Theory, the New Materialism, and the progressive politics so often attached to these forms of thinking have productively taken us outside of ourselves to think the object, ecology, geological histories, planetary matters, and so on. Yet humanist agency and value tends to creep back in despite the best of intentions. Mosaic invites innovative and interdisciplinary submissions on Materialities of Thinking that address such limit cases as well as escape this capture. As a collaboration between an art historian and a philosopher, this project concerns itself with ways of thinking which materialize beyond the purview of consciousness and the defaults of our cognitive ecologies. We are especially interested in strands of thinking where the “guiding thread of the body” (Nietzsche) departs from the values of humanism and the hungry dialectics of embodiment and personhood. In addition to reflection on the heterogeneous temporalities which produce human, animal and plant populations and their network of interactions, we suggest that material thinking calls for critical engagement with the repurposing of biology as technology and its rapid re-engineering of the natural. Now more than ever, policing the discursive thresholds of our interest in a non-humanist vocabulary is itself one of the key challenges for thinking about nature and the body in our rapidly changing world. What kind of vocabulary is proper to articulating our immanent activity in the world? Can we move beyond the tensions that emerge between progressive politics grounded in embodied thinking and the values of identity politics? Where does one look for examples to follow? We invite contributions in philosophy, science, literature, Indigenous Studies, environmentalism, Affect Theory, the New Materialism, and grass roots activism.

Deadline: April 30, 2024

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Special Issue: Relative Time/Little Time I (March 2022)

This is the first of two special issues featuring the proceedings of the online conference Relative Time/Little Time, developed in collaboration with the Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol.

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