Abstraction plays a
crucial role in many contemporary critical discourses, but is anyone really
clear how it works? Do we really know where it comes from and where it resides?
And do we dare even to ask what it is? We can trace where it appears as it regulates
marxian and postmarxian debates about finance capital, real subsumption and the
task of theory; where it shows up in the algorithm, the interface, and other
abstractive modes of digital technologies; in epistemologically-flirtatious
theorizations of government and corporate detection and the shifting
contextualities of locality and globe; in defenses of the scientificity of
demonstration and reproducibility; in the imaginative leapings that engender
eco-critical objects, the cataloguing of proliferating eco- and non human
relationalities, and the penchant for processual realities; and how it
intensifies scrutiny of philosophy's function – especially where the
ineliminable pressure of blackness’s exclusion threatens what have long passed
for the conceptual frameworks, generative mechanisms, and ontological ground
proper to human thought. Beyond its contribution to this or that discussion,
it’s clear that the intellection of abstraction – abstraction as inherent to
critical method and experience – is an inimitable tool in the critical
theorist’s lexicon.
We invite
submissions of papers and/or panels in all disciplines and treating material
from all time periods by those who conceive of their work within the thematics
of abstraction as well as those who operate beyond the fields touched on above–
even if their relation to this critical concept is not yet a project, nor a
question: merely a hunch. We also welcome submissions as experiments in
reflexive critical practice; the limits of what “we” can think together are as
interesting as any single question "we" all already know how to pose.
Yet, in spite of
this currency, the texture of abstraction's coin seems unwieldy and highly
variable. We propose a forum in which to consider abstraction less as a
conceptual terrain that is claimed and mined to meet particular theoretical
exigencies than by curiosity about the oft-incurious means of abstraction’s
critical deployment. If we turn our attention to the mold and pattern of the
walls that seem discretely to silo the aforementioned concerns, can the demands
of these discourses themselves offer clues as to abstraction's relation to more
familiar guides of social categorization – and thus to social thought's
imbrication with experience: corporeal, cognitive, affective, psychic, even
writing – in a time when categories and grids seem askew?
We are particularly
interested in investigating abstraction as it opens onto the question of the
production of thought, of resources for thinking, of the capacity as well to
delimit thinking from what is not, what is neither thinking’s violence, nor its
force: worn out thinking, tired thought, thought that gets ahead of itself and
trips on its laces, thought that lingers only to fall behind,
thought-in-progress, confused and jumbled thought. This may lead to addressing
conceptuality as a venture in porosity: an oscillation between the
inevitability of identity and the impossibility of totality. However, it must
also ask about the scenes and scales of theorization and the historical damage
and institutional violence wielding the ratchet by which to modulate between them.
Indeed, it may well be that getting clear on abstraction requires weighing in
on the labor undertaken and promulgated by the University itself.
