Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality"
Polygraph 18

Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics, is seeking submissions for its next issue, "Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality."

Call for Papers

Contemporary accounts of politics often coincide with strategies, theories, and experiences of temporality, whether they be historical periodizations, the experience of everyday life, or attempts to give figural or concrete form to such experiences through narration. If we understand narrative as the principal and necessary means through which one is able to make sense of time and temporal experience (and therefore also social change), we must recognize the centrality of narrative to any attempt to think politically; if we reject this claim, we must account for one's ability to make sense of lived experience in some other way.

Beyond this dilemma, however, we must acknowledge the prevalence of narrative as a means for understanding life (everyday or otherwise), causality, and political action, not only in the abstract, but in relation to specific forms of narrative and the different experiences of temporality they engender.The next issue of Polygraph aims to explore the politics of life today—provisionally defined as biopolitics—by examining the constructions of temporality at these various levels. How might a notion of the biopolitical take its form and mode of expression from differing theories of narration, periodization, or everyday life in the present age? How do different forms of narrative provide differing schema for understanding the temporal experience of contemporary life, and to what extent is a notion of everyday life itself contingent on specific modes of temporal understanding?

Moreover, what is the relation between biopolitics and everyday life as we try to think the political or epistemic effectivity of narrative today?

We hope to examine these questions by bringing together analyses of the political with those of narrative and temporal experience in contemporary cultural production: literature, theater or performance art, cinema, television, and other contemporary or emergent media.

How do contemporary narratives and modes of narration coincide with, inform, or make possible the experience of politics or temporality today? How can we understand the relation(s) between historical questions of periodization and social transformation and more empirical or cognitive forms of temporality explored in the fields of science? Through these juxtapositions, we hope to come to a more fully developed understanding of the politics of social life in the contemporary age.

Deadline for submissions
September 1, 2005

E-mail submissions to
Rod Frey (rodger.frey@duke.edu) and Alexander Ruch (alexander.ruch@duke.edu).