[Discussion] CFP: Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality (9/1/05; journal issue)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Alex Ruch <alr10@duke.edu>

POLYGRAPH 18: 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

POLYGRAPH submission guidelines
Papers should be submitted electronically via e-mail to the issue 
editors: Rod
Frey (rodger.frey@duke.edu) and Alexander Ruch 
(alexander.ruch@duke.edu). Any
editable file format is acceptable, but Word or HTML formats are preferred.

Manuscripts should be prepared following Chicago Manual of Style guidelines,
using endnotes for bibliographic citations. Papers published in the journal
generally range in length from 5,000 to 15,000 words.



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