December 10-11, 2020

International Workshop, Leuphana University Lüneburg

Deadline: August 15, 2020

Confirmed Speakers:

• Ursula Biemann
• Esther Leslie
• Annie McClanahan
• Yvonne Volkart

It has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. Investigating the production of these movements and states from a logistical perspective, the proposed workshop focusses on issues of endless, frictionless circulations and continuous flow to investigate their specific logic.

Our assumption is that nothing circulates or flows without also being regulated. This places us within the discussions of environmentality, of regulation, modulation and control through the environment and qua processes of becoming-environmental. Focussing on concrete spaces of circulation, flow and liquidity, as well as their cultural (re)presentation, we want to discuss whether there is a cultural logic of environmentalization that revisits and perhaps radically revises the notion of the cultural logic of late capitalism famously described by Fredric Jameson.

Given the increasing permeation of everyday lives by computational technologies, scholars have observed the emergence of a new power constellation. While Katherine Hayles sees a general “movement of computation out of the box and into the environment” (2009, 48), Florian Sprenger’s account of an environmental mode of regulation concentrates on “the interaction between environment and surrounded and their mutual dependence” (2019, 62). Erich Hörl observes that power works “through the control of environmental variables” (2018, 155). Can we, by addressing the issue of flows, circulation and/or liquidity uncover a logic – and perhaps even a cultural logic – of this environmentalization?

For further information and more details please visit http://liquidity-flows-circulation.org/

Please send us your 500-word proposal for a 30-minute paper as well as a short biographical note to denecke@leuphana.de by August 15, 2020. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.