[csaa-forum] Culture Machine New Edition: Community

[gary hall]

(Apologies for cross-postings)

We are pleased to announce a new edition of the open-access journal
Culture Machine:

CULTURE MACHINE 8 (2006)
http://www.culturemachine.net

COMMUNITY
Edited by Dorota Glowacka

In recent years, the notion of community has emerged as an important but
also contested field of enquiry. The ‘new’ discourse of community has
challenged the understanding of community as related to the
nation-state, and as an ‘imagined’ cultural and political artifact that
provides a collectivity with the sense of unity, continuity, and
closure. Jacques Derrida has insisted that such circumscribed
articulations of community conceal but also perpetrate foundational
violence that underlies the collective myth. Philosophical
investigations of this myth by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and
Giorgio Agamben have opened up the concept of community onto a broader
politico-ethical and cultural context. Here, Nancy’s call for the
disbanding of the immanent community has been especially influential.
According to him, community as the dominant Western political formation,
founded upon a totalizing, exclusionary myth of national, racial or
religious unity, must be tirelessly ‘unworked’ in order to accommodate
more inclusive and fluid forms of Being-in-common, of dwelling together
in the world.

The contributors to this issue of Culture Machine navigate multiple
tangents of community as a socio-historical, politico-ethical, and
cultural construct. The authors comment on the nascent virtual or
networked communities as the forum for cultural avant-garde and
politically progressive forces but also as, potentially, the mainstay of
political conservatism. They ask about the function of community in
rapidly shifting geo-political contexts, of which the European community
is a fecund if also volatile contemporary example, as is the plethora of
post-colonial, post-Western articulations.

The ‘Community’ issue features:

* Editorial, 'Community: Comme-un?'

* Kuisma Korhonen, 'Textual Communities: Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida'

* Ignass Devisch, 'The Sense of Being(-)with Jean-Luc Nancy'

* Marie-Eve Morin, 'Putting Community under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy
on the Plurality of Singularities'

* Dorota Glowacka, 'Community and the Work of Death: Thanato-ontology in
Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy'

* Timothy J. Deines, 'Bartleby the Scrivener, Immanence and the
Resistance of Community'

* Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson, 'Cutting Democracy's Knot'

* Paulina Tambakaki, 'Global Community, Global Citizenship?'

* Daniel H. Ortega, '"En Cada Barrio": Timocracy, Panopticism and the
Landscape of a Normalized Community'

* John Paul Ricco, 'The Surreality of Community: Frederic Brenner's
Diaspora: Homelands in Exile'

* Jake Kennedy, 'Gins, Arakawa and the Undying Community'

* Petra Kuppers, 'Community Arts Practices: Improvising Being-Together'

* Natalie Cherot, 'Transnational Adoptees: Global Biopolitical Orphans
or an Activist Community?'

-------------------------

CONTRIBUTING TO CULTURE MACHINE

Culture Machine publishes new work from both established figures and
up-and-coming writers. It is fully refereed, and has an International
Advisory Board which includes Robert Bernasconi, Lawrence Grossberg,
Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Avital Ronell
and Nicholas Royle. Among the distinguished contributors to the first
seven editions of Culture Machine are Mark Amerika, Alain Badiou,
Geoffrey Bennington, Bifo, Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Diane Elam,
Johan Fornäs, Henry A. Giroux, Lawrence Grossberg, Stevan Harnad, N.
Katherine Hayles, Peggy Kamuf, David Kolb, Ernesto Laclau, J. Hillis
Miller, Anna Munster, Michael Naas, Mark Poster, Melinda Rackham,
Tadeusz Slawek, Bernard Stiegler, Kenneth Surin, Gregory L. Ulmer, Hal
Varian, Cathryn Vasseleu and Samuel Weber.

Culture Machine welcomes original, unpublished submissions on any aspect
of culture and theory. All contributions to Culture Machine are refereed
anonymously. Anyone with material they wish to submit for publication is
invited to contact:

Culture Machine c/o Dave Boothroyd and Gary Hall
e-mail: g.hall at mdx.ac.uk and d.boothroyd at kent.ac.uk

All contributions will be peer-reviewed; all correspondence will be
responded to.

For more information, visit the Culture Machine site at:

http://www.culturemachine.net
or
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk



--
Dr Gary Hall
Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/subjects/mcc/mcs/index.htm
Co-editor of Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net
My website http://www.garyhall.info