Call for papers
Submission deadline: May 1, 2021
Since we announced our call for papers for Cosmic Bulletin 2021 early this year, riots, rebellions, and revolutions have taken hold of Delhi, Barcelona, Athens, Port-au-Prince, Bristol, and countless other locales where the struggle for survival may be less overt but is no less vital. We’ve also now lived through landmark anniversaries of the Arab Spring, the Kronstadt Rebellion, and the Paris Commune.
Total liberation remains the goal, and hope provides the requisite discipline. Now, as we did in early 2021, we invite you to apply cosmism as a vector of strategic thought. While we memorialize our ancestors fallen as a result of state violence and institutional neglect, the demand for new forms of comradely relation is singularly prescient.
We thank everyone who has already sent in their papers for Cosmic Bulletin 2021, and we encourage those who would still like to submit to send your contributions to cosmos [at] e-flux.com by May 1, 2021. The complete call for papers is reproduced below.
Warmly,
The Institute of the Cosmos
The Cosmic Bulletin
The Institute of the Cosmos announces a call for papers for publication in the 2021 edition of the Cosmic Bulletin: an online journal influenced by the philosophy of cosmism and its historical and contemporary manifestations. The Cosmic Bulletin seeks to propagate a series of radical imaginaries informed by a multitude of knowledge systems and sustained by collective experimentation.
The 2021 edition takes as its starting point Aleksander Svyatogor’s anarchist affirmation against localism: “If death (a restriction in time) is the primary root of evil in the life of the individual and society, then its secondary root is caused by a restriction in space, which is to say, the primary position accorded by one’s home, hometown, native land or state, and race. At the end of the day, even internationalism could be construed merely as a limitation in terms of the universe.”
In a 1918 pan-anarchist manifesto, brothers Abba and Wolf Gordin charged five societal institutions with humanity’s oppression: capitalism, the state, colonialism, the family unit, and the school. The remedies for this suffering, as well as for Svyatogor’s conception of internationalism, are inherently cosmist. A politics of interplanetarism would necessitate the abolition of the infrastructures that perpetuate statist violence and carceral logics.
To this end, our inquiries are ever-expanding:
What does total liberation look like beyond the confines of space and time? How might we transcend socialization that privileges authoritarianism, tribalism, and gender binaries? Where is the boundary between the safe haven of interplanetarism and the fantasy of escapism? How might a radical politics of care redefine the science and technology of utopian world-building? What exactly does emancipation demand? And to what extent can we apply these urgent intellectual investigations to the present?
We welcome all scholars, artists, activists, and autodidacts in all fields to contribute original studies, critical essays, theory and fiction pieces, and other cross-genre forms of experimental writing. We look forward to traveling together through spatio-temporal wormholes, loopholes, and rabbit holes.
The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2021.
Please email text as a Microsoft Word document to cosmos [at] e-flux.com. Cosmic Bulletin 2021 is edited by Hallie Ayres.
The Institute of the Cosmos is a collective research project initiated by Arseny Zhilyaev and Anton Vidokle. The Cosmic Bulletin is the publishing platform of the Institute. The inaugural 2020 edition of the Bulletin, edited by Marina Simakova, can be found here.
Want to learn more? Ongoing timeline of cosmism here, and e-flux journal on cosmism here.
