ISTC 2023
Insecurity and the Eclipse of Enlightenment
Call for Papers
Looking back upon almost the first quarter of the 21st century, two themes have risen to the top of the social theory agenda and are likely to continue to become more pronounced: the proliferating sense and reality of insecurity, and the eclipse of enlightenment. Thus far, the 21st century has been characterized by changes in the structure and functioning of global capitalism, which has transmuted from neoliberalism into varieties of neo-authoritarianism. Determining whether these changes have been fundamental and transformational, or merely adaptive and superficial, is both a theoretical and an empirical challenge. Have those changes been pointing toward profoundly different and increasingly disorienting futures? Or are they “merely” following the same patterns and revealing the same persistently contradictory underlying principles of modern societies that have been in sway for at least two centuries, albeit more recently in more conspicuous fashion, which should be no less disconcerting? Digital capital has accumulated far beyond the point of spectacle, with the entwinement of simulation and simulacra bringing humanity to the brink of singularity: the Frankensteinian moment when the prospect of artificial intelligence rising is bound to obliterate the very notion – far-fetched as it was from the start – that humanity does or should have the capacity to “control” itself, the planet, or the future of both. The global war on terror/ism funded the development of new forms of weaponry, engendered new strategies and modalities of warfare, and produced new populations of displaced refugees – thus revealing the regressive systems of social relations that continue to underpin “modernity” and how it is prone to overwriting legitimate self-assessment with wished-for self-delusions. Around the planet, economic inequalities, political polarization and violence, and unwillingness to work with or consider "others" have escalated. In many ways, this escalation has been generated or fostered by design, and promoted with intentionality, by the beneficiaries and those prone to take advantage of existing social structures (including at the expense of most others). This is the larger context in which conducting verbal and physical assaults upon vulnerable populations (LGBTQ, the poor, racial and religious minorities, migrants, etc.) has been normalized and become par for the course in both public and private life, and especially their intersection, such as shopping malls, grocery stores, schools, concerts, or political events. Meanwhile, the global population passed the 8 billion mark, increasing the scale of traumatic displacement from floods, fires, and storms due to the climate crisis, and diminishing the prospects for envisioning and pursuing rational solutions to proliferating problems, as well as approaches to meeting predictable crises in non-catastrophic fashion on a planetary scale.
At a time when facing facts directly -- without relying on convenient, cherished, or emerging ideologies -- is becoming even more important than it has been in the past, a growing percentage of decision-makers and national populations around the globe are positioning themselves openly against enlightened perspectives on tasks and responsibilities, and are working forcefully to subvert efforts and ability of others to acknowledge and then to confront constructively the importance of such tasks and responsibilities, along with those tasks and responsibilities themselves. Increasingly, efforts at subversion are employing the means of democratic participation and representation and the rule of law to thwart the ability of governments – rudimentary as it has been to begin with – to divide and then to implement rational solutions to imminent challenges. Increasingly, those efforts are targeting not just the idea of society and the "social," but corresponding realities in the form of societal communities, what Durkheim referred to as the collective conscience, and social order and stability -- to prepare circumstances in which social destabilization will serve as the precursor to martial law, totalitarian rule, or fascist control? Who knows! Certainly, it would seem, to enable certain privileged elites to exploit the totality of society for their purposes.
In social theory, this nexus between insecurity and the eclipse of enlightenment as purposefully engineered "post/anti-social" social constructs has been theorized for decades, e.g., in terms of the administered world, corporate control, and post-democracy. More recently, debates about neo-imperialism, the new Cold War, eco-fascism, and racial capitalism, among others, have illuminated how a nascent regime of post/anti-humanism and post/anti-life has been taking hold, which increasingly is being perceived as unremarkable by growing segments of any given population. At the same time, even formerly critical approaches to and traditions of studying and diagnosing this miserable condition are prone to subscribing and accommodating the latter, in recent contributions to critical theory as well as in proliferating social movements that are increasingly focused on the specific and finely tuned concerns of ever smaller constituencies and demographics. In this context, this conference will provide a forum for social theorists in the social sciences and humanities working on a broad spectrum of concerns and from the foundations in many different approaches, for the purpose of pooling intellectual, normative, and scholarly resources, innovations, and contributions, to disentangle the entwinement between individual experiences and structural and hyper-structural constellations and configurations.
At a time when facing facts directly -- without relying on convenient, cherished, or emerging ideologies -- is becoming even more important than it has been in the past, a growing percentage of decision-makers and national populations around the globe are positioning themselves openly against enlightened perspectives on tasks and responsibilities, and are working forcefully to subvert efforts and ability of others to acknowledge and then to confront constructively the importance of such tasks and responsibilities, along with those tasks and responsibilities themselves. Increasingly, efforts at subversion are employing the means of democratic participation and representation and the rule of law to thwart the ability of governments – rudimentary as it has been to begin with – to divide and then to implement rational solutions to imminent challenges. Increasingly, those efforts are targeting not just the idea of society and the "social," but corresponding realities in the form of societal communities, what Durkheim referred to as the collective conscience, and social order and stability -- to prepare circumstances in which social destabilization will serve as the precursor to martial law, totalitarian rule, or fascist control? Who knows! Certainly, it would seem, to enable certain privileged elites to exploit the totality of society for their purposes.
In social theory, this nexus between insecurity and the eclipse of enlightenment as purposefully engineered "post/anti-social" social constructs has been theorized for decades, e.g., in terms of the administered world, corporate control, and post-democracy. More recently, debates about neo-imperialism, the new Cold War, eco-fascism, and racial capitalism, among others, have illuminated how a nascent regime of post/anti-humanism and post/anti-life has been taking hold, which increasingly is being perceived as unremarkable by growing segments of any given population. At the same time, even formerly critical approaches to and traditions of studying and diagnosing this miserable condition are prone to subscribing and accommodating the latter, in recent contributions to critical theory as well as in proliferating social movements that are increasingly focused on the specific and finely tuned concerns of ever smaller constituencies and demographics. In this context, this conference will provide a forum for social theorists in the social sciences and humanities working on a broad spectrum of concerns and from the foundations in many different approaches, for the purpose of pooling intellectual, normative, and scholarly resources, innovations, and contributions, to disentangle the entwinement between individual experiences and structural and hyper-structural constellations and configurations.