Call for Papers: Special Issue of Theory Culture and Society
Beyond societies of risk and control? Codes and codings in crisis
Adrian Mackenzie (a.mackenzie@lancaster.ac.uk; Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University) and Theo Vurdubakis (t.vurdubakis@lancaster.ac.uk; Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, LUMS, Lancaster University).
Several crises grip the contemporary world. A global financial crisis appears to destabilise institutions, threaten livelihoods and undermine government control of the ‘economy.’ A still unfolding ecological crisis is said to put life on the planet itself at risk. Meanwhile, ‘terror’ (and the ‘war on terror’) continue to make everyday life insecure. Crises are moments when ‘modern’ expectations of security and control are disappointed. However ‘security’ (and its various synonyms and euphemisms, including safety, reliability, protection, etc) and ‘control’ have a volatile relationship to one-another. Demands for safety and security routinely spill over into anxieties concerning the proliferating mechanisms and apparatuses of control that ‘protect’ us and at the same time put us ‘at risk.’ Security and control, it seems, name both lack and excess. Beck's 'risk society' and Deleuze's 'societies of control' have both inspired extensive commentaries and it is not our objective to add to them. Both bodies of work, whilst very different, share a concern with what we might call the codings to which the natural and social worlds are made subject, and with the consequences which follow from those codings.
Code offers a crucial starting point for any critical exploration of crises and conduct in crisis in their mutual supplementarity and interference. Code systems (software) and coded conducts span various registers of contemporary crises. Climate change, epidemics, financial events, terrorist threats, as well as time, space, media and publics, in various ways constitutively mingle with code and coding processes. Sometimes codes regulate lives and events in the name of safety: passenger check-in and information systems, password and personal identification interfaces, biometric identification. Sometimes, events and situations seem to become manage-able or control-able by virtue of their code-ability. On very many scales, code pervasively mediates the conduct of people and things 'in crisis'.
Code circulates between different orders of being, mediating between events and symbols, between worlds and cultures. Codings and code constructs circulate and replicate across domains. Both in terms of software and in terms of cultural, moral, ethical and religious codes of conduct, coding and code bring danger and risk into view through processes of subjectification, verification, visualization, management-control, and modulation. Of course codes are not just ‘in the service,’ as it were, of something else. Code becomes a way of world-making (Goodman).
While code in the context of information systems, in the life of networks, and as a contemporary metaphysical substance has been extensively discussed in the last two decades, the more recent appearance of software studies (Fuller 2007; Manovich, 2008) attests to dissatisfaction with the way code has been treated
We ask that papers attend to slippages that occur when codes and coding respond to demands that crises and conduct be controlled or made safe. Papers in this special issue will also examine the kind of broader issues of which software is but an exemplar. We are particularly interested in approaches that combine awareness of broader cultural and political economies of design, science,media, commodification, and subjectification with close attention to concrete material-technical
situations (in media, in science, in popular culture, in the military, etc). This could mean posing questions that initially appear to have little to do with code, or pointing to situations that appear irreducible to code in any usual sense of the term.
Sites of slippage would include, but are not limited to:
· At what points do understandings of risk societies and societies of control converge or diverge in their treatment of code and codings?
· What are the genealogies of the forms of code and coding that currently organize our world?
· How codes capture, (dis)order, entrain and exclude knowledges and forms; how different orders of being are handled and rendered compatible in coding.
· Agencies of contemporary liveability. What is the role of code(s) in bringing them into being? How does the ‘same’ thing end up coded differently in quite close proximity? e.g.Moser and Pols’ work on vital signs in care technologies.
· The visibilities and invisibilities of code: given the near-ubiquity of code-mediated
interactions and transactions, what points or conjunctions merit special attention? Should analysis concentrate on rendering visible the quasi-invisible omnipresence in
contemporary environments and infrastructures?
· ‘We ought to have known’: codes as attempts to ensure that not anything can happen. How are codes put in place in order for this knowledge and control to hold? Design has a particular importance here since things should not happen by accident, but by ‘design.’ In sum, we invite contributors to re-examine code as both ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. In so doing, this special issue will provide the opportunity to re-view ‘code’ as a site where different ways of thinking the codings of the contemporary world (including Deleuze, Beck, Harraway, Virilio, Derrida, Badiou, Latour, Serres) can be engaged with and engage each other.
Submissions
Papers should be submitted to Theory, Culture and Society at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcs. Papers will be subject to normal TCS processes of peer review.
When you upload your manuscript, make sure you select the 'Special Issue' designation from the Manuscript Type drop-down menu on the first page and, subsequently, under Submission Details on the Details and Comments (or fifth) page, select 'Code' from the Special Issue drop-down menu list.
Deadline: 15 February 2010
