CFP The pathologies of time

The Pathologies of Time: Stability and its Discontents
 
Timothy Barker’s 2012 book, Time and the Digital, collated perspectives on time in Deleuze, Serres, and Whitehead to theorize a notion of time that is thick, dynamic, and multiple, clarifying the notion that all aspects art, scientific inquiry, and everyday life are involved in a complex becoming inside the operations of flexible, unpredictable movements of time. The idea of continual becoming has been circulating for some time now and informs work by Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, Barbara Bolt, and others as they theorize the ability of subjects and objects to transform each other in an a-linear manner, through their situated relations. What this complex notion of time also carries is a groundlessness that can be considered unstable, unreliable, and even pathological. While we might be excited about the possibilities of non-linear, a-logical time, we also are often compelled to meet it with the need to normalize it or make it recognizable and “healthy.”
 
This panel is proposed for the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts annual meeting where the topic of inquiry is “Out of Time.” The organizers seek to develop a conversation that entertains questions around how pathologies of subjectivity, relational dynamics, and sociability (i.e., illness, dysfunction, disruption) can be considered in complex orders of time, such as digital or queer, beyond the need to resolve the pathology or to impose well-known structures of stability. The reaction to the horrors of disorder and chaos largely consists of balancing gestures intended to return the situation to stasis. We wonder what other responses to instability might be of interest as we consider the prospects for navigating the elastic complexities of a‑normative time.
Areas of interest could include, but are never limited to, haunted time, disabled time, disruption and stability, queer time, ludic time, Trump time, or affective time. Papers that consider art, media, social movements, and everyday life as aesthetic performances of complex time relative to the topic are especially welcome. 
 
Please send abstracts of 300 words with a brief biographical statement to [email protected] with the subject “SLSA Panel Submission.” The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2017.
The conference will be in Phoenix, AZ, November 9-12, 2017.
The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts welcomes colleagues in the sciences, engineering, technology, computer science, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and independent scholars and artists. SLSA members share an interest in problems of science and representation, and in the cultural and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Their website is litsciarts.org.