Static, the online journal of the London Consortium, launches a call for submissions for two forthcoming issues, Static 7 Catastrophe and Static 8 General http://static.londonconsortium.com/

STATIC 7 CATASTROPHE

“What happened, has not happened: thus spoke patience, that the end might not be hurried.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of The Disaster
The catastrophe takes care of everything: from Greek tragedy to sci-fi, from ethics to (an)aesthetics, from architecture to game theory, from opera to snuff. Static 7 aims to reconstruct the contradictions and oppositions of the catastrophic narrative, which is peripheral yet at the centre of all things, consigned to the past and always to be reinstated. Catastrophe is both a central cultural narrative and the point at which all narratives and cultures implode and disappear. The destructive topos par excellence, it has also been instrumental in the development of many of the concepts and categories, from psychology to history, ethics to aesthetics. Static 7 aims to pace the epistemic disaster zone, reading its debris through contributions which explore the notion of catastrophe in literature, architecture, art, politics, science, music and economics, drawing on sources as diverse as Aeschylus and Virilio, Kant and Beckett, financial risk analysis and nuclear reactor meltdown.

The submission deadline is 1 April 2008. Please send your queries and submissions to mailto:static.catastrophe@googlemail.com

Static 7 Catastrophe welcomes diverse formats of submission. Please contact the editors, Chrystalleni Louidzou, Jonathan McKay and Roger Orwell, regarding technical details before submitting your work. Submission guidelines and further information about Static can be found at www.static.londonconsortium.com.

STATIC 8 GENERAL

The general gender [Obs.] = The common sort (of people). (OED) Hamlet.

The general constitutes both the site of a universal quality as well as a collection of the particular. As an idea or shape, it is commonly understood as an inferior mode of description yet the general, uneasily allied with both despotism and democracy, wields an ambiguous authority of its own. Static 8 sets out to probe the power and authority of the general while recognizing the potential for open possibilities that lie in what might be referred to as the undefined, indistinct or even unexceptional. ‘Never alone / Did the King sigh,’ says Shakespeare’s Claudius ‘but with a general groan’ (Hamlet, III, 3). The King, like the military general, is someone who has overall authority but whose supremacy rests dubiously on the plurality and willed consensus of those whose voices are contained in his command. By what means does the general give form? Does it unite, highlight, corrode or simply blur the points of distinction? And what role does it have in the ethos of liberty and coercion? Bearing on the condition of the interdisciplinary in its implicit invocation of ‘General Studies,’ this issue of Static invites contributors to address the possibilities and paradoxes embodied by the general.

The submission deadline is 1 June 2008. Please send your queries and submissions to mailto:staticgeneral@gmail.com

Static 8 General welcomes diverse formats of submission. Please contact the editors, Christien Garcia and Alice Gavin, regarding technical details before submitting your work. Submission guidelines and further information about Static can be found at www.static.londonconsortium.com.

Static is the online journal of the London Consortium, a collaboration between the Architectural Association, Birkbeck College, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum, and Tate.

See www.londonconsortium.com for more information.