Viktoria Huegel, Post-Doctoral researcher at Predef Subproject I Culture will be organising a stream at this year's London Conference in Critical Thought on "Radical Aesthetics: Imagining, Organising, Enacting Democratic Futures".

The call for a radical reimagination and practises of organisation – to think, write, perform, and prefigure another world in (than) this one – has become increasingly urgent in the face of exacerbating crises: today’s societies find themselves caught between ecological collapse driven by neoliberal logics of accumulation and exploitation, and the success of new authoritarian forces. Yet, it is these very tendencies that also limit our ability to imagine forms of emancipation that reach beyond existing economic and political structures; Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that There Is No Alternative (TINA) persists. Accompanying this “crises of imagination” (Haiven, Crises of Imagination), neoliberalism’s individualizing logics together with the devaluation of social language and political spaces limits emancipatory struggles to the success of solitary individuals that ascend within its frames whilst leaving untouched the very oppressive logics from which we attempt to escape (Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism).
Against this background, recent work in radical democratic thought has drawn out the potential of artistic practice – and the aesthetic more generally – to generate novel visions of collective subjectivity and to pre-enact democratic futures (Frank, The democratic sublime; Marchart, Conflictual Aesthetics; Rebentisch, The Art of Freedom; Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key). The registers of such radical performances are myriad drawing on and often melding together literature, dance, theatre, architecture, music, cinema, and the visual arts, together with the spaces in which they are enacted and the forms of subjectivity to which they give voice.
In this stream, we invite theoretical, literary, and empirical explorations along these very interstices – across and in the break(s) of performances of radical reimagination, the rhythms, visions, and gestures of novel forms of political subjectivity, and the heterotopias in which such practices are situated and out of which they emerge.

Contributions may engage with – but need not be limited to – the following questions:

• What radical forms of appearance and visibility – or indeed, of in/visibility and refusal – are instantiated in particular aesthetic practices?
• What are their sites of emergence and what forms of spatialisation do they make possible?
• And what is the political vector or potency of such corporeal/literary/material performance/s?

If you would like to participate in the stream, please send an abstract for a proposed presentation to londoncritical@gmail.com with the stream title indicated in the subject line. Abstracts should be submitted as Word documents of no more than 250 words and must be received by Thursday 29th February 2024. Please note that LCCT is an in-person conference.

Full Call for Presentations here.