CfP: Outsourced! Mediatisation and rivalry

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Inscriptions, a journal of contemporary thinking on philosophy, 
psychoanalysis and art, invites contributions to our upcoming issue 
Outsourced! Mediatisation and rivalry. We are looking for well-crafted 
and skillfully written scholarly essays, interviews, reviews, short 
interventions, and opinion pieces that engage the theme of this issue 
and/or our mandate.

To raise oneself above the fray, to situate oneself at distance, to let 
someone else act in our stead – these are ways that enable us to take up 
an analytical, reflective position. When the mind is released from the 
immediacy of the biological drive, we can enter into a mediate relation 
to our world, and it is this indirect, contemplative relation that lays 
the ground for reflection and insight.

The psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Žižek has used the term 
“outsourcing” to explain this effect: when we allow others to act and 
react in our place, we let them be active for us. This kind of 
interpassivity – some agent is active so that we can be passive – allows 
the observer to take up a mediate relation to his or her world by 
letting the interpassive relationship articulate the immediacy of the 
drive. Indeed, in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan we observe a 
necessary movement of mediatisation as we become beings of desire: it is 
through the intervention of language that we can rise above the 
immediacy of the drive and begin to articulate what it is that we want. 
Language, in this view, is a vehicle to mediatise desire.

In the philosophy of Wolfgang Schirmacher the active agent of 
interpassivity takes the shape of a mediated figure, the Homo generator. 
This is an inaugurator of human reality in the media, and as such it is 
a stand-in for the observer and consumer. It is in this sense that the 
mediate figure serves as a clone of our inner desires: in the media we 
can see generations of new life, and we can begin to determine our 
biological and spirital future. The interpassive encounter in 
Schirmacher is decidedly more artful, more social, than Žižek's 
psychoanalytic approach. The key distinction lies in the medium where 
our desires are transposed: is it restricted to a psychic and linguistic 
realm, or does mediatisation take place in a social, and potentially 
empirical domain?

It was as an amalgamation of these two senses of mediatisation that Rene 
Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry emerged as a profound and 
comprehensive explanation of violence half a century ago. The figure of 
a mediator – or model – of desire enabled Girard to study how it is that 
what we believe is most intimately ours, our desire, continues to be 
shaped by our mediators, which, in turn, become our rivals in our quest 
to satisfy our desires. To Girard it was characteristic of desire itself 
that it was shaped by mimesis, governed by attempts to upend our rivals, 
and culminating in mass-mediated spectacles that stage the elimination 
of the mediator and model.

Our forthcoming issue of Inscriptions (vol. 3, no. 1) seeks to 
investigate questions of desire, mediatisation, and rivalry in ways that 
encompass both psychic and social approaches, and that engage several 
senses of terms such as medium, model, and rivalry. Key questions 
include:

* In what sense is our desire mediated in traditional and contemporary 
media, and to what effect?
* What is the relation between media consumption and reflection, and how 
can philosophy intervene in the debate over social media?
* How does the process of mediatisation generate social effects such as 
scapegoating, and in what sense should we take a normative stand on such 
effects?

Submission instructions
Academic essays should be 3,000 to 4,500 words. We also seek scholarship 
in the form of interviews, reviews, short interventions, opinion pieces, 
etc., and in these cases we also seek shorter texts. Inscriptions 
adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style (footnotes and bibliography). For 
other instructions, please see our website. We encourage potential 
authors to submit proposals for review prior to their writing/submitting 
entire full-length manuscripts. Include title, proposal (150 words), 
short biography, and institutional affiliation in your preliminary 
submission. All academic essays undergo double-blind peer review.

Submit proposals, essays and literary fiction on or before September 15 
through our online platform at https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld
Editor-in-Chief, Inscriptions
http://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

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