CFP. Vol. 2 No. 1: Criticism at Its Critical Moment: Cinema and Media Facing the Challenges Posed by the Digital Revolution

Deadline: January 30

 

Caleidoscopio – Journal of Communication and Culture is the journal of the Department of Communication Sciences at ECATI, Universidade Lusófona. Founded in 2002, Caleidoscopio returned in 2026 as an open-access platform dedicated to critical research in communication sciences, with a special focus on the intersection between communication, media, and the arts in contemporary societies.

 

CFP:

This issue seeks to awaken the etymological affinity, derived from the Greek, between Kritikos and Krísis. The critic is someone who, by virtue of their own po(i)etics, analyzes the work while safeguarding a just distance—one that makes possible both the process of decoding and that of assessment. The critic immerses themselves in the time of the work while simultaneously delineating safety distances in their relationship with the object of study, namely by integrating it into a tradition or set of movements that precede it. The critic is, by definition, both product and producer of this distance, something that is the sine qua non condition of their activity, since all criticism is also a form of mediation.

As Roland Barthes explained well in his Criticism and Truth, all criticism implies a desire for language in the face of immersion in the object of study. Every critical exercise engages in this task—ungrateful and to some extent paradoxical—of leaving the "immediacy" of the work in order to turn it, in writing or speech, into a "mediated" form of discourse. The critic, in this inevitably periphrastic translation (the desire for language generally translates into an excess of words), constitutes themselves as both translator and editor: someone who, in recalling the work and seeking to merge with it in their discourse (one is never mimetic enough, as Manny Farber lamented), aims to give some form to the experience, animating an inner dialogue with the work—that is, within it and outside it, both with it and against it, moving toward it while also structurally modifying it.

Between ethics and aesthetics, between art and communication, between the near and the far, between distance and immersion, between love and judgment, between interpretation and counter-interpretation, criticism asserts itself as a school of thought that establishes ways of being as ways of seeing or, in its most cinephilic dimension, as ways of living. A post-Kantian manager of distances confronting the world and, within it, the leveling clamor of the market and the crowd, the critic faces growing challenges to their activity as a result of the new possibilities and difficulties posed by digital tools and engines (artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the gamification of interpersonal relationships on social media), and by a highly performative culture of the "self" that privileges quick judgment over study—the "I like it, I don't like it," or, ideologically, "I accuse and denounce" over "I think and analyze" (see the current "clash era" and cancel culture and its ramifications). This culture at times neglects the "but" that carries nuance, for, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his fundamental (though unfinished) text "The Task of the Critic," in the true critic, judgment proper is the last thing they arrive at, never the basis of their critical work; the ideal situation is one in which they forget to pass judgment.

How should we confront the crisis of an entire profession—that of critics—in times when criticism (a certain culture of attack and shock) seems to be everywhere? What critical prose should be reclaimed from past examples, forming an active part of a political and aesthetic conception of the world? How can we put into crisis the dominant (and dominated?) critical function in a society cornered by a "capitalist realism" (Mark Fisher) that turns every dissonant act into a commodity, within a narcissistic and self-consuming logic of "if you liked this, you'll like that"? Take an example from the field of cinema: phenomena such as Letterboxd, within a new cinephilia or a cinephagy 2.0, bring the experience of the work closer to a cumulative and disposable logic more akin to market operations than to the original and originating gesture of the creator—but at the same time, why do these forces, those of the market, always seem to be "too much" in an art form that, born as a fairground attraction, has never stopped being exactly that, an industry, just as the spectator has never stopped being a consumer? At the same time, and in the face of all these new challenges posed by the digital revolution — some anticipating a much-touted "end of cinema" — is it not true that the spectator and the critic have always known how to reinvent themselves, just as, indeed, have the films they have been watching? Jonathan Rosenbaum concluded in Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: "In spite of everything we might lose, and would hate to lose, we still have no way yet of determining all we might gain."

Faced with various pressures—technical, social, political, and economic—we ask ourselves about the paths of criticism across the different domains of communication and the arts: to what extent can a certain critical exercise represent an escape from the dissolution of the spectator into the condition (or role) of consumer (without memory), from the reduction of the work of art to content or product (without identity)? In what way will the thinking or rethinking of criticism as a journalistic and literary genre—at a time when it is not only defined as crisis but is effectively in crisis—depend, or not, on the affirmation of a lost "art of loving" (Jean Douchet) in a society that is perhaps excessively Cartesian, cerebral, or algorithmic (even as it becomes ever more amnesiac and uncritical), in which love itself is reduced to highly instrumental codes and keywords? Have we reached the "decisive moment" in which it has become imperative and just to reconvene and renew a certain way of doing criticism as a means of recovering a lost distance with time and things?

The die is cast for a return to the territory of criticism.

 

We invite submissions in the areas of media art, film studies, philosophy of cinema, philosophy of technology, semiotics, critical theory, media theory, and visual studies. There are no processing or publication costs for authors.

 

Call for papers: until January 30, 2027
Notification of decisions to authors: April
Second round of review and editing: May
Publication: July 2027

 

Issue editors: Júlio Alves and Luís Mendonça.

 

Please consult registration and submission information at: https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/caleidoscopio/about/submissions.

 

 

 

About the Journal:

Caleidoscopio, Journal of Communication and Culture of the Department of Communication Sciences at ECATI, Universidade Lusófona. Founded in 2002, Caleidoscopio returns in 2025 for its second series.

Open to the publication of excellent research across a wide range of topics within and at the margins of communication sciences, Caleidoscopio specializes in critical approaches to communication technologies and media. With an interdisciplinary aim, Caleidoscopio operates at the intersection of the philosophy of communication, media theory, philosophy of technology, critical theory, and aesthetics.

The journal has a special focus on the intersection between communication, media, and the arts in contemporary societies—from the proliferation of visual culture and developments in the cultural industries to the aestheticization of politics and everyday life, from questions of the archive and materialities to virtualization and operational media—and welcomes contributions addressing the implications of contemporary media aesthetics for the theorization of communication itself.

Caleidoscopio aims to be a global, multilingual (English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French) platform of excellence and open access for critical and speculative thought across all the areas it covers.