CFP: Vol. 1 No. 1: Becoming Media: Operativity and Medialogical Structures
According to Wolfgang Ernst (2016), media only exist as operative and thus active—that is, agential—media. On a broader horizon, André Leroi-Gourhan (1964) had already pointed out that technique can only be understood in the form of operational chains composed of gestures and tools, chains organized by a syntaxthat articulates fixity and flexibility. Between these two formulations, we find the figure of operativity, which, beyond essentialist descriptions or binary distinctions, emphasizes the processes of co-constitution and performativity through which operations—as material ontogenetic forces—produce both the real and the symbolic, instantiating limits, interfaces, and infrastructures that constitute articulations of the real (Siegert, 2015).
Originally applied in the contexts of the military-security complex and logistics (Parikka, 2023), the logic of operativity has since expanded into the domains of political control (Massumi, 2015), cybernetics and archives, world visualization and the production of the visual, technological media, and the algorithmic logic of computerized culture (Friedrich; Hoel, 2021). Specifically, it involves measuring, calculating, encoding, arranging, or distributing—or, more generally, optimizing and abstracting, spatializing and temporalizing, planetary scaling and calibrating—according to certain structures, rhythms, and operational principles that, due to their automatism, tend toward opacity.
Harun Farocki (2004), in an analysis that can be extended beyond the military uses of images that serve as his starting point, proposes the notion of operative/ghost images—images that do not represent an object but instead are part of an operation. Farocki refers to images whose primary function is to participate in operations of control, detection, inspection, measurement, geolocation, tracking, targeting, supervision, activation, etc., forming what he considers a visible unconscious produced by automatic eyes. These are images that have begun to do things in the world rather than merely reflecting images of those things or simply documenting them.
In the spectral exteriority implied by Farocki lies something that pertains not only to images but to the entire space of technical operations that precedes action and connects the very possibility of all subjectivities—a profane space situated outside, in a non-localized medialogical structure and a horizon of estrangement. Alterity traverses this structure, which is neither fully controlled nor representable, yet still insinuates surfaces of desire, power, aestheticization, deviation, and latent signification.
Amid possible ambivalences, it is nevertheless assumed that to think operativity is to think the quality of what becomes media, recognizing that it is media and their general operativity that constitute the conditions under which media and the real are themselves recognizable and thinkable.
We invite submissions that articulate approaches within media theory, visual studies, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, or contemporary artistic practices, addressing thematic possibilities such as:
- Cultural techniques and operative ontologies in the context of materialist media theory and apparatus theories;
- Military, cybernetic, and logistical genealogies of operativity;
- Processual ontologies in posthuman thought;
- Diagrams, tables, interfaces, and other forms of operative mediation;
- Algorithmic visuality, software culture, and regimes of mediation;
- The automation of archives;
- The role of opacity, spectrality, and alterity in the mediated constitution of the visible;
- Artistic and curatorial practices that expose or intervene in the operative logics of images and media.
Proposals may address these themes theoretically, historiographically, critically, or practically, including case studies, methodological reflections, or visual essays.
Call for papers: until 2 June 2025
Decision communicated to authors: end of June
2nd round review and editing end of July
Publication: September 2025
Please find registration and submission information at https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/caleidoscopio/about/submissions.
