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Panels and Conferences Organised by Subham Mukherjee

London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) June 30th & Saturday July 1st, School of Social Sciences and Professions London Metropolitan University Call for Presentations, 2023

Apocalyptic spaces are heterotopic thinking-spaces which offer us the possibility to re-imagine p... more Apocalyptic spaces are heterotopic thinking-spaces which offer us the possibility to re-imagine planetary futures along with an imperative to re-think alternative configurations of being human. Catastrophic encounters tend to subvert the fixed designations of the human and the planetary, thereby becoming a crucial spatio-temporal opening that resist the constant reinforcement of the dynamics of conformity. In the wake of re-thinking new planetary dimensionalities, catastrophic encounters, despite of their excruciating problematics, are events of alterity occurring as sites of difference, in the Deleuzian sense, and différance, in Derrida’s sense, that initiate a radical (un)becoming of the human, producing new environments, new relations and new subjectivities.

Thinking through the concept of planetarity and the Stieglerian pharmakon, this stream seeks to explore apocalyptic spaces as open and possibility spaces, creating new models of co-existence, reinvent models of care – not merely as emancipation but also in praxis. Through our discussions, we shall attempt to recognise apocalyptic spaces as an open portal of living knowledge – a pharmacological and organological aperture that thwarts epistemic uniformity and neo-expansionist representations of globality and totality, and encounter collective inhabitations and response-ability by re-imagining the planetary and by reworking the praxis of being human. As an assemblage of indeterminacy harbouring, what Spivak said, an “inexhaustible diversity of epistemes”, we shall try to locate the idea of apocalypse in the diverse works of literature, art and architecture and discuss how catastrophic events shapes and conditions the possibility and impossibility of existence by changing our collective and individual percepts, affects and experiences. In a world riven by accelerated exosomatisation inevitably leading to what Han Byung-Chul appropriately called a burnt-out syndrome, we intend to encounter the apocalypse as a caesura – of historical discontinuity; a break from conformity; a necessary breathing rift in a compressed world from which we bleed together, blend together – a space for expunction and reassembling.

Apocalyptic spaces eschew bifurcations and embeddedness and is characterised by a conceptual openness to multiplicities, collectivities, transversalities and haecceities. In other words, it is a metamorphosis machine that produces new lines of flight and new permutations of becoming. It is, what Deleuze and Guattari call, a fibroproliferative unground – a processual exercise of molecular becoming and becoming-other. In this Deleuzo-Guattarian vein and through our discussions, we shall challenge the conventional mode of apocalyptic thinking, as a demarcation problem, that ontologises a nihilistic end-of-the-world thought, without questioning its socio-political agenda. Our idea is to liberate the apocalypse from the topographical ensnarement of our constructed mapping and fractalise apocalyptic thinking – identifying the apocalypse as a fractal-scape characterised by an affirmative schizoid plurality of thought administering a radical reshaping of planetary futures.

Papers by Subham Mukherjee

Edinburgh Architecture Research (EAR38.1: Navigating boundaries: Architectures beyond human), Dec 31, 2023

In our paper, we seek to explore Cornelia Parker's art and how it engages with exhibition making ... more In our paper, we seek to explore Cornelia Parker's art and how it engages with exhibition making that overwrites self-referential narratives by revisioning art and architectural meaning, experience, and space. We intend to theorise how Parker's non-adaptive and divergent architectural artforms transgress artifactual biases and disarticulate the adaptive preferences and prerogatives in exhibition practice. Instead, she offers a speculative possibility space of non-totality and the devalorisation of meaning yet retaining the ability to respond. Parker's radical technics of installation assume an arbitrariness. Her installations, we think, disrupt meaning and genre-conforming specificities and reimagine non-essential ways to de-concretise conventional exhibition making that subsumes the totalising agencies of architectural meaning and representation which invariably arrives at dense rigidities. Parker's large-scale installations like her Cold Dark Matter (1991) not only dislocate the essentialist ways of exhibition practice but also reimagine speculative and innovative technics of spatial and architectural manipulation that fractalises the demarcating ontologies of spatiality and perception, producing immersive and collectively attuned more-than-artifacts that move beyond transcendental dependencies with more-than-art resonances. Parker's artform entails an architectural practice of speculative reworlding which effectuates an affective unfolding of matter and space, instead of imposing fixities or homeostatic formalisations on them. Through these deviant architectural expressions, we shall attempt to conceptualise how Parker stands out and practises a necessary artistic incompletion to destabilise and confront the architectural rigidities in exhibition making and move towards a radical and non-conformist expressivity that accentuates the untapped virtual potentialities of mind, matter and space to produce events and become something more-a fractalising multiplicity recalibrating the collective dynamics of spatiality, sensibility and perception in relation to curatorial methodologies and experiences by designing alternative exhibitions that involve a radical unbecoming in praxis.

Journal of East-West Thought No.3, Vol.13, Fall , Sep 2023

George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant (1936) introduces to the readers the colonial experiences of... more George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant (1936) introduces to the readers the colonial experiences of the author during his time in Burma. Thinking through the author's conflicting ideology and his contradictory identities, this paper argues that beneath the apparent dichotomy, Orwell maintains an underlying complicity in his sentiments of anti-colonialism. In his existential and moral suffering, the author tacitly reproduces the colonial subjects and reinforces the production of alterity, naturalizing the white man's burden. The paper explores the colonial assimilation of the colonizer and the colonized and how it survives in the intellectual recesses of an anti-imperialist. Referring to Althusser's conceptualization of the mechanism of ideology, we critically reexamine the molecular nature of the colonial and the ideological apparatus and how it discreetly constructs ideological complicity, which dialectically defends the colonial subjectivity and the loss of Self through a logic of colonial exclusion.

Tamkang Review : A Journal of Cultural and Literary Studies《淡江評論》, Jun 2023

This paper seeks to explore China Miéville's use of the grotesque in his New Weird novum. Through... more This paper seeks to explore China Miéville's use of the grotesque in his New Weird novum. Through Miéville's literature, we shall study the grotesque as a tool of affective mutability and difference. Without being subservient to fairy-quest logics, his work rejects the rigid structural compressions and challenges the traditional narratology of the fantastic. Miéville's materialist radicalization of the grotesque, present throughout his divergent worldbuilding, enables him to create a polymorphic teratology of molecular becoming. We intend to theorize the transmutability of heterotopic geographies as possibility spaces of co-existential indeterminacy; they produce events that agitate our onto-epistemological understanding of the monstrous. Miéville’s fractalization of the monster proper is potentialized with a heterogeneous expressivity that refrains from constructing rigid and totalizing benchmarks, thereby posing a non-conformist challenge to genre-conforming models in fantasy. Estranging from his precursors, especially those who trailed the Lovecraftian vein, Miéville addresses the overuse of stock archetypes and the demarcation problem that made the monster unintelligible and immobile, and experiments with the shifting potential of genres and subgenres without getting subjected to classifiable categorizations. With a special focus on his King Rat (1998) and Kraken (2010), our objective is to address this elastic breathability in Miéville’s transgressive and creative grotesquerie, to interpret the grotesque as a heuristic tool of extreme potentialities, and to conceptualize his abcanny as a revitalizing agency of dissension intrinsic to his literature with which he effectuates a teratocultural shift and confronts the stagnancy perpetuated by his ancestors of the fantastic.

London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) June 30th & Saturday July 1st, School of Social Sciences and Professions London Metropolitan University Call for Presentations, 2023

Apocalyptic spaces are heterotopic thinking-spaces which offer us the possibility to re-imagine p... more Apocalyptic spaces are heterotopic thinking-spaces which offer us the possibility to re-imagine planetary futures along with an imperative to re-think alternative configurations of being human. Catastrophic encounters tend to subvert the fixed designations of the human and the planetary, thereby becoming a crucial spatio-temporal opening that resist the constant reinforcement of the dynamics of conformity. In the wake of re-thinking new planetary dimensionalities, catastrophic encounters, despite of their excruciating problematics, are events of alterity occurring as sites of difference, in the Deleuzian sense, and différance, in Derrida’s sense, that initiate a radical (un)becoming of the human, producing new environments, new relations and new subjectivities.

Thinking through the concept of planetarity and the Stieglerian pharmakon, this stream seeks to explore apocalyptic spaces as open and possibility spaces, creating new models of co-existence, reinvent models of care – not merely as emancipation but also in praxis. Through our discussions, we shall attempt to recognise apocalyptic spaces as an open portal of living knowledge – a pharmacological and organological aperture that thwarts epistemic uniformity and neo-expansionist representations of globality and totality, and encounter collective inhabitations and response-ability by re-imagining the planetary and by reworking the praxis of being human. As an assemblage of indeterminacy harbouring, what Spivak said, an “inexhaustible diversity of epistemes”, we shall try to locate the idea of apocalypse in the diverse works of literature, art and architecture and discuss how catastrophic events shapes and conditions the possibility and impossibility of existence by changing our collective and individual percepts, affects and experiences. In a world riven by accelerated exosomatisation inevitably leading to what Han Byung-Chul appropriately called a burnt-out syndrome, we intend to encounter the apocalypse as a caesura – of historical discontinuity; a break from conformity; a necessary breathing rift in a compressed world from which we bleed together, blend together – a space for expunction and reassembling.

Apocalyptic spaces eschew bifurcations and embeddedness and is characterised by a conceptual openness to multiplicities, collectivities, transversalities and haecceities. In other words, it is a metamorphosis machine that produces new lines of flight and new permutations of becoming. It is, what Deleuze and Guattari call, a fibroproliferative unground – a processual exercise of molecular becoming and becoming-other. In this Deleuzo-Guattarian vein and through our discussions, we shall challenge the conventional mode of apocalyptic thinking, as a demarcation problem, that ontologises a nihilistic end-of-the-world thought, without questioning its socio-political agenda. Our idea is to liberate the apocalypse from the topographical ensnarement of our constructed mapping and fractalise apocalyptic thinking – identifying the apocalypse as a fractal-scape characterised by an affirmative schizoid plurality of thought administering a radical reshaping of planetary futures.

Edinburgh Architecture Research (EAR38.1: Navigating boundaries: Architectures beyond human), Dec 31, 2023

In our paper, we seek to explore Cornelia Parker's art and how it engages with exhibition making ... more In our paper, we seek to explore Cornelia Parker's art and how it engages with exhibition making that overwrites self-referential narratives by revisioning art and architectural meaning, experience, and space. We intend to theorise how Parker's non-adaptive and divergent architectural artforms transgress artifactual biases and disarticulate the adaptive preferences and prerogatives in exhibition practice. Instead, she offers a speculative possibility space of non-totality and the devalorisation of meaning yet retaining the ability to respond. Parker's radical technics of installation assume an arbitrariness. Her installations, we think, disrupt meaning and genre-conforming specificities and reimagine non-essential ways to de-concretise conventional exhibition making that subsumes the totalising agencies of architectural meaning and representation which invariably arrives at dense rigidities. Parker's large-scale installations like her Cold Dark Matter (1991) not only dislocate the essentialist ways of exhibition practice but also reimagine speculative and innovative technics of spatial and architectural manipulation that fractalises the demarcating ontologies of spatiality and perception, producing immersive and collectively attuned more-than-artifacts that move beyond transcendental dependencies with more-than-art resonances. Parker's artform entails an architectural practice of speculative reworlding which effectuates an affective unfolding of matter and space, instead of imposing fixities or homeostatic formalisations on them. Through these deviant architectural expressions, we shall attempt to conceptualise how Parker stands out and practises a necessary artistic incompletion to destabilise and confront the architectural rigidities in exhibition making and move towards a radical and non-conformist expressivity that accentuates the untapped virtual potentialities of mind, matter and space to produce events and become something more-a fractalising multiplicity recalibrating the collective dynamics of spatiality, sensibility and perception in relation to curatorial methodologies and experiences by designing alternative exhibitions that involve a radical unbecoming in praxis.

Journal of East-West Thought No.3, Vol.13, Fall , Sep 2023

George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant (1936) introduces to the readers the colonial experiences of... more George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant (1936) introduces to the readers the colonial experiences of the author during his time in Burma. Thinking through the author's conflicting ideology and his contradictory identities, this paper argues that beneath the apparent dichotomy, Orwell maintains an underlying complicity in his sentiments of anti-colonialism. In his existential and moral suffering, the author tacitly reproduces the colonial subjects and reinforces the production of alterity, naturalizing the white man's burden. The paper explores the colonial assimilation of the colonizer and the colonized and how it survives in the intellectual recesses of an anti-imperialist. Referring to Althusser's conceptualization of the mechanism of ideology, we critically reexamine the molecular nature of the colonial and the ideological apparatus and how it discreetly constructs ideological complicity, which dialectically defends the colonial subjectivity and the loss of Self through a logic of colonial exclusion.

Tamkang Review : A Journal of Cultural and Literary Studies《淡江評論》, Jun 2023

This paper seeks to explore China Miéville's use of the grotesque in his New Weird novum. Through... more This paper seeks to explore China Miéville's use of the grotesque in his New Weird novum. Through Miéville's literature, we shall study the grotesque as a tool of affective mutability and difference. Without being subservient to fairy-quest logics, his work rejects the rigid structural compressions and challenges the traditional narratology of the fantastic. Miéville's materialist radicalization of the grotesque, present throughout his divergent worldbuilding, enables him to create a polymorphic teratology of molecular becoming. We intend to theorize the transmutability of heterotopic geographies as possibility spaces of co-existential indeterminacy; they produce events that agitate our onto-epistemological understanding of the monstrous. Miéville’s fractalization of the monster proper is potentialized with a heterogeneous expressivity that refrains from constructing rigid and totalizing benchmarks, thereby posing a non-conformist challenge to genre-conforming models in fantasy. Estranging from his precursors, especially those who trailed the Lovecraftian vein, Miéville addresses the overuse of stock archetypes and the demarcation problem that made the monster unintelligible and immobile, and experiments with the shifting potential of genres and subgenres without getting subjected to classifiable categorizations. With a special focus on his King Rat (1998) and Kraken (2010), our objective is to address this elastic breathability in Miéville’s transgressive and creative grotesquerie, to interpret the grotesque as a heuristic tool of extreme potentialities, and to conceptualize his abcanny as a revitalizing agency of dissension intrinsic to his literature with which he effectuates a teratocultural shift and confronts the stagnancy perpetuated by his ancestors of the fantastic.