Call for Submissions: The Exploding Appendix Dossier #2.0 REASON | SUBVERSION

After publishing the first volume of our Exploding Appendix Dossier, we are now working on a second volume. To read the first volume click here. The Exploding Appendix Dossier is an online multimedia publication dedicated to compiling research on the past, present and future of the avant-garde. Each issue will focus on a different theme that we deem, in some sense, relevant to our cause. Research for us can range from engaged intellectual and philosophical essays and interviews to pieces of creative practices themselves. Alongside more ‘conventional articles’ we welcome poetry, prose, music, photography, illustration, comics, films and anything that experiments with the conventions of the serial publication to advance it into the digital age.

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“All things must be examine, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings…We must ride roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, give back to the arts and the sciences the liberty that is so precious to them…”

Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie” in Encyclopédie

Salvador Dalí and others, Yellow Manifesto, 1928

Our second volume explores the relationship between two words that we see as central to the development of the avant-garde: REASON|SUBVERSION. For us, these two words taken together tremor with a tension at the heart of the so-called modernity.  The ambiguity between modernity and modernism is quite useful for our purposes here. On the one hand, the writings of figures like Denis Diderot seem to inextricably link reason to subversion. What made the Diderot and l’Alembert’s Encyclopédie a dangerous and subversive document was its rejection of all authority not grounded upon reason. On the other hand, Salvador Dalí seeks the subversive by rejecting all that Diderot holds dear. Dalí’s ‘subversion’ is an attack on all reasoning, all literature, all poetry and all philosophy.

How should we think about this? How should we conceptualise reason? How should we conceptualise subversion? How do these two thing relate? Is reason an insurgent force that disempowers the powerful and decapitates kings? ‘Or is reason the tool of a technocratic, bureaucratic elite?’ Can we tell a subversive history of philosophy, science and public discourse? Is avant-gardism continuous with Enlightenment thought? Are the two compatible? Should Dalí and the surrealists be seen as part of a long tradition of conservative romantic anti-enlightenment thought? Or are they doing something else? The defense of reason has often included the critique of reason (Socrates’ critique of sophism, the Renaissance critique of  scholasticism, the modernist critique of instrumental rationality), is surrealism a secret rationalism? How should we conceptualise the dialectics of reason? Can reason be reclaimed? Take, for example, the xenofeminist reclamation of reason:

Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a feminism. XF marks the point where their claims intersect in a two-way dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminism emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular”

Laboria Cuboniks – The Xenofeminist Manifesto

We welcome contributions from both the Diderots and Dalís of the world, and everything beyond and in between. Part of the aim of this issue is to generate discussion, and so we welcome a wide range of views.

Deadline for Submission ideas*: May 15th^th 2021
Deadline for Drafts**: July 15^th
Final Deadline: August 15^th
Planned Publication in September

*Abstract of up to 500 words conveying initial ideas are not essential (the piece, for example, may have already been created), but recommended.

**Drafts are useful for us to see where you are going and to offer feedback. They are not always appropriate and can be negotiated with  the team.

Additional Submissions Notes:

Exploding Appendix is a grassroots group based in Brighton [UK] that meets fortnightly, in addition to our website. Our goal is to help cultivate a community that is conscious of how its artistic practices can be used for positive social ends. We work with people from many different backgrounds, in the arts and outside of the arts, in academia and outside of academia, working across art mediums and intellectual disciplines or not working in any at all. It is precisely by drawing upon such a wide spectrum of influences that we want to come together, share and have fun in order to build an important foundation for our intellectual and cultural engagements.

We take our starting point from the history of avant-garde art and radical counter-culture. We are interested in the radical potential for art, all arts, to envision and invent the future, but we hold no fetish for the history of avant-garde art. Just as the avant-gardists used the arts to respond to the demands of their own time, we draw upon the history of art, and our own artistic practice, to address concerns and problems relevant to us. Likewise, we do not limit ourselves to art. We understand that when we critically engage with art and society we are drawn to assess science, philosophy, technology, politics, religion, society and personal life in order to influence how we interpret our aesthetic experiences and creations.

We welcome essays, interviews, book or art reviews, creative writing, visual essays and more unconventional pieces. Topics usually explored in a more conventionally academic context are most certainly welcome, however, we would encourage you to write in a way that is accessible to people  of very different backgrounds and disciplines. Likewise, we welcome writers from a  vast array of backgrounds and approaches, both within and outside of academia.

If you are interested in submitting an article of any kind, please send a brief abstract up to 500 words  to explodingappendix@gmail.com. Headings should follow a standard format. E.g. EA ABSTRACT SUBMSSION, or EA DRAFT SUBMISSION.

Editorial team

Max McNally
Harvey Barrett
Bradley Tuck
Robert Jones