Call for papers

[Kosta Karantonas]

Dear all,

I would like to anounce a call for papers dealing with media and it's use,
language and cultural practices from a cultural studies point of view.
Although the topic seems very specific at first glance Sign Language studies
might however shed interesting light on the subject.
Cheers,

Kosta Karantonas



CALL FOR PAPERS


OriginalCopy. Practices of the secondary

Conference of the
Center for Cultural Research
"Media and Cultural Communication"
University of Cologne, 22./23./24.5.2003



Changes of copyright are supposed to not only regulate problems of authorship and access authorisation, but also to govern practices of copying and quoting in an intermedial manner appropriate to the (digital) state of the art.
Objections to this kind of measure would probably argue that the borderline separating the original from its blueprint has long been blurred by Derrida, according to whom we are in the first place situated within citation. – An objection that can hardly be contradicted, considering the debate on performativity and iteration which has been open within cultural studies since the 1990s.
Yet even within that debate numerous approaches – operating with categories like authenticity and originality – can be found: by supposing, for example, a sign integrity resistant to meanders of context and medium, or by arguing towards the notion of a body whose involuntary actions serve as an instance of irreproducibility.
This conference will focus on different citation techniques, i.e. cultural- and media-specific norms and conventions guiding adoption and alienation: How is the supposed ‘identical’ determined and defined?  How is it legitimated and authorised?  Are there cultural practices which undermine oppositions like primary/secondary, incident/iteration and original/blueprint?  To what extent is coherence – be it with regard to texts or even to cultures as a whole – constituted by structures of iteration/repetition such as recurrence, series or rhythm?  What would be valid criteria with which to establish the kinds of cultural context, to legitimise the claim to ‘originality’ or ‘possession’ in the first place?  And given the globalisation of production processes, what role is left for local conditions which guide processes of adoption?
Based on the break digital reproducibility has meant to the history of media, the conference would like to analyse from a juridical, economical, aesthetic and semiotic point of view whether – and to what extent –  “Practices of the Secondary” depend on cultural and medial parameters.
Conceptual contributions are as welcome as material-based articles dealing with medial techniques such as citation, iteration, paraphrase, imitation or copy, all of which are either aiming at - or undermining - the status of non-authenticity or derivation.
Possible fields of research could be: sampling, remix and cover-versions in popular music, picture-citations, cinematic remakes, quotations of gesture and in sign-language, electronic text processing (copy and paste), multi-media based techniques of copying in the internet, narrative and dialogical methods of iteration. Last but not least, questions concerning science itself are also of interest and could, for example, focus on the relation of personal contribution to citation or self-quotation. 
Abstracts (max. 3000 characters) of 30min talks must be submitted by the 10th of December 2002 and should be sent to the following address:

Kulturwissenschaftliches Forschungskolleg "Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation"
SFB/FK 427 – Universität zu Köln – Bernhard-Feilchenfeld-Str. 11 – D-50969 Köln
http://www.uni-koeln.de/inter-fak/fk-427
E-Mail: fk-427 at uni-koeln.de (Subject: OriginalKopie)

Notification of acceptance/rejection:  January 2003.

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