Deadline: 26.05.2008.

After 9/11, the catastrophe has become the dominant imaginary of the future. From terrorism to global warming and from nuclear proliferation to pandemics, the warning of catastrophic futures has profoundly altered the political arena of threat identification and risk management.

Perhaps most significantly, the idea that the future can be predicted and calculated has been replaced by and understanding of the future as fundamentally contingent and uncertain. Impossible to fathom in rational terms of calculability, the identification and prediction of threats increasingly involves the invention of fictive mediations on the catastrophic future. For example, the 9/11 Commission reproached intelligence services for their lack to imagine the future catastrophe. Similarly, a CIA Report, ‘Mapping the Global Future’, makes the future tangible through an array of fictional letters. And, anticipating the next UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, Connie Hedegaard, has just commissioned a collection of poems on the disastrous effects of climate change.

This panel engages with the aesthetics of catastrophe and analyses how security professionals have mobilised aesthetics for imagining the future. How are we to understand this aestheticisation of catastrophe? What role do aesthetic expressions play in contemporary risk society? In which ways does art contribute to preventive and precautionary modes of decision-making? How far is it possible to monitor perceived futures through aesthetic simulations? And do catastrophic images have the same effect in different spheres (e.g. the environment and terrorism)?

As catastrophic imaginaries have become indispensable for grasping a catastrophic future that should be avoided at all costs, they often also involve explicit values statements about the present. Averting the catastrophe is often based on the idea that the present is the only alternative to a catastrophic future. As such, the aesthetisation of catastrophe raises significant political questions. What kind of society is portrayed through these expressions? Is the aestheticisation of catastrophe a symptom of a lack of critical understanding of society? And in which ways can art resist predominant images of the future? What are alternative ways of unpacking the realtionship between present and future?

This panel welcomes papers that deal with the aesthetics of catastrophe from either a theoretical or empirical perspective. It is also interested in conceptual engagements on the aesthetic and the political and the question of what a critical politics of aesthetics could entail in light of art’s increasing subsumption in practices of security and risk management.

If you are interested in submitting a paper for this panel, please send an email to Rens van Munster (rvm@sam.sdu.dk) by 26 May 2008. The panel will be submitted to the International Political Sociology section.