Cosmic Bulletin 2021

The Institute of the Cosmos announces a call for papers for publication in the 2021 edition of the Cosmic Bulletin: an online journal influenced by the philosophy of cosmism and its historical and contemporary manifestations. The Cosmic Bulletin seeks to propagate a series of radical imaginaries informed by a multitude of knowledge systems and sustained by collective experimentation.

The 2021 edition takes as its starting point Aleksander Svyatogor’s anarchist affirmation against localism: “If death (a restriction in time) is the primary root of evil in the life of the individual and society, then its secondary root is caused by a restriction in space, which is to say, the primary position accorded by one’s home, hometown, native land or state, and race. At the end of the day, even internationalism could be construed merely as a limitation in terms of the universe.”

In a 1918 pan-anarchist manifesto, brothers Abba and Wolf Gordin charged five societal institutions with humanity’s oppression: capitalism, the state, colonialism, the family unit, and the school. The remedies for this suffering, as well as for Svyatogor’s conception of internationalism, are inherently cosmist. A politics of interplanetarism would necessitate the abolition of the infrastructures that perpetuate statist violence and carceral logics.

To this end, our inquiries are ever-expanding:

What does total liberation look like beyond the confines of space and time? How might we transcend socialization that privileges authoritarianism, tribalism, and gender binaries? Where is the boundary between the safe haven of interplanetarism and the fantasy of escapism? How might a radical politics of care redefine the science and technology of utopian world-building? What exactly does emancipation demand? And to what extent can we apply these urgent intellectual investigations to the present?

We welcome all scholars, artists, activists, and autodidacts in all fields to contribute original studies, critical essays, theory and fiction pieces, and other cross-genre forms of experimental writing. We look forward to traveling together through spatio-temporal wormholes, loopholes, and rabbit holes.

The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2021. 

Please email text as a Microsoft Word document to cosmos@e-flux.com. Cosmic Bulletin 2021 is edited by Hallie Ayres.

The Institute of the Cosmos is a collective research project initiated by Arseny Zhilyaev and Anton Vidokle. The Cosmic Bulletin is the publishing platform of the Institute. The inaugural 2020 edition of the Bulletin, edited by Marina Simakova, can be found here.

Want to learn more? Ongoing timeline of cosmism here, and e-flux journal on cosmism here.