Call for Shifter 12 : Unassigned and Shifter 13 : I S Belissop (special issue)
Shifter 12 : Unassigned
Editors: Kajsa Dahlberg, Jane Jin Kaisen and Sreshta Premnath
The Dewey Decimal Classification System:
Most libraries around the world use the Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDCS) to list and categorize books. The DDCS is a library classification system developed by Melvil Dewey in 1876. By categorizing items within a library it serves as a tool for people searching for specific knowledge. It was an attempt to organize all knowledge into ten main classes, which are further subdivided into 100 divisions and 1000 sections. This makes the DDCS appear purely numerical and infinitely rational. However, DDCS is regularly revised, reflecting how culture, ideology, and the perception of knowledge change over time. As a result of these changes and to provide for future alterations 89 of the 1000 sections in the system are classified as " Unassigned."
Example:
131 Occult methods for achieving well-being
132 Unassigned
133 Parapsychology & occultism
134 Unassigned
135 Dreams & mysteries
136 Unassigned
137 Divinatory graphology
For the comprehensive list of the system, visit the OCLC website:
http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/summaries/deweysummaries.pdf
Shifter's 12th issue seeks to reflect on the archive and on how knowledge is systematized. By replacing the 89 currently unoccupied DDC numbers, the Revised Dewey Decimal Classification System will reflect on the dialectics of the "knowable" and the "unknowable"; the "thinkable" and the "unthinkable," as ways of recognizing the necessary exclusions that form systems of categorization. The 89 reassigned categories will thereby propose a "constitutive outside" of this system.
We invite submissions from artists, writers, activists and scholars, who may wish to comment on, disturb and restructure the logic of this system. The project aims to question or expand what is structurally "knowable" within the institution of the public library, by opening up the possibilities held within its undefined categories. Contributions may question or provide other forms of organization and categorization by challenging the DDC system from within, through comments, reflections, parasite systems or prosthetic extensions.
Entries may be image and/or text based. They must, however, be proposed within a new category - one that does not already exist in DDCS. The editors invite proposals and submissions by July 15th 2008. Please contact shiftermail@gmail.com with any questions you may have.
Shifter 13 : Indira Belissop (special issue) Call for Contributions:
Editors: Avi Alpert & Sreshta Premnath
While stranded in Dublin, Ohio on September 13th 2001 due to the grounding of all flights in the US, the editors visited the local library. Thumbing through the card catalog, they found a reference to "Other Possibilities," by Indira Sylvia (I.S.) Belissop assigned the Dewey Decimal call number 125.20. Let alone the book, even this curious number inserted between "Teleology" (124) and "The Self" (126) has since been impossible to find in major libraries around the world. The card, in classic Courier font, stated simply, "Collected philosophical writings of Mozambique-born philosopher." When the shelves were checked, only three torn out pages were found with an anonymously penned biography of Belissop, which we have reproduced in its entirety below the call. The biography, needless to say, testified to the remarkable significance of a thinker who seems never to have existed…
Shifter's 13th issue will focus on the importance and impact of this philosopher, who, though unknown, seems to have been one of the most important thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Belissop's thought has been instrumental in changing the entire terrain of intellectual, artistic and activist practice over the past seven decades of her immense production. Her revolutionary work in activist "interventionism," and her Marxist, materialist commitment never seemed to conflict with her important contribution to experimental poetry. Her philosophical treatises managed to comfortably accommodate both psychoanalysis and neuro-psychology while simultaneously problematizing both disciplines. Her expertise and influence in so many varied disciplines made her something of an Aristotle of our age. Of course, like Aristotle, she was not right in everything she said, but that she said it made so much of our own work possible.
Belissop was an untimely thinker - indeed a thinker whose true time has not come and perhaps never will. We are using this occasion as an opportunity to reflect on critical practice at the present time. The invention of Belissop (and her inventiveness) gives us the opportunity to explore concepts that have yet to be named or written, to test out ideas, to question the history of critical theory that has swept all fields of practice, to engage in a dialog with someone so capacious, so brilliant, that they could never really exist.
We are looking for aphorisms, essays, interviews, letters of friendship or admiration and poems. We also seek visual art, performance and writing practices that grow out of the possibilities opened by her analyses. In fact, personal anecdotes, new insights inspired by her work, hybrid and impossible forms (which, as ISB said, "make the possible possible") are all welcome. The aim of the issue is simply to continue Belissop's legacy - to explore the multifaceted themes that her work touches on and helps animate within our own lives.
Entries may be image and/or text based. They must, however, be proposed within a new category - one that does not already exist in DDCS. The editors invite proposals and submissions by July 15th 2008. Please contact shiftermail@gmail.com with any questions you may have.
