CFP: The Aesthetics of Contamination

We kindly invite Authors to submit proposals to a special issue of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics - "The Aesthetics of Contamination" Vol. 79 (2/2027), edited by Mădălina Diaconu (University of Vienna) and Miloš Ševčík (Charles University, Prague).

Submission deadline: 31 January, 2027

The term contamination typically has negative connotations in biological, medical, and environmental contexts, while linguistics and literary studies employ it as a neutral technical term. While contamination has hitherto only exceptionally been applied to aesthetic contexts (Schneemann, Wolodzko), the planned issue aims to demonstrate that thanks to its ambivalence it can be used for a general aesthetic model that accounts for both the dynamics of complex structures (including aesthetic experience) and the negative effects of interactions. Both these aspects of a potential aesthetic model are highly relevant at the present: the theoretical paradigm of contamination can reveal covert, obscure influences in our age of global interconnectedness, when technology and new media have largely abolished physical distances, and the noxious dimension of contamination corresponds to the recent urge to elaborate a negative aesthetics (Berleant, Brady, Saito). In addition to conceptual clarifications, the issue welcomes analyses of processes of contamination in art and media, environmental experience, everyday life, and sociocultural processes.
Contamination’s ambivalence can be traced to its roots in Latin, where it literally means the neutral act of touching together and by extension came to denote staining, soiling, infecting, or corrupting through contact or mere association. Nowadays, the term contamination evokes physical and chemical processes, from heat induction and infiltration to their results – material alloys, emulsions, suspensions, and amalgams – which can be found both in artistic production and environmental processes. The figurative meaning of contamination is related to influences and by extension implies transfer, interpenetration, entanglement, coalescence, and dissemination, all processes facilitated by contiguity. Also, analysing a process in terms of contamination involves making clarifications regarding the homogeneity/heterogeneity of the interacting units, the degree of fusion, and the intensity of interaction.
The aesthetics of contamination encompasses dynamics and generativity, as well as the outcome of the interpenetration of elements. For example, the concept of contamination can shed new light on the nature of aesthetic experience, especially in relation to contemporary discussions about the atmospheric dimension of this experience. In this respect, the model of contamination revisits an aesthetic theory that endeavoured to locate the aesthetic experience in particular faculties. On the other hand, it is the object of aesthetic experience itself, be it a work of art, a non-artistic artefact, or a natural item, that takes on a dynamic, mutable character in terms of contamination. Last, but not least, a neutral understanding of contamination enables us to highlight the fluid boundaries and transitions between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experiences or art and non-art.
These advantages in applying the concept of contamination to aesthetic issues cannot abstract from the challenges posed by the concept itself: by definition, contamination involves indeterminacy and contingency. Contamination escapes intentionality and full control, both in terms of regulating interactions and anticipating their consequences; contaminations are irreducible to clear influences and deliberate imitations. On the contrary, contamination implies a diffuse spreading, confused alterations, an insidious seeping into the social fabric and creeping “below the radar”, subterranean correspondences, and accidental, even unconscious, borrowings. Processes of contamination are also characterized by accretion: contamination is transformed (often irreversibly) through the accumulation of small, long-unnoticed changes.
In general, contamination challenges analytical approaches; why contamination happens and how it works are less clear than its effects, which include internalized hybridity and transformation, the blurring of boundaries, and, eventually, the fusion (i.e., indiscernibility) of its previous elements. On the whole, the aesthetics of contamination echoes the pervasiveness of the aesthetic in late modernity and the “fluidity” of our age and resonates with contemporary philosophy’s growing interest in processes.
Possible research questions include the following:
- Can aesthetic experience be described as a process of contamination and which further conceptual tools seem most appropriate for this description?
- Is contamination always mutual or can it also remain unilateral? What is the relationship between contamination and the fusion of elements? - Can synesthesia be characterized as sensory contamination?
- What is the relationship between contamination and atmosphere/ambiance? What role does emotional contamination play in the aesthetic experience (e.g., contagious sadness and laughter, attunement as atmospheric contagion in mass popular culture events, etc.)?
- What impact does the contamination of values have on the aesthetic experience (e.g., when moral criteria influence environmental appreciation and political values, the assessment of social-aesthetic phenomena)? In particular, how can different values intermingle or collide in the appreciation of literally contaminated landscapes?
- How can the model of contamination enrich theories about artistic production? Can collective artistic emulation be subsumed to contamination? What about the empathic identification of writers and actors with their characters?
- In which ways can contamination shed new light on the theory of intermediality in art?
- How can insights into spatial contamination (e.g., between a work of art and its environment) and temporal contamination (e.g., when authoritarianism, intolerance, and violence gradually “seep” into society) foster new approaches in aesthetics?

All Authors interested in contributing to this issue of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics are kindly requested to send full papers by submission page at the journal's website by January 31, 2027.   We strongly urge all Authors to read the instructions (‘For Authors’) before the submission.   Welcome to visit our website at: http://pjaesthetics.uj.edu.pl/

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