The call for submissions for the post(s), which will be edited by Bolivian-German writer and cultural programmer Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, is now open. For this issue, we welcome academic essays as well as visual essays and writings that present experimental and creative responses.

 

The submission deadline is January 15, 2025, and the issue will be published on December 2025. All proposals must be submitted through the OJS platform. For more details on the publication process, please visit the Information section or download the guide for authors.

 

post(s)12: Constitutions

We constitute ourselves as individuals, we constitute ourselves as collectives. We constitute ourselves as bodies, we constitute ourselves as states.

There is a creative tension in the processes of constitution, fueled by opposites or even antagonistic forces. From an abstract perspective, we can say that actuality and historicity, change and the established, beginning and end, physical extension and temporal articulation, exist as potentialities in the possible unfoldings of what we understand as constitutions. For the 12th edition of post(s), we are particularly interested in constitutions as processes that tension their opposites.

We are interested in the constitutions of States because they emerge as a heterogeneity of political times and spaces, materializing in bodies and the physical constitutions of their subjects. On the other hand, we are interested in the constitutions of subjects because (from the state's perspective) they are constituted through the materializations of abstract meta-structures, from the temporalization of practices, common habits, and juridico-political relations, but always as singular contingencies. We aim to unfold and conjugate the constitutions we make and that make us, the constituent processes or unconstitutional processes, and the exercise of translating constitutions: nature, creation, the established, the foundation, the complexion, the texture, the call to be.

We are interested in constitutions from the perspective of the tensions they materialize, for two reasons:

1. We have experienced constituent processes in the recent political history of the countries in our region. The constitutions of Ecuador (2008), Bolivia (2009), and Chile (2019-ongoing) represent political histories that have dramatically shaped the geopolitical integration of our region. The moments that led to questioning the existing constitutions and the movements that led to the implementation of constituent assemblies and the negotiation of their outcomes, exemplify struggles that have significantly contributed to the understanding of democracy in the early 21st century. The political mandates they establish—such as plurinationality or the recognition of nature as a subject of rights—represent true milestones in post-colonial political history and chart a new common horizon for the political imagination of social movements, movements in search of memory, truth, justice, and reparation, on a global scale. These constituent—and post-constituent—processes are the materialization of tensions in their most concrete and historically determined sense.
2. We constitute ourselves as subjects affectively, individually and collectively, discursively and politically, physically and biologically, within panoramas of historical tensions, tensions of negotiations and conflicts that exceed our consciousness and our roles in specific social configurations, such as colleagues, partners, families, communities, states. We are insertions, effects, active principles, living elements, microstructures that integrate and constitute tensions of constituent moments on macro scales: as citizens in the political changes of our countries; as ideological agents in historical changes of tectonic movements on the scale of geopolitical blocs; as producers and consumers in economies in crisis; as voices, commentators, observers, and political subjects in a frenetic panorama of media circulation of information that deeply challenges our certainties and our notions of truth; and finally, also deeply challenges our notion of what we represent, what we want to represent, and who we are within everything we call the contemporary world. These processes of questioning are expressions of our constitution as subjects—subjects in the sense of living individuals and human resources, in the philosophical sense as ontological configurations, and also as legal-political subjects—in situations of crisis, in conditions of war, in times of social struggle. Paradoxically, it is precisely our constitution as subjects that creates the condition to reconstitute ourselves, in a different way, to become part of other and new constitutions.

For these two reasons, we are interested in constitutions from the intersection of their various opposites, the micro and macro dimensions of their processes, the dissonances or harmonies of their voices, and their dependencies on specific times and spaces: history, territories, social and political processes. The intersection of these opposites, the network they weave, forms the texture of the processes of the call to be. This texture is determined by the degree of interrelation or antagonism between the active principle and the passive element of this call to be.

We think of political constitution, constituent power, social organization, and collective struggles, constitutive experiences, constituent acts, state, revolution, subjectivity, performativity, the microphysics of power, memory, truth and justice, colonial condition and post-colonial constitution, plurinationality, legal and political constitution, economies of affection, mental and physical condition, imagination, creation, and the call to be.

In this edition, we expect articles and contributions from diverse fields of knowledge and related practices:

- Activism and political theory

- Art and art history

- Literature and cinema

- Aesthetic theory and philosophy

- Spiritual practices and comparative theology

- Sociology and anthropology

- Justice claims and legal studies

- Postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial studies

- Cultural management and public management

- Management, restitution, and reparation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage

Bibliography

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of "sex". Routledge.

Césaire, A. (1950). Discours sur le colonialisme. Présence Africaine.

Convención Constitucional de Chile. (2022). Propuesta de Constitución Política de la República de Chile.

Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia. (2009). Constitución Política del Estado (CPE).

Fanon, F. (1961). Les damnés de la terre. François Maspero.

Foucault, M. (1976-1979). Cours au Collège de France.

   - 1976-77. Il faut défendre la société. Gallimard.

   - 1977-78. Sécurité, territoire, population. Gallimard.

   - 1978-79. Naissance de la biopolitique. Gallimard.

Guattari, F., & Rolnik, S. (1985). Micropolitiques: Cartographies du désir. Galilée.

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

Mbembe, A. (2016). Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press.

Negri, A. (1994). The constitution of power: An essay on the alternatives of modernity. Columbia University Press.

República del Ecuador. (2008). Constitución Política de la República del Ecuador.

Reinaga, F. (1970). Revolución india. Editorial Los Amigos del Libro.

Spivak, G. C. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press.

Tapia, L. (2009). Pensando la democracia geopolíticamente. Editorial Candidus.

About the Guest Editor
Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz is a Bolivian-German writer and cultural programmer. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Dr.phil.) and is co-coordinator of the PCP - Political Culture Program in La Paz. He was the Academic Director of the Independent Studies Program (PEI) at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Previously, he served as Director of the Museo Nacional de Arte (MNA) in La Paz and as Artistic Director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (ADKDW) in Cologne. He has extensively worked as a lecturer, independent curator, and cultural programmer. Along with Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, he was the curator of the exhibition and publication project "Principio Potosí / The Potosí Principle," presented at MNCARS Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, and MNA / MUSEF La Paz, 2008 to 2011.

He is the author of the books Before Beauty: Aesthetics and Anticolonialism (London: Sternberg Press / Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025); La deuda con la belleza: Textos 2019-2021 (La Paz: PCP - Political Culture Program, 2022); and co-author of Hélio Oiticica & Neville D'Almeida: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa - Program in Progress (Afterall Books: London / Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). His recent publications as editor include Yanak Uywaña: The Mutual Nurturing of the Arts, by Elvira Espejo Ayca, and War and Violence, by Maurizio Lazzarato, both published by Transversal Texts, Vienna (2023). He regularly publishes in the newspaper La Razón (La Paz, Bolivia).