This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics—while also including less visible elements and practices. The actors interviewed and materialities and performances observed thus came from spaces and places inhabited by, for example, farmers, crop (...) scientists, statisticians, programmers, and senior leadership in firms located in the U.S. and Canada. The stability of “the” artifacts followed for this project proved challenging, which led to me rethinking how to approach the subject conceptually. The paper is animated by a posthumanist commitment, drawing heavily from assemblage thinking and critical data scholarship coming out of Science and Technology Studies. The argument’s understanding of “chains” therefore lies on an alternative conceptual plane relative to most commodity chain scholarship. To speak of a data value chain is to foreground an orchestrating set of relations among humans, non-humans, products, spaces, places, and practices. The paper’s principle contribution involves interrogating lock-in tendencies at different “points” along the digital farm platform assemblage while pushing for a varied understanding of governance depending on the roles of the actors and actants involved. (shrink)

As symbols of adaptability and transformation, together with qualities of vigilance and intelligence, we argue the relevance of dragons for spatial planning in China. We develop a metaphorical concept – the green dragon – for grasping the condition of contemporary Chinese societies and for facilitating the development of theories and practices of spatial planning which are able to face the challenges of rapid change. We ask Chinese scholars and spatial planners to liberate Deleuzian potential for strategic spatial planning in a (...) ‘becoming-between, coming-together’ of concepts which can effectively make a difference in the world. Having outlined what we regard as key transversals or diagonals between our reading of Gilles Deleuze and aspects of Chinese philosophy, we then offer the metaphor of strategic spatial planning as Chinese literati landscape painting. This is a form of painting which rejects the idea of the world being supremely organised from a particular point of view, preferring to paint immanence and transformation. Chinese literati landscape paintings, like philosophy and strategic spatial planning, ‘look only at the movements’. We conclude that connections between what concepts of Chinese philosophy and those of Gilles Deleuze can do, suggest that in China, a conception of strategic spatial planning as metaphorical green dragon may offer academics and planning practitioners a transverse way to relate the legacies of past philosophies and current thinking. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the status and stakes of Gilles Deleuze’s “break” with structuralism. With a particular focus on a transitional text of Deleuze, the 1967/1972 article “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” it asks how Deleuze understood structuralism and why, after his encounter with Félix Guattari and Guattari’s own transitional text, 1969’s “Machine and Structure,” Deleuze felt the need to break with structuralism. It argues that reading these two texts together allows us to see that Deleuze already perceived tensions (...) within the structuralist project, and argues that Guattari’s non-structural account of the machine allowed Deleuze to clarify this perception, and see it as necessitating a departure from structuralism. To close, however, it turns to recent work by philosophers such as Étienne Balibar and Patrice Maniglier that re-examines the structuralist moment and identifies an ongoing legacy that the “poststructuralism” of Deleuze and Guattari may be part of. By considering Deleuze and Guattari’s break with structuralism in light of this work, this article considers how the polemical rejection of structuralism by Deleuze and Guattari may not fully account for the ongoing legacy of the structuralist program and the persistence of a structuralist problematic in their thought. (shrink)

The way in which educators choose to engage with learners and to offer opportunities to share knowledge of both the physical world and the world of ideas is an ongoing area of international research interest but remains diffuse and difficult to systematise. This idiosyncratic quality underscores the privileged position of teachers as creative professionals. By exploring Claude Lévi-Strauss’s conception of how and for what purpose we share knowledge within society, this paper explores the relationship between perceptions of teachers’ professional role (...) and the challenges they face working within formal education systems. The artisan quality of teachers’ practice, gained through experience, association and personal commitment, makes possible a visualisation of teacher professionalism as bricolage that, when read alongside theories of teacher agency, generates an affirmative picture of how teacher professionalism may be reframed as creative and responsive rather than homogenous and mechanistic. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with phenomenology, and with the phenomenological problematic of sensation, in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Considering Deleuze’s adoption, from the phenomenology of art, of notions of sensation and rhythm, it examines how Deleuze complexifies these phenomenological notions by aligning them with his profoundly non-phenomenological notion of the body without organs, as well as with the concepts of modulation and the diagram. In mapping Deleuze’s complexification of rhythm and his development of a logic (...) of rhythmic modulation, this article shows how Deleuze immanently refines an approach to working beyond phenomenology, through phenomenology. (shrink)

In recent years, the ideas of the mathematician Bernhard Riemann have come to the fore as one of Deleuze's principal sources of inspiration in regard to his engagements with mathematics, and the history of mathematics. Nevertheless, some relevant aspects and implications of Deleuze's philosophical reception and appropriation of Riemann's thought remain unexplored. In the first part of the paper I will begin by reconsidering the first explicit mention of Riemann in Deleuze's work, namely, in the second chapter of Bergsonism. In (...) this context, as I intend to show first, Deleuze's synthesis of some key features of the Riemannian theory of multiplicities is entirely dependent, both textually and conceptually, on his reading of another prominent figure in the history of mathematics: Hermann Weyl. This aspect has been largely underestimated, if not entirely neglected. However, as I attempt to bring out in the second part of the paper, reframing the understanding of Deleuze's philosophical engagement with Riemann's mathematics through the Riemann–Weyl conjunction can allow us to disclose some unexplored aspects of Deleuze's further elaboration of his theory of multiplicities and profound confrontation with contemporary science. This finally permits delineation of a correlation between Deleuze's plane of immanence and the contemporary physico-mathematical space of fundamental interactions. (shrink)

Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism shifted the traditional emphasis on thinking that which participates in a concept to that in which a claim to participation occurs. The first part of this article presents a reading of this reversal that highlights the implications of Deleuze’s ontology for his non-ontological account of participation, highlighting how this ontology builds on aspects of Plato’s philosophy recovered from beneath the later Platonic tradition of philosophy and supports Deleuze’s account of the rival claims of philosophy and opinion (...) to participate in thought. The second part outlines the difficulties presented by philosophy’s constitutive participation in friendship, love, and rivalry for it to be able to achieve its distinctive task of creating concepts that defeat opinion’s rival claims to address the problems that present themselves to thought. (shrink)

This paper juxtaposes Deleuze's notion of the virtual alongside Oyama's notion of a developmental system in order to explore the promises and perils of thinking bodily identity as indeterminate at a time when new technologies render bodily ambiguity increasingly productive of both economic profit and power relations.

This paper juxtaposes Deleuze's notion of the virtual alongside Oyama's notion of a developmental system in order to explore the promises and perils of thinking bodily identity as indeterminate at a time when new technologies render bodily ambiguity increasingly productive of both economic profit and power relations.

Two definitions of algorithm, their uses, and their implied models of computing in society, are reviewed. The first, termed the structural programming definition, aligns more with usage in computer science, and as the name suggests, the intellectual project of structured programming. The second, termed the systemic definition, is more informal and emerges from ethnographic observations of discussions of software in both professional and everyday settings. Specific examples of locating algorithms within modern codebases are shared, as well as code directly impacting (...) social and ethical concerns. The structural distinction between algorithms and social concerns is explained as mirroring the engineering construct of algorithms and data structures. It is proposed that, rather than this separation being an attempt to enforce a professional boundary and evade social responsibility, it is a crucial technical distinction within code which makes it clearer and more transparent. The power structures reinforced by the broader, cultural interpretations of algorithm are reconsidered, along with what it would mean for software to have an inclusive design culture. (shrink)

This essay provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to the writings of Vinciane Despret. Over the last twenty years Despret has contributed a significant number of books and articles in the fields of philosophical ethology and animal studies, and throughout them all Despret's methodological approach resists easy explanation. There is no single, uni- versal method applicable to all animals, in every situation; instead, Despret responds with an open curiosity to the plurality of animal worlds and the storied versions about them. (...) She studies and works with animals just as much as with scientists, farmers, and conserva- tionists. Taking joy in the diversity of animal behaviour, she creates conditions that allow animals to be interesting, and finds humour, warmth, and care in the stories that they tell. Through the practices of human–animal relations Despret contends that humans are transformed, in their thought just as much as in their practices, as much as animals are transformed. This ess.. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is problematic for the future of Deleuze studies that it is difficult if not impossible to answer the question ‘what is the right thing to do?’ from a Deleuzian perspective. It then argues that one of the key reasons Deleuze studies has made limited progress in this area is its over-emphasis on desire and the corresponding tendency to extrapolate ‘ought’ from ‘is’, which as Hume showed is a category mistake. It proposes that to develop a (...) workable ethical discourse from Deleuze's work we need to rethink how we read his work and approach it afresh. (shrink)

This article presents an interpretation of Deleuze’s concept of difference-in-itself. I argue that this is best understood as an adption of Duns Scotus’s concept of ultimate difference. After suggesting that the influence of Scotus on Deleuze extends beyond their shared commitment to the univocity of being, I turn to briefly review Deleuze’s notion of absolute difference. I proceed from there to explain Scotus’s accounts of univocity and ultimate difference, throughout noting the many stark parallels with Deleuze. On the basis of (...) this Scotistic reading of Deleuzian difference, I then show how Deleuze’s synthesis of univocal being and difference-in-itself can be uniquely situated within the fourteenth-century Scotistic disputations on the predicability of univocal being to ultimate difference. I conclude with some suggestions on possible further connections between Deleuze and medieval metaphysics which are opened up through this association of Deleuze with Scotus and the Scotistic tradition. (shrink)

This article examines the evolution of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of culture during his over-sixty-year-long scholarly activity. Bauman wrote his first books on the theory of culture (Culture and Society; Sketches in the Theory of Culture) when he was a Professor at Warsaw University. The ideas put forward at that time were later developed in his writings. This applies in particular to the critical nature of his thought, the combination of synchronic and diachronic perspectives, the inclusion of the context of the (...) social structure as well as his references to the structural dimension and to agency. Later years – starting with the publication of the book, Culture as Praxis – saw Bauman’s growing emphasis on the transcendence of the existing reality and the creative role of an individual in the transformation of cultural reality. This article shows how other theorists of culture inspired Bauman and how he critically referred to them. The article offers a holistic look at Zygmunt Bauman’s oeuvre. It also creates an opportunity for English-speaking readers to become familiar with Bauman’s writings in his mother tongue. (shrink)

Most academic publications refer to Parkour as a subversive and embodied tactic that challenges hegemonic discourses of discipline and control. Architecture becomes the playful ground where new ways to move take form. These approaches rarely address the material and embodied relations that occur in these practices and remain on the discursive plane of cultural signifiers. A theory of movement between bodies as the founding aspect of Parkour unfolds alternative concepts of body, space, time and movement beyond the discursive. Movement becomes (...) the leitmotif for a re-conceptualization of the relations between subjects and objects and abandons their division. With the example of Parkour, I will challenge anthropocentric approaches toward embodiment and instead foreground open-ended shifting configurations of places and their relation to movement. Parkour re-shapes rigid concepts of places and their human encounter through movement. Through its encounter with obstacles Parkour activates the silent potential for movement located in the relation between bodies and thus reaches beyond material boundaries (e.g., a wall). As a deterritorializing practice, I will use Parkour to re-consider the relations between different bodies such as architectural configurations, subjects and their urban ecologies to develop a relational model for movement to shape our everyday encounters with matter. (shrink)

In 1990, Gilles Deleuze publishedPostscript on the Societies of Control, an introduction to the potentially suffocating reality of the nascent control society. This thirty-year update details how Deleuze’s conception has developed from a broad speculative vision into specific economic mechanisms clustering around personal information, big data, predictive analytics, and marketing. The central claim is that today’s advancing control society coerces without prohibitions, and through incentives that are not grim but enjoyable, even euphoric because they compel individuals to obey their own (...) personal information. The article concludes by delineating two strategies for living that are as unexplored as control society itself because they are revealed and then enabled by the particular method of oppression that is control. (shrink)

My paper argues that Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology makes an important contribution to two central concerns of critical theory: the empirical analysis of the contradictions and conflicts of capitalist societies and the reflexive clarification of the epistemological and normative grounds of critique. I show how Boltanski’s assessment of the limitations of Bourdieu’s critical sociology significantly influenced his pragmatic sociology of critique and explication of the political philosophies present in actors’ practices of dispute and justification. Although pragmatism has revealed how social (...) life involves considerable uncertainty, Boltanski contends that critique needs to take into account how institutions generate semantic security, as well as symbolic violence. Boltanski’s endeavour to reformulate critique is compared with influential alternative conceptions, notably those of Habermas, Castoriadis, and Honneth. Despite its potential deficiencies and weaknesses, Boltanski’s reformulation of critique is found to be of considerable theoretical significance. In particular, Boltanski’s analysis of the role critique has played in the reorganization of capitalism can be extended, and his work is suggestive of how some of the intentions of critical theory can be pursued in new ways. (shrink)

When considering spaces of sex-work such as Patpong in Bangkok, Thailand, the inclination is to be drawn into habitual debates concerning the legitimacy of sex-work and the clear objectification of sex-workers. While these concerns are valid and real, there are significant absences in terms of the theoretical mapping of the space, such as the affect of the presence of law, bodies, space and the sexual encounter itself. Law emerges as the most significant presence, since it both forms the transactional surface (...) of Patpong and produces the confusion and revilement that results from the confluence of cold legal exchange with the tactile intimacy of the sexual encounter. This text explores the ethnographic space of Patpong in order to understand ways in which law’s transactional, effective surface is both embodied through subjectivication and spatially emplaced, yet also disrupted through the affective agency of the bodies and spaces it enfolds in order to produce this surface. This exploration will point to the limitations of law’s effective surface and suggest ways in which law might be located within a regime of affect, which returns the law to the body it subjectivises. (shrink)

By tracing the genealogy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's outlandish notion of the fourth person singular and its appropriation in The Logic of Sense, several keys concepts in Deleuze's thought such as the nonpersonal and pre-individual subjectivity can be rendered clearer to the understanding. While there is poetic licence in the use of the term by Ferlinghetti, the fourth person singular is heuristic for exploring the notion of free indirect speech and, more speculatively, the ideas of impersonal death and suicide. The fourth (...) person singular is thus a trope that sheds light on the ideas of humour, irony, lightness and becoming ‘without a verb’ in Deleuze's thought. Under close scrutiny is what Ferlinghetti designates as the ‘cool’ eyes of the fourth person singular. We shall work to differentiate these from so-called mad, Dada-esque ‘unblinking’ eyes. We shall ask how the poet in ‘obscenely seeing’ the impossible possibility of life can envision – perspicaciously – the immanent sense of death-in-life. From what standpoint does the poet gain access to the real? To consider this fully it is necessary to follow the Deleuzian interpretation of singularities as true transcendental events so as to clarify what gives life a ‘non-personal power, above individuals’. (shrink)

We are living in and beyond two massive changes in the world, both of which must be addressed by education, the caretaker of memory. First is the geological era of the Anthropocene—a crisis...

Deleuze's ethics constitutes the core of his philosophy, which proposes a post-humanistic but robust nomadic vision of the subject that respects the complexity of our times while avoiding the pitfalls of postmodern and other forms of relativism. Deleuze's neo-Spinozist ethics rests on an active relational ontology that looks for the ways in which otherness prompts, mobilises and allows for flows of affirmation of values and forces which are not yet sustained by the current conditions. Insofar as the conditions need to (...) be brought about or actualised by collective efforts to induce qualitative transformations in our interactions, it requires the praxis of affirmative ethics. The process of becoming-minor, which necessarily involves becoming-woman, is central to this pragmatic ethical project that includes human as well as non-human actors. This paper addresses this ethics in terms of ontological relationality, affectivity and endurance. (shrink)

This article proffers a critical reading of multiliteracy pedagogy and a materialism of the multimodal and machinic. A critical stance is taken against the mesmerising modes of representation that run rampant across our ocular territories. The article assesses the dangers of fetishizing technologies. To this end, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) is read through a Guattarian theoretical prism to emphasise four chief points: (1) the role of the unconscious, (2) the role of affect (affectus in the Spinozian sense; contrary to feeling (...) which immobilises, affect moves us), (3) the apparent becoming cyborg of the human race and (4) the desire to desire repression. The author contends that while qualitative multiplicities play a central role for MLT, it is neither inconsistent nor contradictory to consider the role of the machinic in greater detail. It is argued that more research must be directed into the cartographic, ethological and noological mechanisms at work in plastic universes of reference (new technologies and the arts) which transform the virtual and transfigure the dynamic of affect. (shrink)

This article compares notes on different and new concepts of ‘the Human’, developed both within disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic scientific research and in broader social practices. The main focus is on the shifting relationship between the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and science in the light of contemporary developments, such as the sophisticated forms of interdisciplinary research that have emerged in the fields of biotechnologies, neural sciences, environmental and climate change research and Information and Communication technologies. These rapid changes affect (...) the very definitions of the human and of human evolution. The question is how and to what extent they have an impact on both the practice of the humanities and on their self-representation. Is humanism challenged or strengthened by these developments? To what extent is anthropocentrism called to task by what is becoming known as posthuman theory? (shrink)

In thinking the passage from the “all-human cerebrum” to what one might call the contemporary “all-too-human” cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the “all-too-transhuman” cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells’s idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering un-world, in considering the prospects of a “world brain” faced with the realities of the “global mnemotechnical system”, in highlighting the differences between the global and authoritarian instrument of “control” in Wells and the descriptions of (...) the control society by Deleuze, and finally, in critiquing the “unifying of the general intelligence services of the world” in Wells and the capturing of the “general intellect”, this paper maps the contemporary prospects of the “world brain” against the backdrop of the worldweariness of the present. (shrink)

Rosi Braidotti's contribution to the Deleuze Studies Conference 2016 held in Rome, later transcribed and then revised by the author, points firmly to the current need for an affirmative thinking approach, actively standing to the present, while assessing its becoming and imagining new configurations. Saying yes to the world, being worthy of it, does not entail passive acceptance but rather the activation of transformative and critical thinking. To this aim, Braidotti looks at Deleuze as well as at feminist theory. The (...) ontology of immanence turns into a materialist, collective, vital, embodied and relational ethics. (shrink)

The article discusses a model first described in a Keynote and revisited to reflect how certain ways of knowing have become subjugated by the power structures of Western society and need to be brought into relationship with the dominant culture. The original keynote did not examine all the polarities which were developed in Unconventional Wisdom. The article explains how I have developed these in my theology, performance and professional practice. The article shows how I have used the thinking in a (...) variety of contexts and forms bringing together the arts and theology to produce a practical theology for my ministry as a Christian priest and a composer/conductor. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I here explore how an ethics of rhythm can shed light on what promotes and inhibits recognition between people across our vulnerable lives, and the need for a renewal of the philosophy of pedagogy. I argue that philosophy itself has contributed to a certain oblivion regarding how we follow and create rhythmic societies, the need for a more profound and fine-tuned listening attitude as a philosophical-ethical marker, using among others Barthes concept of rhuthmos, Kierkegaards concept of repetition, Herbart’s concept (...) of pedagogical tact and Kristeva’s existential relationship. What forms of imposed rhythms of life can be said to cast light on new ways of living together today? I argue that rhythms affect, shape and set boundaries for interpersonal relationships. Moreover, that they serve as incentives for an ethic, or better; as views, perspectives and concepts to think with when describing the rhythm of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

When they want to discredit the political relevance of Deleuze's thought, Hallward considers counter-effectuation as a ‘redemptive gesture’, and Rancière describes Deleuze's history of cinema as a ‘history of redemption’. Each time, redemption refers pejoratively to a break ‘out of this world’ and a form of apolitical passivity, in an attempt to reduce Deleuze to be a mere ‘spiritual’ thinker, simply renewing ‘that “Oriental intuition” which Hegel found at work in Spinoza's philosophy’. But is it all that simple? How should (...) we envisage the relationship between creativity and redemption, politics and passivity in Deleuze's work? And in what way does that concern Deleuze's philosophy connection to the Non-West, and namely China? (shrink)

This paper argues that Chris Marker's 1982 film Sans Soleil derives its affective force from doublings and ‘faces’ of horror and beauty that reveal a twofold synthesis of actual and virtual. While a focus upon the material, ever in relation to transient yet lingering sensations, cannot discharge the power and force of the film, this paper endeavours nevertheless to assess and evoke Marker and Deleuze's own interrogative methods that thoroughly explore, in the manner of a revelatory ‘schizoanalysis’ or empiricism, molecular (...) and variable operations beneath our ‘molar’ structures and organisations. As Sans Soleil's voiceover states, ‘If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black’, a provocative remark that invokes indefinable singularities and the darkness of a wound, cracking of time and splitting of self in film, life and death. Considerations of death, consciousness and subjectivity extend this paper's examinations. (shrink)

: This paper critiques enlightenment notions of representation and rehearses an alternative model of mapping that is grounded in performance. Working from her own practice as a landscape painter, Bolt argues that the particular experience of the "glare" of Australian light fractures the nexus between light, form, knowledge, and subjectivity. This rupture prompts a move from shedding light ON the matter to shedding light FOR the matter and suggests an emergent rather than a representational practice.

This paper critiques enlightenment notions of representation and rehearses an alternative model of mapping that is grounded in performance. Working from her own practice as a landscape painter, Bolt argues that the particular experience of the “glare” of Australian light fractures the nexus between light, form, knowledge, and subjectivity. This rupture prompts a move from shedding light ON the matter to shedding light FOR the matter and suggests an emergent rather than a representational practice.

This article moves from the observation that one of the key characteristics of contemporary Italian fiction is a preoccupation with ethics and more specifically with the issues raised by the “ethical turn” in contemporary philosophy and theory. Current literary criticism, it is argued, has been slow to respond to the ethical dimension of these narratives whose innovative and important cultural contribution has yet to be fully appreciated. It is therefore necessary to develop a keener sensitivity to the ethical discourses developed (...) in these literary texts, but this can only be achieved by first confronting some fundamental questions about the relationship between ethics and literature today. The answers to these questions make it possible to elaborate an initial conceptual framework that can re-orient reading and enable the critic to respond adequately to the ethical issues raised in and by the narrative. Accordingly, in this article the author proposes to explore from a theoretical perspective the relationship between ethics and literature in the context of the historical and philosophical predicaments of contemporary society. The discussion is divided into two parts: the first is devoted to an exploration of contemporary ethical thinking, and the second on the contribution that literature can make to that thinking. In the first part, the author proposes an approach to ethics based on the virtue tradition which, since Aristotle, has defined ethics as the search for "the good life." This tradition, however, is transformed through an engagement with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Levinas. From Deleuze the author draws the idea that the good life is one devoted to pursuing human plenitude through the multiplication of connections and intensities. From Levinas, on the other hand, emerges a powerfully haunting description of an ethical life marked by absolute responsibility for and obligation to the other. These two seemingly opposed views are not construed as irreconcilable and contradictory but rather as vectors which keep opposing tensions in check and ultimately define a necessary negotiation between the desire for human plenitude and the acknowledgement of responsibility for other human and non human life. Ultimately my argument is that such tensions establish the ethical terrain in which contemporary narratives seek to intervene. In the second part of the article, the nature and possibilities of such an intervention are explored through six theses which provocatively articulate the relationship between literature and ethics. The cornerstone thesis is that literature is an encounter. Each subsequent thesis endeavours to develop this initial assertion and explore its consequences. The theses are accompanied by a gloss which unfolds its meaning and significance: the answers that the given thesis provides but also the questions that it raises. Together, the theses provide a heuristic framework for a literary criticism sensitive to ethical issues and therefore capable of grappling with the important cultural work carried out in fictions that have struggled to receive the recognition they deserve. (shrink)

The score of Piece Four of Sylvano Bussotti's Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor is the most important image in A Thousand Plateaus. It serves as a prefatory image not only to the Rhizome plateau, but also to the work as a whole. It functions as the book's musical score, guiding readers in their performance of the text. Embracing John Cage's graphism and aleatory practices, Bussotti created his own ‘aserial’ new music, one that celebrated passion and Bussotti's open homosexuality. The (...) visual elements of Piece Four include a deterritorialisation of the standard piano score, a diagram of the composition's abstract machine, and a drawing that Bussotti had produced ten years before writing Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor. The drawing itself is a rhizomic artwork, with details that echo visual motifs throughout A Thousand Plateaus. The superimposition of the drawing on the deterritorialised framework of the standard piano score conjoins the visible and the audible, faciality and the refrain, in a single artefact. (shrink)

Michel Tournier's novel Friday is the subject of an important essay of Deleuze's, in which he presents the concept of the ‘a priori Other’. Alice Jardine and Peter Hallward have offered critiques of Deleuze via readings of this essay, but neither takes into consideration the full significance of Tournier's novel or Deleuze's commentary. Jardine and Hallward provide divergent and only partial perspectives on Deleuze. If there are several Deleuzes, each defined by a critical point of view, there is also a (...) single Deleuzian problem that informs the Tournier essay and Deleuze's thought as a whole. (shrink)

For well over a decade Inna Semetsky has been at the forefront of an effort to introduce the thought of Gilles Deleuze into educational philosophy and theory. In her (2006) book, Deleuze, Education and Becoming, she set forth a sophisticated reading of Deleuze that drew enlightening parallels between his work and that of John Dewey and his Pragmatist predecessors. In Re-Symbolization of the Self (2011), she linked Deleuze to a very different tradition—that of Jungian psychology—and argued for the integration of (...) Jungian archetypal analysis with the hermeneutic practice of reading Tarot cards. Additionally, through a series of editorial projects, she has brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines in research initiatives that have significantly enriched both Deleuze studies and educational theory. Now, with The Edusemiotics of Images: Essays on the Art–Science of Tarot (2013), Semetsky extends her previous work in provocative ways, integrating a dazzling array of sources .. (shrink)

In Dialogues, Deleuze contrasts French and Anglo-American literatures, arguing that the French are tied to hierarchies, origins, manifestos and personal disputes, whereas the English and Americans discover a line of flight that escapes hierarchies, and abandons questions of origins, schools and personal alliances, instead discovering a collective process of ongoing invention, without beginning or determinate end. Deleuze especially appreciates American writers, and above all Herman Melville. What ultimately distinguishes American from English literature is its pragmatic, democratic commitment to sympathy and (...) camaraderie on the open road. For Deleuze, the American literary line of flight is toward the West, but this orientation reflects his almost exclusive focus on writers of European origins. If one turns to Chinese-American literature, the questions of a literary geography become more complex. Through an examination of works by Maxine Hong Kingston and Tao Lin, some of these complexities are detailed. (shrink)

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus traces the life of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose career culminates in the compositions Apocalipsis cum figuris and The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Mann treats Apocalipsis as the endpoint of a dangerous modernism allied to fascism, and The Lamentation as its partial antidote. From Deleuze and Guattari's perspective, however, Apocalipsis is a positive musical becoming-other and The Lamentation a regression. Crucial to the contrasting interpretations of Apocalipsis are two very different conceptions of modernity and fascism, that (...) of Deleuze and Guattari providing a means of valorising becoming as a mode of aesthetic and political invention and redefining modernism and fascism. (shrink)

The medical humanities are often implemented in the undergraduate medicine curriculum through injection of discrete option courses as compensation for an overdose of science. The medical humanities may be reformulated as process and perspective, rather than content, where the curriculum is viewed as an aesthetic text and learning as aesthetic and ethical identity formation. This article suggests that a “humanities” perspective may be inherent to the life sciences required for study of medicine. The medical humanities emerge as a revelation of (...) value inherent to an aesthetic medicine taught and learned imaginatively. (shrink)

The face is a shifting, multiplex, distributed and layered phenomenon. It is by far the most mercurial feature of the human body, and even a single face cannot be isolated in, on or outside any one body. In the following discussion I will employ a variety of differing accounts of the face and suggest that the differences separating each account are merely reflective of the multiplex nature of the face itself.

Even if it is never possible to create a sentient robot that might lay claim to the status of personhood, a convincingly realistic robotic simulation of the human body could alter how human beings act towards one another. This article argues that the human face exerts a powerful influence over interpersonal interaction, creating empathetic connections that limit our capacity to engage in acts of cruelty; an ability to convincingly simulate the human face would detach it from the attribution of human (...) personhood and so encourage a dismissal of its affective charge. This possibility can be understood in the context of existing attempts to inoculate individuals against the appeal of the face so as to facilitate organised killing. (shrink)

This conceptual paper explores the theoretical possibilities of posthumanism and presents ecologies of repair as a heuristic device to explore the association modes of different entities, which, when confronted with the effects of human-induced destructive events, seek to repair the damage and transform the conditions of coexistence of various life forms. The central idea is that severe socio-environmental crisis caused by an intensification of industrial activity are conducive to observing new sociomaterial configurations and affective dispositions that, through the reorganization of (...) practices of resistance, remediation, and mutual care, are oriented to generating reparative and/or transformative processes from damaged ecologies and communities. Crises constitute true ontological experimentation processes where the presence of other-than-human natures, and of artifacts or devices that participate in reparative actions, become visible. A post-human approach to nature allows us to use languages and methodologies that do not restrict the emergence of assemblages under the assumption of theira prioriontological separation, but rather examine their reparative potential based on the efficacy of situated relationships. Methodologically, transdisciplinarity is relevant, with ethnography and other engaged methods applied over units of observation and experience called socio-geo-ecologies. The relevant attributes of these socio-geo-ecologies, beyond the individual, community, or institutional aspects, are the specific geological characteristics that make possible an entanglement of interdependent relationships between human and non-human agents. The conceptual analysis is illustrated with empirical examples stemming from socio-geo-ecologies researched in Southern Chile. (shrink)

This paper explores the many meanings attached to the designation,"the rodent in the laboratory". Generations of selective breeding have created these rodents. They now differ markedly from their wild progenitors, nonhuman animals associated with carrying all kinds of diseases.Through selective breeding, they have moved from the rats of the sewers to become standardized laboratory tools and saviors of humans in the fight against disease. This paper sketches two intertwined strands of metaphors associated with laboratory rodents.The first focuses on the idea (...) of medical/scientific progress; in this context, the paper looks at laboratory rodents often depicted as epitomizing medical triumph or serving as helpers or saviors. The second strand concerns the ambiguous status of the laboratory rodent who is both an animal and not an animal.The paper argues that, partly because of these ambiguous and multiple meanings, the rodent in the laboratory is doubly "othered"—first in the way that animals so often are made other to ourselves and then other in the relationship of the animal in the laboratory to other animals. (shrink)

Given that the Obama administration still relies on many strategies we would think of as sitting on the side of secrecy, it seems that the only lasting transparency legacy of the Obama administration will be data-driven or e-transparency as exemplified by the web interface ‘data.gov’. As the data-driven transparency model is exported and assumes an ascendant position around the globe, it is imperative that we ask what kind of publics, subjects, and indeed, politics it will produce. Open government data is (...) not just a matter concerning accountability but is seen as a necessary component of the new ‘data economy’. To participate and benefit from this info-capitalist-democracy, the data subject is called upon to be both auditor and entrepreneur. This article explores the implications of responsibilization, outsourcing, and commodification on the contract of representational democracy and asks if there are other forms of transparency that might better resist neoliberal formations and re-politicize the public sphere. (shrink)

This paper explores the themes of apathy and activism by contrasting the conventionally negative concept of motivational desire-lack with Deleuze and Guattari's positive concept of ‘desiring-production’. I suggest that apathy and activism are both problematically tied to the same motivational force: the conventional negativity of desire, which results in a ‘split subject’ always already ‘undone’ by difference. The philosophy of positive desiring-production provides alternative concepts of motivation and selfhood, not characterised by generative lack or alienation. On the contrary, this alternative (...) ontology describes an identity that is not primarily ‘undone’ by difference, but ‘done’ or ‘made’ through the complex and piecemeal relations it forges with various aspects of the bodies it encounters. Understood as a complex multiplicity, the self or community accordingly has a primary, immediate and active interest in the quality of its multifaceted relations with others. Finally, I argue that some contemporary forms of activism can be read as practices aimed at creating and safeguarding the social conditions that foster the complex relational composition of selves and communities. (shrink)

Plural expressions of ‘belonging’ in postcolonial and multicultural societies give particular emphasis to a politics of cultural recognition. Within nations, diverse communities call for acknowledgement of their aspirations, for fair representation in public life and for protection of the distinctive cultural practices and beliefs that define and help to sustain minoritarian identities. Recognition is also important for group self-concept and cohesion, and so plays a vital role in the creation of stable platforms for political resistance. This essay explores Deleuze and (...) Guattari's concept of ‘faciality’ and their implied critique of the politics of recognition. I argue that their rejection of the ‘politics of the face’ does not simply dismiss or disregard the pluralist imperatives of the just recognition that is required for postcolonialism. In fact, their preference for ‘dismantling the face’ provides a perspective that can be useful in assisting efforts to rethink recognition in terms adequate to forms of pluralist political engagement and non-imperial forms of subjectivity and sociality. (shrink)