Eleven top Deleuze scholars reclaim Deleuzian philosophy as moral philosophy Ethics plays a crucial, if subtle, role in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project. Michel Foucault claimed that Anti-Oedipus was `a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time'. But what is the nature of the immanent ethics that is developed in Deleuze's thought? How does it differ from previous conceptions of ethics? And what paths does it open for future thought, given (...) the ethical challenges facing humanity in so many domains? Each of the eleven essays in this collection explores the ethical dimension of Deleuze's thought along a new and singular trajectory, and in so doing, attempts to reclaim his philosophy as an ethical philosophy. (shrink)

_Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze._.

Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze this chapter investigates the virtual as what problematizes the possible by inserting contingency in the process of emergence of the new. The tension between the virtual as what is uniquely placed to engender true innovation, and its aleatory and unforeseeable nature mirrors the tension existing in design between form-making and the need to acknowledge contingency. In embracing the un-designability of the virtual, design is called to take contingency and material variability as forces impinging on the process (...) of emergence of the new. The chapter puts forward a new model for design research that shifts from problem-solving to problem-finding and is predicated on the undesigned at the core of design itself. This points to a further shift: the role of designer from creator to facilitator, teasing form out of the formless, engaged with the manifold forces expressed through material variation. (shrink)

In his 1993 article ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to survive in the posthuman era’ the computer scientist Virnor Vinge speculated that developments in artificial intelligence might reach a point where improvements in machine intelligence result in smart AI’s producing ever-smarter AI’s. According to Vinge the ‘singularity’, as he called this threshold of recursive self-improvement, would be a ‘transcendental event’ transforming life on Earth in ways that unaugmented humans are not equipped to envisage. In this paper I argue Vinge’s idea (...) of a technologically led intelligence explosion is philosophically important because it requires us to consider the prospect of a posthuman condition succeeding the human one. What is the ‘humanity’ to which the posthuman is ‘post’? Does the possibility of a posthumanity presuppose that there is a ‘human essence’, or is there some other way of conceiving the human-posthuman difference? I argue that the difference should be conceived as a historically emergent disconnection between individuals, not in terms of the presence or lack of essential properties. I also suggest that these individuals should not be conceived in narrow biological terms but in ‘wide’ terms permitting biological, cultural and technological relations of descent between human and posthuman. Finally, I consider the ethical implications of this metaphysics of the posthuman. If, as I claim, the posthuman difference is not one between kinds but between individuals, we cannot specify its nature a priori but only a posteriori. Thus the only way to evaluate the posthuman condition would be to witness the emergence of posthumans. The implications of this are somewhat paradoxical. We are not currently in a position to evaluate the posthuman condition. Since there are no posthumans, the condition of posthumanity is not defined. However, posthumans could result from some iteration of our current technical activity, so we have an interest in understanding what they might be like. It follows that we have an interest in making or becoming posthumans. (shrink)

This is the first book to use complexity theory to open up the 'geophilosophy' developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy?.

We develop a methodological framework to develop process theories on routines by leveraging large volumes of digital trace data following critical realism principles. Our framework begins with collecting and preprocessing digital trace data, corresponding to the empirically observed experience of critical realism. In the second and third steps of the framework, we identify a finite set of similar repetitive patterns (routines) through computational analysis. We accomplish this by combining frequent subsequence mining and clustering analysis to transform empirical observation into a (...) set of routines that correspond to actual happening in critical realism. Then, we employ a retroduction approach to identify generative mechanisms of the routines. In the final step, we validate the generative mechanisms by evaluating proposed processual explanations and/or eliminating alternatives. We provide an illustrative example of developing a process theory in relation to the collaboration pattern in Wikipedia. (shrink)

This paper follows recent debates on the ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities to exemplify how this turn creates important openings of methodological and political potential in education. In particular, the paper makes an attempt to show two things: first, the new questions and possibilities that are opened from explicitly acknowledging the methodological and political consequences of the ontological turn in education—e.g. concerning agency, transformation, materiality and relations; and second, the importance of being clear about how educators and (...) educational researchers conceptualize ontology and engage with debates on the ontological turn in related disciplines. The paper sketches some of the methodological and political implications of the ontological turn for education, focusing in particular on the concept of learning. (shrink)

This paper introduces Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming in a system theoretic framework and proposes an alternative ontological foundation to the study of systems and complex systems in particular. A brief critique of systems theory and the difficulties apparent in it is proposed as an introduction to the discussion. Following is an overview aimed at providing access to the ‘big picture’ of Deleuze’s revolutionary philosophical system with emphasis on a system theoretic approach and terminology. The major concepts of Deleuze’s ontology—difference, virtuality, (...) multiplicity, assemblages, quasi-causation, becoming, intensity and progressive determination are introduced and discussed. Deleuze’s work is a radical departure from the dogma of western philosophy that guides the foundations of science and systems theory. It replaces identity with difference and being with becoming; in other words, it provides systems theory with an ontological ground based on change, heterogeneity and the inexhaustible novelty-producing process that underlies all phenomena. The conceptual tools made available by this philosophy seem to capture the fundamental aspects of complexity and complex systems much better than the current conceptual system that is based on static transcendent ontological entities. (shrink)

This article has two parts. The first one compares the ontological and epistemological implications of two main philosophical stances on how reality relates to appearance. I call the first group the “plane of superficiality,” where reality and appearance are the same; there is no gap between what a thing is and how it manifests itself. I call the second group “volume of representation,” in which reality is beyond appearances; there is an insurmountable gap between the thing and its phenomena. The (...) second part of the article focuses on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as the second group’s contemporary position. Within the OOO epistemological model of “knowledge without truth,” Harman’s schema of the observer’s participation in the object’s knowledge production is questioned. Alternatively, based on the notion proposed here of “flat representativity” in which each appearance is equally valuable to represent different aspects of the object, I argue for the full spectrum of the sensual as the basis for “knowledge without truth.” In particular, the aesthetic method, excluded from Harman’s concerns about knowledge, is suggested as another contribution to the episteme. (shrink)

Straipsnyje analizuojamos biopolitikos sampratos, suformuluotos Michelio Foucault ir Gior­gio Agambeno darbuose. Foucault biopolitiką apibrėžia kaip galios ir gyvybės santykį, kuris istoriškai kinta: suvereno turimą galią pakeičia disciplininė galia, o pastarąją – biopolitika. Biopolitikos atsiradimą Foucault tiesiogiai sieja su kapitalizmo raida ir ekonominiais procesais, todėl politinę teoriją jis siūlo keisti politine ekonomija. Agambenas, priešingai, biopolitiką suvokia kaip kvaziontologinę sąlygą: jo manymu, biopolitinių kūnų produkavimas ir tą produkavimą pagrindžianti išimties būklė apibrėžia tiek senąsias imperijas, tiek šiuolaikines demokratijas. Toks išimtinai negatyvus biopolitikos suvokimas (...) verčia klausti, kaip įmanoma pasipriešinti galiai ir kokios galimos tokio pasipriešinimo formos. Tiek Foucault, tiek Gilles’is Deleuze’as teigia, kad galiai priešinasi būtent tai, ką ji siekia pajungti, – pati gyvybė. Tačiau svarbu suvokti, jog biopolitinė galia ir gyvybinė galia yra visiškai kitokios prigimties, todėl yra nebendramatės. Taigi gyvy­bės galia turi būti apibrėžiama remiantis naujomis sąvokomis, kurios perimamos iš Deleuze’o filosofijos. Straipsnyje siekiama suformuluoti gyvybės filosofijos, arba biofilosofijos, pagrindines charakteristikas bei atskleisti, kaip įmanomas pasipriešinimas galiai. (shrink)

Following Deleuze’s analysis of expressivity, this article approaches the two opening aphorisms of the Dao De Jing 道德經 as two movements of a triadic differentiation of expressive elements. These aphorisms are further presented within four Deleuzean paradoxes which necessarily accompany linguistic expression. Simultaneously, the opening lines are also analyzed as philosophical problems which constitute the core of the Daoist project itself within which the unthinkable or ineffable must be conceived of not as conditioned by privation or negation, but as being (...) located within the movement of differentiation which is by nature positive and creative. As the paper shows, the linguistic involvement here is not one of discrimination but of a fundamentally dynamic immersion in problematic thought which underlies the mechanism of sense-making. This dynamism is presupposed by the disequilibrium between what expresses itself and its expressions, which is the birthplace of sense as the expressed. Our analysis of the latter is unfolded through an analogy drawn between Daoist and Spinozian expressionism supported by Deleuze’s study on Spinoza. (shrink)

This article explores some of the ways in which the conceptual apparatus of A Thousand Plateaus, and especially its machinic metaphysics, can be connected to recent developments in computer modelling and social simulation, which provide new tools for thinking that are becoming increasingly popular among philosophers and social scientists. Conversely, the successful deployment of these tools provides warrant for the flat ontology articulated in A Thousand Plateaus and therefore contributes to the ‘reversal of Platonism’ for which Deleuze had called in (...) his earlier works, such as Logic of Sense. The first major section offers a brief exposition of some key concepts in A Thousand Plateaus in order to set the stage for the second and third major sections, which argue that the fabrication of a metaphysics of immanence can be accelerated by connecting its conceptual apparatus more explicitly to insights derived from philosophical analyses of computational modelling and simulation and the social scientific use of ‘assemblage theory’. The article concludes with a summary of the argument and a brief consideration of some of the potential ethical and political implications of this interdisciplinary engagement. (shrink)

This essay interprets the meaning of one of the cards in aTarot deck, "The Magician," in the context of process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead. It brings into the conversation the philosophical legacy of American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as well as French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored herein for the purpose of explaining the symbolic function of the Magician in the world. From the perspective of the logic of explanation, the sign of (...) the Magician is an index of nonmechanistic, mutualist or circular, causality that enables self-organization embedded in coordination dynamics. Its action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty. I present a model for process∼structure that uses mathematics on the complex plane and the rules of projective geometry. The corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world enables a particular organization of thought that makes pre-cognition possible. (shrink)

This paper situates moral education in the context of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and as embedded in lived experience qualified by three dimensions, namely critical, clinical, and creative (‘3C’). The construct of ‘3C’ education will be enriched by reference to the theoretical corpus of Nel Noddings, specifically her 2006 book Critical Lessons: What our schools should teach. The paper argues that only as embodying all three ‘C's in experience can education become genuinely moral and bring the missing element of values into (...) quality teaching (cf. Lovat, 2006a). The novel concept ‘pedagogy of values’ is proposed, analysed and synthesized alongside Deleuze's unorthodox ‘pedagogy of the concept’. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; (...) and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism. In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.”. (shrink)

The hallucinogenic art of Michaux and other surrealists should never be regarded as advocating unbridled sensuous experimentation. The affects they generate may index absurdity, incongruity and comedy – they may ‘ridiculise’ our systematic thinking – but these affects thereby serve a more serious production of concepts. Through an abstemious aesthetics of existence Michaux becomes an ontologist of the prephilosophical sort. Carefully but ambiguously he explores the truths of matter, movement, body and modernity. As Deleuze saw clearly, the resulting ontology has (...) strong affinities with that of Leibniz, though we have to insist on Simondon's transindividual dimension to obtain the full ontological purchase of hallucinogenic surrealisation. (shrink)

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, (...) the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies. (shrink)

Diariamente vemos noticias sobre políticos irresponsables que rechazan el consejo que los expertos basan en los modelos científicos, o nos encontramos con notas periodísticas que distorsionan los hechos o las teorías. En México, diariamente somos testigos —tanto que se ha vuelto un chiste recurrente— de la evidente incapacidad de la comunidad periodística para cubrir informes técnicos, así como de la dificultad que tienen muchos columnistas para comprender incluso los más básicos conceptos de la estadística. Además, muchas veces nos preguntamos por (...) qué los científicos y las organizaciones de salud parecen estar cambiando constantemente de opinión, contradiciéndose entre sí, o no terminan de ponerse de acuerdo. (shrink)

Upon first reading, the beginning of Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, with its talk of ―contemplative souls‖ and ―larval subjects,‖ seems something of a bizarre biological panpsychism. Actually it does defend a sort of biological panpsychism, but by defining the kind of psyche Deleuze is talking about, I‘ll show here how we can remove the bizarreness from that concept. First, I will sketch Deleuze‘s treatment of ―larval subjects,‖ then show how Deleuze‘s discourse can be articulated with Evan Thompson‘s biologically (...) based intervention into cognitive science, the ―mind in life‖ or ―enaction‖ position. Then I will then show how each in turn fits with contemporary biological work on E. coli chemotaxis (movement in response to changes in environment). (shrink)

In this article I will suggest ways in which adding the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to the mix can complement and extend the 4EA approach to cognitive science. In the first part of the paper, I will show how the Deleuzean tripartite ontological difference (virtual/intensive/actual) can provide an explicit ontology for dynamical systems theory. The second part will take these ontological notions and apply them to three areas of concern to the 4EA approaches: (a) the Deleuzean concept of the virtual (...) will clarify the ontological status of perceptual capacity as sensorimotor skill; (b) the Deleuzean concept of “intensive individuation” will clarify the ontological status of the genesis of perceptually guided behavior; (c) the Deleuzean critique of confusing the actual and the virtual will enable us to intervene in the realism/idealism debate. These aspects will not be addressed sequentially but will be interwoven into an unfolding argument. (shrink)

This paper introduces Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory into the contemporary biological context. I begin by laying out at some length what I take to be the defining features of Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblage. I consider this to be a worthwhile endeavour in its own right, and so dedicate a large portion of this paper to producing a clear account of what it is that characterises an assemblage. Then I provide a reading of Deleuze and Guattari's critical conception (...) of the organism as a kind of assemblage typified by an especially restrictive, self-regulating form of functional integration. This restrictiveness comprises what I take to be the first pole of organic life. Then I reconsider Deleuze and Guattari's positive comments about ‘non-organic life’ in this context, as a feature internal to the organisation of organic life instead of something to be set against it. I theorise this mostly in terms of symbiosis. I take the significance of symbiosis, consisting in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘shared deterritorialisation’, to comprise the second pole of organic life. I conclude the paper with a brief discussion of how Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage-based conception of organism might be thought to anticipate and accommodate some of the contemporary research on biological individuality. (shrink)

While talking about comparative philosophy, we should presumably know what philosophy is. In this paper, the concepts of interpenetration, intensity, and juxtaposition are proposed as philosophical tools to analyse phenomena, including philosophy itself. The axis of interpenetration-juxtaposition is discussed in three domains: embodiment, speaking, and thinking. The role of philosophy is seen, on different levels of interpenetration, as redistribution of concepts, resonance of intensities, and thawing of actualities. In comparative philosophy involving texts from different traditions, these effects should be especially (...) notable. (shrink)

In this paper I present an interpretation of Deleuze's concept of the virtual. I argue that this concept is best understood in relation to the problematic of individuation or differentiation, which Deleuze inherits from Duns Scotus. After analysing Scotus' critique of Aristotelian or hylomorphic approaches to the problem of individuation, I turn to Deleuze's account of differentiation and his interpretation of the calculus in chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition. The paper seeks thereby to explicate Deleuze's dialectics or theory of (...) Ideas, his approach to the principle of sufficient reason, and the concept of the virtual itself. (shrink)

Husserlian variation, Bergsonian intuition and Peircean abduction are contrasted as methodological responses to the traditional philosophical problem of deriving knowledge of universals from singulars. Each method implies a correspondingly different view of the generation of the variations from which knowledge is derived. To make sense of the latter differences, and to distinguish the different sorts of variation sought by philosophers and scientists, a distinction between extensive, intensive, and abductive-intensive variation is introduced. The link between philosophical method and the generation of (...) variation is used to illuminate different philosophical conceptions of nature and nature's relation to meaning and sense. (shrink)

Studies that compare human and animal behaviour suspend prejudices about mind, body and their relation, by approaching thinking in terms of behaviour. Yet comparative approaches typically engage another prejudice, motivated by human social and bodily experience: taking the lone animal as the unit of comparison. This prejudice informs Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s comparative studies, and conceals something important: that animals moving as a group in an environment can develop new sorts of “sense.” The study of animal group-life suggests a new way (...) of thinking about the creation of sense, about the body, the brain, and the relation between thinking and nature. (shrink)

The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, is emerging as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century, having published widely on philosophy, literature, language, psychoanalysis, art, politics, and cinema. However, because of the ‘experimental’ nature of certain works, combined with the manner in which he draws upon a variety of sources from various disciplines, his work can seem difficult, obscure, and even ‘willfully obstructive’. In an attempt to resist such impressions, this paper will seek to provide an (...) accessible introduction to Deleuze's work, and to begin to discuss how it can be employed to provide a significant critique and reconceptualization of the theoretical foundations and therapeutic practices of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing. In order to do this, the paper will focus upon Deleuze's masterwork, and the cornerstone to his philosophy as a whole, Difference and Repetition; in particular, it will discuss how his innovative and challenging account of time can be employed to provide a conception of human life as a ‘continuity’, rather than as a series of distinct ‘moments’ or ‘events’. As well as discussing the manner in which his work can provide us with an understanding of how life is different and significant for each human being, this paper will also highlight the potential importance of Deleuze's work for logotherapy, for the recent ‘turn’ to ‘narrative’ as a psychotherapeutic approach and for contemporary mental health care's growing interest in ‘social constructionism’. As such, this paper also seeks to stimulate further discussion and research into the importance and the relevance of Deleuze's work for the theory and practice of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing. (shrink)

There is an aesthetic undercurrent traversing Deleuze's philosophy along confluent trajectories of Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, which harbours untapped potentials and far-reaching consequences for contemporary discussions of art and architecture. According to this subterranean stream, aesthetic experience is generated, neither in ready-made mental faculties of a subject, nor in essential qualities of an object, but through affective interactions of a relational field. A cartographic inquiry of affective aesthetics constitutes the subject matter of this paper, beginning with a philosophical elaboration (...) that connects aesthetic theories of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze, evolving via a comparative analysis of aesthetic processes specific to Francis Bacon's artistic assemblages and Vogelkop bowerbirds' architectural constructs, and concluding with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric aesthetics. (shrink)

Some variants of Object-Oriented Ontology define entities in terms of their powers. Such variants are rooted in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “machinic assemblages”. This article asks whether such entities can be metaphysical primitives with regard to similarity and change. This is the case if no further existents are needed to account for these two features of reality. According to Levi Bryant’s machine-oriented ontology, entities defined in terms of powers are such primitives. According to Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory, (...) they are not. DeLanda therefore holds that further metaphysical primitives must exist. After reconstructing the key features of the theories involved, I argue that Bryant’s position is ultimately more parsimonious, and that DeLanda’s theory confuses epistemological models with ontological realities. (shrink)

Este artigo procura desenvolver o âmbito da assim chamada ontopolítica como contribuição original do pensamento do G. Deleuze para a filosofia política contemporânea. Com este objetivo, veremos que Deleuze toma o conceito de poder em Foucault e lhe confere alçada ontológica. Este conceito de poder dá acesso a outro elemento importante da filosofia política deleuzeana, ou seja, o estudo dos diagramas históricos do poder nas denominadas sociedades disciplinar e de controle. Com o diagrama de funcionamento das mesmas podemos entender qual (...) o retrato deleuzeano para a democracia em sociedades contemporâneas. Adentrando a ontopolítica deleuzeana, nos dedicaremos aos conceitos de maioria, minoria e devir-minoritário. É neste ponto que se faz o encontro da ontopolítica de Deleuze com a ontologia matemática de Ch. Sanders Peirce. Acontece que os conceitos ontopolíticos de Deleuze, além de sua vinculação com uma ontologia do poder, recebem também um tratamento matemático, tendo em vista certas noções aritméticas (contável e não contável) e geométricas (linhas). As maiorias e minorias são conjuntos contáveis que são atravessados por devires não contáveis. Com isso, chegaremos ao ponto central do presente artigo, onde realizamos uma incursão inicial à imagem dos conceitos de maioria e minoria em Deleuze, com base na teoria das coleções e multidões de C. S. Peirce, principalmente com relação à ontologia matemática nela incluída. Quanto a isso, a principal operação será mostrar de que forma a distinção deleuzeana entre maiorias/minorias contáveis e devir-minoritário não contável pode ser escandida em termos de coleções discretas denominadas enumeráveis, denumeráveis e abnumeráveis ou pós-numeráveis, de acordo com a terminologia de Peirce. (shrink)

This paper examines the varied cultural meanings of computer game play in competitive and professional computer gaming and live-streaming. To do so it riffs off Andrew Feenberg’s 1994 work exploring the changing meanings of the ancient board game of Go in mid-century Japan. We argue that whereas Go saw a de-aestheticization with the growth of newspaper reporting and a new breed of ‘westernized’ player, the rise of professionalized computer gameplay has upset this trend, causing a re-aestheticization of professional game competition (...) as a result of the many informal elements that contribute to the successes, and public perceptions, of professional players. In doing so we open up the consideration of the aesthetics of broadcasted gameplay, how they reflect back upon the players and the game, and locate this shift historically and culturally within the last two decades of computer games as a creative industry, entertainment industry, a media form, and as an embodied practice. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy presents the relationship between life and matter in both dualistic and monistic terms. Life is duration, a rhythm of incalculable novelty that approaches pure creative activity. In stark contrast, matter is identified with the determinism of homogeneous space. After Time and Free Will, Bergson concedes some share of duration to matter. In this context, his dualism can be understood as a methodological step towards the articulation of a monistic metaphysics of duration. This article suggests that the distinction (...) between life and matter is also motivated by an unconscious imperative to establish a sexed hierarchy. Bergson repeatedly presents life as seminal, while matter is figured in terms of passivity. (shrink)

This article proposes that the propagation of vibrations could serve as a better model for understanding the transmission of affect than the flow, circulation or movement of bodies by which it is most often theorized. The vibrations (or idiomatically ‘vibes’) among the sound system audience (or ‘crowd’) on a night out on the dancehall scene in Kingston, Jamaica, provide an example. Counting the repeating frequencies of these vibrations in a methodology inspired by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis results in a Frequency Spectrogram. This (...) ranges from the sociocultural frequencies of nightly, weekly and seasonal cycles and circulations of musical style and fashion, to the material frequencies of the amplitudes and timbres of sound itself, with reggae’s signature low-pitched bass-line, to the corporeal frequencies of the flesh and blood of the dancehall ‘crowd’, pulsating with heartbeats and kinetic dance rhythms. The vibration model then addresses the intensities of affect in terms of auditory amplitudes, as with sonic dominance; feelings as frequencies; and the distinctive meaning of affect as timbre. This aims to encourage the radical impulse of the idea of affect to abandon the traditional envelope of the autonomous, self-consistent, rational individual. The meaning of affect is thus located in the ratio, proportions and patterning of vibrations, that is, outside the discourse of emotions or representation of feelings. (shrink)

This study draws on interviews with forty-nine members of a biomedical research community in the UK that is involved in negotiating data sharing and access. During an interview, an interviewee used the words “ethical moment” to describe a confrontation between collaborators in relation to data sharing. In this article, I use this as a lens for thinking about relations between “the conceptual and the empirical” in a way that allows both analyst and actor to challenge the status quo and consider (...) other ethical possibilities. Drawing on actor network theory, I approach “the empirical” using the concepts of controversy and ontological uncertainty as methodological tools to tackle the problem of ethics. I suggest that these concepts also provide a bridge for understanding the ontological structure of the virtual and the actual, as described in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. While other science and technology studies scholars have sought to draw on Deleuze, this article addresses the integration of ethics and empirical research. It arises as a critical reaction to existing treatments of this problem as found in empirical ethics, especially in the sociology of bioethics, and indirectly in ANT texts. (shrink)

This article contends that the central principle of modern philosophy is obscured by a side-debate between two opposed camps that are united in accepting a deeper flawed premise. Consider the powerful critiques of Kantian philosophy offered by Quentin Meillassoux and Bruno Latour, respectively. These two thinkers criticize Kant for opposite reasons: Meillassoux because Kant collapses thought and world into a permanent “correlate” without isolated terms, and Latour because Kant tries to purify thought and world from each other rather than realizing (...) that they are always combined in “hybrid” form. What both critiques tacitly accept is the notion that “thought” and “world” are the two major poles of the universe. I claim that this stems from the post-Cartesian assumption that thought and world are the two basic kinds of things that exist. The name “onto-taxonomy” is introduced for this view. (shrink)

In this article I examine how Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory allows us to offer a new challenge to the enlightenment categories of thought that have dominated archaeological thinking. The history of archaeological thought, whilst superficially a series of paradigm shifts, can be retold as arguments constructed within distinctions between ideas and materials, present and past, and culture and nature. At the heart of all of these has been the critical issue of representation, of how the gap between people and the world (...) can be bridged. In the last decade or so, however, archaeologists have begun to make a more significant challenge to these ideas, and have attempted to offer a critique of our enlightenment heritage that is ontologically, rather than epistemologically, inspired. Drawing on the manner in which assemblages allow for the vibrancy of matter, are non-anthropocentric, multiscalar and more-than-representational, this article argues that Deleuzian thought offers the best chance to rework our understanding of the past in this manner. This is explored through a case study of three scales of analysis of Neolithic Britain. (shrink)

Manuel DeLanda is one of the few admitted realists in present-day continental philosophy, a position he claims to draw from Deleuze. DeLanda conceives of the world as made up of countless layers of assemblages, irreducible to their parts and never dissolved into larger organic wholes. This article supports DeLanda’s position as a refreshing new model for continental thought. It also criticizes his movement away from singular individuals toward disembodied attractors and topological structures lying outside all specific beings. While endorsing DeLanda’s (...) realism, I reject his shift from the actual to the virtual. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, (...) transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality. (shrink)

The article combines the research strategies developed by Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann to problematize how we interpret the world when discussing globalization. Two previous approaches – global modernity and global consciousness – interpret the world as completely objective (nature transcends culture). Another approach – global governmentality – interprets the world as completely subjective (culture transcends nature). Against these approaches, this article proposes a new one: the symmetrical anthropology (or sociology) of globalization. Inspired by Latour’s variable ontologies, it considers multiple (...) descriptions of the world and multiple descriptions of society simultaneously. It considers globalization as one description of society and searches for the description of the world corresponding to it. It distinguishes three descriptions of the world: (1) the world as natural order; (2) the world as external object; and (3) the world as levels of organization. It is argued that the description of the world that is the most closely connected with globalization is the third one. (shrink)