Revisiting Guattari's visits to Japan in the 1980s during the country's ‘bubble economy’, this paper investigates from a personal perspective the Radio Homerun mini-FM station as well as other stops on Guattari's Tokyo ‘pilgrimage’. Guattari's reception and influence in Japan is contextualised through the writer Kõbõ Abe and philosopher Kiyoteru Hanada, in addition to the groundbreaking work of Tetsuo Kogawa, against the backdrop of the rise of postmodernism. Similarities between Guattari's sense of Japan and Brazil are then broached.

We adventure becomings-Merry Pranksters with Félix Guattari on Ken Kesey's magic bus to resonate the group's transversality that we already affect subjunctively, individually and plurally from which our subjectivities crystallise collectively and independently with intensive-extensions to go viscerallectric and fractalactic. Yet in-process, before our consciousnesses go motored, we swim with jet streams of both Guattari and transversal poetics to navigate subjective affects by which wilful parameterisations achieve desirable eventualisations.

This paper examines Guattari's notion of transversality through a creative and ambiguous form of political intervention, the performative encounter. Drawing from Guattari's work on subject groups, in combination with Deleuze's conjunctive ‘and’, via contemporary theorisations of creative activism and affect, it maps out a movement that destabilises categorical dualisms between activists and non-activists, artists and non-artists. It proposes that transversals such as those enacted by the performative encounter open spaces for the emergence of new subjectivities, relations and worlds. In doing (...) so it critically extends Guattari's conceptualisations of political organisation, group subjectivation and aesthetics into radical political terrains that are antagonistic of the nation-state and capital at the same time as being affirmative of possible present and future conditions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to give an account of a methodological link between drama and political theory. This account is drawn primarily from the early philosophical work of Deleuze. Following Deleuze, we will refer to it as ‘the method of dramatization’. We will argue that dramatization is a method aimed at determining the quality of political concepts by ‘bringing them to life’, in the way that dramatic performances bring to life the characters and themes of a play-script. We (...) demonstrate that this can be specified in relation to the development of this method in Deleuze's early philosophical work as a practical, critical and artistic method and, in relation to the ontological assumptions he articulated and defended in Difference and Repetition, as a process of intensification of the Idea of the political. By way of example, we discuss how the dramatization of the concept of ideology functions in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. We conclude with some lines of inquiry that could be pursued by political theorists looking to investigate further the dramatic nature of method in political theory. (shrink)

The is a possibility to expand the theoretical understandings behind the social construction of technology (SCOT). By reconfiguring the processes of modelization involved in SCOT, metamodelization will admit the subpolitics involved in SCOT and expand the cosmopolitical and ecological awareness involved in our model-making activities. This essay contests the politics of SCOT in order to increase its theoretical richness and acceptability to broader audiences.

In taking up Deleuze's differential diagnosis by observing Masoch's literary practice and extracting his libidinal principles of imperatives, contracts, fetishism and rituals, I demonstrate Deleuzian libidinal symptomatology as a specific semiotics in the service of schizoanalysis. I shall argue that in Masoch the schizoanalytic curettage of the unconscious is executed as schizoid waiting where the fleeting outer symptoms of pain–pleasure reveal the masochist's desired inner splitting of the senses.Several critical-clinical inroads to the schizoanalytic project can be envisaged. Initially, Masoch's visionary (...) concept of sexualised world history is supported by his strategic move to the law of the oral mother, yet then extended by Deleuze's concept of (inter)maternal symbolic which speculates on the fantasised rebirth of a sexless or hermaphroditic man. Finally, the parodic enactment of eros and thanatos functions as technique of dialectical disguise within the masochist's scheme of practising libidinal liberation.Masochism considered as a state of bodily experimentation which turns the oedipal law upside down, emerges as a distinct literary genre in Deleuzian aesthetics. (shrink)

Transversality occupies a central place in Guattari's thought, appearing in his early writings on institutional analysis and on through to his final work, Chaosmosis. Transversality is thus particularly pertinent to understanding Guattari's critique of semiocapitalism and his goal of re-imagining forms of institutional subjectivisation as a way to free the unconscious from structures of lack and the desire for punishment, the very structures upon which capitalism relies for its reproduction. If there is one institution that has taken advantage of semiocapitalism's (...) ability to mask its role in the reproduction of capitalist subjectivity, however, it is the contemporary neoliberal University. This essay thus brings transversality to bear upon the question of the University in semiocapitalism, focusing on the discourses that speak in defence of the humanities. Though defences of the humanities are intended to argue for the humanities’ usefulness in contemporary society, transversality exposes such discourses as the speech of a ‘subjugated group’ whose only effect is to reinforce existing structures of lack and punishment. (shrink)

This essay looks at Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz to trace the film's transformation of a mechanistic scientific discourse into affective indeterminacy. Through patterns of repetition of a key event, the film considers its protagonist as a complex web of constantly shifting forces – a network of biological, social, political and semiotic flows coalescing in a body that exists in a state of perpetual oscillation between force and mutilation, ecstasy and pain. The role of physics and other materialist discourses in the film (...) is thus not to fixate subjectivity, but rather to provide a passage into its affective transformations and the intense desubjectification that results. (shrink)

In his books on the cinema, Gilles Deleuze describes the sign as an expression of semiotic matter. Importantly, expression is a process whereby semiotic matter is molded into form, but this process is not rightfully guided by any structure transcendent to semiotic matter itself. It is the result of matter’s self-modulation. Using an early essay of Deleuze’s called ‘How do we recognize structuralism?’, I take a closer look at the cinema books and unpack exactly what is involved in the process (...) of expression, and the implications of expression for established ideas of the sign and meaning in semiotics. (shrink)

How often does an interest or pleasure in your life become something that has to be managed, given a hierarchical position amongst other tasks, and thus becomes a chore alongside other chores? When content and possibility are stripped by scheduling and the demands of capitalist required labour mean that free play or time required for speculative and/or creative thought is removed in the interests of deadlines, what happens to the compassionate, generous and intimate functioning of thought and life? This paper (...) considers how Guattari argues that subjectivities are produced and organised by what he describes as machinic assemblages. Machinic assemblages are those aspects of life that operate to regulate the affective powers of life. Guattari's work on activities such as art making, game play, music and performance provides ways to consider the labour of subjectivity outside of work. I ask the reader to consider what the notion and motivation for play signal. Arguing that a singular life at play is the collective event of play, I describe play as a mediatising form for the production of subjectivity. The play field situates and directs the machinic assemblage of subjectivation through its own forms of mediatisation. (shrink)

The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as metaphysics was perhaps integrally ‘onto-theology,’ that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that (...) Heidegger is the ‘last universally recognised philosopher’, provides the means for a radical reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself. (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)

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition , he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze (...) was also well-known for a number of important monographs he published in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), as well as for his writings on the various arts, which include a two- volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a monograph on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays on literature. Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991). (shrink)

If only everything were formed of neat laminar flows, with easy to understand conditions, and determinable outcomes: there would be no risk to manage out, messy inconsistencies and uncertainties to disrupt well-laid out plans. Things are not so clear-cut however. Indeed, as scientists, poets and philosophers of science have pointed out it is under conditions of nondeterminism and complexity that everything comes into being. There is an issue, then, when creative disciplines in particular find such complexity problematic enough to design (...) systems and models in which uncertainty, disruption and aleatory collisions are if not destroyed, then dampened. We wonder: what might become of a creative practice that championed its encounter with The Swerve, Lucretius's clinamen? This article examines the role, value and applicability of the concept of collision to design. It takes a philosophical approach to examining this concept and mapping the possibilities of its use in design. We will argue using concepts mainly from Lucretius and Serres – but also Deleuze and others – that collision is an important aspect of all creativity, and that there would be nothing were it not for collisions, disruptive deviation and swerves from equilibrium. The aim will be to articulate the conditions for the possibility of designing that is a 'fan of collisions'. (shrink)