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)

_Ideology_ draws on the social, political and cultural theory of Jurgen Habermas, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek in order to explore the possibility of developing a 'critical conception of ideology'. The book is concerned with two main themes: the relationship of ideology to the 'real' and the relationship between ideology and the 'ethical'. Although these three writers are often assumed to have little in common, Porter demonstrates a formal homology between them by showing that they all offer an idea of (...) critique that pivots around two central intuitions. Firstly, they insist that a substantive critical distinction can be drawn between the ideological and the real. And, secondly, Habermas, Deleuze and Žižek all offer an image of ideology critique that is importantly grounded on ethical terms. By engaging, among other things, with Habermas's sociological work on the public sphere, Žižek’s forays into popular culture, and Deleuze's analysis of political cinema, Ideology strives to concretely animate how each of these figures provide the critical tools necessary to challenge the kinds of ideological practice that pervade the contemporary social world. (shrink)

Does cinema express or engender political thought? Can we think of cinema, or certain specific cinematic texts, as bodies of political theory? In this paper I provide a positive response to such questions by arguing for a notion of, what I want to call, cinema as political critique. In order to make sense of this idea and render it more concrete, I will draw on fragments of the political theory of Jürgen Habermas and will discuss and give an analysis of (...) a popular and relatively recent Hollywood film: Gary Ross's Pleasantville . Reading Habermasian themes in and through Pleasantville, I will argue that this text can be seen as a concrete instance of political critique and, more particularly, as a form of political critique that ethically implies a certain conception of freedom. (shrink)

This volume examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics at the forefront of the philosophies espoused by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, especially in their famous collaborative works _Anti-Oedipus _ and _A Thousand Plateaus_. Robert Porter analyzes the relationship between art and socio-political life, considering the ways the aesthetic and political draw from each other. Particular attention is paid to how Deleuze and Guattari, in their belief that political theory can take on aesthetic form and vice-versa, forced us to confront (...) the fact that art always has the potential to become political, not in the least because of its ability to name and give shape to the order of our world, rather than its representation. (shrink)

Written by experts in their field, this Companion surveys the challenges and provocations raised by the major voices of poststructuralism: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Guattari, Kristeva, Irigaray, Barthes and Baudrillard. Thematically organised and clearly written, it will guide students and researchers in philosophy, literature, art, geography, politics, sociology, law, film and cultural studies around the nature and contemporary relevance of poststructuralism.

Drawing on Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, our initial focus in this article will be on the role of institutions within societies of control, an analysis which brings Deleuze into the orbit of Ervin Goffman’s famous ethnographic work on total institutions. This cross-comparative analysis of Deleuze and Goffman will allow us to show how institutions of control function by sequencing ‘dividuals’ across institutional domains in a continual process of totalization. Inspired by James Williams’s recent work on the ‘process philosophy of (...) signs’, we then argue that a critique of totalizing institutions can be positively articulated as a process-oriented challenge to algorithmic technologies and as a counter-sequencing of institutional control. We conclude with some reflections on the emergent modes of resistance that challenge both institutional and technological control, and we will proffer criteria for assessing such practices in relation to the two-sided nature of critique they enact, both processual and counter-sequential. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationship between art, politics and resistance by focusing on the following question: on what basis can artistic practices and practices of resistance become mutually sustainable as forms of resistance to ‘integrated world capitalism’? The question arises from understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s account of schizoanalysis as ‘an incomplete project’ (Buchanan) and from within current debates about the relationship between art, politics and resistance. We argue that current understandings of the art-politics relationship tend towards two dominant motifs: the (...) contributory and the constitutive. Although both of these approaches provide considerable insight into the increasing areas of overlap between art and politics they nonetheless run the risk of instituting a hierarchical relationship between art and politics. We propose instead that the common space of contemporary art and politics is defined precisely where artistic practices and practices of resistance meet. This is demonstrated through a schizoanalytic reading of Johnny’s famously rebellious question in The Wild One (1953): ‘Whaddaya got?’. We present a reading of this question as a call for immanent and singular (rather than transcendent and universal) forms of resistance. We argue that resistance understood as an immanent and singular intervention in the world is best expressed as a form of artistic practice, and only when expressed as a form of artistic practice will practices of resistance have the theoretical resources to sustain themselves. The article concludes with the claim that schizoanalytical method is the artistic practice of creating sustainable forms of resistance within integrated world capitalism. (shrink)

The key point of the book, ideally as well as practically, is to realize that there may be something potentially significant, and politically significant, in the very act of making such connections, of understanding the supposedly trite and trivial world of the everyday against a broader political backcloth.

The key point of the book, ideally as well as practically, is to realize that there may be something potentially significant, and politically significant, in the very act of making such connections, of understanding the supposedly trite and trivial world of the everyday against a broader political backcloth.

Occupying a space in-between conventional scholarship and imaginative storytelling, The University in Crumbs: A Register of Things Seen and Heard is an experimental work that dramatizes the everyday life of the academy.