Enacting Worlds Together: Art as Catalyst for Asemiotic Tentacular Geostories

In this chapter, the author's interest in Deleuze and Guattari is quite specific - the connection between Marx and theology in their work. The author engages in close critical commentary on a few extraordinary pages in A Thousand Plateaus called 'On Several Regimes of Signs’, as well as the plateau on the war machine, 'Treatise on Nomadology', which proposes to read as part of the chapter on regimes of signs. Through these two texts by Deleuze and Guattari, the author highlights an overriding concern with the patterns of resistance against despotism. Tribal pre-signifiers, with their segmented structures and expressive signs, are by no means the only form of external opposition as far as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned. Deleuze, Guattari and the author have trekked from the segmented tribe to the despotic state via the nomadic war-band.Keywords: despotic regime; Felix Guattari; Gilles Deleuze; nomads; tribal pre-signifiers

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When Gilles Deleuze, in his book on Michel Foucault, asks, ‘who would think of looking for life among the archives?’, he uncovers something particular to Foucault's philosophy, but also to his own: a commitment to the question of what it means to think, and think politically. Although Foucault and Deleuze, who first met in 1952, immediately felt fondness for each other, a growing animosity had settled into the friendship by the end of the 1970s – a rift deepened by theoretical differences. Notwithstanding these difficulties, Foucault and Deleuze shared a love for Nietzsche, as well as a curious fascination with Kant. Kant's influence, which was met with more opposition, is precisely the tension I tease out in this article, showing how Foucault critiques Kant's a priori through his own concept of the historical a priori, along with regularity and resistance, while Deleuze and Guattari, if more obliquely, critique Kant's a priori by further developing Foucault's notion of the historical a priori through their own method of pragmatics, particularly in three chapters of A Thousand Plateaus, namely ‘The Geology of Morals’, ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ and ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’. What I am interested in, then, is Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of redundancy, a concept mentioned seventy times in A Thousand Plateaus. Although not one of their main or most developed concepts, redundancy is a thread that can be traced back to Deleuze's first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity. Moreover, their more developed concepts, for example the diagram, the abstract machine, becoming, micro-politics and the ritornello, as well as their political philosophy, are grounded in their understanding of redundancy, which moves their philosophy beyond mapping out the conditions of possibility (Kant) and demonstrating that the historical a priori emerges as a contingent function of its own expression (Foucault) to the genesis of thought.

This essay juxtaposes concepts created by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari with worlds imagined by Ursula Le Guin in a performance of ‘rhizosemiotic play’ that explores some possible ways of generating and sustaining what William Pinar calls ‘complicated conversation’ within the regime of signs that constitutes an increasingly internationalized curriculum field. Deleuze and Guattari analyze thinking as flows or movements across space. They argue, for example, that every mode of intellectual inquiry needs to account for the plane of immanence upon which it operates—the preconceptual field presupposed by the concepts that inquiry creates. Curriculum inquiry currently operates on numerous nationally distinctive planes of immanence. I argue that the internationalization of curriculum studies should not presume a singular transnational plane of immanence but, rather, envisage a process performed by curriculum scholars with the capacities and competencies to change planes—to move between one plane of immanence and another and/or to transform their own planes. My essay is a ‘narrative experiment’ that takes seriously Deleuze’s argument that a work of philosophy should be, in part, a kind of science fiction, and also takes inspiration from Le Guin’s science fictional stories of ‘changing planes’ to generate productive and disruptive transnational agendas in curriculum inquiry.

In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated. To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control. Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.

This article attends to the collaborative project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and specifically to their concept of “probe‐head” as mapped out in A Thousand Plateaus. Probe‐head names the rupturing of, and production of alternative modes of organisation to, the mixed semiotic of faciality that determines much of our lived life, in fact that constitutes us as “human”. In exploring this alternative “production of subjectivity” the essay attends also to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “several regimes of signs”, and to the idea of an experimental “pragmatics” of living. The essay goes on to map out what might be called two operating terrains of probe‐heads, in fact two different “times” of the contemporary – the past and the future – and looks at how these might be deployed against the impasses of the present. As far as the latter goes the essay looks at case studies of myth/modern paganism and contemporary art production.

Jack and the Signifying Machines______ David Crandall I hope there's an animal out there nobody's everfound. And I hope nobodyfinds it. — Wendell Berry, quoting his daughter1 Undecideable Questions Let's talk about Jack. Little old Jack: cute Jack, backward Jack, JungJack , Disney-Jack, Chase-Jack, Jack the unbeliever, Jack the lovable sociopath. That little terror of the mountains. A number of questions spring to mind. These are familiar: Who is he? What is the real, authentic essence ofJack? What do we mean when we say "authentic," and who says it? What constitutes "creativity" in folk traditions? Where does Jack gofrom here? Does he need to be rescued? From whom? And so forth. One of the problems with these questions is that they are, in the form they are posed, undecideable. The answer depends on what you want from the answer. Aperforming folk-teller, a tenured scholar from North Carolina, an untenured one from California, a collector at the Smithsonian or a filmmaker may all give different answers. Would we like it if the answers were all the same? Further, an answer arrived at in one discipline will always be redundant with the assumptions and goals of that discipline. Whoever preaches, preaches to the choir. Different preachers, different choirs. Jack himself would roll his eyes and head for the road—which is, after all, where the action is. "Where the action is" is, I believe, a great place to start. Because the point I want to make is that the story of Jack is best understood as a pragmatics of Jack: whether they're archetypal, Freudian, German or Scots, one quality the tales have in common is that they've been around for a long while, and they've been around for a reason. There's something useful in the tradition; it does something, or even a whole set of things. Of course, Jack can be taken and used for things—that's been proven: a number of careers can attest to that. But that's notwhat I mean. 1 Farming: A Hand Book (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971). 29 The tales do things, a number of things. Now you Jungians may be nodding your heads, but I'm sorry, you'll have to get your own grant (or better, read Joyce Hancock's Jungian treatment of a Jack tale in this journal). I'm talking about the tradition as a body of indirect discourse, its interaction with various regimes ofsigns, its capacity for lines offlight. In other words, I'm interested in its existence as a rhizome. That cluster of jargon brings me to my major source for this discussion, other than the tales themselves and associated background material.3 In the aftermath of the 1968 revolutionary movements in Europe, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychiatrist Felix Guattari wrote A Thousand Plateaus.11 It is part of a larger work, Capitalism and Schizophreniaf that undertakes to create a new descriptive language, a pragmatics that matches the complexity of interlocking systems— physical, cultural, political, economic—which produce the reality we live in. It's a maddeningbook—reading it canbe like forcing your head through a shrub—but the insight it offers is worth the scrapes. First, we should look at some terms Deleuze and Guattari have coined in creating their new language. Rhizome The central image in Deleuze and Guattari's book is the rhizome. G? botany, this term refers to underground, root-like lateral stems that can sprout either leaves or roots. Deleuze and Guattari generalize this term to refer to a complex structure of rhizome-like, polyvalent connections, and more generally still to the sort of network botanical rhizomes give rise to. Another coinage is the adjective rhizomatic to 2 "'Raglif Jaglif Teetartlif Pole/ A Folk Myth," AH vol. 15 no. 2 (Spring 1987): 27-45. 3 One source I found especially helpful is William Bernard McCarthy's Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 4 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 5 A Thousand Plateaus is the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The...

Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Struggle in Education is less than modest: it attempts to become a critical attempt to rearticulate critical theory and reformulate the possibilities of current critical education. By the time of the publication of this book I already felt it was less of a summary and more of a departure to a new beginning. A gate to a new path which, while remaining true to the initial inspiration that gave birth to critical theory and its educational fruits, would be brave enough to face unavoidable questions that currently demand our courage: what has gone wrong with critical education? Does greater alethea await us in what the post-structuralist educational alternatives hide from us? And what does this closure tell us about human existence and its (counter-) educational telos in the omnipotent dullness of the present historical moment? In this book I tried to articulate the origin of the fantastic optimism which in modernity was adjunct to the project of the human-killing-God-each-moment-anew and the deification of humanity as a manifestation of the overcoming of the quest to return ‘‘home’’ to nothingness. My goal was to address the impetus of critical education, from within the current process of deconstruction of its preconditions, master signifiers, and, more importantly, its Eros. This birth-giving fire was actualized historically and individually in the framework of the Enlightenment’s project in two very different prisms and strivings: (1) Overcoming the imperatives of determinism by devoting its spirit to a commitment to a new kind of transcending holiness. (2) Striving to surrender to meaninglessness, sometime ecstatic surrender to the invitation to return ‘‘home’’—to the ‘‘harmony’’ of nothingness or to the glorious return of the Gnostic God from its exile. Its most common modern manifestation is the Utopia of consensus, synthesis, or the ideal of a just, free and solidarian society. These are the two strongest suggestive wings of the hospitality of modern education as the loyal servant of the ‘‘home-returning’’ striving. Historically, humanist critical education was explicitly committed to a grand refusal to the ‘‘home-returning’’ hospitality, which enabled, justified and did its best to ornament and reproduce hierarchical social relations, dogmas and enslaving/meaning-birth-giving mysterium. As a substitute it offered a critique of the traditional ‘‘home-returning’’ prisms

Does culture need genes?

In the introduction to part one of this special issue we addressed the thorny question of whether an anthropological theory of value is needed or indeed possible at all. By way of a Socratic debate, we argued respectively for one of two opposite positions. Ton Otto suggested that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory and he was in favor of bringing the papers together from a “history of ideas” perspective, thereby tracing how the authors’ varied perspectives and approaches to questions of value advanced particular—and easily specified—trends in social theory. Rane Willerslev, to the contrary, proposed that anthropology is an ethnographically driven discipline, which can only produce idiosyncratic “antitheories” of value. In Willerslev’s view, anthropologists are and should be, primarily, warriors of the periphery—that is, “guerrilla warriors,” using indigenous conceptual productions as tactics to fight dominant theoretical traditions. The debate reflects an underlying disagreement, which runs through the collection of articles themselves, about the place of anthropology in relation to other disciplines and, in particular, whether anthropology is primarily theory-driven or ethnography-driven, and whether or not these two abstractions (“theory” and “ethnography”) can be reconciled. This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions about what value means for anthropological practice by considering how anthropologists engage with their field sites and projects via critique and collaboration.

Raymond Williams’ work on television as a cultural form offers a theoretical basis for overcoming technological determinism in the study of the Internet. The Internet in China exerts social and political influences through the cultural forms it enables and then only when these forms respond to the human condition. Chinese Internet culture consists of new cultural forms that emerge out of the interactions between Internet and society and that are the products of both cultural tradition and innovation.

Creativity is considered one of the skills crucial for 21 Century to face the challenges proposed by the 2030 education agenda (Frey & Osborne 2013; OECD, 2018 , Reimers & Chung 2019) . In our reading, active methodologies such as project-based learning and design thinking are often seen as fundamental in favoring creativity together oriented towards individual, social, and planetary well-being (UN, 2022). A persistent problem for the training of 21st century skills, in which creativity, intellectual openness and computational thinking are essential in teacher training, is the adherence to cognitivist foundations and conventional methodologies. The traditional cognitivism has reduced the notion of creativity in processes and products. In our proposal, we want to redirect the question about what happens in the head (process) or in the world that makes people creative (world), rather, we invite creativity to be considered as a skillful experience embedded in a context and that arises from sensorimotor engagement and distributed perception (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991; Hutchins 1995; Kalaydjian et al 2022) .

Two-way communication, participation in creating and sharing content on the Internet and complete human experience enabled in cyberspace or social media affected the emergence of a new form of culture – real virtuality. Social power transforms and moves to cyberspace. The Internet became the most democratic medium and a framework for updating information on various problems and planning actions in order to solve them. This sets up new aspects of resistance and social organizing. The Internet is a powerful technological weapon, and if used in responsible and proper manner, it can be a meaningful instrument to achieve social changes. This research paper thus investigates social networks as tools to achieve social changes, or means for communication and organization of protests, and in broader sense tools for activism. Beside theoretical background and examples of social networks usage for the purpose of protest coordination and organization and communication among activists, such as Arabian Spring and Occupy Wall Street, this paper presents a case study of the Facebook group Anonymous Hrvatska, which was used to organise a couple of protests in Croatia but which did not achieve much attention. The aim of this research paper is primarily to get deeper insight in the role that social networks play in social movements. Next we try to answer whether social networks are just communication tools for organizing protests or whether they even can be catalysts for changes. Furthermore, the goal is to

The article is based on an interdisciplinary approach by bringing methodological strategies philosophical and historical scientific knowledge, grounded methodological principles of human understanding of the phenomenon in historical and cultural studies. It is shown that the problem of man has always appeared to philosophy, philosophical anthropology (NA Berdyaev, Buber M., A. Gehlen, W. Dilthey, G. Plesner, M. Shelyer et al.) And almost all the areas of philosophy of the twentieth century, among them – a philosophy of life, and ekzystentsionalizm personalism, psychoanalysis and neofreydizm, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism (E. Durkheim, M. Moss, B. Malinowski, Margaret Mead, L. Levy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, E. Taylor, J. Frazer, Freud, Erich Fromm, V. Frankl, V. Turner, Piaget, J. Huizinga, Sartre, E. Cassirer, Foucault et al.). Cultural Studies as an interdisciplinary, integrative research area of knowledge can be represented among modern anthropological studies in the humanities with their own interdisciplinary matrix in which the human problem arises from the standpoint of understanding the value created by its semantic content-the evolution of spiritual and cultural forms. It is noted that the search for new, appropriate to the current state of scientific knowledge, methodologies are a sign of all areas of modern humanities. This process describes the dynamics of the modern and cultural knowledge, as discussed in the works of contemporary domestic and foreign researchers (O. Astaf'eva, M. Alexandrova, P. Bogucki, M. Brovko, P. Herchanivska, P. Huryevych, M.. Kagan, V. Levin, V. Rozin, S. Nyeryetina, A. Flier et al.). Based on the analysis of the conceptual foundations of problems in the history and theory of culture scientists developed the foundations of cultural knowledge as the methodology of individual cultural phenomena, and integral stages in the development of artistic and historical process. Organic interdependence of human communication and culture are the subject of reflection kulturfilosofskoyi thoughts as always konstytuyuvalasya culture in human history as a phenomenon, which is a generalized diverse form of ownership rights to the world. Given the interdisciplinary of cultural studies, as well as taking a statement that it, along with philosophy of history is the most old and often interpenetrating sciences, in the bosom of which was born the cultural opinion, the article made reference to cognitive strategies have produced philosophical and historical knowledge. From the standpoint of philosophical reflection on the relation of man and culture, there are three levels of interaction: hands-on, practical and intellectual, spiritual and theoretical. Bottom level is found in the creation of a real man of his second nature – cultural objects and processes and in the same real creation of human culture; practical and spiritual level opryyavnyuyetsya in mythological, religious and artistic understanding of human culture, just as she vividly interprets the natural and social life; spiritual and theoretical level realized in the study of human culture and human culture – the existential consciousness, as well as different types of knowledge – philosophy, a religion and more. Thus, all three levels of human communication and culture manifested bilateral – man creates culture and culture creates man Involvement in the context of cultural studies and methodological approaches of historical knowledge it provides a conceptual understanding of how the relationship between the present and the past that meets the requirements of the deep cultural and scientific thought of today. Historical research provides a scientific reconstruction of history. For these reconstructions characteristic: the reliance on historical facts and historical material; use for historical explanation means and instruments of various human sciences – sociology, psychology, semiotics and, indeed, culture. In terms of the methodology of cultural knowledge and new understanding becomes itself a historical fact, as history taught as a set of events and the facts alone, on which the whole historical science, but based on the study of events, situations and forms in their not clever, and the usual, ordinary, trivial terms that inherent in their cultural science reading. Taken in such a historical fact appears as an important cultural phenomenon, the interpretation of which can detect the features of the historical dynamics of culture and the implementation of social life as an individual and entire community. Particular importance is the question of the expansion of cultural studies their subject areas, all of which are based on an integrated approach allows to solve problems systematically and structural generalization test material to identify functional parameters and semantically universal culture, as well as identifying specific features and peculiarities of Ukrainian culture.

This essay explores the possibility of a narrative theology of culture by drawing on the trinitarian metaphysics of Robert W. Jenson. Postliberal or narrative theologies have often been said to hinder the intercultural translation of the gospel by promoting the cultural forms of Western Christianity as the ideal, but I argue here that Jenson’s theology (enlisting some distinctively postliberal themes) creates a critical distance between the church and Christian civilization, while also enabling the free creation and expression of diverse cultural expressions of the gospel. The first section of the paper is a critical project, using a trinitarian metaphysics to rule out any reduction of Christian culture to its Western expressions. Since the community of the Trinity is the one cultural form to which God’s people strive, and because the church’s full participation in this community is eschatological, Christian cultural expression cannot be reduced to one particular cultural form. This creates distance between the church and the world, preventing a strict identification of Christianity with Western culture. The second part of the paper then offers a constructive project, demonstrating how a trinitarian understanding of creaturely freedom enables the development of human culture. By grounding creation’s freedom in the freedom of the triune persons, a trinitarian metaphysics enables the free and loving development of creation in an infinite number of ways. In doing so, Jenson’s metaphysics does not compromise the diversity of human cultures, but instead allows human cultures to flourish in their endless variety.