Deleuzian Concept Research Articles

The Regulator Regulated: A Genealogy of the Pakistani Broadcast Media and its State of ‘Double Capture’ in the Post-Musharraf Era

This article traces a genealogy of regulatory and other tactics through which the Pakistani broadcast media is controlled, comparing the colonial context of the development of these tactics with the postcolonial circumstances of their re-deployment. Archival research into the East India Company’s documents from the turn of the nineteenth century uncovers the development of regulatory regimes referred to as Censorship, Self-Regulation, and Licensing, in addition to extra-legal techniques. The article argues that colonial tactics still form key components of Pakistan’s postcolonial broadcast regulations. However, in the past, one regime was replaced by another in a linear progression; today these regulatory techniques appear concomitantly stacked, selectively deployable and enfolded within an expanding array of extralegal techniques. The article seeks to move beyond conceptions of ‘regulatory capture’ or ‘media capture’ by applying the Deleuzian concept of ‘double capture’: in the case of the Pakistani broadcast media, the government regulator (and to some extent the government itself) is captured by ‘media power’ in the same instance that the media assemblage itself becomes subject to ‘state capture’ through extralegal means. Part one focuses on the decades when the colonial state first regulated newsprint (1780–1823), tracing the development from extralegal controls to a succession of legal regulations through which Company administrators could regulate – rather than be regulated by – colonial newsprint. Part two considers the paradoxical situation in Pakistan’s contemporary broadcast regulations (2002–2018), where PEMRA seems powerless to regulate the media, yet the media is subject to a ‘double capture’ through a combination of legal and extralegal modes of control.

‘Becoming-with’ a repeat healthy volunteer: Managing and negotiating trust among repeat healthy volunteers in commercial clinical drug trials

Recent sociological research has raised important sociological and ethical questions about the role of financial rewards in terms of healthy volunteer involvement in clinical trials. Research suggests that it would be parochial to assume financial rewards alone are sufficient to explain repeat healthy volunteering. This paper explores other factors that might explain repeat healthy volunteering behaviours in phase I clinical drug trials. Drawing on qualitative research with healthy volunteers, the paper argues that while healthy volunteers make rational decisions to take part in drug trials, understanding how they become repeat volunteers requires considering varied relationships and networks involved. Drawing on Deleuze's concept of ‘event’ and ‘becoming-with’, the paper illustrates the relational, processual and embodied nature of trust in repeat healthy volunteer involvement in clinical drug trials. The paper concludes that repeat healthy volunteering is a constant flux of negotiating trust and mistrust. The paper contributes to sociological debates about trust and public engagement with technological innovations to illustrate trust among healthy volunteers as processual and changeable.

Фрэггинг: Распыление и собирание лирического субъекта в поэзии Александра Скидана

For much of the twentieth century, Russian literary scholarship on lyric subjectivity was impeded by its isolation from global philosophical thought, which was, at the time, reconsidering the very category of the subject. In the twenty-first century, as researchers have begun to bridge this gap, their efforts have been paralleled by the work of certain poets who themselves explicitly appeal to current world philosophy in their writings. The poetry of Aleksandr Skidan (b. 1965), who relies directly on Deleuzian concepts in his understanding of the nature of the “I,” linking his poems intertextually to the works of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben, offers particular interest for researchers of subjectivity in contemporary Russian poetic texts. Skidan’s “ragged” writing, in which heavily fragmented language coincides with the recurrent theme of bodily dismemberment, articulating in this manner an analytical discourse of trauma, may be described as a form of “fragging” – the subversion of discursive cohesiveness that scholars in the United States have attributed to American poetry of the Vietnam War era. The unique innovation of Skidan’s poetics of fragging derives from its intertextual elements, including foreign-language interpolations. In his poetry, Skidan explores the multilevel disintegration of the text as an active practice that ultimately works towards the reestablishment of the authority of the subject.

Cognition, Domination and Complexity: A Speculative Outline of Intersections Between Cognitive Activity and Structures of Control, and their Relation to Dynamics of Complexity and Simplicity

It’s a relatively common observation that the conquest of political regimes and the “promethean” expansion of human knowledge have important tendencies in common; both knowledge and political conquest are expressions of a “will to power.” This paper seeks to analyze what some of these specific tendencies are by using certain conceptual models as tools to carry out this analysis. But rather than focusing on the historical unfolding of this will to power, this paper attempts to analyze the way in which it is expressed at different ontological levels; specifically, at the levels of matter, cognition, and conceptualization, respectively. The aforementioned conceptual “models” used in this analysis are the Deleuzian concept of “stratification,” and a certain notion of “complexity,” which could also be understood as “organization.” Stratification is understood as the particular process that facilitates complexity and organization, while complexity is understood in terms of its capacity to produce higher-order “unities” or “simplicities.” The idea of this relation between complexity and simplicity is taken from complexity theory and chaos theory. Regarding the specific topic of political regimes, this paper uses Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Society of Control” as an example of how concepts themselves are an integral part of these regimes, in that they are not merely implemented, but, rather, are “incarnated” through them.

Rethinking Critique: Becoming Clinician

Today, capitalism functions as a very complex tool of colonisation capturing our desires, dreams, and putting life itself at risk. Its effects lead us all to times of extreme anxiety increasing the number of people with mental health problems. This paper is concerned with the question of ‘critique’ within this context. How can critical legal scholarship engage with a theoretical mode that allows us to confront the politics of law with today’s capitalism? This analysis shows that contemporary capitalism, which operates as an immanent desiring-machine, is investing in our unconscious. In this sense, we aim to rethink the idea of ‘critique’ as an opportunity to make it creative and effective. As such, this paper argues that the Deleuzian concept Critical and Clinical is particularly useful, as it opens new roots for the critical movement. Taking the literary strategy of Masochism and the experience of the Institutional Psychotherapy movement in France, the clinical–critical practice contributes to push and expand critical scholarship into new terrains of thought and practice.

A Posthumanist Perspective on Caring in Early Childhood Teaching

Caring occupies a contested space in early childhood teaching. Caring is valued as crucial to children’s physical and emotional wellbeing but, at the same time, it is undervalued as separate from education and more difficult to measure. This article argues for reconceptualising care as complex, dynamic, problematic, political, and assembled in affective flows among human and other-than-human components. Concepts from writing of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari are used in a concept-as-method approach using a vignette from a research study of emotions in early childhood teaching. Rhizoanalysis involves mapping affective flows at the same time as tracing constraints within assemblages as means to critique and innovate from within entanglements of an early childhood setting. A cartographic approach using Deleuzian concepts of sense, paradox, and nonsense is used to explore how language expresses sense of caring beyond what can be denoted, manifested, or signified in statements by an early childhood teacher.

Spatial media and cycling spaces: A theory of coded attractors

This paper contributes to the literature on the digital geographies of cycling and everyday mobility by further examining the ways that spatial media have become embedded in the riding practices of amateur road cyclists. Road cycling offers a useful case study for examining the complexity of these relations because it is a primarily mobile practice that unfolds across multiple spaces, all of which may be contextually mediated by people, technologies, and environments in various ways. Using empirical evidence taken from an ethnographic study exploring the impacts of spatial media in an amateur road‐cycling club, the paper demonstrates why geographers could pay more attention to the sociomaterial assemblages of leisure spaces. The paper complicates the notion that cycling is simply mediated, tracked, and datafied by digital technologies, by arguing that cycling spaces are mediated by a multiplicity of socio‐material modulations. Adapting the Deleuzian concept of attractors, the paper demonstrates how spatial media can be conceptualised as a form of “coded attractor,” which competes with other socio‐material attractors to transduce and shape the spaces and practices of cycling. It is argued that this theoretical approach could be applied by geographers and others seeking alternative theoretical perspectives on studies of spatial media and everyday mobility.

Conflict Kitchen and Enemy Kitchen: Socially Engaged Food Pedagogy

In this article, we examine food-engaged art practice and its artistic and pedagogical possibilities. First, we describe the precedents of socially engaged food art practices and provide a detailed account of Conflict Kitchen and Enemy Kitchen, from which we envision new pedagogical possibilities to embrace food and cooking as socially engaged art. In the second part of the study, we discuss the two kitchens through Deleuzian concepts such as nomadism, agencément, and becoming-others, to explore and encourage a shift from the pedagogy of being to the pedagogy of becoming. We argue that art educators pay attention to the becoming pedagogy as a rhizomatic, transforming, and unresting status of socially engaged learning, challenging the being pedagogy of the structured, goals-oriented, and standard-based learning.

Critique of zeroness: understanding Deleuze’s (mis)understanding of Peirce

This article aims to explore the relation between Deleuze and Peirce, from what seems to be the main point of confrontation between them: Deleuze's statement that there would be a zeroness before Peirce's firstness. Specifically, the aim is to criticize this statement in two ways: an exogenous one, based on the critique of Deleuze's understanding of Peirce's work; another endogenous, based on Deleuze's own concepts and comments. The hypothesis is that there is no a deep conceptual divergence. The key to understand this statement lies in how Deleuze’s limited knowledge on Peirce's theory led him to frame firstness into his own philosophical work and to disregard a Peircian concept that would be more adequate than zeroness.

Walking in rhythm with Deleuze and a dog inside the classroom: being and becoming well and happy together.

This paper plateau describes children’s interspecies relation with a classroom canine, utilising posthumanism, post-structuralism and new materialism as its research paradigm and methodology. Once feelings are cognitised or articulated, their true essence can be lost. Therefore, elucidating moment-to-moment child–dog interactions through the lens of affect theory attempts to materialise the invisible, embodied, ‘unthought’ and non-conscious experience. Through consideration of Deleuzian concepts such as the ‘rhizome’ and ‘Body-without-Organs’ being enacted it illuminates new, ‘situated knowledge’. This is explicated and revealed using visual methods with ‘data’ produced by both, the children and their classroom dog such as photographs and video footage mounted on the dogs harness, from a GoPro micro camera. In addition, individual drawings, artefacts and paintings completed by the children are profound points in the research process, which are referred to as ‘plateaus’. These then become emergent as a children’s comic book where their relationship with ‘Dave’, their classroom dog is materialised. Through their interspecies relationship both child and dog exercise agency, co-constitute and transform one another and occupy a space of shared relations and multiple subjectivities. The affectual capacities of both child and dog also co-create an affective atmosphere and emotional spaces. Through ethnographic, participant observation and the ‘researcher’s body’ as a tool, they visually create illustrations through the sketching of ‘etudes’ (drawing exercises) to draw forth this embodied experience to reveal multiple lines and entanglements, mapping a landscape of interconnections and relations.

Thinking space differently: Deleuze's Möbius topology for a theorisation of the encounter

The relation between difference and space has long been and continues to be an animating problem in theoretical and political conversations across the discipline of geography, including in much recent work on encounter. In this paper, we make the case for the value of a less explored angle on space in Deleuze's work, which we call the topologies of space‐as‐difference. We highlight the Möbius strip as a central figure in his ontological system, and we show the significance of this topological structure both for understanding key Deleuzian concepts, such as the virtual and actual, and for understanding space and difference in productive ways. We demonstrate this by showing how Deleuzian topologies of difference enable us to further theorise the encounter – a key theme in recent geographical scholarship – as spatial and embodied, connecting up with material feminism and work on the skin, touch, and breath. We suggest that Deleuze's concept of space‐as‐difference thus contributes to the intensification of relational and topological approaches to space that are currently shaping the discipline.

Assemblages, routines, and social justice research in community archaeology

ABSTRACTArchaeologists often perceive community archaeology as an inclusive space where the presence of multiple voices drawn into this space through a shared interest in recovering and understanding the past broadens the discourse of archaeology and related heritage. While this work provides access for diverse stakeholders, certain routines seem embedded that limit the potential for community archaeology to produce something new. I suggest that rethinking the point of engagement, by shifting it from stakeholders to the discursive assemblages that cohere as stakeholders come together, allows for a deeper ethnographic reading of the engaging communities and the possibility that they will learn about others as well as themselves. The approach I describe draws from Gilles Deleuze's concept of transcendental empiricism, such that what we do in becoming engaged, even in the most routine way, requires consistently analysing how those we engage with come into view and why they become open to collaboration.

Past, Passivity, Passion: Deleuze's Allegorical Drama

This article offers a rhetorical analysis of Deleuze's concept of the past, understood not as a modification of the present but as a pre-predicative, non-subjective articulation of time. Focusing on the discussion of the three passive syntheses of time in Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, it traces the continuity between past, passivity and passion across Deleuze's body of work in an effort not only to remark on the conceptual resonances between them, but, more importantly, to examine the figural and formal choices that codify those resonances, and to some extent over-determine them – in particular, Deleuze's recourse to allegory and tragic form. Though the past is constituted as a primordial component of time, it already exceeds itself in the passivity of that constitutive moment, of that originary gesture by which it is first committed to historical experience. The process is rendered in dramatic terms: Habitus and Mnemosyne (Habit and Memory; Present and Past) are first pitted against each other – respectively, as the origin of time and its ground. They are then overthrown by an unnamed third element ‘which subordinates the other two to itself’ and opens the whole to infinity. The article thematises the significance of the past within this allegorical drama, develops the character, and draws out the temporal structures encoded in Deleuze's figurations.

A Deleuzian rethinking of time in healthy lifestyle advice and change

AbstractTime is a powerful but under‐examined element in healthy lifestyle advice, particularly in the promise of stable states of future health achievable through sustained lifestyle change. But such linear, sequential time frames reinforce notions of rational choice, personal control, and responsibility despite common experiences of diet and exercise regimens as non‐linear, effortful, and difficult to maintain. An over‐simplification of time thus contributes to the logic of blame when people fail to achieve healthy lifestyle goals, producing spoiled health identities and abject bodies as people struggle to sustain what can be unsustainable. Addressing these problems, we argue that Deleuze's philosophy offers tools to develop an alternative approach in health promotion. Deleuze affords a conceptualisation of multidimensional, embodied, and affective temporalities of health, which give rise to plural subjectivities and disrupt linear models of time. This framework affords a recognition of multiple time frames, such as histories and imagined futures that form part of a living present and shape lifestyle behaviours and identities. Deleuzian concepts that tie into his philosophy of time and form his process ontology, including monism and rhizomes, affect, becoming, and assemblages, are discussed in relation to health promotion. The article concludes that Deleuze offers a critical theory of time that enables a mapping of the ways that people embody multiplicity, non‐linearity, and fluidity as they negotiate healthy lifestyle advice. His concepts illuminate ways in which people can be oppressed and limited by discourses of healthy living, but also point to new, more affirmative directions for health promotion and healthy lifestyle advice.

Religious Belonging in the East Asian Context: An Exploration of Rhizomatic Belonging

This article explores the hermeneutical challenges to understand religious belonging and religious identity in the East Asian context. In East Asia, religious identities have not always been as exclusively delineated, as is the case in Western models of religious diversity, for example in the so-called World Religions paradigm. Various theoretical frameworks are discussed in religious studies, sociology and anthropology of religion in China and East Asia, to acquire a better understanding of religious belonging. It is observed that two hermeneutical frameworks are used by scholars to discuss religious diversity: a hermeneutics of multiple religions and a hermeneutics of religiosity. The former analyses “religious belonging” as a “belonging to religious traditions”. In the latter, “religious belonging” is understood as transcending particular religious traditions. It is argued that we need to take another look at the philosophical concept of “multiplicity” to understand religious diversity and religious belonging. We can use the Deleuzian concepts of “rhizome” and “assemblage” to describe religious belongings in East Asia specifically and also religion in general. A rhizomatic thinking about religion enables us to reimagine the concept of religious belonging as rhizomatic belonging, and also, as is argued by Haiyan Lee and Mayfair Yang, make it possible to subvert power structures inherent to religion.

Simulacra and the structure of the work of art

The concept of simulacra, with a propensity to diverge into in-betweenness, is a complex notion at the best of times. A dualistic structure of communication made up of signifier and signified that always produces a floating signifier, links simulacra with experience as an active agent of change. A story of divergence in an artwork can simultaneously affect the communication of it, even given no apparent narrative. This article then identifies three ways the simulacrum effects the communication of a work of art in artist-curator practice through the Deleuzian concept of simulacra, as a living recurrence of difference.

The Minority Machine: Alterity and Excess in the Films of Sai Yōichi

The Minority Machine:Alterity and Excess in the Films of Sai Yōichi Nathaniel Heneghan (bio) The majority of Zainichi Korean filmmaker Sai Yōichi's (b. 1949) cinematic works depict the struggle of individuals who live at the social or geographic margins of Japanese society, with two of his better-known films—All Under the Moon (Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru, 1993) and Blood and Bones (Chi to hone, 2004)—being adaptations of Zainichi writer Yang Sŏkil's (b. 1936) novels that foreground members of the Zainichi community.1 I will use this piece, however, to examine two of Sai's more overlooked films, Mosquito on the Tenth Floor (Jikkai no mosukīto, 1983) and Soo (Su, 2007), neither of which features overt depictions of Zainichi characters, but that I read as visually and thematically resonant with experiences of being Korean in Japan.2 This essay engages in an experimental reading of these two films, analyzing Mosquito on the Tenth Floor as a commentary on Zainichi "disrecognition" and Soo as a covert exploration of the doubleness and excess that marks Zainichi alterity through a play on the cinematic strategies of "difference and repetition" as articulated in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze posits difference and repetition as dynamic theoretical strategies that [End Page 365] exceed the traditional order of representation and are only subordinated to this same order through repression.3 In this analysis, I link alterity and excess—two tropes that have come to describe the Zainichi condition of being both marginalized and unwanted (or "excessive") by the standards of Japanese mainstream society—with Deleuze's concepts of difference and repetition. Much as strategies of difference and repetition are erased or repressed for the preservation of the symbolic order, as described by Deleuze, notions of Koreanness have been subordinated for the maintenance of Japanese national identity rooted in the myth of homogeneity (Nihonjinron). I thus argue that Sai's films employ similar transgressive strategies for the interrogation of minority identity formation as that of avant-garde filmmaker Ōshima Nagisa (1932–2013), under whom Sai worked, while also exceeding this discursive approach by locating the potential for a transnational identity in an originary hybridity that transcends political designations. The term "excess" is also deployed here to connote Kristin Thompson's theory of cinematic excess, which is used to characterize elements of a film that reside outside the coherent unifying forces of narrative.4 The two films discussed here exhibit elements of excess in this sense as well, often in the form of gratuitous violence and incoherent or nonfunctional thematics, which have the effect of challenging conventional modes of cinematic representation. In addition, I read both Soo and Mosquito on the Tenth Floor as expressions of Zainichi "disrecognition," which John Lie characterizes as the lack of a "complex of attributes—love, right, and esteem—that endow people with a sense of acceptance and acknowledgment"5 and whose internalization is "implicit [End Page 366] in the phenomenon of passing."6 While passing is traditionally understood as "the fact of being accepted, or representing oneself successfully as, a member of a different group" and most commonly refers to "the means by which nonwhite people represent themselves as white,"7 several recent studies have reevaluated passing for its subversive potential, as a process that contests the binarism of the dominant racial discourse by underscoring the "instability and fluidity" of race and thereby revealing the constructedness of racial identity.8 As I observe in my reading of Sai's films, if recuperated in this way, passing functions as an "'actual' mode of political or ideological critique" that attempts to subvert hegemonic racial discourses.9 However, while for nonwhite Americans passing typically constitutes a conscious decision, Lie argues that passing was the default option for Zainichi Koreans, particularly the second generation and beyond, by virtue of the lack of visual distinctions that would mark them as "other."10 Thus, while the sociology of passing can indeed be regarded as somewhat generic regardless of identity, the Zainichi case even further problematizes binary notions of passing by complicating the "politics of visibility" (much as recent discourses of biracial passing seek to do) and foregrounding cultural...

Music's Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies ed. by Sally Macarthur, Judy Lochhead, and Jennifer Shaw

Reviewed by: Music's Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies ed. by Sally Macarthur, Judy Lochhead, and Jennifer Shaw Dimitris Exarchos Music's Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies. Edited by Sally Macarthur, Judy Lochhead, Jennifer Shaw. Abingdon, Oxon, Eng.: Routledge, 2016. [xx, 240 p. ISBN 9781472460219 (hard-cover), $160; ISBN 9781315597027 (ebook), $28.98.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. [End Page 529] Music's Immanent Future is a kaleidoscopic collection that reflects on aspects of music studies today, drawing on concepts by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-Luc Nancy, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault, among others. The collection, subtitled The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies, includes seventeen chapters grouped into five parts that explore themes such as music studies in higher education ("The Academic Music Machine"), musical practices ("Deleuzian Encounters"), composition ("Materialities of Sounding"), listening ("Immanent Listening"), and ontology ("Deleuzian Ontologies"). In addition to an overall introduction to the book, there are introductory chapters to each part—"folding" chapters that serve to connect the different strands of the contributed chapters in each part. The Deleuzian concept of the fold indexes the possibility of space that is opened up each time, avoiding the single-view perspective that "leads to privileging the identity of the author." The book's main ambition is to move beyond a typical account of music, conceived to have "an essence, surface, and depth," and achieve a multiplicity of types of engagement, both by its authors and by its readers (p. 2). Such multiplicity (a central Deleuzian concept, whereby difference is privileged over identity, and relationship in is privileged over relationship to) is evident by the editors' choice of approaches. (It should be noted that the book originates in two symposia at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, in 2012 and 2013.) Not all chapters employ a Deleuzian approach, properly speaking. Two out of three contributing authors in part 1 make no explicit reference to Deleuze. This is also true of the entirety of part 3, in which composers discuss their approach to music making. Similarly, the two contributing authors of part 4, and the sole contributed chapter of part 5, make no substantial Deleuzian analysis either (except for brief references). This seems to suggest that a turn to a Deleuzian mode of thought has been underway in music studies, even when scholars do not engage with Deleuzian or Guattarian concepts. The implicit conclusion might be drawn then that there is something Deleuzian in the way authors employ concepts by Nancy, Kristeva, Foucault, or others. The editors, however, do not warn readers away from concluding that these authors should be categorized as "Deleuzian." I doubt that this was the intention of the editors or contributors, and to say the least, that conclusion would have very little connection to Deleuze's thinking. This decision to include such diverse approaches is counteracted by the introductory chapters to each part, thus providing a Deleuzian perspective (without which parts 3 and 5 would seem out of context). If a Deleuzian turn has been underway even with no explicit reference to Deleuze, then of what does this turn consist? The keyword immanent in the title suggests that all authors favor an approach to music that is not representational, which would entail subsuming things to the already-known. Rather, "Immanent listening … is a continual openness to the not-yet-known." The practice of listening is central to all activities—including composing, analyzing, and performing—as it enables thinking beyond traditional boundaries: "Immanent listening seeks to dissolve all boundaries, and the categorisations that divide the self from the other, and the self from sound object" (p. 9). All the above practices are explored in the book, including those of education and the formation of musical canons, as for example in the chapter by Susan McClary, whose pedagogical practice supersedes the dichotomies of [End Page 530] Western/non-Western, art/popular, and so forth. Nonetheless, the book is mainly preoccupied with Western art composition, with references in the chapters by McClary and Bruce Crossman to other kinds of music precisely as others. For instance, the book lacks discussion of improvised music (Western or not, jazz, traditional...

Bodies,Gestus, Becoming: Cinema as a Technology of Gender and (Post)memory

The first issue this essay examines is the articulation of the cinema of the body, the feminine gestus, and the ‘political cinema’, which begins with the philosophical shout, ‘Give me a body, then!’ and ends with the ‘Third World Cinema’ as a cinema of memory. How is this Deleuzian concept in tension with the one proposed here of ‘missing body’? The second issue concerns the importance of the body for theory and practice within feminist film theory and queer theory. The question of the body is introduced in-between these two lines in the context of a series of Latin American documentaries. The final problem is then how to see and show a body that is missing, like an outside of the body image, and of a certain regime of the visible and the audible that tends to be fixed in topics by the production of technologies of (post)memory.

Introduction

Introduction