Deleuzian Terms Research Articles

A Curriculum in the Post: A Reading of the First Foreign Language Sixth Grade Curriculum through a Posthumanist Lens

This paper looks at how the ontological and epistemological premises of posthumanism allow educators to reread a curriculum. Document analysis reveals the current grade 6 first foreign language curriculum in Lithuania as being, in Deleuzian terms, a striated, exhaustive, and positivist one. It is also ridden with tension to meet both the naturally arising learners’ interests and standardized learning outcomes. Posthumanism, which invites educators to look at the curriculum rhizomatically, allows for different kind of learning – defined through thinking, becoming, and affirming.

Buďme pragmatici, požadujme nezamýšlené!

The present paper intends to follow the debate on applied research in Czech social sciences and presents the case of interdisciplinary research in Southern Slovakia. The authors frame their approach to the research field using the Deleuzian terms of virtuality and multiplicity to underline the processual character of both ethnography and the field itself. On this basis, we develop the argument that the social sciences always act ontologically through their performative nature, which is especially, but not exclusively, true for such applied research where intervention plays an integral part. We consider our intended actions according to the features of the so-called medium design to be desired interplays, which transfer our actions to other actors in our research field and within which we seek to improve the living conditions in a building of flats at risk of eviction. Such interventions carry unintended consequences, which we reflect on in the text and describe how we dealt with them. The mission is to consider engagement and intervention in terms of their public and practical addressability and to show that the use of knowledge outside of academics as being something implicit to the social sciences rather than a trendy extension of their scope.

Exploring the notion of “from-within” through the concept of event

The target paper presents the foundations of the Course-of-Experience Framework, discussing a theoretical and methodological tool appropriate for addressing cognition in the wild and from-within. This commentary considers the meaning of from-within in this context. By relying on the enactive paradigm, the Course-of-Experience Framework focuses on singular experiences but does not take individuals as its starting point. Thus, from-within gains a very particular meaning that will be explored here through the concept of event, in Deleuzian terms, the event is neither subjective nor objective in the usual meaning of these words, even though it is a singularity, capable of producing both individual and collective effects. This concept prevents considering subjective experience as a property of individuals. The concept of event is valuable to elucidate the notion of “common experiential ground.”

Hunger: Time is in the Body

Hunger (2008), Steve McQueen's first feature film, is about the 1981 Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland. He tells the story through prisoners’ bodies. This corporeal presentation creates a political discourse in the film: the progression of the narrative through imagery allows McQueen to show the fact of the matter rather than saying what is right or wrong. Hunger: Time Is In The Body aims to display the aestheticized corporeality of the film and argue that the film represents inner temporality and carries the marks of Deleuzian time-image. Objective corporeality as the fabric of the imagery manifests itself in the bodily resistance of the prisoners. Nevertheless, this imagery does not place the film within realism; in the film, the causal chain and the temporal line that we are accustomed to in classical cinema are constantly broken. The broken timeline is observable within the flow of corporeality, and the experience of dureé emerges by the density of such imagery. The spectator does not follow the narration; they follow the imagery because the timeline and the meaning are built through the bodies' attitudes. In Deleuzian terms, the film can be observed as the cinema of bodies, which is a kind of time-image, and with that, it gets separated from the classical dramatic structure. In conclusion, this article suggests that in Hunger, Steve McQueen places time in the body through the critical objectivity of corporeality.

Deleuze and Ethology: A Philosophy of Entangled Life

Although the title of Cullen's book is Deleuze and Ethology, the author does not focus on passages in which Gilles Deleuze discusses ethology or animals. Cullen does not even quote Deleuze's valuable definition of ethology as “the study . . . of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing.” Instead, Cullen tries to construct a philosophical ethology of his own with reference to Deleuze's works on cinema, which, Cullen argues, allowed the philosopher “to describe his ontology from the point of view of the particular beings that inhabit the world.” It is this emphasis on particular beings rather than species that, according to Cullen, lies “at the heart of philosophical ethology.”Philosophers have often asked if it is possible to understand what animals feel, as for instance in the famous article “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel. In films, the question of what characters see and feel is also important. When filmmakers use a subjective camera, it is almost always paired with an objective one. They might first show the fearful face of a character (objective view) before letting us see the snake she is seeing (subjective view). Most often, a film will then return to the objective view. The shot/countershot is an essential film technique, because the subjective view is not reached by eliminating the observer (in this case, the objective camera) but by oscillating between the observer's and the character's points of view. Moreover, Cullen adds, the distinction between a subjective and an objective shot is not always clear. In one shot we may see, for example, an intoxicated character from the perspective of a third-person camera, but that camera is swinging and blurred in order to suggest the character's subjective state. Deleuze terms this sort of shot “semi-subjective.”Ethologists likewise mingle points of view. They do not put themselves in an animal's shoes—an impossible task, as Nagel has contended. Instead, they learn to pay attention to what the animals they are studying pay attention to. Ethologists blend their perspective with that of animals, semi-subjectively, and the result is a viewpoint neither completely human nor entirely animal. And so, Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue, in A Thousand Plateaus, the ethologists to some extent “become-animal.” Becoming-animal is not an identification with animals at large but a creative process triggered by encounter with one particular animal; the semi-subjective view is a new perspective that did not exist before the encounter. While ethologists change and become-animal, the animals they study also change during their interactions with ethologists, since they too learn to understand what matters to the particular humans with whom they live. Curiously, Cullen introduces the notion of becoming-animal only in the book's conclusion. But by approaching it indirectly, via Deleuze's consideration of cinema rather than his writings about animals, Cullen offers us a refreshing characterization of a concept central to Deleuze.

Plastic Memories of the Anthropocene

Plastic has become a ubiquitous material on planet Earth. I use Bennett’s term, thing-power, to analyse various aspects of plastic’s onto-materiality. Generally considered a single-use material, plastic is easily discarded, leaving the individualized, private space of capitalism, and becoming a nomad, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, thus travelling through a smooth space. Then, plastic enters a symbiotic relationship with all biotic and abiotic bodies, becoming endo-plastic. As a geological layer, it becomes a “vibrant” memory of the nexus between capitalism and humanism, revealing its full political potential. Plastic is a witness, by-product and determinant of the Anthropocene, and its memory tells the political and ideological geostory (Donna J. Haraway) of human exceptionalism. Becoming-plastic is one way of overcoming anthropocentrism: not just by advocating for “post-humanism,” but by advocating for “posthum-ism,” even if this means “embracing human extinction” (Patricia MacCormack).

The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation

The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation

Multipli-city, My Winnipeg and a pedagogy of the permanent circuit

The city is a network of boulevards, thoroughfares, highways and subway systems. The city is also a site of learning, or rather the city houses sites of learning: museums, libraries, schools, theatres and cinemas, for instance. Interestingly, these sites of learning need not be physical; indeed, regarding cinema, for example, they can be websites like Amazon, Criterion Channel, Netflix, where cinephiles can stream movies from the comfort of their home, office, car, on a phone, tablet, television. It is at the intersection of these sites – the cinema and the city – that I wish to situate this article. In particular, I explore how the filmmaker Guy Maddin with My Winnipeg () finagles cinema’s essay-film genre to turn a physical space (in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) from, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, striated to smooth, points to pointillism, in which event replaces essence and multipli-city replaces singular(c)ity. The city is a machine and the machine here is D+G’s assemblage. As such, the city and the citizen/creator become one, symbio[(y)tic], and the two cannot be separated without returning the city to a simpli-city and the filmmaker to a documentarian. This film amounts to an encounter that causes thinking (in Deleuzian terms) and thus learning and thus a way forward for thinking through a pedagogy of the permanent circuit.

Is Anti-Oedipus Really a Critique of Psychoanalysis?

ABSTRACT “: We cannot say psychoanalysts are very jolly people; see the dead look they have, their stiff necks.” In 1972, the tone Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used in Anti-Oedipus caused an immediate public reaction: it was regarded as the mark of a fatal critique of psychoanalysis. However, critique, in philosophy, is used in certain technical and precise senses. We will try to demonstrate that, technically, Anti-Oedipus is a delimitation of a Kantian sort, an evaluation of a Nietzschean kind, and, finally, a divergence in terms of Deleuze himself. Thanks to this precision, we will find that the target of Anti-Oedipus is not psychoanalysis in general but what Deleuze and Guattari call, respectively, “the illegitimate use of the synthesis of the unconscious,” a conception of life presupposed by psychoanalysis, and a configuration of desire that explains both psychoanalysis and the system in which it functions.

Larval intelligence: Approaching AI in terms of Deleuze’s “system of the dissolved self”

In this article, the work of Gilles Deleuze, specifically in his 1968 book, Difference and Repetition, is investigated in order to make a contribution at a philosophical and conceptual level to the question of what kind of cognitive architecture could best facilitate progress towards strong artificial general intelligence. After tracing the outlines of Deleuze’s consistently genetic position on the emergence of thought from material sensibility, it is argued that the situated, embodied, dynamic (SED) architecture proposed by cognitive scientist Randall Beer has affinities with the Deleuzian understanding of thought that merit further investigation. With regard to the “situatedness” strand of SED, affinities with Deleuze’s description of the nested structure of contemplation are pointed out. The “embodied” strand of SED, on the other hand, invites investigation of the correspondence with the genetic line of the emergence of thought as conceived by Deleuze. Finally, the “dynamic” strand of SED which employs dynamic systems theory might benefit from Deleuze’s understanding of virtual ideas as problems that could be actualised in many diverse solutions.

Julian Barnes: Toward a Minor History

Julian Barnes is predominantly known for his radical experiment with the notion of history. He uses and abuses official accounts of history in order to register a history of the unvoiced in his novels. In his attempt to foreground what is unregistered in history, he often ends up embracing a very strong dystopian mode, depicting a world full of terrors, disasters and crises. As this article argues, he presents a “hystopia,” that is, a history of dystopia or history as a dystopia. In Barnes, history is a hystopia not only in the sense that it is full of catastrophes, but also in the sense that it is subjective, unreliable and even fascistic in imposing only a single version of the past. Barnes creates alternative histories which downplay the absoluteness of the official accounts and create ruptures in the causal lines of hystopia. In this sense, these alternative accounts can be seen as “minor” history in Deleuzian terms, which is non-linear, rhizomatic and eventful. Against this background this article aims to elaborate on these new notions of “hystopia” and “minor history” in Barnes’s novels, addressing the relation of his understanding of history to minoritarian politics in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy.

Deterritorialize Yourself! (Four Meta-Musical Vignettes for John Rahn)

DETERRITORIALIZE YOURSELF! (FOUR META-MUSICAL VIGNETTES FOR JOHN RAHN) CHRIS STOVER MADE MY FIRST DEEP DIVE INTO BOTH Deleuze and Guattari and J.K. Randall’s work at around the same time, and through the same source: John Rahn’s seminars on analytical personae and critical theory at the University of Washington in the mid-2000s. It was also in one of these seminars that I first began thinking seriously about how one might go about critically, analytically, theoretically, and politically engaging musical improvisation, as well as, more generally, how to think musically: that is, how to make thinking about music be more like music.1 In order to clarify this last point, we might read four statements of John’s alongside one another: 1. All discourse is “committed” to forming the world that it is about, so that it behooves the musician to make discourse about music like music, at least in the essential quality of rich particularity , and perhaps in all five of Nelson Goodman’s “symptoms of the aesthetic” . . . : semantic density, syntactical density, relative repleteness, exemplification, and multiple and complex reference.2 I 256 Perspectives of New Music 2. At the in-time extreme is an obsessive concern for the way in which, at every musical time, events immediately following that time grow out of events preceding that time. Such an explanation would consist of as many explanations as there are moments of musical time in a piece . . . plus an explanation of the way all soexperienced piece-moments integrate into the entire piece.3 3. [following a select list of Heraclitus aphorisms] Musicians, he is speaking to us! The vagabonds of the night, the magicians, the bacchantes, the inspired! Clearly this is a different voice. . . . Music flows, and swirls madly.4 4. The advantage of semigroups and monoids over groups as a general model for machines is that not all machines can run backwards. Indeed, if we want to model musical acts as taking place in irreversible time, we will need to escape groups and inhabit monoids.5 Among many other take-aways, these maxims suggest to me a temporal effervescence, a commitment to understanding (and describing) music from within the ongoing practice of its enactment, a productive conflation of rational and mystical, and an attitude toward transformational thinking that escapes both the ontological fixity of Being and the formalist apparatus of homomorphic group functions.6 It is important to note that John in no way is taking a hard line with any of the positions articulated or implied in these quotes; each is intended as an image of thought, a provocation to get us thinking about how we think about music, to imagine other perspectives and refine the ones we’re already engaged in. Time and change (and discourse about time and change): these are the themes that have animated the way I think about doing music theory. What follows are four loosely related meta-musical vignettes, nominally about theorizing music-improvisation (and, to a degree, about Deleuze), but ducking and weaving through many ancillary themes, all rhizomatically connected, but also all forming a single quasi-improvisational narrative. 1. IMPROVISATION AND BECOMING-OTHER It is not so much working together to make something new out of the old but, rather, the more solitary act of “standing-within” the Deterritorialize Yourself! 257 old, occupying it in such a way that its own opening onto being or “thrust into the Open” is preserved. If there is a collaborative dimension to improvisation it is not empathic but closer to what Heidegger describes as the “unsociability” of “Being-with.”7 Improvised musical expression is an ongoing process of becomingother . We can speak of the becoming-other of music as a purely sonic phenomenon, as the way in which the sonic materiality of a collective musical expression (the music, in its process of becoming) transforms over time. In Deleuzian terms, this proceeds by way of a series of actualizations of the virtual openness of what at any moment could be, and which every moment opens onto. Another way to say this is that the event of an action enacts a becoming-actual of some bundle of virtual forces, all already there...

Letter from the Guest Editor

Letter from the Guest Editor

When the dead rise: encountering resistant legacies of creative economy within an artist’s residency at a municipal cemetery

ABSTRACTRecent criticism of creative economies demonstrates tensions between programmes that support innovative cultural expression and community belonging, and those more oriented to instrumentally economic outcomes. While municipal planners recognize the link between cultural activity and enhanced quality of life, related budget support typically calls for quantifiable outcomes. Creative economy policies and projects are thus vulnerable to favouring more narrowly construed forms of economic growth. We explore the municipally embedded artist-in-residence (AiR) programme as a source of friction, complexity and inefficiency intentionally introduced into organizations constitutionally regulated to suppress exactly these kinds of excesses. In Deleuzian terms, the social machinery of neoliberal urban and economic development hesitates when it encounters the short-circuiting unpredictabilities of creative desire introduced by the embedded residency. The municipally embedded AiR is a residual apparatus of creative economy policy that can offer resistance to and even inoculation against easy alliances with neoliberal economic agendas. In the case of an embedded AiR in city cemeteries in Edmonton, Canada, the artist, working on the grounds, meeting visitors and holding workshops, uses now-obsolete photographic craft production to manipulate conventional memorial images and texts in unexpected conjunctions with experimental aesthetic expression and living stories. The physical presence of the residency also disrupts received categories to produce the cemetery as living public space rather than a setting with “holes to put the past in”. In this sense, the cemetery becomes accessible as newly encoded, sustainable cultural and recreational space with minimal civic investment. Calling up ghosts of challenged creative economy ideals, this AiR opens new forms of engagement between citizens, local history and urban nature as a complex adaptive system that incorporates both cultural values and commodity logic without primary emphasis on quantifiable outcomes.

Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication

Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication

The Semiotics of Strategy: A Preliminary Structuralist Assessment of the Battle-Map in <em>Patton</em> (1970) and <em>Midway</em> (1976)

This essay offers a preliminary examination of the battle-map as depicted in two films about the Second World War: Franklin J. Shaffner's biopic Patton (1970) and Jack Smight's epic Midway (1976). In these films, maps, charts, or tableaux (the three-dimensional models upon which are plotted the movements of battalions, fleets, and so on) emerge as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. It is argued that the battle-map emerges as a crucial isomorphic element. It features as a prop to signify command and to relay otherwise complex strategic plottings, giving audiences a glimpse into how military strategy is formed and tested: a traditional 'reading' of the map. Conversely, the map is a device of foreshadowing and a sign of command's profound limitations. It is thus resolved that the battle-map is as much a sign of the subjective as the objective.

Hareket İmge ve Zaman İmge Kavramları Çerçevesinde Torino Atı’nın Ayak İzleri

This study aims to analyze The Turin Horse (2011) which is one of the pieces of Bela Tarr filmography, in the light of movement image and time image concepts of Deleuze. According to the claim that this study relies on, the cinematographic language of Bela Tarr have parallels with Deleuzian sense of cinema. In Deleuzian point of view, cinema is the creative exploration of the world. In this vain, Tarr completed a half finished story creatively by making the film of The Turin Horse . The term of movement, plays a cental role both in the perception of Tarr and Deleuze. This study attempts to understand this similarity. In accordance with this purpose, the cinematographic elements of the film are examined within the framework of movement image and time image concepts which Deleuze developed. Cinematographic elements of the film are evaluated due to time image and movement image concepts. Moreover, there are several discussions related to cinematographic language of the director. The discussions are visually enriched. In other words, cinematographic elements are expounded in Deleuzian terms. In this process, the political side of the film is also discussed. The study also includes the effort of examination related to elements which make the film political.

Cultural Studies and Deleuze-Guattari, Part 2: From Affect to Conjunctures

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the state of the ‘field’ of affect studies and its development – partly through the involvement of one of its authors – over the course of decades. It argues that rather than identifying affect as the ‘other’ of signification and representation, thus ‘subtracting’ it from the conjuncture, one should understand the question of affect to point to the multiplicity of forms of sign behaviours – or, better, of forms of expression or collective assemblages of enunciation (in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari) that constitute a conjuncture in all its complexity. This article attempts to map this multiplicity by refining and expanding Guattari’s ‘mixed semiotics’. Finally, it offers a brief example of how such multiplicities (and their resulting hybridities) might be used to compare the ‘affective topographies’ and structures of feelings that have differentially enabled oppositional movements in the 1960s and the current moment.

Teatro como campo expandido: a imagem em Gilles Deleuze e Hans-Thies Lehmann.

Este texto caracteriza o “teatro da dramaturgia visual”, de Hans-Thies Lehmann, ou teatro como campo expandido, pela incorporação de diversas mídias. Recorremos à crítica de Gilles Deleuze aos “ardis da representação” e à “diferença ontológica entre modelo e cópia”, ressaltando que esse teatro se opõe à imagem-representação do teatro dramático e do cinema clássico, assim como à imagem-simulacro do mundo mass-midiático. Recorremos, ainda, aos comentários de Anne Sauvagnargues à noção deleuzeana de “imagem-individuação”, baseadas nas modulações de longitude e de latitude. Procuramos mostrar que esse teatro expandido é o lugar, por excelência, para o desenvolvimento do drama da percepção, questão que está no centro da reflexão estética contemporânea. Na confluência das linguagens, de signos de luz e do corpo do ator, teríamos uma imagem que efetua uma crítica às imagens circulantes, ou uma forma que “afeta a sensação e força o pensamento”, no sentido de Gilles Deleuze.

Governed as It Were by Chance

To degree that world is now made up of divergent series . . . crapshooting replaces game of Plenitude.-Gilles Deleuze1IntroductionWhen Spinoza wrote The Ethics in 1600s world was largely a wild place. Intense human settlement occupied only a quarter of globe.2 We now live in a very different world. In 1600s world was largely comprised of biomes: contiguous area[s] with similar climatic conditions, and communities of plants, animals, and soil organisms.3 By year 2000, only 20 percent of world might be considered semi-natural and 25 percent wild. But no place is leftuntouched by anthropogenic transformations; we live in a world of anthromes.4 Spinoza was largely concerned with questions of association between humans as they relate to a causal understanding of human body.5 Today, forms of governance, indeed choice between socialism or barbarism, is an ever more pressing question, but it is complicated by concerns about species extinction, loss of biodiversity and anthropogenic threats to global stability, unevenly felt in global north and global south. With these concerns in mind, many scholars are calling for a reframing of question of association to include our relations to non-human others.6In this paper I explore question of ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza's theory of composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause (whether good or evil). The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition-which Nature do we ally with, what components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported (and threatened) by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of monstrous infinite.To outline contours of problem I turn to a brief description of Baroque to mark its coordinates, specifically ways in which monstrous infinitude surfaces as an ontological horizon first in seventeenth and again in twenty-first century. Drawing on a Deleuzian distinction between Baroque strategy of closure and neo-Baroque strategy of capture as different responses to this monstrous infinitude, I explore a growing contemporary movement around the of which, though laudable, illustrates dimensions of problem by virtue of its current limitations. My premise is that a restrictive vision of a rights of is in a sense inadequate, an inadequate idea-a baroque response to a neo-baroque world: it is predicated on a strategy of closure, idea that a harmony of nature might be restored, re-established against infinite incursions of human indiscretion. My argument simply put is this: that those who attempt to protect nature and those who would simply exploit natural systems while envisioning, even generating incompossible worlds, partake of same presumption of a human-nature divide (in Deleuzian terms an aleatory point in a disjunctive synthesis).In order to investigate what capture might look like I explore premises of this movement through a Spinozist lens, turning to writings of Baruch Spinoza-not as a Baroque but rather a thinker of Baroque.7 We might ask-why turn to Spinoza? Genevieve Lloyd for instance declares, Anyone who looks to Ethics for a viable, coherent metaphysical system to ground a belief in of non-human will look in vain.8 And Spinoza himself was somewhat disparaging in his attitude towards non-human others.9Spinoza's usefulness here lies not in his writings on humans or non-human nature per se, but his thinking about composite individual. The few short passages on composite individual are a heavily contested terrain, a battleground between neo-liberal scholars who enlist Spinoza in their promotion of a vision of methodological individualism and thinkers of more complex collaborations in relation between individuation as a process and individuals as effect of that process. …