Regime Of Signs Research Articles

1956: Deleuze and Foucault in the Archives, or, What Happened to theA Priori?

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.

2006: The Topology of Morals (Who Does the Algorithm Think We Are?)

Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control has been the most common entry point for interrogating the ways in which contemporary digital technologies have altered the social and the subjective from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective. It is, however, in A Thousand Plateaus that we find the most comprehensive set of resources for grappling with the Algocene, the contemporary digitally interconnected world of ubiquitous computing, drones, data mining, smart cities, social media, automated trading and other data-driven technologies that are heavily reliant upon algorithmic processes and deep learning networks. In this broad survey, I argue that in order to grapple with these new technological assemblages and the implications of their deployment across society, we should posit a new major stratum, the algoplastic, and, along with it, new modes of operation of order-words and the regimes of signs they form part of. I conclude by posing some of the new problems that emerge with the Algocene.

In Praise of Eclecticism: Relational Thinking and Theoretical Assemblage

In this essay I trace a path through the intellectual history of the last thirty-five years by using the idea of relationality to connect widely different theoretical frameworks that have been used in the fields of ethnomusicology and musicology. These perspectives are all part of a generalized move away from the fixity of structuralism and towards more contingent, dynamic, and anti-foundationalist modes of understanding power, identity, embodiment, technology, and the sensory. Although philosophical perspectives must be addressed, I am fundamentally more interested in exploring the application of these ideas to empirical work—historical and ethnographic. To this end I sing in praise of theoretical eclecticism: the practice of selecting the most productive ideas from philosophy, social theory, and other fields, according to how well they can illuminate and frame an empirical project. To borrow a concept from a recently fashionable philosopher, I suggest that creating theoretical assemblages with clear points of connection to the principle topic of research might serve us well. Deleuze famously advocated for a rhizomatic rather than arborescent understanding of interconnection: “unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21). Or more pithily: “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much” (15). Assemblages, for Deleuze and Guattari, are non-hierarchical consistencies that develop among these connections and they may link different strata. After tracing an outline of the legacy of relational thinking I will show how and why I have applied an anthropological assemblage theory of ethics and morality to my work on Malian balafonist Neba Solo in conjunction with older social and cultural theories. This essay also addresses the limits of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage, and philosophical perspectives more generally, as resources for socially engaged empirical musical studies. The need to engage issues of power, inequality, diversity and gender inequality, I argue, requires engagement with the social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and economics. Emphasis on these social theoretical resources encapsulates one historical difference between musicology and ethnomusicology in terms of relational thinking.

Die Entweltlichung der Bühne: Zur Mediologie des Theaters der klassischen Episteme by Franz-Josef Deiters

Reviewed by: Die Entweltlichung der Bühne: Zur Mediologie des Theaters der klassischen Episteme by Franz-Josef Deiters Jane K. Brown Franz-Josef Deiters. Die Entweltlichung der Bühne: Zur Mediologie des Theaters der klassischen Episteme. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2015. 264 pp. As Franz-Josef Deiters's title signals, his book offers a sophisticated reading of theater carefully located between theater history, media theory, Michel Foucault's "classical episteme," and Walter Benjamin's "Entweltlichung." Not clear from the title, but equally important, are its exceptionally thoughtful readings of five representative dramatic texts of the first half of the Goethezeit. Both the theory and the readings are presented with a clarity and concreteness that belie the abstraction of the title, yet also precisely illuminate the insights to be gained from the major epistemological shifts delineated by media theory and intellectual history of the last several decades. This structure already emerges in the table of contents, where all the chapter titles are quotations from the work at hand, and, in the crucial historical second chapter, most of the sub-section titles as well. Die Entweltlichung der Bühne makes a double argument: first, theater is a medium in the sense of media theory, and not exclusively performance, and second, as such, it is an important symptom of the shift identified in Foucault's Order of Things from an analogical world-view to the "classical" regime of signs. Deiters lays out the general argument in his "Medienkritische Vorrede," more accessibly than its title might suggest. Here he politely debunks Erika Fischer-Lichte's influential view that performativity is the essence of theater, using Foucault to relocate the theater into the context of media theory and identifying the shift from analogy to the primacy of signs as "Entweltlichung," a process of abstraction whose formulation owes, I suspect, something to Deiters's previous engagement with Benjamin on allegory in drama (Drama im Augenblick seines Sturzes: Zur Allegorisierung des Dramas in der Moderne. Versuche zu einer Konstitutionstheorie, 1999). The second chapter reviews pronouncements about the theater from Gottsched to Schiller and the Romantics. Thankfully, Deiters does not proceed chronologically by summarizing the usual suspects. Instead, he surveys categories that demonstrate exactly how leading thinkers wrote about Entweltlichung and semiotics. Deiters considers here changes in the meaning of truth in philosophy; the new priority of the printed text over performance; the shifts in the triad of communication between author, actors, and audience (the depersonalization of the actor, the silencing of the spectator, the withdrawal of the author behind the curtain); the separation of acting space and viewing space and the use of vestibules to separate the stage from the outside world; the development of a "grammar" of acting; dramaturgical devices like the chorus and prologues as [End Page 299] walls around the play. Along the way he offers sensitive readings of the goals of particular figures; the sympathetic explanation of Gottsched's goals is particularly revealing. This rich chapter offers a superb synthesis of a wealth of learning from intellectual history, theater history, and literary history to assemble a useful tool-box for approaching the plays to follow. The remaining chapters change register again, from dramatic theory to readings of texts—Egmont (3), Iphigenie (4), Maria Stuart (5), Der gestiefelte Kater and Die verkehrte Welt (6), and "Über das Marionettentheater," Die Hermannsschlacht, and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (7). Each reading identifies the play's contribution to the shift to the new dramaturgy. They are all intelligent, interesting, and well informed on the relevant scholarship without overwhelming the reader with footnotes. I can only mention a few high points: Egmont realizes himself as a symbol by his death and becomes all "Aura" as he leaves the political world behind. Iphigenie frees herself from the past as fate by realizing it as myth; at the end she and Thoas, through trust, enter the world of the classical epistemé in that they become individual subjects in relation to an abstract truth. Maria Stuart lives in her play essentially through the act of writing and writes herself out of the world in the last act; in the narrated finale she appears as a symbol. Tieck's comedies recognize the impossibility...

Beyond regimes of signs: making art/istic portrayals of haptic moments/movements with child/ren/hood

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we try to move beyond fixed narratives of child/ren and childhoods, a fixity that comes, in part, as a consequence of the adult/child dyad. We undertake a cutting together-apart of childhood photographs which allows us to explore the complex machinery that produces the categories of child/ren as human beings that are, variously, de(scribed) as not only ‘natural’, ‘innocent’ and ‘romantic’, but also ‘uncanny’ and ‘sexual’, tropes that find meaning and depiction through child/hood bodies and faces. Inspired by non-representational ethnography, we want to generate pictorial acts that move beyond the face – ‘as regimes of signs’ so that body and language can interrelate where ‘the configuration of the face is inextricably tied to the evolution of the voice’. In undertaking a form of schizoanalysis, we undo images of child/ren/hood from ‘the inside’ by connecting to haptic thinking as well as cutting together-apart, processes that allow us to think otherwise about our own and other childhood(s). Additionally, we want to liberate child/ren/hoods through artistic photograph sensing, and doings may be seen as a political act, a way to break down boundaries of power through art as events.

On the Subject of Badiou: A Deleuzian Critique

ABSTRACT In the Deleuze–Badiou debate most criticisms of Badiou focus on how Badiou gets Deleuze wrong. What this defensive posture does not exploit, though, is the way in which Deleuze and Guattari can be seen to have anticipated and criticized Badiou's work. I argue that in A Thousand Plateaus, particularly “On Several Regimes of Signs,” Badiou's theory of the subject can be read as an attempt to extract a passional, postsignifying regime out of its mixture with a despotic, signifying regime. It is here that we can locate all of Badiou's concerns about subject formation in fidelity to an event.

The Greek Gloom and the December 2008 Uprising

This paper employs the notion of apparatus of capture in the context of the historical formation and transformations of the Greek nation state. The aim is to demystify the overcoding poles of political sovereignty as they are expressed in different chronological periods and to sketch an analysis of the appropriations of social living forms, social movements and war machines into regimes of signs. The term war machine is deployed as a key term for grasping the variables of content and the variables of expression that are encountered in the different historical circumstances. The order word modernisation illustrates not only the machinic enslavement but also new social subjections within a society of the spectacle and global capital. The account given here of the December 2008 uprising in Greece offers an insight into the political event and attempts a pragmatic analysis of the December war machine.

The Greek Gloom and the December 2008 Uprising

This paper employs the notion of apparatus of capture in the context of the historical formation and transformations of the Greek nation state. The aim is to demystify the overcoding poles of political sovereignty as they are expressed in different chronological periods and to sketch an analysis of the appropriations of social living forms, social movements and war machines into regimes of signs. The term war machine is deployed as a key term for grasping the variables of content and the variables of expression that are encountered in the different historical circumstances. The order word modernisation illustrates not only the machinic enslavement but also new social subjections within a society of the spectacle and global capital. The account given here of the December 2008 uprising in Greece offers an insight into the political event and attempts a pragmatic analysis of the December war machine.

Deleuze’s Regime of Signs & the Faces of Power, and Hamlet

Deleuze’s Regime of Signs & the Faces of Power, and Hamlet

Failure Notice

Failure Notice

Changing planes: rhizosemiotic play in transnational curriculum inquiry

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.

Is a Schizoanalysis of Cinema Possible?

Is a schizoanalysis of cinema possible? This question arises from the observation that there is no apparent continuity between Deleuze’s two-volume collaboration with Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, and the books he wrote afterwards, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. It is also prompted by the observation that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus seem to rely a great deal on cinema in order to develop and exemplify the many new concepts these books introduce. This paper highlights three such instances in their work. The fact is, Deleuze and Guattari claim that the core schizoanalytic concepts of the body without organs, the abstract machine and assemblage can account for “all things”; as such, these concepts must account for cinema too. It is the sheer expansiveness of these concepts that makes them attractive to cinema studies. Not only that, they promise a way of engaging with cinema that isn’t reliant on the fictions of identification, recognition and fantasy. In this sense we are permitted to assume that to some degree Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 are already schizoanalytic, albeit in ways we have yet to properly understand. The author makes a direct link between cinema and schizoanalysis by highlighting the significance of delirium to both. This paper argues that the royal road to a schizoanalysis of cinema is via delirium rather than dream or fantasy. It goes on to show how Deleuze and Guattari’s formalisation of delirium as a “regime of signs” can be used to inaugurate a new kind of semiology of cinema.

Deleuze & Guattari’s Intensive & Pragmatic Semiotic of Emergent Law

The paper articulates Deleuze & Guattari’s semiotics towards a semiotic of law through a discussion of the intensive semiotics of the field of emergence and pragmatic semiotics of social power. Within the framework of the pragmatic semiotics, it is argued that the crucial tension is how social machines and their regimes of signs operate with the intensive semiotics of the field of emergence. The signifying regime of the State social machine constructs itself on the excluded foundation of the field of emergence, and what is lost are the real ontological and social conditions of emergence, intensity and affect. In contrast, the counter-signifying regime of the war social machine actively operates with the intensive semiotic of the field of emergence, and develops an image of legality and regime of signs that taps the field of emergence for social organisation and expression. Returning to the issue of emergence and legality, the concept of Emergent Law is developed as a war social machine, abstract machine, assemblage, and regime of signs, that operates a semiotic that is developed in terms of an intensive semiotics that is open to and taps the forces of the field of emergence.

Diversity, law and justice: a Deleuzian semiotic view of ‘criminal justice’

This article takes a Deleuzian view toward diversity, law and justice. It makes use of the insights developed in his two books on cinema comparing an “organic regime” to a “crystalline regime.” The former will be seen as the image of thought and regime of signs of traditional criminal justice practices (due process model, crime control model, family model, actuarial justice, restorative justice); the latter, the basis of a transformative justice (social justice) and the regime of signs that are its constitutive elements. Deleuze’s views on semiotics can be fruitfully contrasted with Lacan’s. I want to indicate how Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic semiotics, on the descriptive level, quite accurately describes the connection of desire based on lack with capital logic, whereas, Deleuze provides an alternative ontology (desire based on production) and develops suggestions for privileging a becoming rather than a being. His is a call for ongoing transformations. I want to indicate how diversity, transformation and tolerance can have better developments in a Deleuzian model of the crystalline regime. This entails alternative discursive subject positions and regimes of signs within which constructions of reality by diverse peoples find wider expression. Accordingly, this is about better approximations to social justice.

Pragmatics for the Production of Subjectivity: Time for Probe‐Heads

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.

Hobbes’s Radical Nominalism

This paper analyzes Hobbes's understanding of signification, the process whereby words come to have meaning. Most generally, Hobbes develops and extends the nominalist critique of universals as it is found in Ockham and subsequently carried forward by early moderns such as Descartes. Hobbes's radicality emerges in comparison with Ockham and Descartes, as, unlike them, Hobbes also reduces the intellectual faculty entirely to imagination. According to Hobbes, we have nothing in which a stabilizing, pre-discursive mental language could inhere. Hobbes thus concludes that all thinking is affective and semiotic, and depends on the regulation of conventionally established regimes of signs. Establishing this regulation is one of the central functions of the Hobbesian commonwealth.

When Fibre Meets Fibre

When Fibre Meets Fibre

Aesthetics of leisure—disciplining desire

This paper critically reflects upon the nature and significance of aesthetics and its multiple representations within leisure. The paper focuses upon one specific leisure context, the health club environment, and presents a critique of aesthetics within the discursive context of modernity and postmodemity. The paper outlines the emerging territory of aesthetics (Nickson et al, 2000; Van Maanen, 1990; Witz et al, 1998; Du Gay, 1996) and challenges its notion as a passive entity, instead suggesting that aesthetics resides within a ‘society of signs’ (Rojek 1995) or ‘regime of signs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984) with inscriptive and territorializing tendencies. The contention here is that the health club environment services and supports such a society in its construction, reaffirmation, maintenance and reactivation of desire. Desire (Nietzsche, 1967; Foucault 1984; Deleuze and Guattari 1984; Megill 1987) is intrinsically linked to the aestheticisation process as exemplified in the search for the body image of the ‘other’ (Fox 1993; Foucault 1984). However, this paper argues that this quest for the ‘other’ establishes a process of regulation and surveillance of the self, resulting in a continual dissatisfaction of desire alluded to through the metaphor of travel. Moreover, it is suggested that a paradox exists within the health club environment, reflecting both discourses of modernity and postmodernity. Modernity is represented in the rationalised body process and its deferral within a techno-centric/dependency culture. The postmodern discourse is represented in a consumer culture of instant gratification, where identity is transmuted through the sign.

Ways of Reading as Signifying Regime of Signs

Ways of Reading as Signifying Regime of Signs

Jack and the Signifying Machines

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...