This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to The Stendhal Syndrome'. In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento's giallo specifically, this thesis argues that the giallo, both textually and meta-textually, actively resists oedipalisation. Taking up from Deleuze's contention in Cinema 1: The Movement Image that the cinematic-image can be consider the equivalent to a philosophical concept, I suggest that (...) Argento's giallo are examples of what Deleuze calls cinema of the "time-image": provoked and extended "philosophical" acts of imagining the world which opens up a theoretical space of thinking differently about questions of gender and genre in horror film, which takes us beyond the fixed images of thought offered by traditional psychoanalytical and feminist paradigms of horror. In the opening chapters of this thesis, I argue that the cinematic-image has to be thought "historically", and that it is only be understanding the emergence of the "giallo" in the 1960s within the wider picture of Italian national cinema, that we can understand Argento's films as specific cultural expressions of thought, which are not reducible to paradigms based upon analyses of the more puritan and fixed American horror film. In my subsequent discussion of Argento's "Diva" trilogy, I consider an assemblage of Deleuzian becoming and poststructuralist feminist thought as a mechanism through which to explore the increasingly feminised and feminist spaces of his later work. This thesis concludes by assessing Argento's critical and creative legacy in films such as Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap and Cindy Sherman's Office Killer. In these terms, a Deleuzian "approach", enables a set of readings, which open up the texts to a more productive consideration of their appeal, in a way which other more traditional approaches do not, and cannot, account for. The close textual and historical analysis demanded by Deleuze is both a reconsideration of the [feminist] politics of Argento's work, and a response to criticisms of misogynism. (shrink)

‘Beyond their instrumental functions,’ writes Rivka Oxman in an article about design, creativity and innovation, ‘advanced digital and computational environments are also becoming tools for thinking design’. At the leading edge of creativity and innovation design does not only speculate the plausible, possible or potential, but pragmatically inserts such futures into the present must). Using concepts mainly from Deleuze, Guattari, Spinoza and Simondon, I will position such design speculation as pragmatic, divergent, complex and emergent. That is, as manifesting the technical (...) mentalities that provide the milieu in which we can show what we ‘might be capable of’. (shrink)

Technological augmentation in the field of communication is a new way of controlling and manipulating the interface between current political communications and information. This is because, within the new paradigms of power, political communication is under the influence of netocracy, a new and mythical form of cybertechnological superpanopticism. The general objective of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of cybertechnological globalization where, according to Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, this new form of political and communicative superpanopticism is the result (...) of netocracy. This is related not just to the undermining of capitalism, but also to the myth of internet transparency as the site for communicational freedom. In theoretical terms, this paper seeks to deconstruct this hypothesis based on Slavoj Žižek’s position on netocracy. He claims this phenomenon is little more than a new and perverse form of capitalism which engages new methods of manipulating political communication. The methodology used in this paper draws on Bard and Söderqvist’s arguments, Žižek’s critique and Gilles Deleuze’s deconstruction. (shrink)

We develop a new understanding of the historical horizon of event ontology. Within the general area of the philosophy of nature, event ontology is a still emerging field of investigation in search for the ultimate materialist ontology of the world. While event ontology itself will not be explicated in full mathematical details here, our focus is on its conceptual interrelation with the dominant current of Idealism in Western thought approached by us as a problem in the history of ideas. Our (...) presentation is designed to be accessible to a wider audience. We especially highlight the deep connection between event ontology and postmodernism in general, and the post-war French philosophers Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari in particular, who are viewed as main sources for current and future programs of abstract materialism. (shrink)

The rise of the sitar from a limited accompaniment instrument used in the regional courts of Northern India to an internationally recognized cultural icon underscores its importance both as an instrument and a cultural symbol—the sitar mirrors India’s social complexity. This story encapsulates the social, political and economic trauma resulting from the dismantling of Mughal empire to the partition of Pakistan, reflecting contesting social narratives and Hindu/Muslim cultural heritages through the distinctive musical styles modern India. A musical instrument and material (...) object of contested origins, the sitar extends from wood, gourd, wire, and ivory into complex social and cultural networks. I argue that the sitar, as object, cannot be reduced to either an empirical or phenomenological entity; it is a space of potentiality, the actualization of a virtual object. I examine the sitar as both byproduct and narrative, demonstrating how it defies attempts to limit its constantly rupturing borders with imposed cognitive frames, and how materiality and philosophical systems can inform ethnographic practice. (shrink)

The Tshwane Conference on African Information Ethics of 5-7 February 2007 forces the question, What is an African information ethics? This question is addressed with reference to the complexities of a distinctly African information ethics, taking into account the distinction between ethics and morality, and the assumptions of the language of the Tshwane Declaration on Information Ethics in Africa. Gilles Deleuze‘s concept of assem-blage, analyzed from the perspectives of Bruno Latour‘s concept of ―reassembling the social‖ and recent anthropological approaches to (...) global assemblages are put to work to investigate possibilities of an African information ethics, with special attention to the concepts of universality and African identity. The task of assembling an African information ethics is then analyzed in terms of Latour‘s call for building "livable collectives". (shrink)

The space of the modern megapolis is treated in the paper in terms of environmental perspective — as a consistent and active environment following its inner logic of ordering and exercising its orderly influence on the human behavior. The “creativity of the environment”, as a focal point of the paper, is rendered through the context of the counterfinality and heterotopia.

In this thesis I apply Merleau-Ponty's brand of existential phenomenology to the developmental language disorder 'dyslexia'. Developmental dyslexia is marked by an unexpected failure to acquire written language skills, in particularly reading, spelling and aspects of writing, and has primarily been studied by experimental cognitive psychology, physiology, and more recently, the neurosciences. The current explanatory paradigm holds the view that symptoms of dyslexia are caused by deficits in phonological skills, in particularly verbal memory and phoneme awareness. As a means of (...) facilitating previous research, I take a phenomenological approach to the pre-reflective, lived experience of dyslexia by studying the peculiar style of intentional relationships that are developed by dyslexics in linguistic situations. This approach adopts a non-causal, descriptive methodology which attends to the manner in which dyslexics not only have a disrupted experience of the written word, but also a meaningful relationship with language. Using the notion of the 'lived body', I propose that dyslexics are marked by a loosening of body intentionality in linguistic situations, and this is further interpreted as an incohesive sedimentation of skills. I apply these general findings to the topics of spatiality, expression and temporality, and conclude that dyslexics exhibit a different style of being-in-the-world. This difference in style is characterised as an interaction between the propensity to foreclose the transitional and differential structures of perceptual experience, and moreover, the possibility of sustaining a provisional relationship with language through the development of compensatory strategies, the latter of these observations prompting a new line of future qualitative research. (shrink)

This essay circles around two ideas. First, I try to answer the ethical question “What is the right thing to do?” through the application of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative philosophy. Second, I relate Deleuze’s philosophy to mindfulness. I do not wish to suggest that they are identical. They are not. Yet, mixing mindfulness with Deleuze leads to a philosophy of mindfulness. That is a philosophy that makes us less blind to our experiences, but also ethically responsible for what (...) actually happens. Hereby, I move mindfulness from the sphere of psychology into philosophy, or from being primarily a practice of turning inward to one of turning outward, but also make Deleuze’s ethic more operational. The latter I will – briefly – illustrate by touching on elements of feminism. (shrink)

This thesis arises out of a critique of the way language is decontextualized and presented from a reductively linguistic viewpoint in foreign language instruction. In particular, it focuses on the weaknesses of the broad approach known as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and highlights the disparity between its theoretical assumptions and practical applications. With this in mind, the thesis identifies and explores three foundational premises that should be considered as part of an attempt to design a theoretically coherent framework for foreign (...) language instruction. By applying three sets of principles based on these premises, the thesis goes on to outline such a framework. After providing a background to the study, the first consideration is the nature of cultural and communicative performance. The study turns to sociological concepts regarding cultural organization and production, in order to better conceptualize how 'culture' can be understood in the context of foreign language learning. The second part of this area focuses on meaning and communication in order to undermine current treatments of 'language' in foreign language pedagogy. The second area of interest is that of learning and thus considers a number of theories of how people learn. The focus here is on learning-in-general rather than learning languages specifically. What emerges from this are a number of principles that should be borne in mind when creating conditions favorable to language learning. Finally, one largely overlooked area in foreign language learning and applied linguistics more broadly, is how the field of foreign language pedagogy constructs and legitimizes its practices, as well as suppresses its foundational theoretical assumptions in its activities (including research, methodology and teaching). A chapter is therefore devoted to this issue, and a set of principles is formulated in order to ensure that the design of any instructional framework is honest and ethical. Thus furnished with the triangulation of principles, an attempt is made to outline how a learner-focused, ethical pedagogical framework that stresses culture might look. This thesis is theoretical in nature and relies on arguments and positions from diverse and less commonly considered academic fields in foreign language instruction. Its main theoretical inspiration comes from concepts and claims generally considered 'poststructural' or 'postmodern'. However, there is no exclusive devotion to any particular author or theory. It is hoped that this thesis can make a genuine, if not controversial, contribution to the field of foreign language teaching by initiating a dialogue concerning the (lack of) philosophical and epistemological reflexivity in the field. (shrink)

In the plateau November 20, 1923: Postulates of linguistics, Deleuze and Guattari subvert the traditional confrontation between language and music, refusing to look at the latter for the constants that are usually thought to define the first and recognizing in both systems a regime of continuous variation. An example of this regime is Luciano Berio’s Visage, in which «despite what Berio himself says, it is less a matter of using pseudo constants to produce a simulacrum of language or a metaphor (...) for the voice than of attaining that secret neuter language without constants […].» This use of Berio against Berio himself is probably due to the declaration contained in Visage : «When I was composing Visage what attracted me […] was research intended as a way to expand the chances of bringing nearer musical and acoustic processes, and as a means to find musical equivalents of linguistic articulations.» Despite the apparent contradiction, D&G and Berio agree that music is not a form of sui generis language, nor, on the contrary, an expressive form without any relation to language, but rather a deterritorialization of the voice that produces a form of varied repetition of language, now devoid of meaning. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new approach to the performance of Schumann’s music, in particular to his song cycle Dichterliebe op. 48. Starting from the many productive instabilities and inconsistencies that characterize the compositional approach in Dichterliebe, I ask under which conditions we could think a performance practice that embraces these inconsistencies instead of stabilizing them into a finished performance. To do so, I propose the appropriation from music performance of the philosophical notion of “the problem” as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, (...) connecting it with the “pre-individual” in Gilbert Simondon and the notion of “outside,” mostly in the acceptation of Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault. A critique is enacted of what I suggest calling the traditional “image of musical thought.” From this critique can emerge a performance practice that moves away from the “problem of performance,” regarded in its traditional form as a representative practice oriented towards recognition, and that embraces instead the “performance of the problem,” where the problematic dimension of Schumann is enhanced and further dynamized. (shrink)

This thesis aims to explore Nietzsche's concept of individuality. Nietzsche, a radical and innovative thinker who attacks Christian morality and proclaims the death of God, provides us with a self-interpreting way to understand humanity and affirm life through self-overcoming and self-experimentation. Nietzsche's concept of individuality is his main philosophical concern. I first compare his perspective on human nature in Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and Beyond Good and Evil with Charles Darwin's, Sigmund Freud's and St Augustine's in order to examine (...) how his thinking differs from theirs with regard to the concept of human nature. Second, I turn to his On the Genealogy of Morals, in comparison with the thought of John Stuart Mill, analysing their criticism of Christian morality and discussing their different conceptions of individuality and the development of the self. The last chapter compares Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ, Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo with Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy of self-development, using this comparison to highlight the way in which Nietzsche expounds his concept of individuality and sets himself as a living example of an individual with autonomy and responsibility. Nietzsche attacks Christianity and argues that humanity can potentially be developed not through Christian morality but reflective self-interpretation. We shall not forget that being a self-developing individual is Nietzsche's chief aim although his arguments are too circuitous and controversial to be easily comprehended. His aim is not to offer some final, authoritative solution to these issues of the self and morality. In contrast, he offers us a new, uneven and perhaps dangerous way to understand humanity and modern culture. In order to achieve this, we need to interpret what he says from our own standpoints and also to interpret ourselves through self-reflection. Nietzsche's radical but insightful perspective is a means for guiding us to open our minds and affirm our lives through interpretation and experimentation. Then we might potentially overcome nihilism and become what we are: self-reflective individuals with free spirits. (shrink)

In the aftermath of a normalized Foucaultian world with an all encompassing web of biopower, one remaining hope is to cultivate nimbleness. Nimbleness is an embodied aesthetic sensitivity to the material presence. Cultivating nimbleness is a particular style of cultivation; it is to willfully gather together one’s self in the wake of a formative force far richer than the derivative web of living power relationships of human embeddness within a horizon of social, economical, political and historical subjectivating power relations; which (...) are chronicled and labeled by Michel Foucault as the normalizing practices of biopower. In other words to have freedom, one must start by rejecting the categories and labels normally internalized in order to relearn to learn from the material presence. Such a style of cultivation is a means of resisting normalizing power relations which co-opt cultivating practices to engross their own dominance which has had the by-product of an impotence to negate the gross material injustices present. This normalizing style of cultivation is a prevalent, corrupted, semblance which denies the importance of beauty for that of efficiency, rejects non-human purposiveness, and limits its measure of ethics to short term economical pragmatism. The thesis acknowledges that something is awry with the world and that giving care to beauty might help. The aim is to examine the event of Beauty as depicted by the philosopher Immanuel Kant and to apply this characterization to elective architectural spaces such that it may motivate individuals to cultivate their own nimbleness in relation to a formative force of nature. However given the revealed need for sensitivity to the particular material presence, the thesis can not be a rule book or catalog for beautiful design. Rather it is a rehabilitation for architects who are already heterospatially curious, with the desired outcome of architects cultivating their own nimbleness to reflectively judge as a ground up, multi-node, rhizomatic means of resistance to normalizing power practices as manifest in bad architecture. (shrink)

Bu makalede, çağdaş felsefede önemli bir yere sahip olan Gilles Deleuze’ün, metafiziğin krizini veya öznenin krizini edebiyat ile aşma girişimine ilişkin bir değerlendirme yapmak amaçlanmıştır. Deleuze için edebiyat, parçalanmış ve alt bileşenlerine bölünmüş öznenin, duygu - düşünce yoğunluğu ile yeni yaşam alanları yaratmasıdır. Başka bir deyişle birey, içine hapis olduğu bedeninden edebiyatın yarattığı duygu - düşünce yoğunluğu ile çıkar. Bu anlamda duygu - düşünce yoğunluğu, öznede hareketsizle hareketlinin; yaşananla yaşanmayanın; hayal ile gerçeğin buluşmasını sağlar. Edebiyat bu yönü ile bütünüyle “bir (...) yaşam olayı"dır. Deleuze’e göre edebiyat “.. asla tamamlanmayan, her zaman meydana gelmekte olan ve her yaşanabilir ya da yaşanmış malzemeyi aşan bir oluş meselesidir”. Daha da önemlisi edebiyat yarattığı oluşumlarla, düşüncede yer alan teorik ve pratik arasındaki yarılmayı ortadan kaldıran bir deneyimdir. Çünkü edebiyat, yaşamı tanımlamaktan ziyade onun sahip olduğu oluş ve gücü açığa çıkartan bir etkinliktir. Bu yüzden, sağaltıcı bir edim dâhilinde yaşamsal problemlere çözüm üretme çabasında olduğu söylenebilir. Bu çaba, daha çok “bir yaşam etiği” olarak tanımlanabilir. (shrink)

Theories of cognition and theories of social practices and institutions have often each separately acknowledged the relevance of the other; but seldom have there been consistent and sustained attempts to synthesize these two areas within one explanatory framework. This is precisely what my dissertation aims to remedy. I propose that certain recent developments and themes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, when understood in the right way, can explain the emergence and dynamics of social practices and institutions. Likewise, the (...) view I construct explains how social practices and institutions shape the character of cognition of their constituent agents. Moreover, I explain both cognitive and social agency under the single explanatory framework provided by Dynamic Systems Theory. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition, "embodied, "extended", "embedded", "enactive", and "ecological" approaches to cognition, as well as the conceptual resources of Dynamic Systems Theory, I construct a theory of agency that sees cognitive and social agents as far-from-equilibrium, open, recursively self-maintenant dynamic systems. Depending on the specifics of concrete circumstances, such systems, which I call "Dynamic Embodied Agents", may develop and possess emergent capacities for error-detection, flexible learning, normative behavior, representation, self-reflection, various modes of pattern-recognition, a temporal sense of self, and even moral responsibility. Some such systems are also sensitive to perceived social influences ; while reciprocally constituting and causally affecting them. (shrink)

This article focuses on the current trends and initiatives in human capacity building in Africa. It takes as it starting point that human capacity development is essential for Africa to become an information and know-ledge society and therefore an equal partner in the global sharing of knowledge. Four knowledge areas are identified and discussed. These are education, research and development, brain drain and information and documentation drain. The paper concludes that there is a clear understanding in Africa that its future (...) lies with education and that most African leaders have a strong political will to invest in human capacity building on the continent. It is also clear that much has been done, particularly primary education. Africa will most defi-nitely benefit from this in the long run. Problem areas remain however. These are in the needed growth of research and development and how to address the brain and information drain phenomena. (shrink)

This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they (...) have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies, as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD. (shrink)

Conversations about Everything is based on a three way conversation about a performative educational project called Mapping Strange Assemblages. This was a part of UAL/London College of Communication‘s contribution the 2018 London Design Festival and the Design School’s Public Programme. It rhizomatically maps out the interventions by a group of students and alumni who where named the Band of Animateurs. As an assemblages it attempts to create a visual and narrative affect that mirrored the performances during the Exhibition, Everything Happens (...) So Much’. (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje keliamas ir nagrinėjamas klausimas: koks santykis yra tarp Kanto transcendentalinio idealizmo ir Deleuze’o transcendentalinio empirizmo. Šis tyrimas suponuoja ir kitus klausimus: jeigu kartotė galima, kodėl tai negalėtų būti moralės dėsnis? Kaip nutinka, kad dogmatizmo filosofas Kantas tampa dogmatinės minties ženklu Deleuze’o tyrime? Kodėl vidinės proto iliuzijos sukuria prielaidas minties dogmatikai įveikti? Kaip transcendentalinė logika oponuoja formaliajai logikai Deleuze’o prasmės koncepcijoje? Kokia prielaida remdamasis Deleuze’as priešpriešina champ transcendentalkonceptą Kanto ir Husserlio transcendentaliniam idealizmui? Kaip yra įmanoma preferuoti bedugnę transcendentaliniam idealui (...) ir priešpriešinti Kantui Antoniną Artaud? (shrink)

This article has already been published in The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, Numer 61. We warmly thank Ineta Kivle and The Polish Journal of Aesthetics for the permission to republish it here.: During the pandemic situation while the usual order changes and the search for new elements of security become more active, rhythm studies may provide a deeper understanding of human and ongoing processes. The current study views rhythm as a force of stability in the context of - Philosophie – (...) Nouvel article. (shrink)

Algorithmic governmentality is a new form of political governance interconnected with technology and computation. By coining the term “algorithmic governmentality,” Antoinette Rouvroy argues that this mode of governance reduces everything to data, and people are no longer individuals but dividuals (able to be divided) or readable data profiles. Implementing the concept of algorithmic governmentality, the current study analyses Project Itoh’s award-winning novel Harmony in terms of such relevant concepts as “subjectivity,” “infra-individuality” and “control,” as suggested by Rouvroy and colleagues. The (...) analysis further draws on Foucault’s ideas of “governmentality” and “neoliberalism” and Deleuze’s concepts of “dividuality” and “society of control.” In Itoh’s fictional world, the entire society is subject to the new medical government, which replaced the chaotic world with a perfect but harrowing benevolent society, eradicating disease, suicide and crime. As elucidated in this paper, despite the dominant controlling government, there is a hope for humans to regain and reestablish their subjectivity and give meaning to their own personality by defying the nihilistic computational system. (shrink)

In this article I explore the possibilities of experimentation as a non-foundational praxis for introducing novel ways of being into existence. Beginning with a discussion, following Bataille, of the excess of any thought, I argue that any action in the world is necessarily uncertain. Using the insights of Derridean deconstruction combined with Badiousian truth procedure I argue that experimentation offers a means for acting from this uncertain position. Experimentation takes advantage of the play and uncertainty of our understanding of the (...) world as a means of moving towards more progressive political positions. Normal 0 false false false EN-IE X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}. (shrink)

We develop an approach to temporal logic that replaces the traditional objective, agent- and event-independent notion of time with a constructive, event-dependent notion of time. We show how to make this event-dependent time entropic and hence well-defined. We use sheaf-theoretic techniques to render event-dependent time functorial and to construct memories as sequences of observed and constructed events with well-defined limits that maximize the consistency of categorizations assigned to objects appearing in memories. We then develop a condensed formalism that represents memories (...) as pure constructs from single events. We formulate an empirical hypothesis that human episodic memory implements a particular constructive functor. (shrink)

To make sense of what Gilles Deleuze understands by a mathematical concept requires unpacking what he considers to be the conceptualizable character of a mathematical theory. For Deleuze, the mathematical problems to which theories are solutions retain their relevance to the theories not only as the conditions that govern their development, but also insofar as they can contribute to determining the conceptualizable character of those theories. Deleuze presents two examples of mathematical problems that operate in this way, which he considers (...) to be characteristic of a more general theory of mathematical problems. By providing an account of the historical development of this more general theory, which he traces drawing upon the work of Weierstrass, Poincaré, Riemann, and Weyl, and of its significance to the work of Deleuze, an account of what a mathematical concept is for Deleuze will be developed. (shrink)

Colonialism’s legacy in South Africa includes persistent economic inequality which, since the country’s universities charge fees, bars many from higher education, perpetuating the marginalisation of those previously disadvantaged by the apartheid regime. In 2015-6, country-wide unrest raged across university campuses, as students protested the yearly cycle of tuition increases under the slogan #FeesMustFall, demanding “free, decolonised education”. Protests ended in December 2017 when the government announced a sliding-scale payment policy alleviating the economic burden for poorer students. This paper sets the (...) #FMF movement and its twin demands within the context of decoloniality, and argues that while free education has been achieved, imagining and implementing decolonised education for South Africa in an increasingly globalised world is a more challenging, elusive goal. (shrink)

This article is a response to Peter Dahlgren’s review of The discursive-material knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation. Dahlgren’s engagement with the DMK book consisted of four questions, with an invitation to respond to them. These questions were not so much critiques, but more like invitations to clarify, and – more importantly – to expand into a few territories that were insufficiently addressed in the DMK book. This article starts with explaining the platform structure of the DMK book (...) and the strategy that was used to write it. This then allows to focus on the first platform, explaining the basics of the DMK, the supporting role of the structure/agency dimension, and the difference between the concepts of ideology and discourse. This is also a good opportunity to think through the opportunities for discourse critique. In the next part, the issues related to high theory, ontology and metaphysics are addressed. The last part returns to the DMK book’s case study and the interdependence of the different platforms, arguing that empirical research can also feed into non-essentialist ontological reflections, while these reflections also provide support for the research itself. (shrink)

The Somali pirates are met with scorn and have often been oversimplified in films such as Captain Phillips. Through the critical examination of factors that led to the rise of modern piracy while synthesizing historical understandings of piracy and State sovereignty with contemporary analyses, it is possible to draw a historical comparison between the pirates of the 17th century and piratical communities today. Via a Deleuzoguattarian framework new ways of understanding the existence of the pirates are provided. From this perspective (...) the Somali pirates are examples of nomadic peoples operating war machinically against the State. (shrink)

This paper draws on artistic explorations of territorial and spatial forces through analysis of projects set in the natural landscape, in a specific indoor site or at the threshold between the two. Specific attention is given to the artistic processes at play in the transformation of materials created/collected in the natural environment when shaped for presentation in an indoor location. What is the relation between being and becoming in this liminal space? According to Erwin Straus, the impetus to this process (...) is the pathic moment of sensation, a moment which evolves in two dimensions: as an unfolding of the world and of the self. Louis Schreel argues that in Deleuze and Guattari, artistic practice activates a process in which «the work ‘captures’ forces at work in the world and renders these sensible. Its effects are above all real and not merely imaginary: the image is not a mental given but a concrete, existing reality». Here, Deleuze distinguishes between the percept – landscape in the absence of man – and affect, the non-human becomings contained in the artwork. This paper wishes to unpack these processes through a study of two concrete instances of artistic practice, aiming to create immediate interaction between musician and environment, in which either of the two authors took part. (shrink)

Through an analysis of the film The Cry of Jazz, the Afro-Futurism of Ed Bland is contrasted with the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari to demonstrate both the application of schizoanalysis to jazz theory and the application of Afro-Futurism to schizoanalysis. In the first part, Bland’s critical race theory of jazz is outlined through the dialogue provided by the protagonist Alex in The Cry of Jazz demonstrating the dialectical Hegelianism of Bland’s analysis. Bland’s theory of jazz is sifted through a (...) reading of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition as a critique of Hegelianism. Through an elaboration of jazz theory,the Deleuzian concepts of difference and repetition develop further Bland’s jazz theory leading to the death of jazz and the potential becoming of a new America. The survival of the spirit of jazz after death is demonstrated through the body without organs. Here, Bland’s Afro-Futurist critical race theory comes into focus as a pure affectivity that decomposes the boundaries of musicality and the social condition simultaneously. (shrink)

The paper aims to give an insight on various concepts created and developed within the Caribbean literary context, in order to find some strategic elements capable of allowing us reframe the idea and meaning of locality. The necessity of such an operation lies in the urgency of rethinking the political dimension of locality due to its reactionary and repressive use by alt-right and fascist movements, in particular in Europe and the US. In this vein, concepts such as “polyrhythm”, “metaarchipelago”, “tidalectics”, (...) “poetics of relation”, “creolization”, “transnation” and “commonplace”, become of strategic use as a way of opening up the idea of locality, which we aim to conceive precisely as a kind of social openness. Beside this conceptual reframing of locality, developed through the analysis of Benítez Rojo and Kamau Brathwaite’s rhythmical concepts, the reader can find, on the one hand, the concept of performance as the very engine of such a reframing, and, on the other end, an attempt to show how the concepts we analyse are deeply intertwined with those of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular multiplicity, difference and repetition, and rhizome. This article has been produced in the context of the International Research Project Real Smart Cities, which has received funding from the European Union Marie Sklodowska Curie Action, program RISE/Horizon 2020, agreement n. 777707. (shrink)

Nature relative to subjectivity is an under theorized area of performance philosophy, one that we ignore at our peril. There is such a thing as nature. It encompasses all that humans are not, and suffuses all that we are and do. It is not merely a social or cultural construction, as we consider in this essay. In order to speak more definitively of nature and the body, we employ the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and reach back to the lifeworld philosophy (...) of Edmund Husserl. Some read Husserl as an essentialist, but there are other readings, such as the one developed here. One of Ricoeur’s major works, Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and the Involuntary, concerns motives and values at the organic level, studying how habits inform individual habitus and become embodied as nature in flux. Accordingly, this essay explores subjectivity, intentionality and nature in performance using examples from butoh relative to metamorphosis, a ubiquitous process in the rhythms and multi-tiered rhizomes of nature. Through Sartre and Ricoeur, the text also considers lived values of freedom relative to intention. In this light, readers are invited to explore their own porousness and evaporations via Freedom in Plasma, a butoh to do at the end of the essay. (shrink)

The article proposes to model the phenomenon of the cell phone as a wall-window. This model aims at explicating some of the perceptions and experiences associated with cellular technology. The wall-window model means that the cell phone simultaneously separates the user from the physical surroundings (the wall), and connects the user to a remote space (the window). The remote space may be where the interlocutor resides or where information is stored (e.g. the Internet). Most cell phone usage patterns are modeled (...) as a single dimension according to the level of distraction or attention of the user. In order to accommodate nuanced situations such as augmented reality, I suggest a two-dimensional layout: the wall-window. The wall represents the attention to the immediate physical environment, while the window represents the attention to a remote space. The wall-window model further evolves once a screen is woven into this layout. This addition is easily understood due to the screen’s etymology, which is associated with the concepts of shield or barrier. From a technical perspective, the screen has become an integral part of the cell phone. Furthermore, a screen itself is both a wall and a window. Lastly, once a cell phone is supplemented with a screen, it is easier to refer to it as media. And again, media fits into the wall-window model. (shrink)

Building on the multivalent meanings of the Arabo- Persian tarjama (‘to interpret’, ‘to translate’, ‘to narrate’), this essay argues for the relevance of Qur’ānic inimitability (i'jāz) to contemporary translation theory. I examine how the translation of Arabic rhetorical theory ('ilm al-balāgha) into Persian inaugurated new trends within the study of literary meaning. Finally, I show how Islamic aesthetics conceptualizes the translatability of literary texts along lines kindred to Walter Benjamin. -/- .

The purpose of this essay is to make the case for a heterodox reading of Leibniz’s The Monadology (published 1720) through the lens of Professor John Wheeler’s hypothesis of the one-electron universe (proposed in 1940). My conjecture is this: That there exists in the knowable universe only one monad; that this monad traverses time in both directions, eventually criss-crossing the entire past and future history of the universe; and that this singular monad interacts with itself countless times, thereby filling the (...) universe with simultaneous appearances of itself. In the course of this article I will consider the possibility that our solitary monad is synonymous with Leibniz’s God, or if the monad in question is rather a created substance that is alone with God, a notion that gains some traction thanks to Leibniz’s admiration for the solipsism of Saint Teresa of Avila. I will also consider whether the one-monad hypothesis is consistent with Leibniz’s own views on harmony, simplicity and perfection. (shrink)

In this article, nonhuman poetry is explored. Departing from an autoethnographic project based on audio recordings made while running on revetments, and which discussed how to give voice to nonhuman actors the possibilities of nonhuman poetry, this text aims at taking it one step further by extracting poetry from the material. Ethnographically, this is discussed in terms of affect, and an 'ethnography to be'. Theoretically, the study has a posthumanist approach, with a specific focus on the econarratology of philosopher Michel (...) Serres. The method and theory are are discussed in tandem in relation to what philospher Peter Sloterdijk has coined 'amphibian anthropology'. By stacking the bracketed words in my transcriptions, four poems emerge in which background sounds, contextual descriptions, corrections and bodily sounds form the content. Each poem is accompanied by a map made from smartphone screenshots. The prose is found to be evocative of the surroundings of the recording, and also resonating with the ideas of human language as derivative of what Serres calls the Great narrative, the story of universe and nature themselves. The proximity to water and rocks discernible in the experiment is seen as a result stemming from practicing the hope-oriented 'ethnography to be'. (shrink)

In their monograph Opera’s Second Death from 2002, Žižek and Dolar seem to join the illustrious company of cultural critics and musicologists, from Adorno to Gary Tomlinson, tolling the death knell for the operatic genre: with the advent of the 20 th century and the radical critique of the humanist premises that opera relied upon, the genre, so the story goes, had become at least anachronistic, if not outright reactionary. In the first section of my article I intend to not (...) only counter this claim, but also to directly engage with a recent attempt on the part of musicologist Nicholas Till to frame from a Deleuzian perspective contemporary opera’s renewed ability to deal with the metaphysical premises of the genre. In this respect I will suggest how, in spite of his own thesis on opera’s death, Žižek’s ontological thinking aptly frames the kind of metaphysics that operatic production is dealing with today. In the second section I intend to examine in more detail a case in point, even if a twisted one, for a recent musical reflection of opera’s metaphysical ties. In his late work Aristaeus, the German composer Hans Werner Henze attempts to reimagine the orphic myth outside its humanist framework. By closely reading this work against the grain of Henze’s earlier retelling of the Orpheus story in the form of a ballet, I will highlight how in Aristaeus he “traverses the fantasy” of his own humanism, seeking to directly engage at both the dramatic and the musical level with an Hegelian/Žižekian dimension of absolute negativity. (shrink)

Since the first memorandum “agreement” between Greece and its international creditors in 2010, the “tragedy of the Greek debt crisis” has become one of the most popular narratives that frame Greece’s condition of indebtedness. Highlighting the interplay between appearances of “debt crisis” and notions of tragedy as its point of departure, this essay builds on Nietzsche’s thought and introduces a philosophy of tragedy that understands what appears to be a “debt crisis” as, in fact, a crisis of the creditor’s capacity (...) to reproduce the non-resolvable power relations between them and their debtor. For Nietzsche, in order for the creditor to experiment with their debtor’s appropriation, the creditor stages a series of acts of judgment that introduce masks and appearances of their debtor’s redemption. In the comments that follow I make the case that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw upon Nietzsche’s philosophy of tragedy in order to grasp the interdependencies between performances of evaluation, capitalistic modes of production and the production of infinite debt. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s readings of Nietzsche’s philosophy of tragedy and Maurizio Lazzarato’s works on Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that what appears to be a “Greek debt crisis” is a crisis of credit’s capacity to extract profit from infinite debt. Connecting this theorization to the Greek situation, I look at the “YES” and “NO” demonstrations that occurred two days before the Greek bailout referendum of 2015. I contend that while the “YES” demonstration reenacted the infinitization of Greece’s indebtedness to its creditors the “NO” demonstration performed politics that exceed notions of judgment and debt. (shrink)

This paper attempts a parallelism, through the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s conception of a practical philosophy, between the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Benedict de Spinoza. Inspired by Nietzsche’s image as a nomadic thinker, Deleuze presents us with a more convincing image of Spinoza: a man who is closer to LIFE. The specific aspect of the Nietzsche-Spinoza relation I want to discuss in what follows is the difference between “morality” and “ethics” — it will become clear that with Nietzsche and (...) Spinoza, ethics has an “ethological” basis. It is hoped that the distinction between morality and ethics will illuminate what Deleuze sees in both Nietzsche and Spinoza as a basic notion of philosophical thinking — a way of thinking which is beyond good and evil, that is, beyond moralistic ontology. (shrink)

This paper draws on data from an longitudinal case study of a Local Learning and Employment Network instituted by a state government in Victoria in the arena of post compulsory education and training to explore the possibilities of a new approach to thinking about networks, their formation and operation, one that is inspired by ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Using a rhizomatic approach my focus is on the middle — the plateau — a space that is made of lines moving in multiple (...) directions. Looking at the middle disrupts taken-for-granted understandings and perceptions of linearity; it is in considering middles and plateaus that it is possible to move beyond a concern with joining-up ‘fixed’ entities within existing, and constrained, ways of knowing and, in the process, finding new ways of understanding and realizing the potential of a phenomenon that is ‘fast becoming a standard explanation of structure and action in both the public and private domain’. (shrink)