This paper reviews Deleuze’s theory of language in Logic of Sense, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and language do not exist separately but in a mixture of words and things. The author argues that this flattened ontology of surfaces is incommensurable with the ontology of depth used in conventional humanist qualitative methodology and recommends beginning new empirical inquiry with a concept instead (...) of with method and methodology. (shrink)

Sylvia Wynter, novelist, dramatist, cultural critic, and philosopher, has called for a new poetics that “will have to take as its referent subject, that of the concrete individual human subject”. By “referent subject” Wynter means a shared sense, poetic in nature, that can nevertheless exclude many who are also expected to live it. Man, Wynter argues, as a referent subject first appeared in the Italian Renaissance. As Walter Mignolo has argued, this way of representing an individual is made visual in (...) Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a man of perfect... (shrink)

This review essay attempts to present a coherent and reasonably unitary picture of the contemporary ‘speculative turn’ in continental philosophy as charted in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, eds, The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism (2011). Avoiding a more objective yet more anodyne chapter by chapter summary, I paint an intentionally synoptic view by selecting some common concerns of the authors involved, and group them under five ‘core themes’. Throughout, I try to keep open the comparative channel (...) with the realist tenets of critical realism, and conclude vouching for the necessity for more bridge-building works to appear in the future. (shrink)

The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the nascent (...) literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The author had had a plan for a kind of melodrama constructed around two orders of motivation. In the foreground of the stage, there was to be a series of realistic incidents, dealing with typical human situations, such as family quarrels, scenes at a business office, lovers during courtship, a public address by a spell-binder, etc. In the background, like a set of comments on this action, there was to be a primeval forest filled with mythically prehistoric monsters, marauding and (...) fighting in silent pantomime. These two realms were to have no overt connection with each other. The monsters in the "prehistoric" background would pay no attention to the everyday persons of the... (shrink)

Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart investigates the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and death. (...) Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries. In this way, this doctoral thesis concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: “semi-living” sculptures created by The Tissue Culture and Art Project and the performance May the Horse Live in Me by L’Art Orienté Objet. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

The imperative to theorize emerges in the practical question of how to live in the world with others. In the contemporary historical moment, one shot through with two hundred fifty years of capitalist political economic practices, such an imperative requires theorists to both use and go beyond a Marxist critique. This need to fold Marxist theory back into itself in an effort to emerge differently inspired, among others, Frankfurt School theorists who wove psychoanalysis into historical materialism, Birmingham School thinkers who (...) stressed difference and the power of ordinary culture, anti-colonial thinkers who theorized the global marketplace, settler colonialism, and racial difference, and Italian Autonomists who... (shrink)

This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine (...) three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual, and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings. (shrink)

The planet seems to be heading into an ecological catastrophe, in which the earth will become uninhabitable for many species, including human beings. At the same time we humans are beset by appalling injustices. The Rio Declaration which addressed both these sets of problems contains conceptual contradictions about ‘development and ‘nature’. This paper addresses the issue of whether it is logically possible to work for both global justice and ecological sustainability. The article proposes a way of responding to the spirit (...) of the Rio Declaration without reinstating its contradictions; considers a posthuman perspective on the issue; and proposes a phenomenological approach to ethics and justice which would include both the human and more-than-human parts of the world. In section the implications for education are drawn out, in terms of ‘learning to mind’. Finally, links are drawn to the Journal theme of translation. (shrink)

Agency and representation are viewed as preconditions for democratic action. The dominant understanding of agency and representation is defined in terms of certain capacities and abilities that are considered to constitute the basis of personhood. The article will put into question this understanding and the assumptions that underpin it and argue that it rests on a mistaken conception of human animality – one that reduces the self to an autonomous and disembodied rational mind. The article will also suggest that it (...) is problematic because it marginalizes more than human forms of life – as well as those of us who are differently human – and excludes their points of view from the political processes of world making. In contrast, I will put forward an understanding of agency and representation that is attuned to the relational dimensions of all life on earth. By paying attention to the semiotic propensities that all forms of life share – which entails considering nonlinguistic forms of communication – this article responds to the need for more radically democratic ways of listening, giving voice, and caring for the earth’s beings and the relations that form the conditions for life to flourish. (shrink)

This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti’s nomadic subject and Barad’s conception of agency, we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications, we introduce four concepts: homelessness, agelessness, playfulness and wakefulness. These may appear improbable in the context of education policy-making today, but they are (...) born of theorising our practices in the age-transgressive field of Philosophy with Children. We argue that these concepts help to reconfigure intra-generational relations, ways of being and becoming. They express the longing, corporeality and visionary epistemology of nomadic enquiry. These inventions express a non-hierarchical philosophy of immanence. We draw some tentative conclusions about educational practices more generally. (shrink)

In recent years the affective turn has irrupted in gender theory to the point of having pervaded important debates in the field of political philosophy. Recognizing clear precedents in certain works as from the ’80s, the proposal is based in the need to elaborate a conceptualization of affects which abandons a series of dualisms: interior/exterior, public/private, action/passion. The purpose of this critical study is to analyse the impact of such proposal in light of the publication, in the Spanish language, of (...) Lauren Berlant’s El corazón de la nación, which constitutes a key work for the analysis of the extension and of the problems involved in a perspective that calls for the revisiting of issues such as agency, the relationship between past and present and embodiment. (shrink)