In such 3D virtual environments (3DVEs) as Second Life, one can ‘be’ re-created as avatar in whatever form one wants to be, facilitated by extensive beauty and cosmetic industries to help the residents of this world achieve a particular kind of glamorous image – limited only by their imaginations and Linden Dollar accounts. Yet, others in 3DVEs are working hard to re-create their avatars to be replicas of their ‘offline’ selves, appearing as they do in actuality. Such phenomena provide a (...) rich opportunity to explore the cultural contexts of ‘self-making’, the process of ‘becoming’ and the transformative, often transgressive, processes of ‘beauty practices’ as bodily praxis and serious play. Drawing on their international ethnographic research undertaken in Second Life, the authors explore the phenomenon of image, affect, subjectivity and representation in this alternative arena. We focus specifically on three interrelated and paradoxical aspects of self-making in this 3D virtual world: first, the ways in which many of our respondents described their avatar personae as symbolically representing their ‘authentic inner selves’; second, the ways our respondents used photography and video to verify and authenticate these ‘inner selves’, through capturing representations of their avatar bodies in action; and, third, the ways ‘authenticity’, for many of our respondents, depended on their avatar image aligning as closely as possible with their bodily appearance off-screen. The concept of what residents of Second Life understand as constituting the ‘authentic inner self’ both in and outside of the virtual world becomes particularly pertinent here. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Deleuze’s treatment of the Nietzschean problem of nihilism. Of all the major figures in contemporary continental thought, Deleuze is at once one of the most luminous, and practically a lone voice in suggesting that nihilism may successfully be overcome. Whether or not he is correct on this point is thus a commanding question in relation to our understanding of the issue. Many commentators on Nietzsche have argued that his project of overcoming nihilism is destined to failure (...) because of the affinity between the problem of nihilism and the logic of negation. While Nietzsche wants an absolute affirmation of life, Spinoza’s principle that “all determination is negation,” as well as Hegel’s dialectical conception of negation, suggest that affirmation free of negation is not possible. However, some commentators indicate that Deleuze successfully shows how overcoming nihilism is possible because his “logic of difference” allows for an affirmation which is not dialectically reappropriated by negation. This paper argues that beyond such logical considerations, there are metaphysical and existential reasons why Deleuze’s interpretation of nihilism fails to show that it can be overcome. For Deleuze, the overcoming of nihilism hinges not just on a logic of difference, but on a radical interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return as “selective being.” Drawing on recent scholarship and on Nietzsche’s own writings I argue that this is not a tenable interpretation, and also, more importantly, that the metaphysical and existential implications of this understanding of eternal return reinstate nihilism at the very point where it is supposedly overcome. Moreover, I argue that there are attendant ethical and political dangers to Deleuze’s position on nihilism. (shrink)

This paper mounts a philosophical defence of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus by interpreting it from three perspectives: that of Freud, Jung, and Deleuze and Guattari. The latter's concept of becoming-animal is offered as a leading perspective which reveals the deep philosophical significance of the drama, belying the claims of those critics who have dismissed it as bogus or banal. This interpretation also allows Equus to be seen as an exemplary illustration of what Deleuze and Guattari mean by their intriguing (...) concept of becoming-animal, and throws fresh light on this fascinating but difficult notion. (shrink)

The scope of the essay is limited by the ideas behind the mechanisation of desire as conceptualised in The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp. This glass-based installation depicts a convoluted mechanism, as the full-title of the work suggests, representing The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Using tropes and figures from his earlier studies, the artist designed a machine for the production of desire, rendering the unconscious mechanical and dynamic. The paper aims to present selected aspects of the installation, (...) including mechanical reproduction (1), technological fetishism (2), transparency (3), as well as to discuss its significance with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs (4). The interpretive force of the machine metaphor in the work of Duchamp is analysed in the context of integrative and non-integrative attitudes to technology. (shrink)

Responding to Ike Kamphof’s “Webcams to save nature: Online space as affective and ethical space,” this essay considers the further contextualization of Kamphof’s analysis using the idea of agencement and the provocation to consider further the politics of affect.

: Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, I use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn to Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Haraway's reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, 1 use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn tojewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Harauiay's reading of vampires, retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

Insects and ‘the swarm’ as metaphors and objects of research have inspired works in the genres of science fiction and horror; social and political theorists; and the development of war-fighting technologies such as ‘drone swarms’, which function as robot/insect hybrids. Contemporary developments suggest that the future of warfare will not be ‘robots’ as technological, individualised substitutions for idealised (masculine) warfighters, but warfighters understood as swarms: insect metaphors for non-centrally organised problem-solvers that will become technologies of racialisation. As such, contemporary feminist (...) analysis requires an analysis of the politics of life and death in the insect and the swarm, which, following Braidotti (2002), cannot be assumed to be a mere metaphor or representation of political life, but an animating materialist logic. The swarm is not only a metaphor but also a central mode of biopolitical and necropolitical war, with the ‘terrorist’ enemy represented as swarmlike as well. In analysing the relations of assemblage and antagonism in the war ontologies of the drone swarm, I seek inspiration from what Hayles (1999, p. 47) describes as a double vision that ‘looks simultaneously at the power of simulation and at the materialities that produce it’. I discuss various representations and manifestations of swarms and insect life in science/speculative fiction, from various presentations of the ‘Borg’ in Star Trek (1987–1994, 1995–2001, 1996), Alien (1979) and The Fly (1958, 1986) to more positive representations of the ‘becoming-insect’ as possible feminist Utopia in Gilman's Herland (2015 [1915]) and Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1989 [1976]). Posthuman warfare also contains the possibilities of both appropriating and rewriting antagonisms of masculine and feminine in the embodiment of the subject of war in the swarm. This piece seeks to analyse new ways of feminist theorising of the relations of power and violence in the embodiment of war as the swarm. (shrink)

A central claim of Deleuze's reading of Bergson is that Bergson's distinction between space as an extensive multiplicity and duration as an intensive multiplicity is inspired by the distinction between discrete and continuous manifolds found in Bernhard Riemann's 1854 thesis on the foundations of geometry. Yet there is no evidence from Bergson that Riemann influences his division, and the distinction between the discrete and continuous is hardly a Riemannian invention. Claiming Riemann's influence, however, allows Deleuze to argue that quantity, in (...) the form of ‘virtual number’, still pertains to continuous multiplicities. This not only supports Deleuze's attempt to redeem Bergson's argument against Einstein in Duration and Simultaneity, but also allows Deleuze to position Bergson against Hegelian dialectics. The use of Riemann is thereby an important element of the incorporation of Bergson into Deleuze's larger early project of developing an anti-Hegelian philosophy of difference. This article first reviews the role of discrete and continuous multiplicities or manifolds in Riemann's Habilitationsschrift, and how Riemann uses them to establish the foundations of an intrinsic geometry. It then outlines how Deleuze reinterprets Riemann's thesis to make it a credible resource for Deleuze's Bergsonism. Finally, it explores the limits of this move, and how Deleuze's later move away from Bergson turns on the rejection of an assumption of Riemann's thesis, that of ‘flatness in smallest parts’, which Deleuze challenges with the idea, taken from Riemann's contemporary, Richard Dedekind, of the irrational cut. (shrink)

This essay explores the symbiotic relationship between European modernity, its vision of woman and water. The union of these three metaconcepts is consecrated by the Ovidian story of Narcissus and his other, Echo. The West finally found itself completely through Hegel, the Ur-narcissist, who explains the immutable link between that European monopoly, history (by which he means the potential for becoming modern), and the sea. The narcissism of modernity is the great theme of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, (...) which shows how the bourgeoisie seeks to remake the entire world in its own image. Psychoanalysis, through the writings of Ferenczi, joined in cementing the connection, likening woman to the primal sea to which the male ever yearns to return. And Foucault suggests a potential conclusion from this metaconceptual constellation: that Man, a Western creation, may well disappear like a face drawn on a sandy beach. (shrink)

In order to understand how Deleuze's method of dramatization is ‘not privileging mankind in any way’, this article turns to the figure of the marionette as it is discreetly, but consistently, developed thorough Deleuze's books. Inspired by Kleist's On the Marionette Theatre, this marionette figure claims for a rhizomatic approach to the subject, defined by the lines it draws into space and exercising its freedom in the present of Aion through spatio-temporal dynamisms similar to those of Leibniz's monads. The strange (...) freedom developed by marionettes also leads to an examination of Nietzsche's ‘eternal return’, which is at the core of Deleuze's elaboration of the method of dramatization. Combining Nietzsche's eternal return with the characteristics of Deleuzian marionettes then requires us to revisit the famous concept of ‘becoming’: becomings are selective, both methodologically and ontologically. (shrink)

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin's ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, contemporary feminist writing in the social sciences and the humanities has been characterised by a strong renewal of interest in storytelling, as is evidenced by the works of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway among others. How can storytelling grow with and beyond its literary origin to become a political and heuristic tool? And how does the Anthropocene – our specific geologic epoch – require the renewal of the means of (...) expression of such an old tool as storytelling, so that it becomes a human and nonhuman process? To answer those questions, Deleuze's and Haraway's takes on ‘fabulation’ are intermingled along three lines: the part played by storytelling in the construction of earthly knowledges, the imbrication of speculation and politics, and the nonhuman dimension of fabulation that allows for the liberation of forces of life repressed by an anthropocentric approach. (shrink)

While the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of ‘body without organs’ is developed alongside their critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is also developed alongside their critique of Christianity, most poignantly in the sixth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. Here Deleuze and Guattari quote Antonin Artaud in order to show how ‘the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO’. In order to understand this relationship between judgement of God and the BwO, this essay explores Deleuze's critiques of Christianity (...) in his earlier works and concludes that the BwO, much like Artaud's own poetry, is developed in contrast to an internalised form of Christianity. (shrink)

I here distinguish dissensual from consensual corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the grounds that the former is more concerned to organize (or portray) corporate-civil society disagreement than it is corporate-civil society agreement. In doing so, I first conceive of consensual CSR, and identify a positive and negative view thereof. Second, I conceive of dissensual CSR, and suggest that it can be actualized through the construction of dissent enabling, rather than consent-oriented, public spheres. Following this, I describe four actor-centred institutional theories—i.e. (...) a sociological, ethical, transformative and economic perspective, respectively—and suggest that an economic perspective is generally well suited to explaining CSR activities at the organizational level. Accordingly, I then use the economic perspective to analyse a dissent enabling public sphere that Shell has constructed, and within which Greenpeace participated. In particular, I explain Shell’s employment of dissensual CSR in terms of their core business interests; and identify some potential implications thereof for Shell, Greenpeace, and society more generally. In concluding, I highlight a number of ways in which the present paper can inform future research on business and society interactions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reconsider and explore the ontoepistemology of student engagement in higher education as part of a democratic education, going beyond neo-liberal groundings. This is urgent as the concept of student engagement seems to be taken for granted and used uncritically in higher education. In addition, higher education is affected by, and under pressure from, different global and societal forces, which raises questions about the purpose of education. In our exploration, we mainly draw on the (...) philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his co-writers Felix Guattari and Claire Parnet, but also Karen Barad and writers who are inspired by these theories. We present four arguments on which we elaborate: Rethinking power relations, Questioning linearity and how to use goals, Appreciating pedagogical relationships as multiple voices and becoming-multiple-others, and Considering assemblages, rhizomes and lines in student engagement. These arguments open up, as we argue, the poss... (shrink)

We welcome Raymond et al.s invitation to further discuss the pragmatics of relational thinking in sustainability science. We clarify that relational approaches provide distinct theoretical and methodological resources that may be adopted on their own, or used to enrich other approaches, including systems research. We situate Raymond et al.s characterization of relational thinking in a broader landscape of differing approaches to mobilizing relationality in sustainability science. A key contribution of relational thinking in the process-relational, pragmatist and post-structural traditions is the (...) focus on the generation and use of concepts. This focus is proving methodologically useful for sustainability scientists. We caution against viewing the generation of concepts purely in terms of applying the knife to divide components. Relational thinking offers alternatives more congruent with complexity: away from an external actor cutting away at the world with an either/or logic, towards an immersed actor contributing generatively within it using a both/and not only logic. The pragmatics of relational thinking will vary according to purposes. We describe two possible pathways for using relational thinking in research practice - (i) working forwards from relations, and (ii) working backwards from existing concepts - and discuss how relational thinking can contribute to complexity-oriented visions of solutions-oriented sustainability science. (shrink)

In times of the Anthropocene, we are in need of philosophical anthropology, revisiting the question concerning the human condition. I suggest rethinking what one may call ‘human transcendence’ in terms of a responsivist paradigm. Drawing on Heidegger and Plessner, the idea is that we should think of the eccentric or ecstatic position of the human in terms of something we undergo, instead of it being a human capability or something we do. It is a gift, emplacing us to the time-space (...) of responsive embodied existence. The paper will follow this agenda in five steps. Having introduced what I take to be the challenge for a timely ontology, I will unfold the problem entailed in the very idea of philosophical anthropology according to Heidegger. I then focus on Heidegger’s (hidden) rapprochement to Helmuth Plessner’s anthropology, recalling Plessner’s analysis of laughter as a bodily expression displaying the ‘eccentric positionality’ of the human. I suggest rephrasing this kind of transcendence in a responsivist paradigm: Humans are responsive beings. (shrink)

Why does a cell phone have a screen? From televisions and cell phones to refrigerators, many contemporary technologies come with a screen. The article aims at answering this question by employing Emmanuel Levinas’ notions of the Other and the face. This article also engages with Don Ihde’s conceptualization of alterity relations, in which the technological acts as quasi-other with which we maintain relations. If technology is a quasi-other, then, I claim, the screen is the quasi-face. By exploring Levinas’ ontology, specifically (...) what can be identified as his tool analysis, as well as his notion of the face, a new understanding of contemporary technologies can be extracted. Some of these technologies hardly fit into the Heideggerian notion of the hand as the main interface to artifacts. Instead they require the face. Levinas’ notion of the face is analyzed from an ontological perspective and developed in conjunction with the screen. As the screen serves as a quasi-face, it enables the construction of quasi-other technological artifacts. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus includes some useful concepts to understand technologies and their relations to humans as individuals and as a society. This article provides an introduction to their notions of machine and becoming and places them in the context of technological use in general, with a special focus on the cellphone. The concept of machine exceeds the technological context, yet it can be still relevant to technologies, especially digital ones. The concept of becoming assists in better understanding co-shaping (...) processes in which a technology and its users change in tandem. Becoming is analyzed as a set of five characteristics: [1] transduction, a change process in both the user and the technology; [2] rhizome, no starting or end point; [3] molecularity, small movement or change that can create a big difference; [4] partial simulation, creating a non-identical copy; and [5] anti-memory, forgetting the past. Based on this analysis, the concept of becoming-mobile is introduced as a new way of understanding the interrelations between humans and their cellphones. Becoming-mobile can be further developed either with Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts such as nomadicism or with “external” concepts such as postphenomenology’s embodiment and new mobility studies’ virtual mobility. Machine, becoming, and becoming-mobile address some basic questions in philosophy of technology, thereby enabling us to refer to Deleuze and Guattari as philosophers of technology. (shrink)

This is the first of two special issues and the articles are grouped according to two themes: This first issue will feature articles that share a theme we call Technologies and the Political, while the second issue will feature the theme Subjectivities. However, we could equally consider them exercises in provincialization in the (counter)factual register in the first issue, and by affective historiography as conceptual-empirical labor(atory) in the second issue. What we have generally asked of all authors is to consider (...) that the relation between science and society is often heavily influenced by and identified in the intermediary figurations portrayed in the genre of science fiction. (shrink)

This paper introduces Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming in a system theoretic framework and proposes an alternative ontological foundation to the study of systems and complex systems in particular. A brief critique of systems theory and the difficulties apparent in it is proposed as an introduction to the discussion. Following is an overview aimed at providing access to the ‘big picture’ of Deleuze’s revolutionary philosophical system with emphasis on a system theoretic approach and terminology. The major concepts of Deleuze’s ontology—difference, virtuality, (...) multiplicity, assemblages, quasi-causation, becoming, intensity and progressive determination are introduced and discussed. Deleuze’s work is a radical departure from the dogma of western philosophy that guides the foundations of science and systems theory. It replaces identity with difference and being with becoming; in other words, it provides systems theory with an ontological ground based on change, heterogeneity and the inexhaustible novelty-producing process that underlies all phenomena. The conceptual tools made available by this philosophy seem to capture the fundamental aspects of complexity and complex systems much better than the current conceptual system that is based on static transcendent ontological entities. (shrink)

This article is intended to work on a number of different levels. First it is concerned with the brain-become-subject as hypothesized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book What is Philosophy?. It is concerned with demonstrating the convergence between Deleuze and Guattari's work and the claims of some contemporary neuro-biological theories of consciousness. In particular, I will be comparing Deleuze and Guattari's hypothesis to the work of Gerald Edelman and Daniel Dennett. Second, it is my contention that the (...) shared themes of this convergence amount to the renewal of a paradigm in the understanding of human consciousness and its relationship to the body, which I have elsewhere called `the new Bergsonism'. The emphasis in the text on themes such as duration, material connectedness and immanence, Becoming, multiplicity, selection and so on, is taken to be self-evidently Bergsonian. The primary task of this particular article is, then, to establish a careful technical demonstration of the existence of a shared set of themes and concepts. I have made this demonstration more concrete by placing it within the context of a discussion of the affective dimensions of the experience of social idiosyncrasy (as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer). My wider agenda is that this demonstration of shared themes in poststructuralism and neuro-science should contribute towards a more general attempt to establish a neo-Bergsonian paradigm at the heart of a new sociology of affect. (shrink)

The mass popular dissent which has marked the early twenty-first century, from al-Qaeda to the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, can be read as expressions of collective, subjective, existential mutation. This reading is inspired by Félix Guattari, who described the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Polish Solidarity movement and the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations as demands for subjective singularisation. In each of these examples of social discontent, past and present, demands vary widely even within the same movement, spanning economics, lifestyle, (...) religion and politics, and ranging from cries for liberation to conservative returns to ancient tradition. In order to perform a schizoanalysis of such amorphous movements, Guattari developed a four-part ecosophic object, composed of existential Territories, Universes of value, material-energetic Flows and machinic Phyla. Assemblages can be dynamically mapped along these four dimensions. Of crucial importance in the age of extreme deterritorialisation is the existential Territory, which could potentially take the form of a homeland based on poetry or music rather than on ethnicity or even place. Such portable homelands would characterise the dissensual processual post-media era for which Guattari longed. (shrink)

Symbiosis is a biological phenomenon in which two dissimilar organisms coexist for mutual subsistence. The concept of symbiosis can be employed to foster mutual learning. In this paper, the...

What is?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is?Curriculum Theory argues that these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference (...) from the a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is?Curriculum Theory draws upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual and the virtual. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari's work opens theoretical and political possibilities for us by demonstrating that the boundary between ‘the West’ and the ‘non-West’ is itself a historically unstable epistemological inscription on the surface of the earth, but one that nevertheless retraces itself over and over again. They show us that our political possibilities exist precisely in the ‘non-West’, so long as we understand this term not in the sense of an existing supposedly ‘non-Western’ territory or ‘substance’, but rather as a ‘line (...) of flight’ beyond the nation-state, the form in which the ‘original division’ and creation of the social relation called ‘the West’ continues to produce itself. They thus demonstrate that the way out of the Eurocentric epistemological order lies precisely in clarifying how ‘the West’ was created as an effect of the capitalist axiomatic and maintained by the repetition of this paradoxical ‘commencement’ in the form of the ‘anthropological difference’, congealed into the modern nation-state. In the pursuit of this moment, we will investigate the question of how the social surface is territorialised and enclosed for capitalist accumulation, how the purely heterogeneous topology of the social comes to be inscribed with the traces of the apparatus of capture. (shrink)

In this paper I draw on the French philosopher Michel Foucault for a viewpoint on aspects of EBM. This means that I develop his idea of the spaces occupied by disease. I give much of the paper to only one of these spaces, the space of perception of disease, in order to major on the medical gaze, one of Foucault’s best-known contributions to the philosophy of medicine. As I explain what I mean by each of the spaces of disease, I (...) configure EBM into this space. The conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. Evidence-based clinical practice requires integration of individual clinical expertise and patient preferences with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research and consideration of available resources. EBM can be considered a subcategory of evidence-based healthcare, which also includes other branches of health-care practice such as evidence-based nursing or evidence-based physiotherapy. EBM subcategories include evidence-based surgery and evidence-based cardiology (Guyatt et al. 2008 , 783). (shrink)

Reconceptualist and post‐reconceptualist curriculum scholars have drawn upon the notion of a complicated curriculum conversation as a means to describe the imbricated, pluralist, and eclectic character of curriculum theorizing. Insofar as this curriculum conversation is accomplished via language however, it remains wed to a particular representational logic restricting what might be thought. This essay explores the question of what it means to theorize curriculum when the very idea of a complicated curriculum conversation begins to fall into cliché. Mobilizing the philosophical (...) thought of Gilles Deleuze, this essay analyzes three representational commitments of contemporary curriculum theorizing, addressing how each are inadequate for the theorization of difference or the instantiation of the radically new. Against the implicit commitment to conformity alive in the curriculum field, this essay posits an ethics of disidentification exemplified via Bruce McDonald's horror film Pontypool. It is via such a tactic of productive disidentification, this essay claims, that thought might be unfettered from the orthodoxies of common sense, becoming in this way more adequate for opening spaces unanticipated by contemporary representational regimes. (shrink)

The significance of educational research is today predicated on its ability to engage with the ecological, economic, and political challenges of the anthropocene, for where we might take seriously education’s commitment to the future necessitates a sustained encounter with the implications and questions raised in the wake of ‘our’ mutated planetary ecology. To repeat in the image of those educational practices, models and patterns of thinking that have contributed to the contemporary ecological crisis of the planet falls gravely short of (...) apprehending what it might entail to live in the contemporary moment. Yet further, where education is intimate to teleology, it is today clear that the image of the future posited educationally has fallen out of synch with the ‘outside thought’ of ecocatastrophe, or rather, our being ‘thought’ from the inhuman perspective of a planet destined to go on without us. Educationally, this threat poses a quite remarkable opportunity, for where human thought might be doomed to extinction, the question of how and where we might think assumes urgency. In this vein, this essay explores the wisdom that ‘we’ are and will be thought from perspectives alien to human desire becomes a catalyst for how educational research might be rethought otherwise in a more-than-human world. (shrink)

This article argues that vehicles, roads and routes merit a much more central place in theorizations of migration politics. This argument is developed in terms of three theses. First, the study of migration politics should examine how vehicles feature in the public mediation of migration and border controversies. Second, it is important to analyze vehicles as mobile sites of power and contestation in their own right. Third, an understanding of the materiality of transportation helps to explain how the vehicle can (...) sometimes become a site of strategic political action. These arguments are in turn used to develop a concept of viapolitics as a contribution to literatures on migration, mobilities and power. Viapolitics orients us to see migration from the middle, that is, from the angle of the vehicle and not just the state. It also seeks to connect migration studies to the history of problematizations, cultural types and the mythopoetics of the road. (shrink)

The article explores the place of affect in community relations with respect to trauma following the closure of a steelworks for a working-class community in the South Wales valleys in 2002. A review of sociological approaches to community demonstrates the poor handling of relational and affective aspects which, it is argued, are central to the way in which community relations were formed and provided a safe and containing skin against the uncertainty of industrial production. Using psychoanalytic approaches to affect which (...) stress the importance of skin, particularly the work of Bick, Tustin, Winnicott and Anzieu, the article explores how a sense of a containing skin provides a feeling of ontological security for a community beset by uncertainty and insecurity. It is argued that, following the closure of the steelworks in 2002, this skin is ruptured and that it is difficult for the members of the community to find a way forward. Using examples taken from psychosocial interviews with community members, the case is made for a range of affective relations and practices through which the skin is created. The absence of these practices and relations creates a profound sense of lack of safety and fear of death within the inhabitants, which needs to be addressed, but is rarely discussed in approaches to community or regeneration. (shrink)

In our research project, we will elaborate Charles Sanders Peirce’s three philosophical categories, and show how these categories operate at the levels of Protection, Regulation and Identity in the process of sign-meaning and sign-making within Cultural Heritage, Law and Discourse. The process of semiosis comprises a triadic dimension between signs, their functions and interpretations, operating on four axes within our special issue: Theoretical Cultural Heritage Issue, Cultural Heritage and Postcolonialism, Intertwined Notions of Heritage and Culture, and Protection of Cultural Heritage.

This paper explores the semiotic status of algebraic variables. To do that we build on a structuralist and post-structuralist train of thought going from Mauss and L vi-Strauss to Baudrillard and Derrida. We import these authors' semiotic thinking from the register of indigenous concepts (such as mana), and apply it to the register of algebra via a concrete case study of generating functions. The purpose of this experiment is to provide a philosophical language that can explore the openness of mathematical (...) signs to reinterpretation, and bridge some barriers between philosophy of mathematics and critical approaches to knowledge. (shrink)

Young netizens are an emerging generator of online content, engaging in an increasing number of online flaming interactions. This shortened communication mode has incorporated power amplifiers, enabling the inclusion of both verbal and non-verbal triggers, thereby initiating abuses akin to cyberbullying. Cyberbullying has emerged as an extremely unstable hot issue, which is difficult to regulate upstream, severely impacting inexperienced young netizens. This Machiavellian apparatus proves to be sophisticated, given its powerful nature, and results in its victims being ensnared in a (...) cyber net from which they see very little escape. Laws have been enacted to combat cyberbullying, which is rampant among netizens, highly naive or actively aggressive in their use of various social media platforms. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper argues for the viability of a different philosophical point of view concerning classical Greek geometry. It reviews Reviel Netz's interpretation of classical Greek geometry and offers a Deleuzian, post-structural alternative. Deleuze's notion of haptic vision is imported from its art history context to propose an analysis of Greek geometric practices that serves as counterpoint to their linear modular cognitive narration by Netz. Our interpretation highlights the relation between embodied practices, noisy material constraints, and operational codes. Furthermore, it sheds (...) some new light on the distinctness and clarity of Greek mathematical conceptual divisions. (shrink)

At the beginning of his essay ‘Philosophies of the Transindividual: Spinoza, Marx, Freud’, Balibar [2018] hints at some reasons why he will not be dealing with Simondon, despite agreeing with the latter’s program of going beyond ‘the metaphysics of the subject and of substance’ and towards an ‘ontology of relations’. In what follows I would like to outline Simondon’s concept of transindividuality and spell out more clearly why Balibar cannot follow Simondon’s trajectory. At the same time, I suggest a number (...) of socio-political approaches that a specifically Simondonian concept of transindividuality opens up. (shrink)

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the article discusses Roma Pentecostalism as nomad self-governance or self-ministry and political affirmation, in a dialectical conversation with stable apparatuses of power such as state and transnational polities advancing a neoliberal program of social integration as semiological apparatus of capture. The latter is upheld by expert social sciences as royal sciences, which translate alternative forms of self-governance into the conceptual apparatus of the state and transnational polities. On the other hand, Pentecostal self-ministry works as disaffected (...) power undoing the architecture of the state subject, authorizing new hermeneutics of the self to take control over semiological acts of translation, and engenders a political resubjectivation of the governed. The article identifies Roma Pentecostalism as a source of political reawakening of Romani civil society, a creative line of flight with an immense power of deterritorialization of the main domains of subjection. (shrink)

This paper draws on process philosophy to imagine “care” as a collective practice of children and the forest in the context of Finnish early childhood education. By locating care in movement rather than an individual, the author challenges the notion of caring subjectivity and employs postqualitative inquiry to conceptually focus on an impersonal production of care. The author shows how care emerges in the between of children and forest in an outdoor learning environment and highlights what it continually produces. She (...) concludes by discussing the need for a conceptual evolution of “care” in the philosophies of environmental and outdoor education. (shrink)

Historians of rhetoric refer to two Sophistics, one in the 5th century B.C. and another c. 2nd century A.D. Besides these two, there is a 3rd Sophistic, but it is not necessarily sequential. (The 3rd is “counter” to counting sequentially.) Whereas the representative Sophists of the 1st Sophistic is Protagoras, and the second, Aeschines, the representative sophists of the 3rd are Gorgias (as proto-Third) and Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man.To distinguish between and among (...) Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then Protagoras, Gorgias, and Lacan, the author determines how far each of these personages can “count.” The model of counting, used semiotically across the topoi of “possible/impossible,” is that of the people of New Guinea: “one thing, two things, many things.” It is determined (generally) that the philosophers, including Aristotle, count to “one”; the Sophists to “two”; and Gorgias, Lacan, and Lyotard, et al. count to “many things,” thereby breaking up a monism or binarism. The ancient philosophers employ a substratum of probability to hold together the contraries of “possible/impossible”; the Sophists employ anti/logic, which keeps the contraries/antitheses separate and therefore without synthesis, but which eventually threatens the integrity of the substratum, or the law of non-contradiction; and Gorgias, Lacan, Lyotard et al. theorize about the “impossibility”/“Resistance” of the Logos (reason, logic, law, argumentation, history) to Theory/Totalization, because of the Gorgian Kairos and the Lacanian Real — both of which enter the Logos and break up the cycle of the antitheses and create “something new, irrational” (Untersteiner).This “breaking up” has a negative/positive influence on Protagoras's “man-measure doctrine,” which in turn has a similar influence on “the problem of the ethical subject.” The subject/agent not only no longer “knows” (by way of Logos) but also no longer “acts” (as independent agent); the subject becomes a function of Logos as determined by Kairos/Real; it moves from a hypotaxis/syntaxis of “one” and “two” to a radical parataxis/paralogy of “some more.”From the “Impossibility”/“tragedy” of knowledge, however, comes the “Possible,” or “Possibilisms,” which allows for the new (though divided) ethical subject to reclaim its position as “individual.” Such a reclamation of the subject, however, has a profound effect on argumentation, and especially the notion of “consensus.” What is wanted, then, in a Third Sophistic “ethical” — as opposed to a “political” — rhetoric is “dissensus” through radical parataxes and paralogies. (shrink)

In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, nomadism works as an approach to the creation of concepts that favour space: geophilosophy. Nomadism is the way in which one crosses the plane of immanence and the many becomings; in fact, nomadism exceeds the ancient rhetoric of the subject because its disposition belongs to the multiple and to the environment in which it can unfold. In this sense, the disorientation in the present appears less disturbing; it is rather a shift in perspective, (...) certainly difficult to understand in the time in which the mega-machine of power is becoming more and more persecutory. Lines of flight, movements of slippage, becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-minor refer not only to the exercise of criticism, but also to the production of assemblages that intend to resist the present. (shrink)

This paper is an ethnographic endeavour in mapping the Deleuzian concept of Becoming-Animal in a sport called Jallikattu, which involves humans and bulls. Initially, I map the legal and social discourses surrounding this sport to argue the necessity to understand the immanent patterns of molecular forces, activating the human–bull relationships, embedded in this sport. Ethnographic data collected from the domain of Jallikattu bull selection and grooming and from the players of this sport are analysed to materially ground the dynamic ontology (...) of becoming-animal, specifically the conceptions of the pack and the anomalous. I explain how the formation of the Jallikattu assemblage, comprising both the humans and the bulls, compels us to grasp the specific encounters of selectors, groomers and players with the bull in establishing an affective relationship. The act of hugging the bull in this sport and the local conception of action-characteristics help in tracing the nodes of deterritorialisation and rhizomatic connections in the apparatus of Jallikattu. I argue that the richness of becomings embedded in this sport needs to be taken into account, amidst the quantitative surge in legal and social discourses. (shrink)

The paper aims to describe the stakes of a Nietzschean influence on Deleuze's reflections on the transcendental and conversely to highlight the Deleuzian operation of politicising Nietzsche by ‘minorising’ him. In order to further understand such a complex relationship of becoming between Deleuze and Nietzsche, the first objective of the paper is to focus on active and reactive forces, which seem to be the core of this very relation. Thus, the paper suggests that micropolitics has its conditions of possibility in (...) the Nietzschean corpus and, in particular, in the symptomatology of decadence, resentment and nihilism. In this sense, now the title of the paper reveals its meaning: the whole Deleuzian operation could be summarised as the passage from the criticism and questioning of an image of Nietzsche ‘forbidden to minors’, typical of the interpretations of the first half of the twentieth century, to a becoming-minor of these very same Nietzschean concepts. It is precisely through such a becoming-minor that Nietzsche's diagnosis and concepts are translated in a political and emancipatory key, in order to give power to minorities. (shrink)

It has become almost commonplace to recognise that teaching is an embodied practice. Most analyses of teaching as embodied practice focus on the embodied nature of the teacher as subject. Here, we use Butler's concept of performativity to analyse the reiterated acts that are intelligible as—performatively constitute—teaching, rather of the teacher as subject. We suggest that this simultaneously helps explain the persistence of teaching as a narrow repertoire of actions recognisable as ‘teaching’, and the policing of conformity to teaching thus (...) embodied. However, like performatively accomplished subjectivity, this repertoire is unstable and ambiguous, and thus open to change and disruption. Moreover, teacher subjectivities may lead them to mobilise these possibilities of disruption. (shrink)