Straipsnyje bandoma atsakyti į klausimą, kaip Gilles’o Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari geismo samprata atsispindi jų politinėje filosofijoje. Tyrinėjama geismo mašinų ir jų gamybos koncepcija, jų santykis su sociumo struktūra ir kapitalo logika. Savo veikaluose šie du autoriai teigia, kad geismo mašinos kuria materialią revoliucinę energiją, kuri nuolat konfrontuoja tiek su sociumo normomis, tiek su kapitalistine priespauda. Tačiau, pasak jų, tokią energiją sociumas mėgina represuoti, paversti revoliucinį geismą fašistiniu „tvirtos rankos“ geismu, o kapitalas fetišizuoja, suprekina ir pritaiko savo tikslams. Šiame tekste, (...) remiantis tiek Deleuze’o ir Guattari, tiek jų sekėjų tekstais, daroma prielaida, kad geismo mašinos sociumo represijoms ir kapitalistiniam suprekinimui gali priešintis pasirinkdamos atstumtųjų terpėje gimstančias kūrybingas ir radikalias mažosios politikos strategijas. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: geismas, geismo mašinos, sociumas, reakcija, kapitalas, suprekinimas, revoliucija, mažoji politika. Desire and Liberation in Political Philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari Kasparas Pocius Summary The article analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and desiring-machines, their origins and workings in the organized structure of socius and in the capitalist regime as well as the revolutionary strategies and milieus that these desiring-machines engender. Contemporary social critique often distorts the notion of desire while linking it exclusively with capital that forces people to consume identities and commodities. Meanwhile, in the conception of Deleuze and Guattari desire is a material revolutionary energy which constantly aims to confront the norms of both socius and capitalist repressions. Unfortunately, this energy is continually under the threat of being appropriated and inactivated by socius, and it also undergoes the risk of being fetishized and commodified by capital, which makes desire serve its aims of seeking profit and extracting surplus value. Desiring-machines attempt to break through to the other side of socius and capital, the former of which is decoded and deterritorialized, whereas the latter is too limited to deal with desire as an absolute limit of socius. Capital is unable to commodify potential revolutionary energy or to absorb it in another way. However, in the structure of socius active and creative desire may be reversed into reactionary fascist desire of hierarchy, exploitation, humiliation, slavery and death. The molar order of socius is distinguished by a clear structure and hierarchy where individuals have fixed identities. However, capital tries to demolish those structures and deterritorialize socius by following the desiring-machines. The discipline, laws and norms are substituted by the flexible axiomatic of capitalism, which can adjust itself to the demands of desire or regenerate to the former repressive forms of command. Such milieu gives rise to a single monolithic molar class. Therefore, today the conflict lies not between the capitalist class and the working class but between the class and those who are outside the class – minor people, creating minor politics in molecular milieu. There is a paradox in the conception of minor politics by Deleuze and Guattari. Although this kind of politics originates in the space that is oppressed by socius and capital, however such space can become highly active, creative and radical. Desire as a material basis for creativity becomes a powerful revolutionary potential. Minor politics is based not on identification or representation of somebody’s interests, but on permanent creativity. This politics emerges within the milieu of mutual communication and intellect as well as uncommodified affectivity and sexuality and it embodies revolutionary desire in everyday practices of self-valorization. Keywords: desire, desiring-machines, socius, reaction, capital, commodification, revolution, minor politics. (shrink)

This essay responds to Frederic Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology by arguing that this book is centrally concerned with the masses. By developing Jameson’s own model of allegorical reading the pressure of the masses on the text is explored. This is demonstrated through a reading of Albert Camus’s The Plague, Jameson’s central example of ‘bad’ allegory. While this novel is ‘bad’ for implying a one-to-one allegory between the plague infection and the occupation of France during World War Two or to the (...) human condition, a reading of the text as biopolitical allegory reveals the complex presence of the masses. Finally, this response considers the ‘immortality’ of the masses as the utopian moment traced within Allegory and Ideology. (shrink)

This article focuses on the impact of globalization on international law and the discourse of sovereignty. It challenges the claim that we have entered into a new world order characterized by transnational governance and decentered global law, which have replaced “traditional” international law and rendered the concepts of state sovereignty and international society anachronistic. We are indeed in the presence of something new. But if we drop the concept of sovereignty and buy into the idea that transnational governance has upstaged (...) international treaty organizations, we will misconstrue the nature of contemporary international society and the political choices facing us. In the contemporary context where there is a powerful imperial project afoot (on the part of the United States) that seeks to develop a useful version of global (cosmopolitan) right to justify its self-interested interventions, proposals to abandon the default position of sovereignty and its corollary, the principle of nonintervention in international law, are both premature and dangerous. Instead, we should rethink the normative dimensions of the concept of sovereignty in light of the new principle of sovereign equality articulated in the UN Charter, and show how it can complement cosmopolitan principles such as human rights and collective security. The task is to strengthen, not abandon, international law and supranational institutions, and to foster a global rule of law that protects both the sovereign equality of states, based on a revised conception of sovereignty, and human rights. (shrink)

The following text is an introduction to Ed Cohen’s book A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Author investigates the way in which immunology influences the perception of both the human body, and political entities, demonstrating that contemporary conceptualizations of these phenomena exist in a double bind. The historical framework Cohen applies allows for tracing the history of the metaphor of immunity in politics and medicine.

In twentieth century Europe and the USA, industrial relations, labour, and workers' rights issues have been handled through collective bargaining and industrial agreements between firms and unions, with varying degrees of government intervention from country to country. This industrial relations landscape is currently undergoing fundamental change with the emergence of transnational industrial relations systems that complement existing national industrial relations systems. Despite the significance of this ongoing change, existing research has only started to explore the implications of this change for (...) how workers' rights are governed around the globe. This paper addresses this gap by outlining an agenda for future research into the transnational governance of workers' rights. Fulfilling such a research agenda would be both challenging, as it requires combining the so far divergent industrial relations and business ethics research streams, and rewarding, as it provides ample scope for promising future research. (shrink)

The ‘European Space of Higher Education’ could be mapped as an infrastructure for entrepreneurship and a place where the distinction between the social and the economic becomes obsolete. Using Foucault's understanding of biopolitics and discussing the analyses of Agamben and Negri/hardt it is argued that the actual governmental configuration, i.e. the economisation of the social, also has a biopolitical dimension. Focusing on the intersection between a politicisation and economisation of human life allows us to discuss a kind of ‘bio‐economisation’ (cf. (...) Bröckling), a regime of economic terror and learning as investment. Finally it is argued how fostering learning, i.e. fostering life (as a learning process) could turn into ‘let die’ and even into ‘make die’. (shrink)

The problematique addressed by the article is the growth of a dominant discourse in early childhood education and care, which has a strong effect on policy and practice, paralleled by an increasing number of other discourses which problematise most of the values, assumptions and understandings of the former. Yet there is very little engagement between these discourses, in large part because they are situated within different paradigms—modernity in the former case, postfoundationalism in the latter. The author argues that the absence (...) of dialogue and debate impoverishes early childhood and weakens democratic practice. The article considers whether and in what conditions the concept of agonistic pluralism might provide a framework for political engagement among at least some on either side of the paradigmatic divide, and takes evaluation as one example of a subject for an agonistic politics of early childhood. (shrink)

The moral philosophy of Levinas offers a stark prospectus of impossibility for corporate ethics. It differs from most traditional ethical theories in that, for Levinas, the ethical develops in a personal meeting of one with the Other, rather than residing in some internal deliberation of the moral subject. Levinasian ethics emphasises an infinite personal responsibility arising for each of us in the face of the Other and in the presence of the Third. It stresses the imperious demand we experience to (...) be open to, prepared for and impassioned with that which we may not know, or recognise, about ourselves or about the Other. Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential; it involves us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics in a business context, it cannot be a matter of corporate ethics but only a matter of individual managerial ethics. What such an ethics would be like is yet to be outlined. This paper proposes a series of questions and suggestions that will explicate some key terms of a practice organised around a Levinasian vocabulary of otherness, responsibility, proximity, diachrony and justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over." (...) --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

The screen continues to be the primary generator of visual imagery in contemporary culture, including of the natural world. This paper examines the screen as visual interface in the construction and consumption of physical environments. Screens are increasingly incorporated in our daily habits and imbricated into our lives, especially as mediating technologies are embedded into the surfaces of our physical surroundings, shaping and molding our interactions with and perceptions of those environments. As screens become increasingly portable and digitized, they further (...) modify our relationships with environments, projecting multiple images and imagery which fracture and layer visual consumption. And as screens become ubiquitous in urban environments, they network into maps of information control and consumption. We need to fully understand these processes of screen-mediated representation and interaction in order to be able to comment on the ethics of contemporary practices of visually consuming physical environments. In particular, the paper will argue that processes of consumption and their interaction with visual interfacing technologies are not simple or straight-forward, but nevertheless pose ethical questions about the relationship between visual and material circuits of consumption. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of marketing as an ideological set of practices that makes cultural interventions designed to infuse social relations with biopolitical injunctions. We examine a contemporary site of heightened attention within marketing: the rise of online communities and the attendant profession of social media marketing managers. We argue that social media marketers disavow a core problem; namely, that the object at stake, the customer community, barely exists. The community therefore functions ideologically. We describe the ideological gymnastics necessary (...) for maintaining momentum behind a practice that barely exists and we ponder why such ideologies are necessary, and what they allow the marketer to do. Working with such concepts as ‘the wild’, ‘communicative capitalism’, and ‘biopolitical marketing’, we explore a genre of popular business literature that proselytizes for online customer communities and we reflect on the broader implications. (shrink)

This paper presents an overall view of the Philosophy of Tian-xia, a particular form of neo-universalism developed by its author and very much debated in the last years. The system of Tian-xia, or ‘all-under-heaven’, is a philosophical re-elaboration of an ancient form of Chinese universalism. The world is constituted as a global unity and a basic concept of political philosophy. It aims at a world institution as a way to rethink all problems in the world as problems of the world. (...) Zhao Tingyang has analytically developed this view in some recent publications in Chinese. This article represents the most recent attempt to provide a synthetic view of his philosophy of ‘all-under-heaven’. (shrink)

Prompted by what is seen as a missing analysis in the discussions about passion and affect in education, this essay attempts to clarify and provide a context for understanding the contribution of Foucault in the discourse of passion. In particular, the author traces the politics of passion in Foucault's work. A ‘politics of passion’ is the analysis that challenges the cultural and historical emotional rules with respect to what passion is, how it is expressed, who gets to express it and (...) under what circumstances. It is argued that a discussion of Foucault's ideas on passion provides a way of sharpening and clarifying his politics on affect, particularly what is relevant to individual and collective emotional control in education. (shrink)

In the university system today, co-research may be a decolonising strategy. We evaluate teaching a ‘Modernization and Social Change’ course in Vietnam as an experiment in co-research anthropology t...

The TGarden is a genre of responsive environment in which actor–spectators shape dense media sensitive to their movements. These dense fields of light, sound, and material also evolve according to their own composed dynamics, so the agency is distributed throughout the multiple media. These TGardens explore open-ended questions like the following: what makes some time-based, responsive environments compelling, and others flat? How can people improvise gestures without words, that are individually or collectively meaningful? When and how is a movement intentional, (...) or collectively intentional? This paper introduces what has been at stake behind the experimental work: subjectivation, moving from technologies of representation to technologies of performance, and the potential for ethico-aesthetic novelty. (shrink)

There is currently a growing interest in the philosophy and political thought of Baruch de Spinoza following many years of comparative neglect, particularly within political philosophy. The focus of this paper is Spinoza's major work, the Ethics, and its relation to his political writings. It explores Spinoza's distinctive formulations of imagination and affect and considers some of the ways in which these impact upon his political thought, specifically via his reflections upon democracy and knowledge. The discussion draws particular attention to (...) the aporetic status of imagination and its tendency towards ambivalence. It argues that this dynamic account of imagination introduces provisionality and contingency into Spinoza's reflections upon politics that may, in turn, enrich discussions seeking to introduce an awareness of the affective resonances of communication and identification to democratic theory. (shrink)

In Can We Live Together? Alain Touraine combines a consummate analysis of crucial social tensions in contemporary societies with a strong normative appeal for a new emancipatory 'Subject' capable of overcoming the twin threats of atomisation or authoritarianism. He calls for a move from 'politics to ethics' and then from ethics back to politics to enable the new Subject to make a reality out of the goals of democracy and solidarity. However, he has little to say about the nature of (...) such an ethics. This article argues that this lacuna could usefully be filled by adopting a form of radical humanism found in the work of Erich Fromm. It defies convention in the social sciences by operating from an explicit view of the 'is' and the 'ought' of common human nature, specifying reason, love and productive work as the qualities to be realised if we are to move closer to human solidarity. Although there remain significant philosophical and political differences between the two positions, particularly on the role to be played by 'the nation', their juxtaposition opens new lines of inquiry in the field of cosmopolitan ethics. (shrink)

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)

I begin this article by arguing that it is justified to believe in the real presence of a civilizational crisis in the contemporary world; and that this crisis is a real, emergent phenomenon. In so...

In this article, I discuss the nature, causes and effects of the crisis of civilization which we can observe for over forty years. This crisis affects social order, with its economic, institutional and demographic dimensions, as well as the culture and the social structure. Here, I am particularly dealing with the question of human person and their relations with others, as well as the humanities. I show globalization, the growth of cancerous mass culture and secularization as a background of the (...) crisis of civilization. In this context, I try to show the importance of Chiara Lubich and her work. (shrink)

This paper will articulate an underappreciated side of the psychoanalytical Deleuze: his relation to Melanie Klein, particularly as it appears in The Logic of Sense. Deleuze's engagement with Klein largely follows his familiar strategy of re-reading a thinker off of a twist in one or two of that thinker's key concepts. With Klein, this twist involves re-reading her story of psychic development on the basis of disjunction rather than negation, so that the psychic surface that emerges generates a persistent non-correspondence (...) between self and other and between concept and thing. Deleuze thereby makes Klein a central figure in his ontology of sense and his analysis of how the physical surface of bodies generates a metaphysical surface of thought. However, Deleuze's ultimate turn is a Nietzschean one towards overcoming, the thought of eternal return, and the demolition of the Oedipal Law. As this final turn makes clear, even in his early writings that engaged more directly and affirmatively with psychoanalytical thought, Deleuze was already on an anti-Oedipal path. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben suggests that Herman’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ offers the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’. Bartleby, a legal scribe who does not write, is best known for the formula with which he responds to all his employer’s requests, ‘I would prefer not to.’ This paper examines this formula, asking what it would mean to ‘prefer not to’ when the law is in question. By reading Melville’s story alongside Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and Walter Benjamin’s (...) theses on history, it suggests that Bartleby’s interest, for Agamben, lies in his challenge to dominant conceptions of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which, he believes, are rendered indistinct in sovereignty. By reflecting critically on Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as a ‘new Messiah’, this paper examines Agamben’s understanding of what it would mean to fulfil the law, and what form of political task this would entail. (shrink)

So much of what we experience in neoliberal capitalism resembles the operation of the camp. How then can we understand the camp as a political technology of labour control recurrent in historical capitalism, and why would we want to? Driven by the perennial imperatives to govern and to accumulate, the camp as a modulation of social control allows us to explore the role of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique in the ‘real subsumption of labour’. The aims here are to question the sanguine expectations (...) of a liberal pastorate that is inextricable from the needs of capital; to articulate the ‘techniques of domination’ experienced in the idiom of neoliberal capitalism; and to find inspiration for corresponding counter-conducts and ‘techniques of the self’. This article offers a kind of historical archaeology of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique by resuscitating Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a surprisingly rich source of insight into the operations of the camp modulation and the counter-conducts it engenders. The analysis to follow works in the space between Marxian and Foucauldian political thought opened up by the new materialisms, and draws upon the recent works of Lordon, Lazzarato, Negri, inter alia, that are currently enriching critical theory. (shrink)

This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the transformation of academic life that is currently taking place under the sign of ‘neoliberalization’. The main aim is to differentiate appropriation from exploitation as strategies of surplus labour dispossession, to identify the growth of appropriative techniques in academic life, and to situate the proliferation of such techniques in the broader transformations of global political economy. Alloyed with poststructuralist social theory, the historical materialist thrust of the article demonstrates how, in the technologically (...) articulate ‘social factory’ of advanced capitalism, the spatial operations of these techniques of dispossession have a particularly ‘aesthetic’ character that is immanent to their appropriative operation, and which renders their workings both more discreet and effective. The article aims: (1) to problematize the neoliberal concepts of efficiency, transparency, and autonomy, in terms of practical outcomes; (2) to stimulate reflexive consideration of the ‘positioning’ of academics themselves in the reproduction of these techniques; and (3) to ask how these techniques might generate new ‘historical subjects’ of struggle and organization in academic life. (shrink)

Given that Deleuze and Guattari came to prominence after May 1968, many readers attempt to determine the political significance of their work. The difficulty that some encounter finding its political implications contrasts with Deleuze and Guattari's commitment to radical causes. In response, Patton and Thoburn elaborate on the Marxist elements in the pair's oeuvre, a line of analysis I continue. Focusing on A Thousand Plateaus, I discuss their references to the theorisation of the ‘dependency theorists’, a group of Marxist-inspired scholars (...) who became influential during the 1960s. Does their engagement with dependency theory provide the basis for a political project? (shrink)

How might we historicize the idea of border control? If state borders can be understood as institutional sites of governance, what forms of governance do they enact? This article asks what insights Foucauldian political sociology might offer these questions. Drawing on Deleuze's analytic of ‘control’, the article seeks to bring new meaning to the idea of border control. Under standing control as a particular technology of power, special attention to the changing topography of border control as well as the changing (...) subjectivities presupposed by this form of power is paid. (shrink)

Humanitarian aid’s psycho-therapeutic turn in the 1990s was mirrored by the increasing emotionalization and subjectivation of fund-raising campaigns. In order to grasp the depth of this interconnectedness, this article argues that in both cases what we see is the post-Fordist production paradigm at work; namely, as Hardt and Negri put it, the direct production of subjectivity and social relations. To explore this, the therapeutic and mental health approach in humanitarian aid is juxtaposed with the more general phenomenon of psychologization. This (...) allows us to see that the psychologized production of subjectivity has a problematic waste-product as it reduces the human to Homo sacer, to use Giorgi Agamben’s term. Drawing out a double matrix of a de-psychologizing psychologization connected to a politicizing de-politicization, it will further become possible to understand psycho-therapeutic humanitarianism as a case of how, in these times of globalization, psychology, subjectivity and money are all interrelated. (shrink)

A steady stream of commentary criticizes Foucault’s ‘agentless position’ for its inability to observe, much less theorize, the ways in which human actors manoeuvre, negotiate, transform or resist the structures within which they are situated. This article does not so much refute this critical consensus but seeks to reconstruct a framework from Foucault’s writings, which allows space for ‘human agency’, including individuals’ pursuit of tactics, attempts at solving problems, reactions to unexpected events and their reflexive work on their own subjectivities. (...) The revised analytical framework, ‘dispositional analytics’, integrates the study of self-techniques with the analysis of dispositifs. Recognizing that Foucault’s work eschewed an adequate consideration of individuals’ capacity to affect the forces that bear upon them, the article discusses the sociopolitical conditions for self-formation. Finally, a case study of ‘voice-hearers’ who use self-techniques to reconstitute themselves in opposition to institutional psychiatry is reinterpreted through the framework of dispositional analysis. (shrink)

Only one year after the global wave of protest movements and revolts—starting with the ‘Arab Spring’, then, subsequently, the Indignados movement and Occupy- our appreciation of such movements turned sour. The aim of this contribution is to question the predominantly sceptical and defeatist discourse on these movements. One element central to many defeatist discourses on the 2011 movements, is the way in which a lack of demonstrable ‘outcomes’ or ‘successes’ is retrospectively ascribed to them. Therefore, an alternative approach should be (...) formulated, which would allow us to recognise the significant or valuable aspects of these movements and their practices, without downplaying them as ‘unsuccessful’ or ‘failures’ altogether. Pierre Rosanvallon’s concept of ‘counter-democracy’ and Hardt and Negri’s perspective of a ‘Multitude’ will be evaluated as alternative approaches to current political movements. Although they are meritorious, both perspectives do not go far enough and need further articulation. The notion of ‘prefiguration’, originally derived from contemporary anarchist discourse, could be beneficial to this endeavour. After defining and deepening this concept from an anarchist perspective, it will be applied to one particular context: the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, during the 2011 revolution in Egypt. As will be concluded, in its application this concept of ‘prefiguration’ could teach us more about the recent wave of protest movements in general, and could help us to formulate a different approach to such movements. (shrink)

In this article we argue that ideas about management are led by cognitive frameworks rooted in cultural, including intellectual, traditions. African management is part of ambiguous mental concepts. African management results from a quest for an essentialist authenticity in the framework of decolonisation. Through analysing the life and work of the Ugandan African nationalist, poet and anthropologist Okot p’Bitek (1931–1982), we argue that the concept of double consciousness as defined by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) can be used as (...) a strategy to analyse the ambiguous nature of management in Africa. Generally speaking, double or, even better, multiple consciousness could serve as an instrument of any manager (and scholar), both in Africa and outside Africa, avoiding the danger of essentialism. (shrink)

This article looks at the problems of the co-determination of the political within western metaphysics and political reflection, and considers solutions that are figured in terms of failure and incompletion. The focus is on the relation of the political to political modernity, its defenders and attackers, and those who seek to overcome the opposition.

Straipsnyje analizuojamos biopolitikos sampratos, suformuluotos Michelio Foucault ir Gior­gio Agambeno darbuose. Foucault biopolitiką apibrėžia kaip galios ir gyvybės santykį, kuris istoriškai kinta: suvereno turimą galią pakeičia disciplininė galia, o pastarąją – biopolitika. Biopolitikos atsiradimą Foucault tiesiogiai sieja su kapitalizmo raida ir ekonominiais procesais, todėl politinę teoriją jis siūlo keisti politine ekonomija. Agambenas, priešingai, biopolitiką suvokia kaip kvaziontologinę sąlygą: jo manymu, biopolitinių kūnų produkavimas ir tą produkavimą pagrindžianti išimties būklė apibrėžia tiek senąsias imperijas, tiek šiuolaikines demokratijas. Toks išimtinai negatyvus biopolitikos suvokimas (...) verčia klausti, kaip įmanoma pasipriešinti galiai ir kokios galimos tokio pasipriešinimo formos. Tiek Foucault, tiek Gilles’is Deleuze’as teigia, kad galiai priešinasi būtent tai, ką ji siekia pajungti, – pati gyvybė. Tačiau svarbu suvokti, jog biopolitinė galia ir gyvybinė galia yra visiškai kitokios prigimties, todėl yra nebendramatės. Taigi gyvy­bės galia turi būti apibrėžiama remiantis naujomis sąvokomis, kurios perimamos iš Deleuze’o filosofijos. Straipsnyje siekiama suformuluoti gyvybės filosofijos, arba biofilosofijos, pagrindines charakteristikas bei atskleisti, kaip įmanomas pasipriešinimas galiai. (shrink)

The meeting of Deleuze and Guattari in 1969 is generally used to explain how the former's thought became politicised under the influence of the latter. This narrative, however useful it might be in explaining Deleuze's move away from the domain of academic philosophy following the upheavals of May 1968, has had the effect of de-emphasising the conceptual development which occurred between Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus. Worst of all, it has had the effect of reducing the role of Marx's philosophy (...) to the superficial level of political alibi, impoverishing our understanding of its importance with respect to the conceptual assemblage of Anti-Oedipus. This paper attempts to restore Marx's relevance to Deleuze and Guattari's project by understanding Anti-Oedipus through the Marxian categories of production, distribution, surplus-value and consumption, and argues for a conception of schizoanalysis which does not relegate the name of Marx to the garbage heap of poststructuralist intellectual strategy. (shrink)

The criticism of “traditional,” “toxic,” or “patriarchal” masculinity in both academic and popular venues recognizes that there is some sense in which the character traits and tendencies that are associated with masculinity are structurally connected to oppressive, gendered social practices and patriarchal social structures. One important theme of criticism centers on the gender distribution of emotional labor, generally speaking, but this criticism is also particularly meaningful in the context of heterosexual romantic relationships. I begin with the premise that there is (...) a gendered and asymmetrical distribution in how much emotional labor is performed, but I also consider that there might be meaningful and informative distinctions in what kind of emotional labor is characteristically performed by different genders. Specifically, I argue that the social norms around stoicism and restricted emotional expression are masculine-coded forms of emotional labor, and that they are potentially prosocial. Responding to structural and interpersonal asymmetries of emotional labor could well involve supplementing or better cultivating this aspect of male socialization rather than discarding it. (shrink)

At the heart of this paper is an exploration of belonging and how this is assumed to connect with a set of values represented as national. There is a particular interest in the relationship between these values and education. Because the significance of the learning that occurs through the public domain outside educational institutions such as schools is assumed, several cultural texts are examined in order to consider public pedagogies of Australianness including iconic displays such as those associated with the (...) Sydney Olympics and the Melbourne Commonwealth Games. Media reports surrounding the Cronulla riots are also examined as a means of understanding the values associated with non‐belonging. These cultural texts are considered along side curriculum and policy concerned with values education. Through an exploration of the imaginary, the argument is made that in relation to ethnic difference, an hegemonic narrative has remained at the core of how Australianness is represented, despite multicultural incursions and fears about the cultural dissipation associated with globalisation and so‐called postmodern fragmentation. (shrink)

This article analyses Neill Blomkamp's Academy Award-winning District 9 to investigate the extent to which popular cinema might support neoliberal ideological positions. It draws upon Slavoj...

In this paper we claim educational leadership as an autonomous discipline whose goals and strategies should not mirror those typical of business and political leadership. In order to define the aims proper to educational leadership we question three common assumptions of what it is supposed to carry out. First, we turn to Hannah Arendt and her contemporary critics to maintain that education aims at opening up exceptions within the normal course of events rather than simply preserving it. This way, education (...) is not reduced to an instrument at the service of the reinforcement of a given social and economic system. This leads us to ask what should exactly educational leadership oppose by means of these exceptions. According to Tyson E. Lewis’s wise application to education of Giorgio Agamben’s ontology of impotentiality, the apparently reasonable idea that education must help the subject to develop his potentials is precisely an instrumentalization of education which brings about a desubjectification of the learner. Education should actually make the pupil aware of his right not to carry his potentiality to its actualization and dwell instead in a state of impotentiality. Third and last, we complicate this picture by alluding to Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of the rejection of Western individuals to realize certain possibilities, which they deem too costly. By analysing in conjunction Agamben’s encouragement to suspend one’s potential and Bauman’s insistence on the need of not suspending it, we conclude by defining what, in our opinion, defines the raison d’être of educational leadership. (shrink)

The paper explores the relation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work to that of Deleuze and Guattari. The main focus is on Hardt and Negri's concept of ‘the common’ as developed in their most recent book Commonwealth. It is argued that the common can complement what Nicholas Thoburn terms the ‘minor’ characteristics of Deleuze's political thinking while also surpassing certain limitations posed by Hardt and Negri's own previous emphasis on ‘autonomy-in-production’. With reference to Marx's notion of real subsumption and (...) early workerism's social-factory thesis, the discussion circles around showing how a distinction between capital and the common can provide a basis for what Alberto Toscano calls ‘antagonistic separation’ from capital in a more effective way than can the classical capital–labour distinction. To this end, it is demonstrated how the common might benefit from being understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual apparatus, with reference primarily to the ‘body without organs’ of Anti-Oedipus. It is argued that the common as body without organs, now understood as constituting its own ‘social production’ separate from the BwO of capital, can provide a new basis for antagonistic separation from capital. Of fundamental importance is how the common potentially invents a novel regime of qualitative valorisation, distinct from capital's limitation to quantity and scarcity. (shrink)

While the concept of hegemony had a central place in the crystallization of 1980s cultural studies, recent developments in cultural economy, information and communication technologies, and globalization suggest a decline in the utility of the frameworks of democracy and the 'logic of equivalence' that lie at the heart of the hegemony thesis and its conception of the social. This article considers how cultural studies is engaging with this situation by arguing that a set of themes can be seen that approach (...) power and culture through an expanded understanding of production, a production considered as the patterning – or mobilization, arrangement and distribution – of rich social, technical, economic and affective relations. The perspective of production does not carry the unifying project that hegemony and democracy gave to an earlier cultural studies, but is instead composed of diverse problematics that suggest heterogeneous sites of critical intervention and politicization. Situating the discussion in the frame of Deleuze's figure of 'control society', the article explores the overlapping themes of communication, affect, fear, work, class and war. (shrink)