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)

George Orwell has often been accused of articulating a naive version of empiricism in his writings. Naive empiricism can be said to be based on the belief that an external objective world exists independently of us which can nevertheless be studied and observed by constructing atomistic theories of causality between objects in the world. However, by revisiting some of Orwell's most well-known writings, this paper argues that it makes more sense to place his empiricism within the contours of Deleuze's empiricist (...) philosophy. By recourse to Deleuze's ideas the paper argues that far from being a naive empiricist Orwell in fact engages in a reflexive exploration of his virtual affects through the particular events he writes about. The assemblage that is ‘George Orwell’ is thus comprised by a whole array of affects from this unique middle-class socialist as he crosses through particular events. Orwell subsequently acts as a ‘schizoid nomad’ who transverses the affects of others. As a result Orwell takes flight from his own middle-class surroundings in order to reterritorialise his identity within the affects, habits and sensations of others. By becoming a schizoid nomad Orwell is able to construct a critical and passionate moral standpoint against forces of domination. (shrink)

Drawing on my article “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, this paper provides a detailed response to the above commentaries by Lisa Adkins, Bridget Fowler, Michael Grenfell, David Inglis, Hans-Herbert Kögler, Steph Lawler, William Outhwaite, Derek Robbins and Bryan S. Turner. The main purpose of this “Reply to my critics” is to reflect upon the most important issues raised by these commentators and thereby contribute to a more nuanced understanding of key questions arising from Bourdieu’s (...) analysis of language. (shrink)

In “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, Simon Susen proposes that Bourdieu’s account of language is based on a number of ontological presuppositions. While the extensive commentary on Bourdieu’s analysis of language tends to bracket these assumptions—not least because of an enduring attachment to the “sociological Bourdieu”—Susen insists that a recognition of the ontological features of language is consistent with Bourdieu’s own writings. While Susen’s ontological retrieval may be controversial, especially to those attached to the (...) “sociological Bourdieu”, in this reply I suggest that in “Bourdieusian reflections on language” we find something more interesting than any such controversy. Specifically, Susen’s ontological retrieval opens out Bourdieu’s oeuvre to currents in the social sciences which question the limits of the sociology of the social in the context of an increasingly ontological life. In this reply, I ask how Susen’s “ontological Bourdieu” fares in a dialogue with this body of work. (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)