Deleuze and Guattari and the Future of Politics: Science Fiction, Protocols and the People to Come

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 77-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Bogue

When is the future? Is it to come or is it already here? This question serves as the frame for three further questions: why is utopia a bad concept and in what way is fabulation its superior counterpart? If the object of fabulation is the creation of a people to come, how do we get from the present to the future? And what is a people to come? The answers are (1) that the future is both now and to come, now as the becoming-revolutionary of our present and to come as the goal of our becoming; (2) utopia is a bad concept because it posits a pre-formed blueprint of the future, whereas a genuinely creative future has no predetermined shape and fabulation is the means whereby a creative future may be generated; (3) the movement from the revolutionary present toward a people to come proceeds via the protocol, which provides reference points for an experiment which exceeds our capacities to foresee; (4) a people to come is a collectivity that reconfigures group relations in a polity superior to the present, but it is not a utopian collectivity without differences, conflicts and political issues. Science fiction formulates protocols of the politics of a people to come, and Octavia Butler's science fiction is especially valuable in disclosing the relationship between fabulation and the invention of a people to come.

1944 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 484-515
Author(s):  
Mario Einaudi

The efforts of the Italian people to create the basis of a new political life are proceeding amidst the most serious difficulties, but not without well-founded hopes for the future. There is hunger in Italy today—and insecurity, unemployment, lack of transportation and of some of the bare necessities of civilized human life. Worst of all, there is inflation on a fearful scale, with its destruction of economic and moral values, with its sudden impoverishment of whole classes. No wonder that some foreign observers have reported apathy among the people with regard to political problems. It is difficult to imagine any other attitude under conditions which make life a nightmare. Nevertheless, the outlines of things to come are taking shape.


2016 ◽  
pp. 126-137
Author(s):  
Piotr Petrykowski

[full article and abstract in Lithuanian; abstract in English] This article discusses the relationship between the development of individual identity and the culture of social memory. The starting point of the analysis is the hermeneutics of biblical texts referencing the postulate to remember and commemorate specific events in the history of the people of Israel. Such remembrance, however, is not understood solely as a memory of the past, but instead becomes the point of reference for the present and the future. The results of the analysis of the biblical texts are then referenced to education in contemporary social and cultural settings. The author points out that breaking with the past causes confusion and disorientation with regard to the reference points in the future and ultimately affects the meaning of the present, which – deprived of perspective – acquires its own autotelic value. The lack of the culture of memory also results in reducing the past to an idyllic form, illusionary rather than authentic, thus becoming a mere object of longing. It also reduces the future to the merely incidental, uprooted from the past events and thoughtlessly independent of the human being.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.


Robotics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Rousi

With a backdrop of action and science fiction movie horrors of the dystopian relationship between humans and robots, surprisingly to date-with the exception of ethical discussions-the relationship aspect of humans and sex robots has seemed relatively unproblematic. The attraction to sex robots perhaps is the promise of unproblematic affectionate and sexual interactions, without the need to consider the other’s (the robot’s) emotions and indeed preference of sexual partners. Yet, with rapid advancements in information technology and robotics, particularly in relation to artificial intelligence and indeed, artificial emotions, there almost seems the likelihood, that sometime in the future, robots too, may love others in return. Who those others are-whether human or robot-is to be speculated. As with the laws of emotion, and particularly that of the cognitive-emotional theory on Appraisal, a reality in which robots experience their own emotions, may not be as rosy as would be expected.


Veritas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-115
Author(s):  
Damrah Mamang

The dynamics in the system and structure of the Indonesian constitution began in the reform era so quickly developed. All can run properly and correctly because it was initiated by reforming the constitution through an amendment or constitutional amendment mechanism (the 1945 Constitution) in four stages of change (1999 - 2002). One of the essence of the amendment, gave birth to the Regional Representative Council (DPD RI) as a state institution with its constitutionality can be found explicitly in Chapter VIIA Article 22 C Paragraph 1 - Paragraph 4 and Article 22 D Paragraph 1 - Paragraph 4. And UUNO. 17 of 2014 Jo UUNo.2 of 2018 concerning the MPR, DPR, DPD, DPRD. As a new post-amendment state institution, the DPD is designed as a strong bicameral second chamber of our parliament which was originally only unicameral, namely the DPR RI as a state institution and a representative institution of the people. But one of the characteristics of bicameral is if both parliamentary chambers carry out the legislative function as they should. However, if examined carefully until now based on the substitution of article 22 C and Article 22D of the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia in 1945 the authority and authority of the DPD is still very limited. So that as an organic law does not give much space for the implementation of authority to the DPD in carrying out its main duties and functions, especially the legislative function like the DPR. For this reason, in order to strengthen and empower the future, the DPD's consistency and authority need to get priority place in the context of the subsequent amendments to the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia as the Holder of strategic and fundamental national political decision authority. Everything is inseparable from the problems in the DPD now is a matter of the authority granted by the constitution to him, especially in the context of the legislative function to make laws. Its existence is expected to bridge the relationship between the center and the regions, in a two-chamber parliamentary frame which has strong bicameralism authority.  


Author(s):  
Peter Marks

This chapter deals with of recent novels and films that project forward into the near future, suggesting where surveillance might be heading. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, surveillance is figured into a future world of interplanetary environmentalism, in protecting planets and helping to monitor the ‘rewilding’ of an environmentally devastated Earth. Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium fashions another Earth under environmental stress, patrolled by stringent surveillance operatives and systems that also screen the put-upon inhabitants from the eponymous eutopian space station literally and metaphorically above them. The film concentrates on the utopian urges of that population in their endeavour to overcome oppressive monitoring and receive medical treatment reserved for those on Elysium. Dave Eggers conjures up an apparently eutopian hi-tech company, The Circle, in his novel of the same name, representing how new technologies manipulate data and images for economic, social and political control. Spike Jonze’s film Her explores the relationship between surveillance and intimacy through the interaction between a human and an operating system. As with Eggers’ The Circle, Her investigates how data confuses definitions of identities as it allows for the fusion of surveillance and intimacy. These novels and films suggest some of the ways in which new forms of surveillance promise or threaten to fashion the worlds of the future. As with all such texts, they suggest options and present narratives and characters that enable readers and viewers to think and act so that the future approximates the eutopian rather than the dystopian.


2020 ◽  
pp. 115-148
Author(s):  
Joel P. Christensen

This chapter explores the creation of narrative agency by examining Odysseus's lies in the second half of the Odyssey from a perspective informed by correspondence and coherence in memory. The lying tales offer a continuing although coded probing of the relationship between the self, internal motivation, external action, and an evaluation of consequences. Odysseus's storytelling changes from reflective of his own experiences to manipulative of his addressees and, finally, in addresses to the suitors in particular, predictive of future actions. In an important way, this pattern continues the process of Narrative Therapy, as Odysseus continues to re-author his past in order to predict and act in the future. But this process also entails a complex negotiation between the correspondence of narrative details, which may be shared by a community, and the agent's need for coherence. The chapter's reading of the lies echoes what others have said — that they are instruments by which he achieves his psychological homecoming — but also argues that they have other functions as well in helping to distinguish Odysseus's character further and in providing insights for the Homeric understanding of the interdependence between storytelling and the working of human minds.


Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin

An enduring problem of social life is what to do about the future. Can we predict it? Can we control it? How much sacrifice are we willing to make in the present for the promise of a better future? The questions are harrowing, and agreement comes hard. The year 1921 was a time of famine in some parts of the newly formed Soviet Union. An American journalist, visiting a refugee camp on the Volga, reported that almost half of the people had died of starvation. Noticing some sacks of grain stacked on an adjacent field, he asked the patriarch of the refugee community why the people did not simply overpower the lone soldier guarding the grain and help themselves. The patriarch impatiently explained that the seed was being saved for next season's planting. "We do not steal from the future," he said. It would be too much to claim that only the human animal is capable of imagining what is yet to come, but it is difficult to believe that any other animal can have so keen an appreciation of the demands of the future. Alfred Korbzybski (1879- 1950) called man "the time-binding animal." Binding the future to the present makes sense only if understandable mechanisms connect the two. This understanding was notably missing in the writings of the anarchist-journalist William Godwin. Unlike Malthus, he could make no sense of the fluctuations of human numbers. "Population," he said, "if we consider it historically, appears to be a fitful principle, operating intermittedly and by starts. This is the great mystery of the subject.. .. One of the first ideas that will occur to a reflecting mind is, that the cause of these irregularities cannot be of itself of regular and uniform operation. It cannot be [as Malthus says] 'the numbers of mankind at all times pressing hard against the limits of the means of subsistence.'" Rather than trying to see how appearances might be reconciled with natural laws, Godwin simply said there were no natural laws. His proposal to replace law with "fhfulness" led one of his critics to comment: "Perhaps Godwin was simply carrying his dislike of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed a whole army of facts out of the range of science."


Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller

This chapter examines the dark themes and moods that characterize some of Ray Bradbury's short stories, a reflection of his deep ambivalence toward an increasingly destabilized world. Bradbury never developed a postmodernist dislike of where technology and science had brought the world, but he always remained wary of where science may lead mankind in the future. This predictive urge led him to use his science fiction stories to work through some of the issues left unresolved in his failed novels. This chapter discusses “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and several of Bradbury's tales, written in the 1946–1948 period, which are distinguished from other Bradbury stories of the period by their science fiction trappings, their unrelieved darkness, the lack of any familiar points of reference, and their relative obscurity within the Bradbury canon. It also considers the relationship stories that eased Bradbury through his impasse with Modernist themes.


2001 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Nigel Stuckey Clark

ABSTRACTThe Presidential Address relates events which occurred during significant years in the life of the President with matters relevant to the Institute, past, present and still to come, and with what was written by previous Presidents. It considers actuarial education, and specially its links with universities, and then comments on the President's career as a life actuary.The role of the Appointed Actuary is discussed, and also what an actuary is and does. The international actuarial perspective is covered through a description of the Groupe Consultatif and of the President's other international involvement, especially with Africa. Other subjects covered include with-profits contracts, the dispersion of actuaries throughout England and Wales, the role of the actuary in today's changing world, the relationship between the Institute and the Faculty, and the role of the President. Finally, the President looks forward to what actuaries might be and do in the future.


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