The schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, or the political between schizophrenia and paranoia

AbstractThis article is an ethnographic investigation of the labours of making art and selling liquid petroleum gas (LPG) in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. It locates these activities within a shared social world, centred on one of Bulawayo's major art galleries, and it demonstrates that artists and LPG dealers use similar strategies to respond to the political conditions of life in the city. This article frames these conditions as unpredictable, insofar as they change frequently and crystallize in unexpected forms, and it argues that both groups are attempting to act within these conditions and shape them into emergent assemblages. In adopting this term ‘assemblage’, which has been elaborated theoretically by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and their many interlocutors, this article emphasizes both the mutability and the unpredictability of these formations. The artists who work in the gallery, for their part, make their art by assembling their chosen media. The processes by which they choose their media constitute assemblages as well, in that artists have to adapt their artistic visions to the materials that Zimbabwe's market can provide. Street dealers in gas also produce emergent assemblages against the backdrop of unpredictability. If they want to make natural gas available to consumers, dealers must shepherd their medium through an always emergent process of distribution. They participate in transnational networks of trade, but they also theorize innovative strategies of procurement, develop circuits of trust and loyalty, and conjure up visions of a predatory state. Like artists, they use their work to construct dynamic representations of the world around them. Artists may produce images, and dealers circulate gas, but this article shows that conceptualizing these practices in terms of ‘assemblages’ calls their commonalities into view. In doing so, it also demonstrates that these practices complicate easy distinctions between aesthetics, economics and politics.

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On Feeling Political: Negotiating (within) Affective Landscapes and Soundscapes

PhaenEx ◽

10.22329/p.v7i2.3570 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 96

Author(s):

JEAN-THOMAS TREMBLAY

Keyword(s):

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Research Question ◽

The Other ◽

Political Life ◽

Felix Guattari ◽

The Political ◽

Political Theorist ◽

Alternative Approach ◽

Lauren Berlant

This article generates an affective hermeneutics of the political. The research question, What is feeling political? is, at first, refined through the oeuvre of political theorist Simone Weil, whose focus on experience, involvement and attention highlights the role of sentience in political life. The inescapable normativity of Weil’s texts calls for an alternative approach to the question at hand, one that acknowledges the inevitability of the phenomenon of feeling political. In order to produce such an approach, the realm in which said phenomenon occurs is spatialized as an indefinite series of rhizomatic affective atmospheres in which the negotiation of one’s involvement, resistance, association, and isolation prompts a variety of orientations. The work of Lauren Berlant is subsequently considered as a means to stress the interplay between noise and ambience on one hand, and the notions of citizenship and community on the other. Ultimately, a reflection inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emphasizes the humanist undertone of this investigation, reposing the question of feeling political as an ontological query.

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David Hammons meets Richard Serra downtown

Art & the Public Sphere ◽

10.1386/aps_00036_1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1-2) ◽

pp. 107-117

Author(s):

Anthony Iles

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Political Economy ◽

Michel Foucault ◽

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Felix Guattari ◽

The Political ◽

Production Of Space ◽

Direct Reading ◽

Finite Resource ◽

Richard Serra

This article was originally presented at a seminar organized by Josephine Berry (2020) around the ideas of milieu and geoaesthetics, derived respectively from Michel Foucault (2009) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1999). In this account of a network of artworks, I will focus on direct reading of a significant conjunction between works by Richard Serra and David Hammons through an understanding of the political economy of New York at an important moment of transition. I develop the understanding of milieu derived from Michel Foucault with Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of the ‘production of space’ (1991) and the ‘reproduction of the relations of production’ (1976), operations by which capitalism survives its crisis of accumulation at a key conjuncture in the 1970s which has direct consequences for the works I discuss. Responding to the initial presentation context for this article, a seminar coordinated by Dr Josephine Berry, geoaesthetics, a concept derived by Berry from ideas of milieu and geoaesthetics, respectively, from Michel Foucault (2009) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986) is grasped in the sense of art and aesthetics responding to the earth’s (adopting the same prefix as) geology, geography and geometry (ge) by offering a planetary reading of art or experience of art that is entwined with a consciousness of our planet as a totality, and perhaps galvanized by our increasing awareness of it as a finite resource. Geoaesthetics in this context is thought of as an aesthetics, an attempt to understand the experience of artworks in ways that render accessible the conditions of their making and witnessing in terms that are inseparable from the environments and conditions in which they are made and experienced.

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‘Come and See the Blood in the Streets’: Luciano Berio, ‘Coro’, and the Affective Staging of the One-Crowd

Music and Letters ◽

10.1093/ml/gcz041 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 100 (4) ◽

pp. 685-712

Author(s):

James Davis

Keyword(s):

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Political Context ◽

Political Activity ◽

Felix Guattari ◽

The Political ◽

Luciano Berio ◽

Musical Production ◽

Philosophical Framework ◽

The One ◽

Political Alignment

Abstract Luciano Berio’s most substantial work from the 1970s was Coro (1976)—an hour-long piece for chorus and orchestra. This work has attracted a small literature that attempts to understand it in terms of the philosophical framework of the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. These Deleuzo-Guattari speculations have remained rather abstract; specifically, they have not attempted to relate the work to the concrete political context of 1970s Italy. This essay attempts to enrich our understanding of Berio by relating the choral work to this political context. In so doing, it will contribute towards a more thorough understanding of the political significance and functioning of the works of one of Italy’s leading composers, and suggest a striking political alignment between his musical production and the radical extra-parliamentary political activity of the 1970s.

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Disruptive writing and a critique of territoriality

Review of International Studies ◽

10.1017/s0260210504006011 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 30 (2) ◽

pp. 201-228 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Prem Kumar Rajaram

Keyword(s):

Collective Memory ◽

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Political Identity ◽

Specific Consumption ◽

Felix Guattari ◽

The Political ◽

Contemporary State ◽

The World

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote of the territorialising of the world, describing the commodification of space; its parcelling out and regimentation ensuring stable, unvarying coherence. Territorialised space, when well regulated, becomes a settled base for the political and for notions of political identity, heritage and kinship. Kenan Ferguson describes this as ‘the location and creation of civilization in a specific consumption of the land, as well as the subsequent delegitimation of those with different conceptions of it.’ The contemporary state is the receptacle of human ambition and desires, with history, allegiance and kinship understood in terms of its borders; there is a retrospective history premised on strategic forgetting and the cultivation of a collective memory coherent before the contemporary state.

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Politicizing flight in Edward Albee’s seascape

Linguistics and Culture Review ◽

10.21744/lingcure.v5n1.150 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 10-19

Author(s):

Zied Khamari

Keyword(s):

Political Thought ◽

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Modern Society ◽

Felix Guattari ◽

The Political ◽

Edward Albee ◽

Similar Tendency ◽

The Social ◽

Contemporary Life ◽

The Individual

In recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Many writers emphasized in their literary works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern society and underlined the idea that flight is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Albee, for example, addressed the issue of flight in his drama, particularly the sociopolitical and artistic scopes of escape. In his Seascape, Albee presents a multifaceted perception of flight juxtaposing the social with the literary and the political with the artistic. In the postmodern political thought too, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (2005), for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from all authoritarian policies. This paper, then, seeks to examine Albee’s staging of flight from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective in an attempt to elucidate his complex yet refined dramatization of escape in his play Seascape.

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O Pequeno e o Grande Emílio: elementos para pensar a pedagogia e a produção de subjetividades

CADERNOS DE PESQUISA: PENSAMENTO EDUCACIONAL ◽

10.35168/2175-2613.utp.pens_ed.2020.vol14.n39.pp155-184 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 14 (39) ◽

pp. 155-184

Author(s):

Bruno Gonçalves Borges

Keyword(s):

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Felix Guattari

O problema que pretende responder este texto pode ser resumido ao questionamento acerca do processo que levou a pedagogia a se tornar uma peça indispensável de uma engenhosa estrutura de produção de subjetividades na era capitalista. Para tanto, esse problema ganha contornos a partir do esboço de um cenário dual, em que há de um lado, um Pequeno Emílio, originário da obra rousseauniana , desprendido do desejo de formulação de um padrão subjetivo, ainda que aspectos de um naturalismo liberal sejam pertinentes a ele; e, de outro, um Grande Emílio, produto de uma “pequena”, mas incessante e, talvez, pretensiosa resposta ao problema do governo de si e dos outros por meio dos usos de uma pedagogia científica e suas variações, encerrada na ideia de formação plena de um corpo social que reduz a multiplicidade aos níveis economicamente produtivos. Ao propor a abordagem em questão, este texto lança mão de uma análise ao estilo esquizo dos filósofos franceses Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari de textos importantes para a filosofia da educação e da própria pedagogia em função de encontrar suporte para os elementos de uma produção subjetiva em curso que passa pela pedagogia.

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BACK ON CIRCE'S ISLAND

Ramus ◽

10.1017/rmu.2020.12 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 49 (1-2) ◽

pp. 213-235

Author(s):

Michiel van Veldhuizen

Keyword(s):

Science Fiction ◽

Analogical Reasoning ◽

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Margaret Atwood ◽

Classical Antiquity ◽

Felix Guattari ◽

Dio Chrysostom ◽

The Witch ◽

The Moment ◽

Physical Degradation

The reception of Circe's island in and through Classical Antiquity has largely focused on the enigmatic sorceress herself. The long literary chain of interpretive topoi—Circe the witch, the whore, the temptress—stretches from Apollonius, Virgil, Ovid, and Dio Chrysostom to Spenser, Calderón, Joyce, Margaret Atwood, and Madeline Miller. Her role as Odysseus’ benefactor, so unmistakable in Homer, is soon forgotten; to Virgil, she is above all dea saeva, (‘the savage goddess’, Aen. 7.19). One distinguishing feature of Circe and her reception is the focus on representation: the enchantment of Circe, as Greta Hawes puts it, is above all a study in allegory. From the moment Circe put a spell on Odysseus’ companions, transforming them into animals in Book 10 of the Odyssey, Circe has invited analogical reasoning, centered on what the transformation from one being into another represents. More often than not, this transformation is interpreted according to a dualist thinking about humans and animals: subjects are transformed from one being into another being, thus representing some moral or physical degradation. This article, by contrast, concentrates on Circe's island through the lens of becoming-animal, the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…’. I explicate the concept of becoming-animal by applying it to a Deleuzian encounter with Circe's island, both in its ancient articulations and in its various receptions, including H.G. Wells's science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.

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Becoming Child and Sustainability—The Kindergarten Teacher as Agency Mobiliser for Sustainability through Keeping the Concept of the Child in Play

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13105588 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (10) ◽

pp. 5588

Author(s):

Anita Tvedt Crisostomo ◽

Anne B. Reinertsen

Keyword(s):

Gilles Deleuze ◽

Kindergarten Teacher ◽

Felix Guattari ◽

Teacher Roles ◽

Educational Organization ◽

Nature And Culture ◽

And Function ◽

Opening Up ◽

Power Position

In this article, we seek to theorize the role of the kindergarten teacher as an agency mobiliser for sustainability through keeping the concept of the child in play, ultimately envisioning the child as a knowledgeable and connectable collective. This implies a non-dialectical politics of multiplicity ready to support and join a creative pluralism of educational organization and teacher roles for sustainability. Comprising friction zones between actual and virtual multiplicities that replace discursive productions of educational policies with enfoldedness, relations between bodies and becomings. This changes the power, position and function of language in and for agency and change. Not through making the child a constructivist change-agent through language but through opening up the possibilities for teachers to explore relations between language and matter, nature and culture and what might be produced collectively and individually. We go via the concepts of agencement expanding on the concept of agency, and conceptual personae directing the becoming of the kindergarten teacher. Both concepts informed by the transformational pragmatics of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992). The overarching contribution of this article is therefore political and pragmatic and concerns the constitution of subjectivity and transformative citizenships for sustainability in inter- and intra-generational perspectives.

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Deleuze and Italian Thought

Deleuze and Guattari Studies ◽

10.3366/dlgs.2019.0375 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 495-507 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Felice Cimatti

Keyword(s):

Human Subject ◽

Gilles Deleuze ◽

The Political ◽

The World ◽

Giacomo Leopardi ◽

The One

The tradition of Italian Thought – not the political one but the poetic and naturalistic one – finds in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze a way to enter into the new century, the century of immanence and animality. In fact, Deleuze himself remained outside the main philosophical traditions of his own time (structuralism and phenomenology). The tradition to which Deleuze refers is the one that begins with Spinoza and ends with Nietzsche. It is an ontological tradition, which deals mainly with life and the world rather than with the human subject and knowledge. Finally, the text sketches a possible dialogue between Deleuze and the poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, one of the most important (and still unknown) figures of Italian Thought.

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