Sci Phi : Gilles Deleuze and the Future of Philosophy

Keyword(s):  
MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 50-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Jagodzinski

This paper will first briefly map out the shift from disciplinary to control societies (what I call designer capitalism, the idea of control comes from Gilles Deleuze) in relation to surveillance and mediation of life through screen cultures. The paper then shifts to the issues of digitalization in relation to big data that have the danger of continuing to close off life as zoë, that is life that is creative rather than captured via attention technologies through marketing techniques and surveillance. The last part of this paper then develops the way artists are able to resist the big data archive by turning the data in on itself to offer viewers and participants a glimpse of the current state of manipulating desire and maintaining copy right in order to keep the future closed rather than being potentially open.


2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 167-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew P. Tiessen

Gilles Deleuze once wrote in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992) that in the future (our present) our societies would be controlled or “disciplined” using subtly unobtrusive and strategically applied forms of “modulation.” That is, the rigid physical enclosures of Foucault’s disciplinary society would inevitably yield to more flexible, immaterial, and imperceptible forms of modulation that continually respond and adapt to life’s unpredictability. In this paper I describe how the use of naked body scanners at today’s airport is a most suitable expression of this dematerialized form of discipline, seeming at the same moment to both threaten and protect privacy, to be both non-intrusive and invasive, to both prepare for and determine seemingly unknowable but inevitable futures.   The flying public, meanwhile, is caught in the confusing middle, not knowing what to believe. They find themselves trapped in an undefined surveillance grid that both threatens and protects their freedoms. Will the scanners see through clothing and catch underwear-bombs, or won’t they? Will security agents scan, save, and distribute their naked images or won’t they? The public is left with questions rather than answers. This whole (visual) apparatus which was designed to create clarity and transparency seems opaque.   I suggest, then, that the opacity both of the issues at stake as well as of the scanned images of our naked bodies, confounds our categories and challenges long taken for granted social conventions about, for example, habeas corpus, privacy, security, the present, the future, potentiality, etc. Appearances, it seems, are still deceiving – even if what’s being made to appear are high-resolution scans of our naked bodies.  


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 23-36

The article describes the current state of left-wing post-Deleuzian philosophy, which is going through a period of obsession with the production of fictions. The authors argue that science fiction is today often mobilized as a tool for imagining a future that is incommensurable with the current late capitalist order. However, when trying to imagine a post-capitalist future, contemporary left-wing philosophers tend to look to the past for inspiration, a maneuver which only exacerbates the “exhaustion of the future,” that has retrofuturism as its cultural correlate. Based on this, the authors suggest that philosophical instrumentalization of science fiction may result in a distinct form of intellectual escapism. The article argues that in this context, special attention should be paid to the concept of hyperstition, which has arisen under the influence of science fiction narratives and is embedded in current popular rhetoric about hacking the future. The authors point out that the way hyperstition functions has a resemblance to marketing mechanisms, and they suggest that it corresponds to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called an unconscious representation or fake image. The article subjects hyperstition to a critical analysis in which the authors show that the genealogy of hyperstition as a practice of programming reality through fictions stems from the ideas of William S. Burroughs. Burroughs set out to develop new ways of linguistic infection and modeling human behavior by means of his cutup technique. This approach blurs the distinction between reality and fiction. Some members of the CCRU transplanted Burroughs’ ideas to the theoretical soil that Deleuze and Guattari had tilled. Hyperstition has been reborn in the CCRU’s legacy project of left-wing accelerationism, which redirects the idea of self-fulfilling fiction toward developing a non-deterministic concept of progress. Pointing to the ineffectiveness of hyperstition as a tool for socio-political change, the authors propose abandoning Anti-Oedipus in favor of Anti-Hype.


MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Jan Jagodzinski

This paper will first briefly map out the shift from disciplinary to control societies (what I call designer capitalism, the idea of control comes from Gilles Deleuze) in relation to surveillance and mediation of life through screen cultures. The paper then shifts to the issues of digitalization in relation to big data that have the danger of continuing to close off life as zoë, that is life that is creative rather than captured via attention technologies through marketing techniques and surveillance. The last part of this paper then develops the way artists are able to resist the big data archive by turning the data in on itself to offer viewers and participants a glimpse of the current state of manipulating desire and maintaining copy right in order to keep the future closed rather than being potentially open.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-184
Author(s):  
Susan Kelly

The question ‘what is to be done?’ is most often uttered at moments of great urgency and political crisis. It operates in a divide between theory and practice, when thinking should end, and action must proceed. This article considers how the grammar of this question produces relationships between subjects, action and the future, drawing a relationship between the constituent grammar of the question and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the collective assemblage of enunciation. For Deleuze and Guattari, the collective assemblage of enunciation denotes amongst other things an immanent relationship between language and action: a relationship in which politics and language are bound together in a relationship of forces. This approach aims to rethink the urgency and force that is associated with the question through examining and re-proposing the connection between the linguistic organisation of the question and the different forms of political organisation that the question might produce. In so doing, Deleuze and Guattari provide a conceptual and linguistic apparatus for rethinking the plane of political action and organisation.


Author(s):  
Angela Jones

First, this article draws from Michel Foucault to examine the creation of what is conceptualized here as queer heterotopias. Queer heterotopias are material spaces where radical practices go unregulated. They are sites where actors, whether academics or activists, engage in what we might call a radical politics of subversion, where individuals attempt to dislocate the normative configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality through daily exploration and experimentation with crafting a queer identity. Second, this article, utilizing Gilles Deleuze analyzes the process of becoming queer. The ways in which queerness develops in everyday life must be seen less as a clearly-defined political program and more as a spiritual journey individuals embark on. This article explores the development of queer heterotopias, and the problematic way in which queerness is being made, re-made, and fixed by academics and well-meaning activists who would like to appropriate, qualify, and fix queer subjectivity in order to advance a rights-based political program. The current policing of queerness, by both heteronormative and homonormative logic works against the development of queer heterotopias.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Fleming ◽  
William Brown

Science fiction is often held up as a particularly philosophical genre. For, beyond actualising mind-experiment-like fantasies, science fiction films also commonly toy with speculative ideas, or else engineer encounters with the strange and unknown. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) is a contemporary science fiction film that does exactly this, by introducing Lovecraft-esque tentacular aliens whose arrival on Earth heralds in a novel, but ultimately paralysing, inhuman perspective on the nature of time and reality. This article shows how this cerebral film invites viewers to confront a counterintuitive model of time that at once recalls and reposes what Gilles Deleuze called a “third synthesis” of time, and that which J. M. E. McTaggart named the a-temporal “C series” of “unreal” time. We finally suggest that Arrival's a-temporal conception of the future as having already happened can function as a key to understanding the fate of humanity as a whole as we pass from the anthropocene, in which humans have dominated the planet, to the “chthulucene,” in which humans no longer exist on the planet at all.


Author(s):  
Michael Germana

This introductory chapter traces the origins of Ralph Ellison’s philosophy of temporality, and illustrates how Ellison’s synthesis of the ideas of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche precedes, and in many ways prefigures, the work of Gilles Deleuze. It also demonstrates how Ellison’s Bergsonian critique of spatialized time—a coercive form of temporality that subtends progressive history—anticipates contemporary post-Deleuzian elucidations of the reciprocal relationship between temporality and subjectivity. By attuning his readers to intensities implicit in the present, or the dynamism inherent in what Bergson called duration, Ellison affirms the open-endedness of the future while critiquing all forms of determinism. And by treating race as a matter of time, Ellison shows how the feedback loops by which a racist society chaotically reproduces itself can be destabilized by troubling the coercive temporality with which they are linked “on the lower frequencies” of our immanent existence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146349962110334
Author(s):  
James D Faubion

In “Governing the Future,” Limor Samimian-Darash does much to illuminate scenarism and the divergence between the simulations and the scenarios that constitute the chief apparatuses of anticipatory governance. She renders both of them fabulations, drawing the concept as well as the divergence between simulations and scenarios from the epistemological and ontological precedents that Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze have set. Her renderings are compelling, but leave many epistemological and ontological issues unresolved. I address three of these issues. First, it has to do with what sort of concept scenarism might be. Second, it has to do with the poetics of simulations and scenarios. Third, it has to do with the virtuality or actuality of simulations and scenarios, in their planning as in their enactments.


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