Academic literature on the topic 'Deleuzoguattarian concepts'

The article draws on the Deleuzoguattarian conceptualisation of minor literature in order to analyse the literature of Brina Svit. The concepts of (de)territorialisation (schizophrenia), minor, and other attributes of minor literature are employed in the comparative analysis of different literary elements of four of Brina Svit’s novels. The article outlines the ‘line of flight’ (defined as deterritorialisation, de-oedipisation, politicalness, and collectiveness) that manifests itself from Svit’s novels written in Slovenian to the novels written in French. The literature of Brina Svit is placed in between minor literature and minority literature.

In this paper, I provide an analysis of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and the feature film The End of Evangelion through the theory of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as outlined in their seminal work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I tackle the authors’ concepts of Oedipus and absolute deterritorialization in order to provide a philosophical consideration of the series’ central plot points and developments. My aim is to employ Charles J. Stivale’s concept of academic “animation” to critique Evangelion’s emphasis on the nuclear family structure and its influence on subject-formation, as well as to demonstrate that a Deleuzoguattarian framework is uniquely suited for this task. I conclude that Evangelion, through its experimental use of animation as a medium, produces a compelling depiction of absolute deterritorialization in the form of the Human Instrumentality Project. However, the series ultimately remains loyal to its prioritisation (rooted in psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex) of the family unit, with the protagonist Ikari Shinji rejecting Instrumentality and preferring, instead, to live as a unified subject defined by familial relations.

Abstract covid-19 has changed the way we sing in choirs and has seen the extraordinary uptake of Zoom as a video chat platform across society. This is a reflective tale of four choirs members and their insights into how they improvised with traditional choir singing in a Zoom space. It consideres how zoom pedagogies allowed them to bridge social isolation during the pandemic. It includes the voices of the conductor; music teacher/technician; the voice of a media savvy artist choir member and finally the voice of a singing visual educator. The article embeds Deleuzoguattarian thinking. It draws on the concepts of the machinic assemblage and becoming as choir participants who embraced Zoom to facilitate song. Singing in a zoom virtual choir brings forth a burgeoning new relational way of being. To find ways to sing and imagine life and self without physical, temporal and spatial borders.

This paper assesses how a new materialist ontology can inform the sociological study of gender-related violence (GRV). The new materialisms are relational rather than essentialist; post-anthropocentric as opposed to humanist; and replace dualisms such as agency/structure, reason/emotion and micro/macro with a monist or ‘flat’ ontology. To make sense of GRV from within this ontology, we explore violence as assemblages of human and non-human matter and draw upon the DeleuzoGuattarian micropolitical concepts of ‘the war machine’ and ‘lines of flight’. While violence may supply a protagonist with new capacities (a line of flight), it typically closes down or constrains the capacities of one or more other parties in a violence-assemblage. This theoretical exploration establishes the basis for a methodological approach to studying GRV empirically, using a Deleuzian toolkit of affects, assemblages, capacities and micropolitics. The paper concludes with an assessment of what is gained from this new materialist ontology of GRV.

Desired and abhorred, wished for and fought against, protective and oppressive, surveillance is older than the hills. Since the times immemorial, humans would pray to all-seeing gods in hope that the immortals would watch over them and protect them against perils. Divine protection, however, has always come at a price. Irrespective of the religion, the promise of the deliverance from (variously construed) evil hinges upon the believer’s readiness to dutifully observe gods-given laws. Defiance, impossible to hide from the all-seeing eye, does not only strip one of the “protected” status—it also dooms one to (inevitable) punishment. Why then would anyone choose to transgress? Why not entrust oneself to surveillance if there is nothing sinister to hide? What could be wrong about abiding by the laws? Revisiting some of the essential notions of surveillance studies, this editorial proposes a shift from the concepts explored by Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault to Deleuzoguattarian, post-humanist, perspective on surveillance studies.

Metallica has offered a diverse catalogue of music and breadth of performance over their careers. As a band occupying an integral cultural placement as measured by both level of fame and influential import, many academic inroads have been opened to their work, career and music. These lines of inquiry, along with more general lines of inquiry into the genre of heavy metal itself, frequently position Metallica as the unofficial ambassadors of the music. However, despite the depth and breadth of research devoted to these areas, an underdeveloped opening exists when it comes to the potential parallels and connections between the music and actions of Metallica and the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically their notions of the state and the nomadic war machine. These theories serve as the basis of exploration in this research and provide new considerations and perspectives of both the career of Metallica and the larger implications to the study of popular music. The relations between Deleuze and Guattari and popular music offer many connections and examples, but the work of Metallica was selected as a representation of all of these connections as they are the ideal band from which to launch and develop these notions. Metallica is a group with clear distinctive phases to their career that fall within the concepts of the war machine (1981–91) and the state (1991–2008). While Metallica is not the only example of a band that falls into these dichotomous categorizations, they offer the best opportunity to define and clarify the connections to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. This can then be applied to other bands, genres of music and aspects of popular culture. Metallica is symbolic of this undertheorized connection to the works of Deleuze and Guattari. While these theoretical connections to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari may not serve as the final piece to a full comprehension of the complexities of Metallica’s controversial career, they offer insights and open nascent pathways towards further analysis of the band. This is important because they have existed both on the fringes of marginalization and as a significant part of the discourse of popular culture.

This article experiments with some of the insights provided by the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a move towards deterritorializing fat bodies. This is necessary because in contemporary Western society the fat [female] body is positioned and frequently experienced as lacking in social, cultural and political value and as being in need of surveillance and control, not least by the neo-liberal ‘self’. This article is a response to Deleuze and Guattari's plea to ‘think differently’, in this case about fat and weight loss. The article eschews the paradigmatic form of the traditional academic research paper, adopting a semi autoethnographic approach to present an analysis of my engagement with the Biggest Loser (diet) Club. Thinking through rather than about the body it focuses on embodied experiences of fat and the on-going process of cutting that body down to ‘normal’ size. By utilising two central concepts in Deleuzoguattarian thought – ‘becoming’ and the ‘body – without – organs’ (BwO) - I seek to demonstrate the embodied, theoretical and ethical potential of utilising Deleuze and Guattari's work to explore fat and weight loss and how this might productively serve to deterritorialize contemporary discourses which stigmatise fat bodies.

The paper has several objectives linked to Deleuzoguattarian nomadology. After a brief reconstruction of the concept, it proposes a selective reading oriented towards commonist, autonomist and posthumanist tropes. In this reading, nomadism is understood above all as a movement of countering or resisting enclosures and sustaining vital relations with broadly understood commons. It also critiques certain tendencies, present in Deleuze and Guattari, which make such reading unobvious: abstraction, deterritorialization and postmodern Nietzscheanism. The second part of the article is an inquiry on habits, still from a Deleuzoguattarian perspective. It contests the traditional story about private property as a condition of the development of good habits and reveals an array of ‘nomadic habits’ outside of sedentary, bourgeois and capitalist models of social reproduction. It argues that such understood habits can be seen as the anthropological basis of commoning.

La mayor parte de análisis de las actuales sociedades cibernéticas basados en la obra de Deleuze y Guattari las suelen concebir como sociedades de control y servidumbre maquínica. Esta caracterización se debe a que su concepto de cibernética se reduce a la cibernética de primer orden. Este artículo expone cómo las máquinas no-triviales concebidas por la cibernética de segundo orden permiten desarrollar los aspectos más socialmente emancipadores de la ontología maquínica deleuzoguattariana, sin necesidad de oponerse a las sociedades cibernéticas.

Samad Behrangi, who is known as one of the most significant revolutionary writers of modern literature in Iran, wrote The Little Black Fish in 1968. It is a world-famous children’s story that has been translated into many languages. The story is considered to be a political allegory that traces the adventures of a little black fish that seeks liberty. The fish decides to leave his homeland in order to find an alternative geography that will bestow him freedom. However, the act of migration from a tiny pool to a vast sea is not an easy task. The fish faces many hardships, including his family’s resistance and the various difficulties on his way. Samad Behrangi’s story profoundly shows the road to freedom is full of obstacles. In this perspective, it is possible to argue that the fish’s desire to reach the sea is a symbolic endeavor to create a new perception of a place that allows him to decentralize the sharp borders of his constructed identity. The journey provides the fish with an opportunity to interact with external milieus and to reinforce certain aspects of his life that help him to build a multidimensional identity. The fish does not fall into the stable and the assigned categories of individuality, but rather he is a multiple and always-in-process character. Within this framework, the fish’s journey aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “becoming” process. Behrangi shows how the fish breaks away from the normative codes of his society and transforms into a boundless and free individual. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that the multiplicity of becoming is always “dwelling within us” (1980, p.240). Therefore, as we see in the character of the fish, the process of becoming is a continual transformation, and it creates a permanent desire for change.

The thesis concerns the dynamics during the 1990s of political action by many groups of people, in what came to be called the movement of movements. The activists, who held that corporations were overstepping some mark, worked on alternative arrangements for self-rule. The thesis views the movement as micropolitics, using concepts devised by Deleuze and Guattari. It sets out particulars of the rhizomic make -up of the movement. A key point is that the movement trains participants in decentred organisation, which entails the forming of subject-groups as opposed to subjugated groups. The thesis records how the movement was shaped by earlier events in political action and thinking, especially from the 1960s on. The movement had previously been read as a push for absolute democracy (Hardt and Negri). The thesis shows that reading to have been incomplete: the movement is, in part, a push for agonistic democracy. More a practice than a form of rule, agonistic democracy is found where state power is bent on not moulding peoples into any unified polity. It is found where state power fosters conflicted-self-rule, so that every citizen may engage in the polity as a decentred "I". The thesis throws light on relations between the movement and the constitutionalist state. Part of the movement, while cynical about the existing form of state rule, wears a mask of obedience to constituted authority. When one upholds the fiction of legitimate rule, one can use the fiction as a restraint on the cynics-in-power. The play creates a shadow social contract, producing detente within the polity and within the �I.� The thesis also reports on a search in mainstream cinema for some expression of the movement's dynamics. The search leads to a cycle of thrillers, set in a nonfiction frame story about a coverup of gross abuse of state power.

The thesis concerns the dynamics during the 1990s of political action by many groups of people, in what came to be called the movement of movements. The activists, who held that corporations were overstepping some mark, worked on alternative arrangements for self-rule. The thesis views the movement as micropolitics, using concepts devised by Deleuze and Guattari. It sets out particulars of the rhizomic make -up of the movement. A key point is that the movement trains participants in decentred organisation, which entails the forming of subject-groups as opposed to subjugated groups. The thesis records how the movement was shaped by earlier events in political action and thinking, especially from the 1960s on. The movement had previously been read as a push for absolute democracy (Hardt and Negri). The thesis shows that reading to have been incomplete: the movement is, in part, a push for agonistic democracy. More a practice than a form of rule, agonistic democracy is found where state power is bent on not moulding peoples into any unified polity. It is found where state power fosters conflicted-self-rule, so that every citizen may engage in the polity as a decentred "I". The thesis throws light on relations between the movement and the constitutionalist state. Part of the movement, while cynical about the existing form of state rule, wears a mask of obedience to constituted authority. When one upholds the fiction of legitimate rule, one can use the fiction as a restraint on the cynics-in-power. The play creates a shadow social contract, producing detente within the polity and within the "I". The thesis also reports on a search in mainstream cinema for some expression of the movement's dynamics. The search leads to a cycle of thrillers, set in a nonfiction frame story about a coverup of gross abuse of state power.

The digital age has caused a fundamental transformation of literacy, and young children’s repertoires of literacy and meaning-making practices have undergone drastic changes, as have understandings of becoming literate in the complex digital landscapes (Kress 2010). Despite these changes, current early years literacy discourses remain stubbornly print-centric and fail to acknowledge contemporary children’s cultural expertise, hobbies, popular culture interests and material (physical) and immaterial (virtual) pursuits, which remain largely excluded from classroom literacy practice. This study provides an in-depth and rich description of the digital literacy practices of five children aged between 2 and 6 years in a situated ethnography of out-of-school literacy practices. Fieldwork material was gathered from participant observations, informal conversations and artefact collection and analysed to create an in-depth portrait of emergent contemporary practices in the home connected to contemporary understandings and theories of childhood literacy. Methodologically, I engaged with Deleuzoguattarian constructs such as the rhizome and assemblage theory in order to think differently and creatively about the research design and to embrace and follow the unexpected ways in which young children know/do/be/create literacies in their everyday life (Kuby & Rucker 2016). I engaged in a process of ‘thinking with theory’ (Jackson & Mazzei 2012) to plug in posthuman concepts with the fieldwork material in order to become attuned to the particular material-discursive practices occurring in the children’s home contexts and move away from hierarchies that privilege the human subject over the nonhuman (Barad, 2007). Rhizomapping was utilised as a diagrammatic form of representation to re/present the fieldwork material in a nonlinear and nonhierarchical manner, enabling a conceptual shift to frame the analyses, take more kinds of evidence into account and think more expansively about the fieldwork material. I argue that it is vital to engage with posthuman thinking when examining contemporary literacy practice due to the complex and unstable digital and material conditions of contemporary times. This thesis provides insight into the digitally mediated and shifting practices surrounding children’s reading, writing and meaning-making, and found the material, embodied, affective and spatial dimensions of literacy are substantial components of their early literacy experiences in their home contexts. The findings reveal that: 1) the children’s early literacy experiences were intertwined in complex ways with their intra-actions with everyday materials, digital devices and texts; 2) the everyday materials were important forces in producing literacy for the children and cultivated rich, creative and experimental literacy experiences; 3) the children seamlessly negotiated the online/offline spaces and operated within these hybrid spaces with ease, without differentiating between the virtual and actual. This research makes an important contribution to the task of reinterpreting contemporary literacy practice in the digital age in order to develop an informed early years literacy pedagogy of transformation for current times. Thus it argues that there is an urgent need to disrupt current literacy policy, practice and curriculum, and for early years practitioners to conceive of literacy in enlarged ways that are inclusive of the material, embodied, affective and spatial aspects of literacy.

Collaborating in the Electric Age: [onto]Riffological Experiments in Posthumanizing Education and Theorizing a Machinic Arts-Based Research is a study about locating opportunities and entry points for introducing consideration of the nonhuman and posthuman to pedagogical perspectives that are traditionally concerned with human beings and epistemological subjects. The research, herein, engages doings in collaborative effort, during conditions of unprecedented interconnectedness facilitated by the electric age. Steeped in a environment thus created by technologies’ immense ubiquity and influence, this collaboration endeavours to recognize their full research participation, alongside that of humans. This research presents collaboratively conducted, published inquiries that have been coauthored by myself and fellow doctoral candidate Richard Wainwright. Each facilitates, then attempts to articulate ways to decentre the human in educational contexts, beginning with our own human perspectives. As exercises in broadening our considerations of the life forms, matter, and nonhuman entities that surround humanity, this research prompts us to recognize much more than what humanity typically acknowledges as existing, given the anthropocentric frameworks it has constructed. We reorientate the nature of these relationships—posthumanizing them—and in doing so, disrupt our own thinking to work something different than our circumstances have hitherto informed us to consider. We have co-developed a study and conducted research in collaboration with human and nonhuman research participants.Five nationally and internationally published co-authored journal articles, a book chapter, and five intermezzos (short “observational” pieces) comprise this study that explores collaboration and recombinatoriality during “the electric age” (McLuhan, 1969, 10:05). Recognizing humanity’s increasingly inextricable relationships with technologies, this collaboratively conducted study draws into creative assemblage Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concepts; new materialism as cultural theory; the prescient observations and predictions of Marshall McLuhan and a media studies curriculum he co-developed over forty years ago; arts-based research; museum exhibitions; features of music production such as sampling, mashup, remix, and turntabling; among many other notes and tones. A conceptually developed riff mobilizes our inquiries as “plug in and play,” while its academic study is theorized as [onto]Riffology. Ontological shifts beget a machinic arts-based research (MABR) that develops a posthuman critical pedagogy inspired by Negri and Guattari (2010). Collaborating in the Electric Age: [onto]Riffological Experiments in Posthumanizing Education and Theorizing a Machinic Arts-Based Research celebrates collaborativity, discovery, and learning during the electric age.
Graduate
2022-01-07

AbstractThis chapter explores parental choice of language programs from a socio-material standpoint. It uses a DeleuzoGuattarian framework of smooth and striated spaces to understand how parents in Mozambique and Finland position themselves when making choices concerning their children’s language education. We analyzed interviews from Finland and focus groups and policy documents from Mozambique to understand the materialities and social discourses that constitute parental choice. We found that in Finland, materiality as a physical space (e.g., school location) factored into caregivers’ decision making when selecting schools for their children. In Mozambique, in turn, materiality as socioeconomic stability or advancement was a recurring theme. In the Mozambican context income and educational outcome (associated with Portuguese) were important factors for school/language choice, whereas in Finland social distinction was key. Based on our analysis, we draw conclusions about the nature of choice, arguing that a socio-material approach and the concept of assemblage are well-suited to understand the complexity of it.

Abstract Queer theory’s standard origin story centers on Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, together with Eve Sedgwick and Teresa de Lauretis. This chapter proceeds down a less-traveled road yet to be explored in biblical studies. Deleuze and Guattari’s iconoclastic theory of desire is its point of departure, yielding a concept of the gendered body that is neither discursive (à la Foucault) nor performative (à la Butler) but virtual; a concept of sexuality that overflows the human/nonhuman binary containers no less than the heterosexual/homosexual containers; and an alternative version of queer theory’s “antisocial thesis” that precedes Lee Edelman’s by more than thirty years, namely, Guy Hocquenghem’s Deleuzoguattarian version. Deleuze’s own engagement with Hocquenghem also fuels this chapter. How might Deleuze and Guattari’s hyperqueer theory translate into biblical reading? Addressing this question through an extended analysis of the Gospel of Mark is the main business of the chapter.

This essay reframes and reconceives gender as both a public feeling (in Cvetkovich’s sense of the term) and an affective assemblage. The latter concept, which extends the former, is designed to accommodate the multiplicity of factors, forces, processes, and agencies implicated in gender in general, but in non-normative gender in particular. The essay’s affective assemblage is eclectically composed from Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, pheonomenology, new materialisms, and affect theory, and enacted in the limit case of non-transitioning transgendered people in online communities. Gender as an affective assemblage takes a theological turn in the essay’s concluding section where it counters a territorialized reading of Christ’s body, one which seeks to exclude non-normative genders from the church. Calling for the church’s self-deterritorialization, the essay proposes a corporate body enfleshed by queer affective assemblages that would facilitate gendered exploration and discovery.