Статті в журналах з теми "Deleuze, Gilles (1925-1995 ; philosophe)"

Este artículo interroga por la fina y precisa relación entre Arte y Política al interior del pensamiento del filósofo francés Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Se intenta mostrar cómo Deleuze, en parte siguiendo el trabajo inacabado y juvenil de Nietzsche, quiere realizar una filosofía política desde una lógica de la sensación. Y no como los hegelianos o marxianos o marxistas, etc. que siempre han pensado lo político desde una lógica negativa de la dialéctica histórica. El plan de Deleuze, fundamentalmente en su última etapa, en su trabajo en torno al arte, en general, y, en especial, con la pintura versa desde una lógica de la sensación. Y es desde esta lógica dónde se da el lugar que expresa lo político.

In the approach that sustains this entire essay, besides my own trajectory as a researcher, the path moves away from the orthodox tradition, the more Kantian one, incorporating in Social Theory a philosophical line for a long time forgotten, by including figures such as Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the founding father, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and many others. They would be the famous authors of vitalism, also known as philosophers of life (Lebensphilosophie), philosophers of process, or philosophers of affect. What are the implications when these figures invade the field of Social Theory, which characteristics can be found and, mainly, which advantages when compared with their more orthodox side and their insistent commitment to Kantian philosophy and its transcendental by-products (power, culture, ideology, discourse, etc)? Following this and other questions, six points will be considered as representative of what we call here an Object-Oriented Social Theory (O.O.S.T.).

Au delà des différences de terminologie et de background culturel, on essaye ici de montrer que le physicien quantique David Bohm (Wilkes-Barre 1917 – Londre 1992) et le philosophe poststructuraliste Gilles Deleuze (Paris 1925 – Paris 1995) ont visé un but de pensée commun: remplacer l’image classique (mécaniste) de la réalité, encore dominante à notre époque, par une métaphysique finalement en accord avec les concepts et les résultats de la relativité, de la mécanique quantique et de la biologie contemporaine. Pour cesdeux penseurs, le monde des choses bien individuées dans l’espace et le temps, et ordonnées selon des relations mécaniques de cause et d’effet, n’est rien d’autre que l’expression momentanée d’une “Totalité indivise en devenir” qui en constitue le véritable fondement ontologique. Par le moyen de cette nouvelle métaphysique, le monde de l’expérience quotidienne et de la science classique apparaît comme la manifestation explicite ou développée de l’ordre implicite que la totalité indivise contient virtuellement en elle à des niveaux d’enveloppementet d’imbrication toujours plus profonds. Le monde explicite (de la science classique et de l’expérience quotidienne) est le résultat d’un processus de répétition, ralentissement et stabilisation temporelle, déclenché par l’interaction de nos instruments de mesure – appareils techniques, organes sensoriels et moteurs, formes a priori et catégories de l’entendement – avec une totalité mouvante dont le sujet pensant et observant représente un reflet momentané et partial plutôt qu’un fragment solitaire et autonome. En critiquant l’image classique de la correspondance/adéquation entre l’être et la pensée, Bohm et Deleuze montrent enfin que la pensée qui veut saisir cette Totalité en devenirinteragit inévitablement avec elle, en la modifiant, en la recréant, en l’accomplissant dans une direction plutôt qu’une autre. La pensée ressemble ainsi à une danse qui essaye de s’harmoniser avec le flux universel qui l’engendre et l’emporte dans un seul mouvement avec la matière.

En este trabajo se analizarán las nociones de “Espacio aliento” y “Espacio cualquiera” desarrolladas por el filósofo francés Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) en Cine I: La imagen-movimiento, Cine II: La imagen-tiempo y en sus lecciones de Cine dictadas en la Universidad de Vicennes entre 1982 y 1984. La hipótesis principal es que estos espacios tienen la característica de ser pro-nominales, puesto que las personas se desintegran en ellos, perdiendo si individualidad, luego de un proceso de absorción e interacción con la atmósfera del mismo. Esta desterritorialización sería análoga a aquella del paisaje pictórico, debido a lo cual un análisis de los espacios cualesquiera y espacios-aliento es pertinente para abordar la estética deleuziana.

This article starts with the presumption that Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) created a new conception of cinematic time. This impact on the theory of modern cinema was examined by philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image (in French: Cinéma 2, L’Image-Temps, 1985). The article asks the question: what were the conceptual and social circumstances for everyday time to be implemented in a specific movie? As an example, it takes the film Andrei Rubliov (director Andrei Tarkovsky, 1969), which underwent protracted critique and compulsory shortening. The article asks the question: what is the meaning and significance of the cuts made when passing from the first version of The Passion according to Andrei (in Russian: Strasti po Andreyu, director Tarkovsky, 1966) to the final Andrei Rubliov? What is the meaning of the cuts made to the scenes of violence and nudity? The research conclusions are: the impatience of the critics who demanded that the long scenes in The Passion according to Andrei be shortened speaks not about defects in the film, nor about the inability of Tarkovsky to calculate time, but rather about the inability of observers to grasp Tarkovky’s new conception of cinematic time. According to Deleuze, in his attempt to transfer into cinema the slow speed of everyday life, Tarkovsky created a feature of modern cinema, and made a turn from movement towards time; time in this particular movie is already made visible.

Propõe-se abordar Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) como filósofo trabalhador, operário dos conceitos. Afirma-se a filosofia como atividade produtiva no contexto capitalista, o que implica a militância do filósofo. Esta luta se faz pela análise da atividade filosófica, como meio de interferência nos processos de produção social, acompanhada pela clínica do trabalho filosófico, como desvio desenvolvido a partir das rupturas analíticas. Discute-se a composição do coletivo de trabalho e a sustentação do gênero de atividade em filosofia por Deleuze. A intercessão com a atividade docente se coloca como crucial. Apresentam-se situações concretas tratadas por Deleuze em sua filosofia: droga, literatura, loucura.

There is a tradition of modern French philosophy that contains valuable resources for thinking about the nature and limits of obligation and how a higher calling of life beyond obligation might be conceived. This is a tradition of an ethics of generosity whose best exemplar is perhaps Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and that extends in our own time to the writing of Gilles Deleuze (1925–95).

O presente artigo propõe uma leitura crítica do livro Escuro (2014), de Ana Luísa Amaral, a partir da perspetiva filosófica da noção de rizoma proposta por Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) e Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930-1992). Neste sentido, as multiplicidades cruzadas pela diferença do pensamento num jogo permanente e dicotómico presente em Escuro possibilitam a horizontalidade da poesia que se movimenta na força da delicadeza subterrânea do rizoma que se multiplica diferencialmente. Pela arquitetura corporalizada na multilinearidade de diferentes rotas de leitura, Escuro é perspetivado a partir da análise dicotómica e rizomática que enforma a rede conceptual deleuze-guattariana.

O objetivo deste artigo é delimitar e restituir, de modo sistemático, os eixos argumentativos decisivos que permitem conceder um grau de coerência interna à célebre interpretação expressiva de Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) acerca da filosofia de Espinosa. Trata-se, inicialmente, de examinar o quanto a leitura deleuziana de Espinosa retrata um momento peculiar e único das relações que Deleuze, ao longo de pelo menos três décadas, estabeleceu com a história da filosofia. Em seguida, pretendemos demonstrar a partir de quais ordenamentos conceituais – construídos de maneira não-hierárquica, segundo Deleuze – a tese de uma necessidade prática intrínseca ao processo de constituição ontológica na Ética de Espinosa é sustentada dentro do viés de uma filosofia da diferença.

A partir dos escritos de Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995) e Félix Guattari (1930 – 1992), entou-se apresentar alguns deslocamentos entre a filosofia or eles proposta de maneira a pensarmos acerca de algumas práticas escolares. Antes mesmo da escolha destes autores, partiu-se da hipótese inicial de que houvesse, talvez um certo excesso de conhecimentos científicos no currículo em detrimento das artes e filosofias. Deste modo, buscou-se nestes autores uma base para enriquecer ainda mais nossa compreensão e tal qual, ampliarmos as discussões conceituais acerca das ciências, artes e filosofias. Através destes autores, percebeu-se que tais saberes em sua dimensão menor possuem caráter próprio e criador, coexistindo para fora de hierarquias. Com isto, acreditamos na possibilidade de conteúdos curriculares criadores que possam ensejar a produção contínua destas dimensões do pensamento e integrá-las ainda mais à atualidade. Para melhor explorar estas dimensões, tentou-se deslocar o conceito de rizoma e as múltiplas perspectivas que o envolvem, de maneira a rizomatizar, não apenas as ciências no currículo, mas em igual medida, as artes e as filosofias.

Este trabalho pretende analisar as manifestações do conceito de “dobra”, proposto por Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) em “Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque” (1988), no pensamento barroco e pós-moderno e em suas aplicações no campo da arte e da arquitetura. Objetiva explicitar características convergentes nestes dois momentos, abordados tanto como períodos históricos e estilísticos, quanto pensamentos com essências sobreviventes. Discute sobre a complexidade, deslocamento, repetição, subjetividade e movimento em Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) e em Peter Eisenman (n. 1932) a partir da perspectiva trans-histórica de Aby Warburg (1866-1929).

Pensar a utilização do cinema na sala de aula infere maiores reflexões sobre como aproveitar construtivamente esse instrumento sem deixar que ela caia na banalidade. Optamos pelo filósofo francês Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) e pelo diretor cinematográfico também francês Alain Resnais (1922) como mediadores do diálogo entre Educação e Cinema, por consideramos os conceitos desenvolvidos por ambos como pressupostos destacáveis para reflexões interdisciplinares por parte do professor consciente da importância das interfaces do conhecimento no desenvolvimento de suas aulas. Exporemos alguns conceitos desenvolvidos por Deleuze no tocante ao cinema pensante como produção filosófica, e aplicaremos a leitura de Deleuze, pautada pelo diálogo interdisciplinar entre educação, arte e filosofia, ao curta metragem Toda a Memória do Mundo (1956), de Alain Resnais, por entendermos essa obra como exemplo temático e estético para um trabalho com alunos em sala de aula.

Este texto busca visualizar configurações espaciais e temporais que subvertam estruturas lineares e dicotômicas através de formas de ocupação do espaço construídas na multiplicidade. Tal visualização incidirá a partir das obras do artista plástico Murits Escher (1898-1972) com aproximações de alguns conceitos trabalhados por Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Considera-se que o encontro desses referenciais provindos da Arte e da Filosofia contribuem para a tessitura de percursos para a problematização de outros modos de subjetivação. A obra de Escher é um questionar sobre a realidade através dos seus próprios elementos configurados de formas surpreendentes e inconcebíveis, uma vez que desarticulam o estabelecido.

Confucianism as a mode of life was brought to Taiwan as early as Chinese settlement. Regarding Confucian philosophy, however, it must be traced back to the founding of modern institutions. Even though the historical background of the Chinese diaspora after 1949 is rather complex, it seems possible to examine how it has contributed to the development of academic disciplines in Taiwan, especially with regard to Confucianism. The present paper investigates the corresponding contributions of two philosophers, Tang Junyi (1909–1978) and Mou Zongsan (1909–1995). Both are important scholars, who are indispensable for the development of contemporary intellectual history in Taiwan. In order to describe the creativity in their way of dealing with ruptures, of transforming the separation into the renovation of tradition, the author analyses their efforts in terms of geo-philosophy, through the lens of two concepts, dissemination and reterritorialization, that are borrowed from Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

ResumoA emergência das sociedades de controle trouxe um novo agenciamento que reformulou as formações sociais. O objetivo deste artigo é refletir sobre as novas configurações das instituições a partir da intensificação da axiomática do capital e do surgimento do diagrama de controle. Realizamos uma revisão bibliográfica sobre a obra de Gilles Deleuze e de pensadores contemporâneos. Diferenciamos as instituições abstratas e as instituições concretas para nos referir ao complexo fenômeno das instituições. Discutimos a troca do código pela axiomática do capital enquanto mecanismo predominante de operação social. Esta substituição fez que as instituições tradicionais entrassem num processo de transição a uma nova forma social que denominamos de instituições imateriais. Ao mesmo tempo em que os códigos são descodificados, são reterritorializados a partir da axiomática do capital.Palavras-chave: Análise Institucional; Esquizoanálise; Psicologia Política; Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. AbstractThe emergence of societies of control has brought a new type of assemblage that is reformulating social formations. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on new institutional configurations from the point of view of the intensification of the axiomatics of capital and the emergence of the diagram of control. Through a literature review on the work of Gilles Deleuze and other contemporary thinkers, we differentiate between abstract and concrete institutions to express to the complex phenomenon of institutions. We discuss the replacement of the code by the axiomatics of capital as the predominant mechanism of social operation. This substitution has required traditional institutions to embark on a transitional process towards a new social form which we call immaterial institutions. At the same time that codes are decoded, they are reterritorialized through the axiomatics of capital. Keywords: Institutional Analysis; Schizoanalysis; Political Psychology; Deleuze, Gilles.

Este artigo nasce como fruto da pesquisa “Entre experiências e compreensões: cartografias da formação de professores”, pesquisa financiada pelo CNPq, realizada nos períodos de julho de 2012 a julho de 2013. Pretende-se aqui, refletir e dissertar sobre a formação de professores a partir da filosofia da diferença, mais especificamente à partir da filosofia produzida pelo filósofo francês Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Busca-se assim, pensar a formação de professores e os processos educativos a partir de outros olhares, na tentativa de propor outros caminhos para a trajetória da educação. Não objetiva-se aqui, instituir verdades, mas, sobretudo, objetiva-se ampliar o olhar para as infinitas possibilidades do real.

El presente artículo explora la conexión entre dos modos de pensamiento que en apariencia se ven muy distintos, estos son, las filosofías del francés Gilles Deleuze (Paris 1925- Paris 1995) y del alemán Gottfried Leibniz (Leipzig 1646- Hannover 1716). En esta conexión de filosofías se repiensa la posibilidad misma del ejercicio filosófico en la actualidad; es posible que la filosofía se mueva radicalmente en el horizonte de lo barroco y es solamente desde allí donde se da la posibilidad y agenciamiento de la filosofía como disciplina y quehacer humano, en tanto creadora de conceptos, esto es, territorios desde los cuales podemos levantar nuestras formas de vida. Y para poder entender la filosofía como barroca y creadora de conceptos es necesario analizar desde el pensamiento de Deleuze dos categorías fundamentales: pliegue y concepto. Pues desde ellas podemos entender cómo el filósofo francés se siente un fiel heredero de lo más propia de la historia de la filosofía, esto es, la filosofía encarnada por Leibniz. Y desde esta filosofía alemana se dan las herramientas para seguir creando modos nuevos e intensos de estar en la realidad creativamente.

A memória pode ser reavivada sob distintos vieses. Ao resgatarmos uma lembrança em forma de imagem, presentificamos esta recordação, gerando uma “imagem-lembrança”, de acordo com o conceito de Henri Bergson (1859-1941), resgatado por Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) em seu estudo intitulado Bergsonismo (1987). A lembrança presentificada se encontra fortemente presente na rememoração de eventos traumáticos, suscitando uma fixação da imagem aterradora, o que ocorre no conto de E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) O Homem da Areia (1816), no qual esta lembrança se converte em um fator fantasmagórico. O presente trabalho analisa, desse modo, a forma como o princípio bersgsoniano de “imagem-lembrança”, investigado a partir da publicação deleuziana, se manifesta no texto hoffmanniano, perpassando a problemática da fantasmagoria.

In The Fold (1988), Gilles Deleuze argues that if the Baroque period establishes the concept of total art or the unity of the arts, then it does so in extension. Each art form extends to another art form. To this “extensive unity” – this “universal theatre” – he adds the Elements; we can say the epigene. The philosopher writes: “[t]his extensive unity of the arts forms a universal theatre that includes air and earth, and even fire and water.” According to Giovanni Careri, writing in Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion (1995), the interiors of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's are the most complete realisation of the bel composto. In these chapels, the interiors function as complete autonomous organisms in and of themselves. A theatrical dimension is associated with this autonomous operation. Careri adds another insight. He argues that the proliferations of composition components inherent in Bernini's chapels result in a cinematographic montage. Proceeding from Bernini’s bel composto and Deleuze’s thought, this paper proposes a new reading of the Baroque that is relevant to the present-day for architecture, taking the idea of theatrical scene as an organism supported by architecture and advancing to an idea of montage (beyond Careri’s) in which the spectator, the one who observes the small world, and the small world itself turning into an autonomous organism, makes the assemblage of the whole. A living-montage – an idea of architecture that is constantly interpreted, reinterpreted and recreated by the beholder.

Este trabalho busca articular o estudo deleuziano acerca dos atos cinematográficos (quadro, decupagem e montagem) com o filme Limite (1931) realizado por Mario Peixoto (1908-1992). A partir de sequências selecionadas, analisaremos a forma como Peixoto dirigiu o filme que é considerado o melhor do cinema nacional. Tal aproximação, entre Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) e Mario Peixoto, tem como objetivo fornecer ao filme uma nomenclatura estética capaz de justificar o que faz de Limite “uma obra-prima desconhecida”, termo utilizado pelo crítico Georges Sadoul (1904-1967). Posto isto, é importante ressaltar que, a análise está balizada tanto pelo estudo deleuziana da relação entre cinema e filosofia, como pelos escritos deixados por Peixoto a fim de dialogar diretor e filósofo em torno de uma paixão em comum, o cinema.

O artigo em questão almeja apresentar um breve panorama dos movimentos de difusão e apropriação do pensamento de Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) no campo das pesquisas em Educação, levando em consideração tanto sua obra individual quanto aquela escrita em parceria com Félix Guattari (1930-1992), contextualizando os distintos momentos do processo de recepção do pensamento desses autores e considerando unicamente as suas décadas iniciais (1980-2000). Para tanto, procedemos com a análise de um extenso arquivo bibliográfico compilado ao longo de nossa pesquisa de mestrado e doutorado, levando em consideração o início da recepção desses autores na década de 1980, integrando o grupo de teóricos ‘pós’ – pós-crítico, pós-estruturalista ou pós-modernos –, até a autonomização das pesquisas deleuzianas e/ou deleuzo-guattarianas na década de 2000, quando do surgimento de uma preocupação com questões de cunho metodológico no interior desses estudos. Defendemos não ser possível compreender o modo como se deu a recepção do pensamento deleuziano, guattariano e deleuzo-guattariano no campo educacional sem levarmos em consideração certos contextos maiores, como aquele instaurado com a crise do paradigma crítico na década de 1980, e entendemos que as pesquisas em educação que se filiam ao diapasão teórico da ‘Filosofia da diferença’ adquirem proeminência e autonomia apenas quando se recusam a combater o paradigma crítico e passam a construir ferramentas metodológicas próprias.

Gilles Deleuze posits that judgment is the crowning principle governing tragedy and modern philosophy at the same time (“Pour en finir avec le jugement,” in Critique et Clinique, 1995). Drawing on Antonin Artaud’s final radio play, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu [To Be Done with the Judgment of God], Deleuze argues that Artaud, like D.H. Lawrence, Kafka and Nietzsche, suffered from the judgment of others inasmuch as he was individuated; his body was made to have organs – in other words, to suffer a hierarchy between brain, stomach, anus, etc. – even though he saw himself as utterly porous, without differentiation and without hierarchy. Returning to the concept of judgment and to Artaud’s final years, this paper offers a schizoanalytic reading of this tragedy of individuation, to ask whether Artaud’s theatre of cruelty – finally manifest in Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu – can be read as a performance philosophical act without drama and without philosophy. In other words, it asks whether we might conceive of the pure drama of disindividuation – Artaud’s vision of a porous, horizontal self – eschewing the very philosophical and dramatic acts imputed to it.

Se trata de los fundamentos del caos en un sentido radical, y de su convergencia entre la indagación por la música y la pregunta por el carácter de la creación en el arte como un problema de la filosofía y no solamente de la estética. Y así, la cuestión del caos se hace transversal en la obra y concepto del filósofo francés Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Es universo y virtualidad caótica, fuerzas de caos y obra de arte, otro orden y multiplicidad, fuerzas de caos como condición del pensar, función que revela la presencia de la ciencia, el arte, la política y la filosofía, considerando que toda la filosofía de Deleuze se construye atravesando un constante caos-cosmos, un caos compuesto y no preconcebido. Y me centraré en dos aspectos y reflexiones centrales, se trata de La creación territorializando en la propia tierra del caos, es decir, mirada como una creación de resistencia. Y un segundo aspecto que es La invención de la visibilidad,como una forma de liberar la vida. Una realidad asignificante, que se visibiliza desde el devenir y acontecer de la creación. En este sentido, el caos se confunde con un cosmos ilimitado en cuyo seno se formarían múltiples mundos y así considerar que estamos en medio del caos, o bien que el caos está en medio de nosotros y por lo mismo ese caos, como diría Deleuze, es un movimiento que nos dinamiza de manera activa en los procesos de creación y donde intentamos trazar planos en el caos con él, y no sobre él, para luego agenciar artistas que devienen readores.

This paper is an investigation of “Techno-Orientalism” in postmodern Japanese and global cultural genres and subcultures since the 1980s. It concentrates on the representation of the diaspora from East Asia in the film Swallowtail Butterfly (1996), directed by Iwai Shunji (1963-). This film criticized the expansion of neoliberalism after the collapse of the “Bubble Economy” in the years 1986 to 1991 from the perspective of the diaspora, suggesting a path for the reconsideration of the connection between postmodernism and global capitalism in 1980s Japan. A postmodern genre formed in which urban space in Japan was represented as “Techno-Orientalist”, in works such as Blade Runner (1982) by Sir Ridley Scott (1937-), Akira (1988) by Otomo Katsuhiro (1954-), and Ghost in the Shell (1995) by Oshii Mamoru (1951-). Oriental “Techno Pop” music by Sakamoto Ryuichi (1952-) was also produced in the same context, and it is possible to discuss Iwai Shunji’s Swallowtail Butterfly in this context. The most important point of this movie is that Japanese actors played the roles of those who were part of the diaspora from East Asia, and they speak “Fake Chinese” and “Fake English.” This paper discusses these fake and creole languages through the prism of the theory of “Minor Literature” elaborated by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930-1992).

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.

<p>在波蘭華沙舉行的第十八屆國際蕭邦鋼琴比賽，經過嚴謹的歷程之後，於2021年10月圓滿落幕。此音樂事件透過數位媒體曝光並產生了熱烈的群眾交流，在古典音樂界形成了一個少見的「極峰群落」，箇中「疆域」、「重複」與「差異」等意象是甚為顯著的現象，同時呼應法國哲學家德勒茲與瓜達里或形上、或美學觀點探索下的概念。本研究透過對2021年蕭邦大賽的現象觀察，從「音樂疆域的形塑」、「根莖的力量與差異的回返」、以及「音樂宇宙性的證成」等面向，回應、探討與批判德勒茲／瓜達里的概念。除了提點其理論盲點，亦為此音樂事件注入另類思考，賦予德勒茲式的啟發性意義。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>The 18th International Chopin Piano Competition, held in Warsaw, Poland, came to a successful conclusion in October 2021 after a rigorous selection process. This music event was broadcast on digital media and generated lively exchanges, forming a rare &quot;climax community&quot; in the classical music world in which &quot;territory,&rdquo; &quot;repetition,&quot; and &quot;difference&quot; describe significant phenomena, and echo the theories developed by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) and Pierre-F&eacute;lix Guattari (1930-92), either metaphysically or aesthetically. Through detailed observation of the Chopin Piano Competition in 2021, this research responds to, discusses, and criticizes Deleuze/Guattari&rsquo;s theories from the perspectives of &quot;the shaping of musical territory,&quot; &quot;the power of rhizomes and the return of difference,&quot; and &quot;the justification of the cosmic nature of music.&quot; In addition to bringing out some theoretical blind spots, the author also injects alternative thinking into this musical event, endowing it with Deleuzian enlightenment.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

* Doutora em Educação pela Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Professora do curso de Dança e do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Cênicas (PPGAC) da Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU).** Doutor em Educação pela Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Professor do curso de Filosofia, do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia (PPGFIL) e do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação (PPGED) da Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU). O ano de 2015 marcou os vinte anos da morte de Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), a data foi celebrada com a realização de eventos promovidos pelos núcleos de pesquisa vinculados à filosofia de Deleuze, cuja obra comporta também os livros escritos em coautoria com Félix Guattari. O Dossiê Artes e Oficinas: incursões na filosofia de Deleuze-Guattari foi concebido no mesmo movimento de discussão do legado do pensamento deleuziano, cujo propósito ultrapassa o ensejo de uma simples homenagem e pretende intensificar as experimentações conceituais para vislumbrar, na criação artística, um disparador de encontros ético-político-estéticos, o que confere ao Dossiê uma abordagem transdisciplinar da filosofia de Deleuze - e também Guattari - com vias a favorecer as interfaces entre a filosofia e as artes, recuperando a junção dos afectos e dos perceptos, tal como foram apresentados pelos autores em muitas dos seus escritos, dentre os quais destacamos Qu'est-ce que la filosophie? (1991).O motivo dos artigos que compõem o presente Dossiê são as artes, considerando que essas manifestações são abordadas conforme dois eixos: das oficinas de criação e da lógica do sentido; ou seja, a poiética é considerada em sua autonomia na produção de experimentações do pensamento, por isso, não se trata de uma leitura estética, aliás, não é a intepretação das obras de arte que estão em discussão, mas, antes, a possibilidade das artes esgotarem as fixações de sentidos do mundo contemporâneo que instauram a crise nas mais variadas esferas da vida. Deleuze e Guattari vislumbram nas artes uma política menor, pertinente a mobilização dos afectos e dos perceptos graças as mobilizações engendradas pelos signos artísticos. Assim, apostamos na articulação da clínica, da crítica, das artes e da política, tendo em vista a abertura de novos espaços, contribuindo para o aparecimento de práticas de liberação dos fluxos que poderão fazer variar o pensamento.O que pode ser esperado das oficinas de criação em artes é a invenção de procedimentos diferentes que potencializem os corpos, mobilizando-os para encontrar nos blocos de perceptos e afectos da criação artística o arrancar "o percepto das percepções do objeto, [...], arrancar o afecto das afecções", provocando fluxos de desejo a abrirem a realidade a novos possíveis (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 1991, p. 217). Os pensadores franceses oferecem uma rica abrangência com relação as artes e que acreditamos estar contemplada nos artigos do Dossiê, a saber, que a filosofia como criação de conceitos está conectada - ousamos dizer: acoplada - ao plano de imanência "que deve ser considerado pré-filosófico" (Ibidem, p. 57), porque a atividade conceitual vislumbra a apreensão de uma realidade não conceitual composta pelas criações artísticas, por isso, os pensadores concluíram afirmando que "o não-filosófico está talvez mais no coração da filosofia do que a própria filosofia".A aglutinação dos artigos, que apresentaremos a seguir, propõe a composição de zonas de vizinhança entre conceitos da filosofia em conexões com os perceptos e os afectos com relação as artes, não os confundindo com percepções e sentimentos. Ora, longe da ambição do dogmatismo filosófico, aqui a filosofia é tomada como conceito e devir, permitindo vislumbrar experimentações do pensamento, no encontro com o seu fora, ao entrar na composição de um plano de imanência, que poderá ser construído junto às criações artísticas. As escritas reunias neste Dossiê se processam em meio a produção de um pensar teórico-poiético a partir das artes e das oficinas, traçando divergências convergentes com a filosofia da diferença. [...]

O presente artigo se debruça sobre o conto “Casa Assombrada”, coletado no único volume de contos que Virginia Woolf publicou em vida, Monday or Tuesday (1921), para investigar de que maneira seus contos intensificam a crise dos gêneros literários que seus romances encenam, por um lado; e para entender como tal crise é análoga à questão política que assombra toda sua obra, por outro lado: o gênero enquanto questão identitária. Em diálogo com a filosofia e com a crítica woolfiana, este estudo articula essa “crise dos gêneros” (gender x genre) e, ao mesmo tempo, produz uma contextualização histórico-cultural dos contos de Virginia Woolf. Palavras-chave: Virginia Woolf. Conto. Gênero literário. Questões de gênero. Referências AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Elogio da profanação. In: AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Profanações. Tradução Selvino Assman. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2007. p. 65-81 BENJAMIN, Walter. Sobre a linguagem em geral e sobre a linguagem humana. In: Linguagem, tradução, literatura. Tradução João Barrento. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2018 [1916]. p. 9-27. BENZEL, Kathryn N.; HOBERMAN, Ruth. Trespassing boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. BRAIDOTTI, Rosi. Nomadic theory: The portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University, 2011. BRIGGS, Julia. Virginia Woolf, an Inner Life. Londres: Harcourt Brace, 2005. CIXOUS, Hélène. First names of no one. In: SELLERS, Susan (org.). The Hélène Cixous Reader. Londres: Routledge, 1994 [1974]. p. 25-35. DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. 28 de novembro de 1947 – Como criar para si um corpo sem órgãos?. Tradução Aurélio Guerra Neto. In: DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs. São Paulo: 34, 1996 [1980]. v. 3. p. 11-34. FOUCAULT, Michel. Docile bodies. In: FOUCAULT, Michel; RABINOW, Paul (ed.). The Foucault reader. Toronto: Penguin, 1984a. p. 179-187. FOUCAULT, Michel. The body of the condemned. In: FOUCAULT, Michel; RABINOW, Paul (ed.). The Foucault reader. Toronto: Penguin, 1984b. p. 170-178. GOLDMAN, Jane. Modernism, 1910-1945, Image to apocalypse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. GOLDMAN, Jane. The Cambridge introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2006. HARRIS, Wendell. Vision and form: the English novel and the emergence of the story. In: MAY, Charles (ed.). The new short story theories. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University, 1994. p. 181-191. KRISTEVA, Julia. Stabat mater. Tradução A. Goldhammer. In: MOI, Toril (ed.). The Kristeva reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 [1977]. p. 160-187. MATTHEWS, Brander. The philosophy of the short-story. Londres: Forgotten, 2015. [1901]. PEREIRA, Lucia Miguel. Dualidade de Virginia Woolf. In: ______. Escritos da maturidade. Rio de Janeiro: Graphia, 2005. [1944] p. 106-110. SELLERS, Susan (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. 2. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2010. WOOLF, Leonard. Beginning again: an autobiography of the years 1911 to 1918. New York: Harvest, 1975. [1964] WOOLF, Leonard. Editorial Preface. In: WOOLF, Virginia; WOOLF, Leonard (eds.). Granite and rainbow. Londres: Harcourt, 1958. p. 7-8. WOOLF, Leonard. Foreword. In: WOOLF, Virginia; WOOLF, Leonard (eds.). A haunted house and other stories. Londres: Harcourt, 1944. p. v-vi. WOOLF, Virginia. A haunted house. In: WOOLF, Virginia; WOOLF, Leonard (eds.). A haunted house and other stories. Londres: Harcourt, 1944 [1921]. p. 3-5. WOOLF, Virginia. A room of one’s own & Three guineas. Londres: Oxford University, 1992 [1929] [1938]. WOOLF, Virginia. A sketch of the past. In: WOOLF, Virginia; SCHULKIND, Jeanne (eds.). Moments of being. London: Harcourt Brace, 1985 [1976]. p. 64-159. WOOLF, Virginia. Casa assombrada. In: WOOLF, Virginia. Contos completos. Tradução Leonardo Fróes. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005 [1921]. p. 162-165. WOOLF, Virginia. Granite and rainbow, ed. Leonard Woolf. Londres: Harcourt, 1958. WOOLF, Virginia. Jacob’s room. Oxford: Oxford University, 2008 [1922]. WOOLF, Virginia. Kew gardens. In: WOOLF, Virginia; WOOLF, Leonard (eds.). A haunted house and other stories. Londres: Harcourt, 1944 [1919]. p. 28-36. WOOLF, Virginia. Men and women. In: WOOLF, Virginia; BARRETT, Michele (eds.). Women and writing. Londres: Harcourt, 1979 [1920]. p. 64-68. WOOLF, Virginia. Modern fiction. In: WOOLF, Virginia. The common reader: first series. Londres: Vintage, 2003 [1925]. p. 146-154. WOOLF, Virginia. Monday or Tuesday. Londres: The Hogarth, 1921. WOOLF, Virginia. Night and day. ed. Michael Whitworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2018. WOOLF, Virginia. Professions for women. In: WOOLF, Virginia; WOOLF, Leonard (eds.). The death of the moth and other essays. Londres: Harcourt, 1942 [1931]. WOOLF, Virginia. The complete shorter fiction of Virginia Woolf. ed. Susan Dick. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006 [1985]. WOOLF, Virginia. The diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. New York: Penguin, 1979-1985 [1977-1984]. WOOLF, Virginia. The letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson, 6 vols. Londres: The Hogarth, 1975-1980. WOOLF, Virginia. The mark on the wall. In: WOOLF, Virginia; WOOLF, Leonard (eds.). A haunted house and other stories. Londres: Harcourt, 1944 [1921]. p. 37-47. WOOLF, Virginia. Thoughts on peace in an air raid. In: ______. The death of the moth and other essays, ed. Leonard Woolf. Londres: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942. [1940] WOOLF, Virginia. The voyage out. Oxford: Oxford University, 2009 [1915]. WOOLF, Virginia. The waves. Oxford: Oxford University, 1992 [1931].

e4436026This text presents some reflections on the possibilities of a philosophical education in prisons in the current scenario of the actual pandemic in Brazil. To do so, we first consider, in "Pandemic times: are we worse than covid-19, the critical state of the so-called "civilization” that the pandemic has helped to highlight; in a second moment, "Times of prisons: disappearance by the power of hate" we consider the current state of education in prisons in Brazil, the effects on them of the pandemic and the way the Bolsonaro government responded to it; finally, in "Times of school: reappearance by the wisdom of love" we consider the actual state of education in the schools at prisons and what a philosophical education could be in pandemic times: not only a love of wisdom, but a wisdom of love with and for otherness, to, who knows, bring forth politics of life, and with them, freedom, justice and social peace.ResumoO artigo apresenta reflexões sobre as possibilidades de se pensar uma educação filosófica nas escolas no cárcere no atual cenário de pandemia no Brasil. Para isso consideramos, num primeiro momento, em “Tempos de pandemia: nós somos piores que o covid-19?”, o estado crítico da chamada civilização que a pandemia contribuiu a evidenciar; num segundo momento, “Tempos de cárcere: o desaparecimento pela força do ódio” nos focamos no estado atual do cárcere no Brasil, assim como nos efeitos nele da pandemia e da forma do governo Bolsonaro responder a ela; finalmente, em “Tempos de escola: o reaparecimento pela sabedoria do amor” consideramos o estado atual da educação nas escolas no cárcere no Brasil e o que poderia uma educação filosófica em tempos de pandemia: consideramos a filosofia não apenas um amor à sabedoria, mas uma sabedoria do amor com, pela e para as outridades, para, quem sabe, fazer brotar políticas de vida e, com elas, liberdade, justiça e paz social.ResumenEste texto presenta reflexiones sobre las posibilidades de pensar una educación filosófica en escuelas presiónales en el actual escenario de pandemia en Brasil. Para ello, primero consideramos, en "Tiempos de pandemia: ¿somos peores que el covid-19?" el estado crítico de la llamada "civilización" que la pandemia ha ayudado a resaltar; en un segundo momento “Tiempos de cárcel: la desaparición por la fuerza del odio" consideramos el estado actual de la educación en las prisiones en Brasil y los efectos en ella de la pandemia y la respuesta dada por el gobierno de Bolsonaro; por último, en "Tiempos de escuela: la reaparición por la sabiduría del amor" consideramos el estado actual de la educación en las escuelas carcelarias de Brasil y lo que podría ser una educación filosófica en tiempos de pandemia: no sólo un amor a la sabiduría, sino una sabiduría de amor con, para y por las otredades, para, quién sabe, hacer brotar políticas da vida y, con ellas, libertad, justicia y paz social.Palavras-chave: Cárcere, Ensino de filosofia, Outridade.Keywords: Prison, Teaching philosophy, Otherness.Palabras clave: Cárcel, Enseñanza de la filosofía, Otredades.ReferencesADORNO, Theodor; HORKHEIMER, Max. Dialética do esclarecimento: fragmentos filosóficos. Tradução de Guido Antonio de Almeida. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1985.ADORNO, Theodor. Educação e Emancipação. Tradução de Wolfgang Leo Maar. Rio de Janeiro: Paz Terra, 1995.ADORNO, Theodor. Dialética Negativa. Tradução de Marco Antonio Casanova. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2009.AGAMBEN, Giorgio. O poder soberano e a vida nua: homo sacer. Tradução de Antônio Guerrero. 1a edição. Lisboa: Editorial Presença, 1998.ALMEIDA, Sandra; BARBOSA, Adriana; HERNÁNDEZ, Jimena; MELO, Vanusa; RODRIGUES, Fabiana; UZIEL, Ana. Manifesto educação em tempos de pandemia para os sujeitos privados de liberdade no Rio de Janeiro. In: http://forumeja.org.br/rj/sites/forumeja.org.br.rj/files/Manifesto%20Educa%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20em%20Tempos%20de%20Pandemia%20para%20os%20Sujeitos%20Privados%20de%20Liberdade%20no%20Rio%20De%20Janeiro.pdf (Acesso em 09/06/2020)ARISTÓTELES. Metafísica: livros I, II e III. Tradução de Lucas Angioni. In: Clássicos da filosofia: cadernos de tradução no 15. Campinas: UNICAMP/IFCH, 2008.BARROS, Manoel de. A Espera In: Poesia completa. São Paulo: Leya, 2010.BENJAMIN, Walter. Documentos de cultura. Documentos de barbárie. Escritos escolhidos. Tradução de Celeste H. M. Ribeiro de Sousa. São Paulo: Cultrix, USP, 1986.BRASIL. Recomendação n° 62/2020. Brasília: Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ), 2020. https://www.cnj.jus.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/62-Recomenda%C3%A7%C3%A3o.pdf ( Acesso em 09/06/2020).BRASIL. Parecer CNE/CP no 5 /2020 . Brasília: Conselho Nacional de Educação (CNE), 2020. http://portal.mec.gov.br/index.php?option=com_docmanview=downloadalias=145011-pcp005-20category_slug=marco-2020-pdfItemid=30192BRASIL. Geopresídios - radiografia do sistema prisional. Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ). https://www.cnj.jus.br/inspecao_penal/mapa.php (Acesso em 09/06/2020).BRASIL. INFOPEN 2019 - Levantamento nacional de informações penitenciárias. Brasília: Ministério da Justiça e da Segurança Pública (MJSP); Departamento Penitenciário Nacional (DEPEN), 2019. in: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZTlkZGJjODQtNmJlMi00OTJhLWFlMDktNzRlNmFkNTM0MWI3IiwidCI6ImViMDkwNDIwLTQ0NGMtNDNmNy05MWYyLTRiOGRhNmJmZThlMSJ9 (Acesso em 09/06/2020)BRASIL. INFOPEN 2017 - atualização junho - Levantamento nacional de informações penitenciárias. Brasília: Ministério da Justiça e da Segurança Pública (MJSP); Departamento Penitenciário Nacional (DEPEN), 2019. http://depen.gov.br/DEPEN/depen/sisdepen/infopen/relatorios-sinteticos/infopen-jun-2017-rev-12072019-0721.pdf (Acesso em 09/06/2020).BRASIL. Relatoria Nacional para o Direito Humano à Educação: Educação nas Prisões Brasileiras. São Paulo: Plataforma DhESCA, 2009. https://www.cmv-educare.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/FINAL-relatorioeduca%C3%A7%C3%A3onasprisoesnov2009.pdf (Acesso em 09/06/2020)BRASIL. Relatório de gestão e supervisão do departamento de monitoramento e fiscalização do sistema carcerário e do sistema de execução de medidas socioeducativas. Conselho Nacional de Justiça, CNJ, 2017. http://gmf.tjrj.jus.br/documents/10136/5929327/relatorio-gestao.pdf (Acesso em 09/06/2020)DAVIS, Angela. O racismo mascarado: reflexões sobre o complexo penitenciário industrial. Tradução de Jaque Conceição. In: https://kilombagem.net.br/pensadores/artigos-textos/o-racismo-mascarado-reflexoes-sobre-o-complexo-penitenciario-industrial/ (O texto traduzido não está mais disponível na internet. O texto original foi publicado em 10 de setembro de 1998 em http://www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racism-reflections-prison-industrial-complex).DELEUZE, Gilles. Post-scriptum sobre as sociedades de controle. In: _______. Conversações: 1972-1990. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1992, p. 219-226.DERRIDA, Jacques. O animal que logo sou (a seguir). Tradução Fábio Landa. São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2011.DERRIDA, Jacques. Força de lei: o fundamento místico da autoridade. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2010.FERRARO, Giuseppe. A escola dos sentimentos. Rio de Janeiro: NEFI, 2018.FOUCAULT, Michel. Em defesa da sociedade. São Paulo, SP: Martins Fontes, 2006.FOUCAULT, Michel. Vigiar e punir: o nascimento da prisão. Tradução de Raquel Ramalhete. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1987.JULIÃO, Elionaldo Fernandes; ONOFRE, Elenice Maria Cammarosano. A educação na prisão como política pública: entre desafios e tarefas. In: Educação Realidade, Porto Alegre, v. 38, n. 1, p. 51-69, jan./mar. 2013.KRENAK, Ailton. O amanhã não está à venda. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020.KRENAK, Ailton. Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019.LÉVINAS, Emmanuel. Entre nós: ensaios sobre a alteridade. Petropólis: Vozes, 2010.LYOTARD, Jean-François. Por que filosofar? Tradução: Marcos Marciolino. São Paulo: Parábola, 2013.MARCUSE, Herbert. Eros e civilização: uma interpretação filosófica do pensamento de Freud. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1975.MASSCHELEIN, Jan; SIMONS, Maarten. Em defesa da escola: uma questão pública. Tradução de Cristina Antunes. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2018.MBEMBE, Achille. Necropolítica: biopoder, soberania, estado de exceção, política de morte. Tradução de Renata Santini. São Paulo: N-1 Edições, 2018.OBSERVATÓRIO DAS FAVELAS. Novas configurações das redes criminosas após a implantação das UPPS. Rio de Janeiro: Observatório das Favelas, 2018. http://of.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/E-BOOK_Novas-Configura%C3%A7%C3%B5es-das-Redes-Criminosas-ap%C3%B3s-implanta%C3%A7%C3%A3o-das-UPPs.pdf (Acesso em 09/06/2020)ONOFRE, Elenice Maria Cammarosano. A escola da prisão como espaço de dupla inclusão: no contexto e para além das grades. In: Polyphonía, v. 22/1, jan./ jun., 2011.OY?WÙMÍ, Oyèrónk??. Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects. In: COETZEE, Peter H.; ROUX, Abraham P.J. (eds). The African Philosophy Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 391-415. Tradução para uso didático de Wanderson Flor do Nascimento.PIMENTA, Victor Martins. Por trás das grades: o encarceramento em massa no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 2018.PLATÃO. Banquete. Tradução de Carlos Alberto Nunes. Belém: Editora UFPA, 2003.RAMOS, Graciliano. Memórias do cárcere. São Paulo: Record, 1975.RODRÍGUEZ, Símon. Inventamos ou erramos. Tradução de Cinthia Fernandes. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2016.RUSCHE, Georg; KIRCHHEIMER, Otto. Punição e estrutura social. Tradução de Gizlene Neder. Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 2004.SAFATLE. Vladimir. Só mais um esforço. São Paulo: Três Estrelas, 2017.SIMAS, Luiz Antonio; RUFINO, Luiz. Encantamento: sobre política de vida. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula Editorial, 2020.WACQUANT, Loic. Punir os pobres: a nova gestão da miséria nos Estados Unidos. Tradução de Eliana Aguiar. Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 2003.WACQUANT, Loic. As duas faces do gueto. Tradução de Paulo Castanheira. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2008.

: In the last decades, many studies on diagrams have endeavored to show how that kind of sign influences and is part of reasoning – not only mathematical and scientific reasoning but artistic reasoning as well. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), for instance, depicts the role of the diagrams in the art of Francis Bacon. The American philosopher C.S. Peirce (1839-1914), on the other hand, develops such concept mainly in the context of scientific reasoning. Bearing that in mind, we will argue that in both cases, the philosophers did not present a thorough analysis of how the diagrams are or might be part of the artistic creation. In that sense, we intend to show how relevant their philosophies and more specifically their thoughts on diagrams can be to the understanding of arts and creativity

Queering Thought - Deleuze and the sexes to come. This article argues that queer theory in relation to Judith Butler is unable to account for the complexities of life's creation and immanent potential that exist prior to and in between the hierarchical representations of discourses, language and subjects. This article seeks an opening and understanding of thought as creation, not representation. Through the philosophy of french philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) thought is freed from its image and thereby activated in thinking. It is then possible to think and engage in life as becoming; life as consisting of virtual potentials, the alwaysnot-yet-actualised. The article proceeds by activating queer as a philosophical concept: ‘to queer' thus focusing on the ‘to do', not the ‘to be'; and analysing the queer-art-space Warehouse9 as a smooth space, where it is possible to encounter virtual sexes in concordance with sensible signs and aesthetic expressions.

[Spinoza] sabe, sin embargo, que la muerte no es ni elinicio ni el final sino que, al contrario, se trata de pasara otro la propia vida.Gilles Deleuze Anna Ajmátova, la poeta, escribe: “Cuando muere un hombre / se trasforman sus retratos: / los ojos ven de otro modo, / se altera la sonrisa. / Lo descubrí al regresar del sepelio de un poeta, / luego, innumerables veces / mi intuición se ha confirmado” (35). En efecto, la muerte, de inmediato, lo transforma todo; al poner un punto final, esa vida adquiere, curiosamente, una nueva dimensión; cada gesto, cada mirada, cada palabra dicha y no dicha se resignifican. Es necesario entonces recrearlo, reescribirlo y rehacerlo todo. Cuando creíamos al muerto en un lugar fijo, su muerte sigue viviendo en nosotros. Lo que fue siendo durante su vida no deja de ser, sigue siendo, deviene a pasos lentos su propia muerte. No se muere de un momento a otro, quizás se continúe muriendo de por vida.

Abstract The rhizome is like the poem. The growth power of nature and the possibilities of culture simultaneously and reciprocally. It stretches from biological cell and level of particles to our universal dreams and thoughts about and with life. The rhizome as poem is thus a picture and image of the importance of context and movement, production of constant importance for each/other. The picture breaks all patterns always and always creates new, as points and lines affectively collapsing into each/other for each/other. The rhizome as poem — and the consciousness about the preliminarity of processes across preliminary boundaries, opens up for translations and interpretations beyond known vocabularies and in unfinished channels. It possibilizes the realization of more - than - human concepts such as the dissolution of subjectivity turning my identity into a collective: I contain multitudes and sing myself.1 Knowledge creation and meaning making are thus connected with what situated knowledges makes possible and mobilize, and is about community, not isolated individuals; it is about productive connections and unexpected openings in which every concept is ‘trapped’ in experience. Informatically we are data subjects of an algorithmic nature. I oxymoronically and indirectly therefore ask how we can become materially identifiable subjects and what would it take to move from a mechanistic approach to education to a more machinic one? Further, are the abstractions one attempts to move from imitation to imagination abstract enough? I poem with the speculative process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992) to think the future, theory and practice in Environmental Education other. Taking part in polysemantic ambiguity becomes attractive as condition to side with the child and it might turn into a strong source of energy for learning and change, trans-scientific collaboration and sustainability. The rhizome is my cosmic writing machine, research design and model.

O trabalho busca tecer aproximações entre as operações estruturais e as dinâmicas epistemológicas do pensamento de Aby Warburg (1866-1929), Giorgio Agamben (1942-) e Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) a certa filosofia da diferença. Pretende refletir sobre a natureza comum da matriz conceitual dos três autores (dos quais destaco: “Pathosformel” e “Nachleben” em Warburg; “ponto de inflexão”, “diferença” e “repetição” em Deleuze, e “paradigma” e “analogia” em Agamben), operados principalmente por dinâmicas estruturais baseadas em dispositivos de diferença e repetição. Esta reflexão é motivada pela insurgente revisão epistemológica da historiografia contemporânea da arte e pelo poderio operacional possibilitado por esta estrutura ao lidar com as múltiplas complexidades das imagens.

A escrita é sempre inacabada por estar sempre produzindo novas relações de multiplicidades e por ser detentora de um enunciado que fala por si. Ela é impessoal por ter a capacidade de criar artifícios para se conjugar novos enunciados, cujo centro não é o indivíduo, mas, todas as relações de agenciamentos que existem em torno dele e de outros agentes, relações homem e natureza, homem e tempo, homem e objeto. Essa é a ideia de desterritorialização da escrita definida pelos filósofos franceses Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) e Félix Guattari (1930-1992). O presente artigo tem como objetivo indagar em que medida a escrita literária pode ser compreendida como um caso de devir. Em cotejo à análise do conceito de devir e em como a literatura é atravessada por esse pensamento filosófico, iremos discutir a obra Moby Dick (1851) do escritor estadunidense Herman Melville (1819-1891), exemplo amplamente utilizado pelos próprios autores em livros como Mil Platôs – Devir-intenso, Devir-animal, Devir-imperceptível (2012) e Crítica e Clínica (2011). O artigo parte de uma investigação de cunho bibliográfico e se apoia no estruturalismo como recurso metodológico.

This paper falls within the scope of investigations on the fundamentals and educational practices and it is related to the development of a master's research carried out in Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Brazil. In this text, we propose to contextualize and characterize the senses and challenges pointed out by philosophy teachers to the teaching of this subject at the high school. We take a qualitative perspective, taking into account the use of a mixed questionnaire for data production (GIL, 2010) and the thematic content analysis technique (BARDIN, 2010). Our theoretical framework was supported by Deleuze (1992, 2006), Deleuze e Guattari (1995, 1997a, 1997b, 2005), Nietzsche (2003) e Foucault (1987, 2006, 2007). The senses and challenges attributed by the researched teachers reveals a complexity scenario: if on the one hand the limits imposed by the different bureaucratic aspects of the educational system and the devaluation of philosophy as a thought subject expose the fragility of philosophical practice in high school; on the other hand, the aspects that have been particularized between philosophy and its teaching express the conditions of a provocative philosophical practice of ruptures and movements capable of enunciating, within the own thinking, the cultivation of criticism, autonomy and creativity.ResumoEste artigo se insere no âmbito das pesquisas sobre os fundamentos e práticas educacionais e se relaciona com o desenvolvimento de uma pesquisa de mestrado realizada em Uberaba, Minas Gerais. Neste texto, propomos contextualizar e caracterizar os sentidos e os desafios apontados pelos professores de filosofia ao ensino desta disciplina em nível médio. Pautamo-nos em perspectiva qualitativa, tendo em conta o emprego de questionário misto para a produção de dados (GIL, 2010) e a opção pela técnica da análise temática de conteúdo (BARDIN, 2010). Nosso referencial teórico encontra sustentação no entretecimento das ideias de Deleuze (1992, 2006), Deleuze e Guattari (1995, 1997a, 1997b, 2005), Nietzsche (2003) e Foucault (1987, 2006, 2007). Os sentidos e os desafios atribuídos pelos professores pesquisados evidenciam um cenário de complexidade: se de um lado os limites impostos pelos diferentes aspectos burocráticos do sistema de ensino e a desvalorização da filosofia como disciplina do pensamento expõem a fragilidade do fazer filosófico no ensino médio; por outro lado, os aspectos que se circunstanciam entre a filosofia e o seu ensino exprimem as condições de um fazer provocativo das rupturas e dos movimentos capazes de enunciar, no interior do próprio pensamento, o cultivo da crítica, da autonomia e da criatividade.Palavras-chave: Ensino da filosofia, Ensino médio, Sentidos, Desafios.Keywords: Philosophy teaching, High School, Senses, Challenges.ReferencesBARDIN, Laurence. Análise de conteúdo. Tradução de Luís Antero Reto e Augusto Pinheiro. Lisboa/Portugal: Edições 70, 2010.BIRCHAL, Telma; KAUARK, Patrícia; MARQUES, Marcelo. CBC/Filosofia. Governo do Estado de Minas Gerais, Secretaria de Estado de Educação. Disponível em: <http://crv.educacao.mg.gov.br>. Acesso em: 06 jul. 2016.BRASIL. Lei nº 11.684, de 2 de junho 2008. Diário Oficial [da] República Federativa do Brasil, Poder Executivo, Brasília, DF, 03 jun. 2008. Disponível em: <http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2007-2010/2008/Lei/L11684.htm>. Acesso em: 03 jan. 2016.CESCON, Everaldo; NODARI, Paulo César. Temas de filosofia da educação. Caxias do Sul, RS: Educs, 2009.CHERVEL, André. História das disciplinas escolares: reflexões sobre um campo de pesquisa. Teoria & Educação, Porto Alegre, v. 2, p. 177-229, 1990.CHERVEL, André; COMPÈRE, Marie-Madeleine. As humanidades no ensino. Educação e Pesquisa. São Paulo, vol. 25, n. 2, p. 147-148, jul./dez. 1999. Disponível em: <http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1517-97021999000200011>. Acesso em: 02 set. 2016.DELEUZE, Gilles. O abecedário de Gilles Deleuze. Entrevista a Claire Parnet nos anos 1988-1989, em vídeo, divulgado Brasil pela TV Escola, Ministério da Educação. Tradução e legendas: Raccord [com modificações]. Disponível em: <http://stoa.usp.br/prodsubjeduc/files/262/1015/Abecedario+G.+Deleuze.pdf >. Acesso em: 03 fev. de 2016.DELEUZE, Gilles. Conversações. Tradução Peter Pál Perbart. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1992.DELEUZE, Gilles. Diferença e repetição. Tradução Luiz Orlandi e Roberto Machado. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 2006.DELEUZE; Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil platôs – capitalismo e esquizofrenia (vol. 1). Tradução Aurélio Guerra Neto e Celia Pinto Costa. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 1995.DELEUZE; Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil platôs – capitalismo e esquizofrenia (vol. 4). Tradução Suely Rolnik. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 1997a.DELEUZE; Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil platôs – capitalismo e esquizofrenia (vol. 5). Tradução Peter Pál Pelbart e Janice Caiafa. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 1997b.DELEUZE; Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. O que é a filosofia? Tradução Bento Prado Jr. e Alberto Alonso Muñoz. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 2005.FOUCAULT, Michel. Vigiar e punir: nascimento da prisão. Tradução de Raquel Ramalhete. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1987.FOUCAULT, Michel. Hermenêutica do sujeito. Tradução de Márcio Alves da Fonseca e Salma Tannus Muchail. 2. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006.FOUCAULT, Michel. Os limites da representação. In:______. As palavras e as coisas: uma arqueologia das ciências humanas. Tradução Salma Tannus Muchail. 9. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2007, p. 207-342.GALLO, Sílvio. Deleuze e a Educação. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2003.GALLO, Sílvio. A filosofia e seu ensino: conceito e transversalidade. In: SILVEIRA, René José Trentin; GOTO, Roberto. Filosofia no ensino médio: temas, problemas e propostas. São Paulo: Ed. Loyola, 2007, p. 15-36.GALLO, Sílvio; KOHAN, Walter Omar. Filosofia no Ensino Médio. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2000.GELAMO, Rodrigo Pelloso. O ensino da filosofia no limiar da contemporaneidade: o que faz o filósofo quando o seu ofício é ser professor de filosofia? São Paulo: Cultura Acadêmica, 2009.GIL, Antônio Carlos. Métodos e técnicas da pesquisa social. 6. ed. São Paulo: Atlas, 2010.LALANDE, André. Vocabulário técnico e crítico de filosofia. 3. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999.LORIERI, Marcos Antônio. Filosofia: fundamentos e métodos. São Paulo: Cortez, 2002.MINAS GERAIS (Estado). Resolução nº 2.742, de 24 de janeiro de 2015. Belo Horizonte: SEE-MG, 2015. Disponível em: <ttp://srecaxambu.educacao.mg.gov.br/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download &gid=3543.>. Acesso em: 03 jan. 2016.MOREIRA, Antônio Flávio Barbosa. Conhecimento, currículo e ensino: questões e perspectivas. Em Aberto. Brasília, ano 12. n.58, abr./jun. 1993.NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Escritos sobre educação. Tradução, apresentação e notas de Noéli Correia de Melo Sobrinho. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. PUC-Rio; São Paulo: Loyola, 2003.RODRIGO, Lídia Maria. Filosofia em sala de aula: teoria e prática para o ensino médio. Campinas, SP: Autores Associados, 2009.

O presente artigo, pretende apresentar uma proposição sintética sobre os aspectos de um possível agenciamento filosófico-literário para o ensino de filosofia, por meio de expressões da arte. Para tanto, serão mostrados os resultados da prática de oficinas de “pictuleituras” (pinturas, literatura/leituras e pinturas) e de debates (leituras e conceitos) por meio de café filosófico a partir do contato dos estudantes da Educação Básica do Instituto Federal do Paraná, Campus de Umuarama-PR e do Colégio SESI de Francisco Beltrão-PR com a obra A Metamorfose (1997), de Franz Kafka (1883-1924). A partir da leitura da obra kafkaniana pretende-se elucidar também aspectos conceituais da filosofia de Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) e Felix Guattari (1930-1992) o que permitiu, mais facilmente, pensar uma possibilidade didática no ensino de Filosofia por meio de expressões da arte (cinema, literatura, artes visuais, música e teatro).

Partindo de uma perspectiva spinozista, tratada por Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) como uma etologia, na qual o corpo é definido pelos limiares mínimo e máximo de sua potência, buscamos entender como se fabricam corpos não-monogâmicos, em seu modo singular, o agenciamento indivíduo, e plural, o agenciamento ao qual chamamos de constelações íntimas. Por meio da cartografia, procedimento que traça um mapa dos afetos, analisamos a história de vida de Leci, mulher negra que devém não-monogâmica. Na presente análise destacam-se a resistência ao controle do próprio corpo, os embates com discursos raciais essencialistas e as dificuldades presentes nos processos de desterritorialização da monogamia. Salientam-se também as reterritorializações de sua constelação sob as práticas monogâmicas, sejam pelos conflitos que este modo de vida enfrenta no campo social, sejam pelos sentimentos que suscitam nos indivíduos que os praticam. Palavras-chave: Corpo. Identidade. Não-monogamia. Raça. Constelações íntimas.

19. yüzyıl sonu ve 20. yüzyıl başında hızla gelişen görüntüleme teknolojileri ve sinemaya ilişkin özgün düşünceler ortaya koyan ilk filozoflardan biri olan Bergson, belleğin niteliği ve “zaman”a ilişkin bakış açısı ile özgün bir felsefe ortaya koymuştur. Bergson zamanı, çizgisel ve ölçülebilir bir unsur olmaktan çıkarmaya çabalamıştır. Diğer taraftan sinemanın yeni ortaya çıkmakta olduğu bir dönemde eserlerini ortaya koyan Bergson’un sinema felsefesini de etkilediği görülmektedir. Bergson’un sinematografi eleştirisi, Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) başta olmak üzere pek çok düşünür ya da eleştirmen tarafından yeni bir sinema anlayışının çıkış noktası olarak kabul edilmiştir. Söz konusu ‘Bergsoncu sinema’ yaklaşımının en önemli unsurları ise, zaman, bellek ve benliktir. Yapay zekâ tartışmalarının eşliğinde, günümüzde benlik ve bellek ilişkisinin sıklıkla konu edildiği alanlardan biri de bilim-kurgu sinemasıdır. Distopik içeriğe sahip bir polisiye olan Blade Runner 2049 filmi ise Bergsoncu bir sinemanın mümkün olup olamayacağı sorusunun cevaplanması için elverişli bir içeriğe sahiptir. Nitekim Blade Runner 2049, özellikle başkahramanı K’nin “insan mı yoksa kopya mı” olduğu sorusunu, temelde bu sorunun anlamsızlığına işaret eden bir anlatı ile ele almaktadır. Çalışmamız, Blade Runner 2049 filmini Bergsoncu zaman, bellek ve benlik temaları eşliğinde analiz etmeyi amaçlamaktadır.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’— Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)Dickens’s famous pedant, Thomas Gradgrind, was not an anomaly. He is the pedagogical manifestation of the rise of quantification in modernism that was the necessary adjunct to massive urbanisation and industrialisation. His classroom caricatures the dominant epistemic modality of modern global democracies, our unwavering trust in numbers, “data”, and reproductive predictability. This brief quotation from Hard Times both presents and parodies the 19th century’s displacement of what were previously more commonly living and heterogeneous existential encounters with events and things. The world had not yet been made predictably repetitive through industrialisation, standardisation, law, and ubiquitous codes of construction. Theirs was much more a world of unique events and not the homogenised and orthodox iteration of standardised knowledge. Horses and, by extension, all entities and events gradually were displaced by their rote definitions: individuals of a so-called natural kind were reduced to identicals. Further, these mechanical standardisations were and still are underwritten by mapping them into a numerical and extensive characterisation. On top of standardised objects and procedures appeared assigned numerical equivalents which lent standardisation the seemingly apodictic certainty of deductive demonstrations. The algebraic becomes the socially enforced criterion for the previously more sensory, qualitative, and experiential encounters with becoming that were more likely in pre-industrial life. Here too, we see that the function of this reproductive protocol is not just notational but is the sine qua non for, in Althusser’s famous phrase, the manufacture of citizens as “subject subjects”, those concrete individuals who are educated to understand themselves ideologically in an imaginary relation with their real position in any society’s self-reproduction. Here, however, ideology performs that operation through that nominally least political of cognitive modes, the supposed friend of classical Marxism’s social science, the mathematical. The historical onset of this social and political reproductive hegemony, this uniform supplanting of time’s ineluctable differencing with the parasite of its associated model, can partial be found in the formation of metrics. Before the 19th century, the measures of space and time were local. Units of length and weight varied not just between nations but often by municipality. These parochial standards reflected indigenous traditions, actualities, personalities, and needs. This variation in measurement standards suggested that every exchange or judgment of kind and value relied upon the specificity of that instance. Every evaluation of an instance required perceptual acuity and not the banality of enumeration constituted by commodification and the accounting practices intrinsic to centralised governance. This variability in measure was complicated by similar variability in the currencies of the day. Thus, barter presented the participants with complexities and engagements of skills and discrete observation completely alien to the modern purchase of duplicate consumer objects with stable currencies. Almost nothing of life was iterative: every exchange was, more or less, an anomaly. However, in 1790, immediately following the French Revolution and as a central manifestation of its movement to rational democratisation, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand proposed a metrical system to the French National Assembly. The units of this metric system, based originally on observable features of nature, are now formally codified in all scientific practice by seven physical constants. Further, they are ubiquitous now in almost all public exchanges between individuals, corporations, and states. These units form a coherent and extensible structure whose elements and rules are subject to seemingly lossless symbolic exchange in a mathematic coherence aided by their conformity to decimal representation. From 1960, their basic contemporary form was established as the International System of Units (SI). Since then, all but three of the countries of the world (Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States), regardless of political organisation and individual history, have adopted these standards for commerce and general measurement. The uniformity and rational advantage of this system is easily demonstrable in just the absurd variation in the numeric bases of the Imperial / British system which uses base 16 for ounces/pounds, base 12 for inches/feet, base three for feet/yards, base 180 for degrees between freezing and cooling, 43,560 square feet per acre, eights for division of inches, etc. Even with its abiding antagonism to the French, Britain officially adopted the metric system as was required by its admission to the EU in 1973. The United States is the last great holdout in the public use of the metric system even though SI has long been the standard wanted by the federal government. At first, the move toward U.S. adoption was promising. Following France and rejecting England’s practice, America was founded on a decimal currency system in 1792. In 1793, Jefferson requested a copy of the standard kilogram from France in a first attempt to move to the metric system: however, the ship carrying the copy was captured by pirates. Indeed, The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 expressed a more serious national intention to adopt SI, but after some abortive efforts, the nation fell back into the more archaic measurements dominant since before its revolution. However, the central point remains that while the U.S. is unique in its public measurement standard among dominant powers, it is equally committed to the hegemonic application of a numerical rendition of events.The massive importance of this underlying uniformity is that it supplies the central global mechanism whereby the world’s chaotic variation is continuously parsed and supplanted into comparable, intelligible, and predictable units that understand individuating difference as anomaly. Difference, then, is understood in this method not as qualitative and intensive, which it necessarily is, but quantitative and extensive. Like Gradgrind’s “horse”, the living and unique thing is rendered through the Apollonian dream of standardisation and enumeration. While differencing is the only inherent quality of time’s chaotic flow, accounting and management requite iteration. To order the reproduction of modern society, the unique individuating differences that render an object as “this one”, what the Medieval logicians called haecceities, are only seen as “accidental” and “non-essential” deviations. This is not just odd but illogical since these very differences allow events to be individuated items so to appear as countable at all. As Leibniz’s principle, the indiscernibility of identicals, suggests, the application of the metrical same to different occasions is inherently paradoxical: if each unit were truly the same, there could only be one. As the etymology of “anomaly” suggests, it is that which is unexpected, irregular, out of line, or, going back to the Greek, nomos, at variance with the law. However, as the only “law” that always is at hand is the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, the inconsistently consistent roiling of entropy, the evident theoretical question might be, “how is anomaly possible when regularity itself is impossible?” The answer lies not in events “themselves” but exactly in the deductive valorisations projected by that most durable invention of the French Revolution adumbrated above, the metric system. This seemingly innocuous system has formed the reproductive and iterative bias of modern post-industrial perceptual homogenisation. Metrical modeling allows – indeed, requires – that one mistake the metrical changeling for the experiential event it replaces. Gilles Deleuze, that most powerful French metaphysician (1925-1995) offers some theories to understand the seminal production (not reproduction) of disparity that is intrinsic to time and to distinguish it from its homogenised representation. For him, and his sometime co-author, Felix Guattari, time’s “chaosmosis” is the host constantly parasitised by its symbolic model. This problem, however, of standardisation in the face of time’s originality, is obscured by its very ubiquity; we must first denaturalise the seemingly self-evident metrical concept of countable and uniform units.A central disagreement in ancient Greece was between the proponents of physis (often translated as “nature” but etymologically indicative of growth and becoming, process and not fixed form) and nomos (law or custom). This is one of the first ethical and so political debates in Western philosophy. For Heraclitus and other pre-Socratics, the emphatic character of nature was change, its differencing dynamism, its processual but not iterative character. In anticipation of Hume, Sophists disparaged nomos (νόμος) as simply the habituated application of synthetic law and custom to the fluidity of natural phenomena. The historical winners of this debate, Plato and the scientific attitudes of regularity and taxonomy characteristic of his best pupil, Aristotle, have dominated ever since, but not without opponents.In the modern era, anti-enlightenment figures such as Hamann, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers gave theoretical voice to romanticism’s repudiation of the paradoxical impulses of the democratic state for regulation and uniformity that Talleyrand’s “revolutionary” metrical proposal personified. They saw the correlationalism (as adumbrated by Meillassoux) between thought and thing based upon their hypothetical equitability as a betrayal of the dynamic physis that experience presented. Variable infinity might come either from the character of God or nature or, as famously in Spinoza’s Ethics, both (“deus sive natura”). In any case, the plenum of nature was never iterative. This rejection of metrical regularity finds its synoptic expression in Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche supplies the bridge between the pre-Socratics and the “post-structuralists”. His early mobilisation of the Apollonian, the dream of regularity embodied in the sun god, and the Dionysian, the drunken but inarticulate inexpression of the universe’s changing manifold, gives voice to a new resistance to the already dominate metrical system. His is a new spin of the mythic representatives of Nomos and physis. For him, this pair, however, are not – as they are often mischaracterised – in dialectical dialogue. To place them into the thesis / antithesis formulation would be to give them the very binary character that they cannot share and to, tacitly, place both under Apollo’s procedure of analysis. Their modalities are not antithetical but mutually exclusive. To represent the chaotic and non-iterative processes of becoming, of physis, under the rubric of a common metrics, nomos, is to mistake the parasite for the host. In its structural hubris, the ideological placebo of metrical knowing thinks it non-reductively captures the multiplicity it only interpellates. In short, the polyvalent, fluid, and inductive phenomena that empiricists try to render are, in their intrinsic character, unavailable to deductive method except, first, under the reductive equivalence (the Gradgrind pedagogy) of metrical modeling. This incompatibility of physis and nomos was made manifest by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) just before the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments. There, Hume displays the Apollonian dream’s inability to accurately and non-reductively capture a phenomenon in the wild, free from the stringent requirements of synthetic reproduction. His argument in Book I is succinct.Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin. (Part 3, Section 8)There is nothing in any object, consider'd in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it; ... even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience. (Part 3, Section 12)The rest of mankind ... are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. (Part 4, Section 6)In sum, then, nomos is nothing but habit, a Pavlovian response codified into a symbolic representation and, pragmatically, into a reproductive protocol specifically ordered to exclude anomaly, the inherent chaotic variation that is the hallmark of physis. The Apollonian dream that there can be an adequate metric of unrestricted natural phenomena in their full, open, turbulent, and manifold becoming is just that, a dream. Order, not chaos, is the anomaly. Of course, Kant felt he had overcome this unacceptable challenge to rational application to induction after Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”. But what is perhaps one of the most important assertions of the critiques may be only an evasion of Hume’s radical empiricism: “there are only two ways we can account for the necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition) ... . There remains ... only the second—a system ... of the epigenesis of pure reason” (B167). Unless “necessary agreement” means the dictatorial and unrelenting insistence in a symbolic model of perception of the equivalence of concept and appearance, this assertion appears circular. This “reading” of Kant’s evasion of the very Humean crux, the necessary inequivalence of a metric or concept to the metered or defined, is manifest in Nietzsche.In his early “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche suggests that there is no possible equivalence between a concept and its objects, or, to use Frege’s vocabulary, between sense or reference. We speak of a "snake" [see “horse” in Dickens]: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.The literal is always already a reductive—as opposed to literature’s sometimes expansive agency—metaphorisation of events as “one of those” (a token of “its” type). The “necessary” equivalence in nomos is uncovered but demanded. The same is reproduced by the habitual projection of certain “essential qualities” at the expense of all those others residing in every experiential multiplicity. Only in this prison of nomos can anomaly appear: otherwise all experience would appear as it is, anomalous. With this paradoxical metaphor of the straight and equal, Nietzsche inverts the paradigm of scientific expression. He reveals as a repressive social and political obligation the symbolic assertion homology where actually none can be. Supposed equality and measurement all transpire within an Apollonian “dream within a dream”. The concept captures not the manifold of chaotic experience but supplies its placebo instead by an analytic tautology worthy of Gradgrind. The equivalence of event and definition is always nothing but a symbolic iteration. Such nominal equivalence is nothing more than shifting events into a symbolic frame where they can be commodified, owned, and controlled in pursuit of that tertiary equivalence which has become the primary repressive modality of modern societies: money. This article has attempted, with absurd rapidity, to hint why some ubiquitous concepts, which are generally considered self-evident and philosophically unassailable, are open not only to metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge, but are existentially unjustified. All this was done to defend the smaller thesis that the concept of anomaly is itself a reflection of a global misrepresentation of the chaos of becoming. This global substitution expresses a conservative model and measure of the world in the place of the world’s intrinsic heterogenesis, a misrepresentation convenient for those who control the representational powers of governance. In conclusion, let us look, again too briefly, at a philosopher who neither accepts this normative world picture of regularity nor surrenders to Nietzschean irony, Gilles Deleuze.Throughout his career, Deleuze uses the word “pure” with senses antithetical to so-called common sense and, even more, Kant. In its traditional concept, pure means an entity or substance whose essence is not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material, uncontaminated by physical pollution, clean and immaculate. The pure is that which is itself itself. To insure intelligibility, that which is elemental, alphabetic, must be what it is itself and no other. This discrete character forms the necessary, if often tacit, precondition to any analysis and decomposition of beings into their delimited “parts” that are subject to measurement and measured disaggregation. Any entity available for structural decomposition, then, must be pictured as constituted exhaustively by extensive ones, measurable units, its metrically available components. Dualism having established as its primary axiomatic hypothesis the separability of extension and thought must now overcome that very separation with an adequacy, a one to one correspondence, between a supposedly neatly measurable world and ideological hegemony that presents itself as rational governance. Thus, what is needed is not only a purity of substance but a matching purity of reason, and it is this clarification of thought, then, which, as indicated above, is the central concern of Kant’s influential and grand opus, The Critique of Pure Reason.Deleuze heard a repressed alternative to the purity of the measured self-same and equivalent that, as he said about Plato, “rumbled” under the metaphysics of analysis. This was the dark tradition he teased out of the Stoics, Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Nicholas d’Autrecourt, Spinoza, Meinong, Bergson, Nietzsche, and McLuhan. This is not the purity of identity, A = A, of metrical uniformity and its shadow, anomaly. Rather than repressing, Deleuze revels in the perverse purity of differencing, difference constituted by becoming without the Apollonian imposition of normalcy or definitional identity. One cannot say “difference in itself” because its ontology, its genesis, is not that of anything itself but exactly the impossibility of such a manner of constitution: universal anomaly. No thing or idea can be iterative, separate, or discrete.In his Difference and Repetition, the idea of the purely same is undone: the Ding an sich is a paradox. While the dogmatic image of thought portrays the possibility of the purely self-same, Deleuze never does. His notions of individuation without individuals, of modulation without models, of simulacra without originals, always finds a reflection in his attitudes toward, not language as logical structure, but what necessarily forms the differential making of events, the heterogenesis of ontological symptoms. His theory has none of the categories of Pierce’s triadic construction: not the arbitrary of symbols, the “self-representation” of icons, or even the causal relation of indices. His “signs” are symptoms: the non-representational consequences of the forces that are concurrently producing them. Events, then, are the symptoms of the heterogenetic forces that produce, not reproduce them. To measure them is to export them into a representational modality that is ontologically inapplicable as they are not themselves themselves but the consequences of the ongoing differences of their genesis. Thus, the temperature associated with a fever is neither the body nor the disease.Every event, then, is a diaphora, the pure consequent of the multiplicity of the forces it cannot resemble, an original dynamic anomaly without standard. This term, diaphora, appears at the conclusion of that dialogue some consider Plato’s best, the Theaetetus. There we find perhaps the most important discussion of knowledge in Western metaphysics, which in its final moments attempts to understand how knowledge can be “True Judgement with an Account” (201d-210a). Following this idea leads to a theory, usually known as the “Dream of Socrates”, which posits two kinds of existents, complexes and simples, and proposes that “an account” means “an account of the complexes that analyses them into their simple components … the primary elements (prôta stoikheia)” of which we and everything else are composed (201e2). This—it will be noticed—suggests the ancient heritage of Kant’s own attempted purification of mereological (part/whole relations) nested elementals. He attempts the coordination of pure speculative reason to pure practical reason and, thus, attempts to supply the root of measurement and scientific regularity. However, as adumbrated by the Platonic dialogue, the attempted decompositions, speculative and pragmatic, lead to an impasse, an aporia, as the rational is based upon a correspondence and not the self-synthesis of the diaphorae by their own dynamic disequilibrium. Thus the dialogue ends inconclusively; Socrates rejects the solution, which is the problem itself, and leaves to meet his accusers and quaff his hemlock. The proposal in this article is that the diaphorae are all that exists in Deleuze’s world and indeed any world, including ours. Nor is this production decomposable into pure measured and defined elementals, as such decomposition is indeed exactly opposite what differential production is doing. For Deleuze, what exists is disparate conjunction. But in intensive conjunction the same cannot be the same except in so far as it differs. The diaphorae of events are irremediably asymmetric to their inputs: the actual does not resemble the virtual matrix that is its cause. Indeed, any recourse to those supposedly disaggregate inputs, the supposedly intelligible constituents of the measured image, will always but repeat the problematic of metrical representation at another remove. This is not, however, the traditional postmodern trap of infinite meta-shifting, as the diaphoric always is in each instance the very presentation that is sought. Heterogenesis can never be undone, but it can be affirmed. In a heterogenetic monism, what was the insoluble problem of correspondence in dualism is now its paradoxical solution: the problematic per se. What manifests in becoming is not, nor can be, an object or thought as separate or even separable, measured in units of the self-same. Dogmatic thought habitually translates intensity, the differential medium of chaosmosis, into the nominally same or similar so as to suit the Apollonian illusions of “correlational adequacy”. However, as the measured cannot be other than a calculation’s placebo, the correlation is but the shadow of a shadow. Every diaphora is an event born of an active conjunction of differential forces that give rise to this, their product, an interference pattern. Whatever we know and are is not the correlation of pure entities and thoughts subject to measured analysis but the confused and chaotic confluence of the specific, material, aleatory, differential, and unrepresentable forces under which we subsist not as ourselves but as the always changing product of our milieu. In short, only anomaly without a nominal becomes, and we should view any assertion that maps experience into the “objective” modality of the same, self-evident, and normal as a political prestidigitation motivated, not by “truth”, but by established political interest. ReferencesDella Volpe, Galvano. Logic as a Positive Science. London: NLB, 1980.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.Guenon, René. The Reign of Quantity. New York: Penguin, 1972.Hawley, K. "Identity and Indiscernibility." Mind 118 (2009): 101-9.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 2014.Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1929.Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum, 2008.Naddaf, Gerard. The Greek Concept of Nature. Albany: SUNY, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.———. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1976.Welch, Kathleen Ethel. "Keywords from Classical Rhetoric: The Example of Physis." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17.2 (1987): 193–204.

IntroductionThis article proposes that the practice of relaxation—a mode of bodily self-organisation within time—provides a way to diversify times as political and creative intervention. Relaxation, which could seem counter-intuitive, may function as intentional temporal intervention and means to slip some of the binds of neoliberal, surveillance capitalist logics. Noting the importance of decision-making (resonant with what Zuboff has called “promising”) as political, ethical capacity (and what dilutes it), I will argue here that relaxation precedes and invites a more active relation to the future. Relaxing and deciding are contrasted, in turn, with something dubbed ‘sub-habituality.’ This neologism would work as a critical poetics for the kind of (non)time in which we may be increasingly living. If, in Discipline and Punish, 1970s Foucault explored the various strategies of coupling time constraints/‘refining’ of time periods (150) with surveillance, I argue here that we might reconsider these same elements—time, constraint, intentionality—aslant and anew, as we approach the third decade of the 21st century (nearly 20 years after Google began opportunistically gathering the data exhaust of its searches). If in a disciplinary society, the organisation of bodies in time served various orders of domination, is it possible that in a control society (as Deleuze has named it), time and bodily composure may be harnessed otherwise to evade surreptitious logics of a neoliberal flavour?The elements noted by Foucault (i.e. structured time, bodily organisation) can—when rendered decisive, coupled with relaxation (to be defined), and with surveillance muddled or subtracted—become tools and modes for questioning, resisting and unsettling various mechanisms of domination and the dilutions of ethical capacity that accompany them in the current moment. We may, in other words, decide to structure our time when unobserved (for example with Flight Mode or connectivity off on laptops, etc.) for intentional, onto-political ends. A later Foucault, incidentally, went on to connect certain practices of care of the self to ethics, as ethical obligations (Foucault, “Ethics”). Time plays a role in such practices. With this as background, this article will read atmospherically some of Gilles Deleuze’s ontological offerings regarding time from his 1968 work Difference and Repetition. However, before this, I wish to clarify the article’s understanding of neoliberalisation in a digital moment.A neoliberalising moment, to use Springer’s preferred nomenclature (5), co-exists presently with a ubiquity of digital media engagement and co-opts it and exacerbates its reach for its manoeuvres. The former’s logics—which digital practices might at once support and/or contest—involve well-known imperatives of ‘efficiency’, aesthetics of striving, untrammelled growth, logics of scarcity and competition, privatisation of community assets, the so-called autonomy of the market, and so on. In his essay on control societies (which notably, after World War II, eclipse the disciplinary societies described by Foucault), Deleuze puts it like this:the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. (5, my emphasis)Neoliberalism, where corporations have tended to replace factories, relies variously on competition between peers, dubious forms of (often ludicrous) motivation, fluctuating salaries and debt (in the place of explicit enclosures), so as to reduce the capacity and the lived expansiveness of the human (and non-human) beings who exist within its order.With this as background, I’m interested in the ways that personal electronic devices (PEDs) and the apps they house may—if used mostly compliantly and uncritically—impact what I would like to call our temporal diversity. This would involve a whittling-down of our access to atmospheres, thus to more impoverished constellations of living, and finally to profound disenablings in many spheres. PEDs provide a monetisable means of pervasive surveillance and increasingly-normalised "veillance" (Lupton 44). Certain modes of domination—if we read this term to mean a reduction of (ethical, creative, political) capacity—furthermore mobilise very specifically a co-opting of time (in the form of ‘engagement’, our eyes on a screen) and time’s strategic fragmentation. The latter is facilitated variously by monetised, gamified apps, and social media Skinner-box effects, entwined with the veillance made possible by the data exhaust of our searches and other trackable online behaviours, self-loggings, and so on. Recalling the way, in disciplinary societies, that power relations play out via the enclosure and regulation of bodies and their movement—the latter imposed externally and with the imperative of a ‘useful time’ or with the aim of self-optimising—I’m curious about how self-selected modes of resistant bodily organisation might operate to insulate or shelter humans living under and within various intensities of neoliberalisation, its discourse and its gaze. Sheltered, one might recover a creative or robust response. To use temporal strategies and understandings, we may subtract ourselves (even just sometimes) from stealthy modes of control or ‘nudging’, from ways of being which are increasingly marketed as ‘common sense’ approaches to activity and spendings of time.With regard to neoliberalisation (defined according to Springer, 37-38) and its coupling with digital life, I query if we may be finding ourselves too-often dipping below the threshold of what ought to be our most assumed temporality: namely, Deleuze’s ‘living’ or habitual present (from the second chapter of his Difference and Repetition). The moniker of ‘temporal diversity’ seeks to flag that—in a moment where we observe and resist the shutting down of diversity in numerous spheres, of species, eco-systems, cultures and languages, and their eclipse by modes produced for our consumption by globalisation—we could easily miss another register at which diversity is threatened. We might arguably be facing the loss of something which, after the fact, we may struggle to name—since it is not a ‘thing’—and whose trajectory of disappearance might wholly elude us. This diversity is that of times.Deleuze’s Three Syntheses in Difference and RepetitionIn Chapter 2 of his 1968 work, Deleuze explores three ways in which time can synthesise. Each synthesis involves a kind of weaving of the basic operations of difference and repetition. One way to read Deleuze in this work is that he (among other things) effectively sketches three kinds of atmospheres of time. Each of these, I argue, if seen as frame, contributes a richness and diversity to what a life—and what our shared life—can be and feel like.The first kind of time is called the habitual or ‘living’ present. It synthesises from a stitching together, drawing together, of the retaining of disappearing, disparate instances that otherwise bear no basic relation to one another (Deleuze, Difference 97). As a ‘present’, it has a stretch, a ‘reach’ which depends somewhat on our organism’s capacity to contract discontinuous instants. As Hughes beautifully puts it: “Our contractile range is the index of our finitude” (110). As we’ll see below, it would be a crumbling of this ‘range’ that sub-habituality designates. This living present of Deleuze also has a past inflection, marked by the just-gone and by a mode of memory, as well as by a future aspect, marked—not always constructively—by anticipation.One way to read the ‘living’ present is as being akin to our temporal ‘food and shelter’, a basic synthesis in which to dwell basically. Not thrilling or obviously creative, seductive or vast, it is the time—I’d suggest—in which we establish routine, in which we maintain a liveable life. Theorists such as Grosz have argued—in this tradition with Deleuze which positively evaluates habit—that habit, as mode of time, frees the organism up so that invention and innovation can then seed (see Grosz).The ‘living’ present turns out, however, not to be assumable in every case. For example, in cases of PTSD, I’d contend, it may be interrupted, lost, thus is not to be taken for granted under all conditions. Its status under a gamified neoliberalisation or surveillance capitalism is of interest to me and thus I offer this poetics of sub-habituality as a way to designate its vulnerability—that we might slip below its steadying threshold.Neither does the habitual present constitute much of a diversity; it would not cut it, let’s say, as enough for an abundant or varied temporal life. The habitual present contributes to the conditions that would enable me to form intentions (as a cohering ‘self’), to fashion basic schedules with my own initiative, to order an adult life. For a truly rich temporal life, however, we’d wish to include the poetics intimated by Deleuze’s two other syntheses, their more diverse atmospheres and the arguably political capacities they open to us.The second (passive) synthesis pertains to a vast and insisting past, in the lineage of Henri Bergson, and which, Deleuze notes, might be accessed or ‘saved for ourselves’ via that which we call reminiscence (Difference 107)—a dreamy, expansive and often-pleasurable state (except, for example, in cases of PTSD, or even perhaps versions of dementia, where the person may not be able to leave or surface from it). To dig, in thought, ‘down’ into the register of this vast past and to unearth a rigorous account of it, one goes via a series of paradoxes (see Deleuze, Difference 101-105). If the first passive synthesis is constituted by habit’s mechanisms, the second passive synthesis is constituted by memory’s: “memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present to pass)” (Deleuze, Difference 101). Hughes puts it thus: “the pure past in general [is] a horizon of having-been-ness, in which what was apprehended [in the first synthesis] finds the conditions of its reproducibility” (108). If such a pastness designates one moment in how selves and their being-as-time synthesise, one might want to know how to include this rich, languorous, sometimes lost and meandering, atmosphere in a life. This might assist an understanding of what distorts or precludes it, and thus our learning for how to invite it in, alongside our more habitual modes.No mode of time, therefore, is simplistically inflected as positive or negative. Without their multiplicity, I’m arguing, we are left temporally less endowed. I wish to articulate not the swapping of one kind of time for another—as if one would only favour productive ‘times’, or efficient ‘times’, or competitive ‘times’, or steady ‘times’, or dreamy, meandering ‘times’—but a diversity. When we feel wildly dissatisfied and imagine that a tangible thing, situation or acquisition—content in time, in other words—would serve as a salve for this uneasiness, we might also consider that what’s missing could be a temporal mode. Which one have we lost the capacity to access or drift into? I’ll now turn to the third synthesis which Deleuze explores, which pertains to the future and its opening up.For the purposes of my argument here, I want to use this third synthesis to gesture towards the future as a possible mode—empty, sheer—and which distinguishes itself entirely from the future ‘aspects’ of the first two syntheses. I both take a poetic cue from Deleuze, as well as note that this synthesis is the least obvious or accessible in a usual life, one in which habit’s organisation is established, and even in which perhaps there are pockets of the ‘erotic’ (Deleuze, Difference 107) and/or expansive driftings of the second synthesis of memory. The third synthesis, then—associated with Deleuze’s take on thought—marks the moment when something becomes active. Deleuze presents it to the reader of Difference and Repetition in relation to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return:that is why it is properly called a belief of the future, a belief in the future. Eternal Return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by the intermediary of metamorphosis. However it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the contrary, it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. (Difference 113, emphasis original)When habit dominates our temporal palette, the future appears to be possible only in habit’s guise of it—that is, in the mode of anticipation, which then morphs to prediction as this synthesis moves into its more active modes. Anticipation is a pragmatic but weak future. It is useful, without doubt, since habit’s future mode knows to say: at three o’clock I need to get my shoes on, grab keys and wallet, and drive to pick up X. I anticipate that they will be waiting on this corner, and so on. Habit’s internally available ‘future’ is crucial and steadying. Knowing how to manoeuvre within it is part of learning to live some kind of organised life. In sub-habituality I’d argue, we may not even have that. Zuboff intimates this when in Chapter 11 she speaks of a right to a future tense.Deleuze’s third synthesis opens the self precisely onto that which-cannot-be-anticipated. The Nietzschean mode of the future that Deleuze explores at length is not akin to habit’s ordering and stabilising; it is not to be compared to the reminiscent climes of pure memory, to the vast dilations and contractions of its insisting topographies. The third synthesis asks more of us. It asks us to forget the versions of ourselves we have been (in the very moment that we affirm the repetition of everything that has been, to the letter) and to stare unblinkingly into a roaring Nothingness, or better into the strange weathers of a Not-Determined-Yet.My own practice-based creative research into these matters confirms Deleuze’s architectures. I say: we need the two other temporal syntheses and rely on them in order to dramatise something new in the third synthesis. The is the ability, in other words, to decide and to forget enough to be able to dance forward into an unknown future.Sub-Habituality: Or Less than a ‘Living’ PresentKorean thinker Byung-Chul Han links our use of devices, and the necessity of engaging with them for our social/economic survival, to the kind of dispersed and fretful awareness needed by animals surviving predators in the wild. He sees ‘multitasking’ in no way as any kind of evolution, but names it provocatively a regression, which precludes the kind of contemplation upon which sophisticated cultural practices and fields, such as art and philosophy, arguably depend (Han 26-29). Habit involves the crucial notion of a ‘range’ of, or a capacity for, contracting disparate instants—so as to make possible their being stitched together, via contemplation’s passivity (Deleuze 100), and thereby to synthesise a (stable, even liveable) present. Recall that Hughes called it the index of our finitude. How do digital engagements—specifically with apps and their intentionally gamified designs, and which involve a certain velocity of uncadenced movement and gesture (eyes, hands, neck position)—impact an ability to synthesise a steady-enough present? Sub-habituality, as name, seeks a poetics to bring to articulation an un-ease that would be specifically temporal, not psychological, or even merely physiological.To know about the stability offered by habit’s time allows the cultivation of temporal atmospheres that are pleasant and stable, as well as having the potential to open onto creative/erotic modes of a vast past, as well as not be closed to the pure future. This would be a curation of the present, learning how to ‘play’ its mechanisms such that the most expansive and interesting aspects of this mode—which can condition and court other modes—can come forth.Sub-habituality is that time where the gathering of instants into any stretch is hindered, shattering the operations of coherence and narrowing aperture for certain experiences. No stretch in which to dwell. The vast and calming surfaces of our attention breaking into shards. Sub-habituality would be anti-contemplative, in an ontological sense. No instant could hold for long enough to relate to its temporal peers. Teetering there on the edge of a non-time, any ‘subject’ who might intend is undermined.Next, I turn to the notion of relaxation as bodily practice and strategy to insulate or shelter humans living under and within various intensities of digitalised neoliberalisation. Instead of offering oneself up for monetised organisation, one organises oneself via the nuanced effort that is a ‘dropping of excess effort’. The latter is relaxation and may thwart surreptitious modes of (imposed temporal) (dis)organisation, or what tends to appear increasingly as ‘common sense’ approaches to activity and spendings of time. We practise deciding to structure blocks of time, so that within their bounds we can risk experimenting with relaxation, its erotics and its vectors of transformation.RelaxationNeoliberalisation, after Springer, involves the becoming common-sensical of numerous logics: competitiveness in every sphere of life, ubiquity of free market logics, supposed scarcity (of time, opportunity), rationalisation and instrumentalisation of processes and attitudes to doing, and an emphasis on a discourse of efficiency (even when it is not, in actuality, what obtains). For Deleuze, in a control society, similarlymany young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they are being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. ("Postscript", 7)How can we serve less this current telos? What (counter or subtractive) practices might undermine the conditions for the entrenching of such logics? My contention in this article is that practices of the body that also involve the intentional organising of time, along with approaches to movement generally that forgo striving and forcing (that is: kinds of violent ‘work’), may counter some of the impacts (especially of a temporal nature, as discussed above) that align with and allow for neoliberal logics’ pervading of all spheres of life. Relaxation is a useful shorthand for such strategies.In my work elsewhere on practising, I’ve argued that relaxation is the third (of four) criteria that constitute the specific approach to ‘doing’ that can be designated practising (see Pont; Attiwill et al.). Relaxation is a very particular approach to any behaviour or movement, whereby the ‘doer’ pays close attention and seeks to use only the necessary amount of effort for the activity in question. This dropping of ‘natural’ (or knee-jerk) effort is itself a kind of unusual effort. The word ‘natural’ here comes from writings by Vachaspati Mishra (192) and makes the subtle point that relaxation intervenes on what is ‘natural’ or on what has acquired inertia, on that which enacts itself without decision or intention. In this strictly ontological/temporal intervention, relaxation refuses to collude with common-sense approval for striving-as-new-piety that dominate neoliberalised discourses and their motivational propagandas.Relaxation constitutes an enacted—repeatedly enacted—decision at the level of the body to organise movement/doing in ways subtracted from neoliberalised discourse, reawakening intention. It is a quiet intervention, precise and difficult, that works to counter a widespread fundamentalism of doing with excess (or Leistung with its inevitable flipside of collapse and exhaustion, as critiqued by Han 24-25). This dovetails with the ubiquity of digital engagements/behavioural training, which effectively constitute an unending labour for many. Counter-intuitively, relaxation (when understood strictly as practice, not in its lay inflection as compensatory ‘collapse’) can establish a minimum membrane hindering the penetration of this labour into all spheres of a life. Once PEDs are intentionally used—very difficult to do—and limited in terms of the proportion of time they are engaged with, they pose a reduced threat to times’ diversity. (To organise my time, curiously too, I make use of PED timer features, on flight mode, and so on. Others use apps specifically designed to help them use fewer apps.)We find ourselves here faced with various and emergent practices of saying ‘no’ to serve a process that experiments with affirming something else—perhaps this ‘else’ would be the conditions for that which does yet exist, that is: truly open futures, creativity, robustness in the face of change. Promising? Deciding? My argument is that a body immersed too much in sub-habituality is less capable overall of withstanding the atmospheres of the third synthesis (and, if we follow Han, too dispersed and fragmented to access certain atmospheres that we might associate with the second). It may not even have a sense of a living present. It becomes less and less intentional, more malleable, very tired.There is—in the work of the body that resists complying with the logics of neoliberalisation, that resists a certain corrosion of Deleuze’s first time (and of the subsequent two times that in Deleuze open from them)—a clear practice of dropping, letting fall, not picking up in the first place. We forgo then certain modes of, or approaches to, action when we work to subtract ourselves from an encroaching (a)temporality that is none at all. To foil reactivity we have two obvious options: we learn to activate our reactivity—to act it; or we pause just before enacting from within its logic. Relaxation is more about the latter.ConclusionThe sub-habitual discussed in this article is, most importantly, a grim affective/temporal register to inhabit. For many, its unpleasantness is met with queries about mental health, since it naturally impacts us in a register that feels like bad thinking, like bad feeling. By introducing an onto-temporal inflection into such queries, I suggest there might be a certain kind of ‘health’ or better still a ‘pleasure’ in a life that can obtain with the cultivation of a diversity of times. Deleuze’s model of three kinds of temporal synthesis tempts me as one way to track what might be going missing in a moment when certain technologies, serving particular economic and political agendas and ideologies, can coax our rhythms, behaviours and preoccupations down particular paths. The fleshy, energetic and thinking body, as a site of affirmation, as a vehicle for practices that subtract themselves from dominant logics, can—I’ve argued here—be a crucial factor in working with temporality in such a way that one is not left with an homogenised non-time in which we are not-quite-subjects or diluted selves vulnerable to being worked on by logics that drive neoliberalisation and its sufferings. Relaxation is among a suite of strategies that may keep our times (and ourselves as modes of time) diverse: stable, pleasure-capable, imaginative and fierce.ReferencesAttiwill, Suzie, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe, and Philipa Rothfield. Practising with Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2004.———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3-7.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.———. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. 281-302.Grosz, Elizabeth. “Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us.” Body and Society 19(2&3): 2013. 217-239.Han, Byung-Chul. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft Burnoutgesellschaft Hoch-Zeit. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2016.Hughes, Joe. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.Mishra, Vachaspati. The Yoga System of Patanjali. Trans. J. Haughton Woods. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1914 (by arrangement with Harvard University Press).Pont, Antonia. “An Exemplary Operation: Shikantaza and Articulating Practice via Deleuze.” Transcendence, Immanence and Intercultural Philosophy. Eds. Nahum Brown & William Franke. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 207-236.Springer, Simon. The Discourse of Neoliberalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. (Kindle Edition.)

Western notions of authors’ Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), as expressed within copyright law, maintain a potentially fraught relationship with a range of philosophical and theoretical positions on writing and authorship that have developed within contemporary Western thinking. For Roland Barthes, authorship is compromised, de-identified and multiplied by the very nature of writing: ‘Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (142). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari follow a related line of thought in A Thousand Plateaus: ‘Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency’ (11). Similarly, in Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida suggests that ‘Writing is that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing memory’ (24). To the extent that these philosophical and theoretical positions emerge within the practices of creative writers as remixes of appropriation, homage and/or pastiche, prima facie they problematize the commercial rights of writers as outlined in law. The case of Kathy Acker often comes up in such discussions. Acker’s 1984 novel Blood and Guts in High School, for example, incorporates techniques that have attracted the charge of plagiarism as this term is commonly defined. (Peter Wollen notes this in his aptly named essay ‘Death [and Life] of the Author.’) For texts like Acker’s, the comeback against charges of plagiarism usually involves underscoring the quotient of creativity involved in the re-combination or ‘remixing’ of the parts of the original texts. (Pure repetition would, it would seem, be much harder to defend.) ‘Plagiarism’, so-called, was simply one element of Acker’s writing technique; Robert Lort nuances plagiarism as it applies to Acker as ‘pseudo-plagiarism’. According to Wollen, ‘as she always argued, it wasn’t really plagiarism because she was quite open about what she did.’ As we shall demonstrate in more detail later on, however, there is another and, we suggest, more convincing reason why Acker’s work ‘wasn’t really plagiarism.’ This relates to her conscious interest in calligraphy and to her (perhaps unconscious) appropriation of a certain strand of Chinese philosophy. All the same, within the Western context, the consistent enforcement of copyright law guarantees the rights of authors to control the distribution of their own work and thus its monetised value. The author may be ‘dead’ in writing—just the faintest trace of remixed textuality—but he/she is very much ‘alive’ as in recognised at law. The model of the author as free-standing citizen (as a defined legal entity) that copyright law employs is unlikely to be significantly eroded by the textual practices of authors who tarry artistically in the ‘de-authored territories’ mapped by figures like Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida. Crucially, disputes concerning copyright law and the ethics of remix are resolved, within the Western context, at the intersection of relatively autonomous creative and legal domains. In the West, it is seen that these two domains are related within the one social fabric; each nuances the other (as Acker’s example shows in the simultaneity of her legal/commercial status as an author and her artistic practice as a ‘remixer’ of the original works of other authors). Legal and writing issues co-exist even as they fray each other’s boundaries. And in Western countries there is force to the law’s operations. However, the same cannot be said of the situation with respect to copyright law in China. Chinese artists are traditionally regarded as being aloof from mundane legal and commercial matters, with the consequence that the creative and the legal domains tend to ‘miss each other’ within the fabric of Chinese society. To this extent, the efficacy of the law is muted in China when it comes into contact with circumstances of authorship, writing, originality and creativity. (In saying this though, we do not wish to fall into the trap of cultural essentialism: in this article, ‘China’ and ‘The West’ are placeholders for variant cultural tendencies—clustered, perhaps, around China and its disputed territories such as Taiwan on the one hand, and around America on the other—rather than homogeneous national/cultural blocs.) Since China opened its system to Western capitalist economic activity in the 1980s, an ongoing criticism, sourced mainly out of the West, has been that the country lacks proper respect for notions of authorship and, more directly, for authorship’s derivative: copyright law. Tellingly, it took almost ten years of fierce negotiations between elements of the capitalist lobby in China and the Legislative Bureau to make the Seventh National People’s Congress pass the first Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China on 7 September 1990. A law is one thing though, and adherence to the law is another. Jayanthi Iyengar of Asia Times Online reports that ‘the US government estimates that piracy within China [of all types of products] costs American companies $20-24 billion a year in damages…. If one includes European and Japanese firms, the losses on account of Chinese piracy is in excess of $50 billion annually.’ In 2008, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported that more than 99% of all music files in China are pirated. In the same year, Cara Anna wrote in The Seattle Times that, in desperation at the extent of Chinese infringement of its Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), Microsoft has deployed an anti-piracy tactic that blacks out the screens of computers detected running a fake copy of Windows. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has filed complaints from many countries against China over IPRs. Iyengar also reports that, under such pressure, the State Intellectual Property Office in Beijing has vowed it will continue to reinforce awareness of IPRs in order to better ensure their protection. Still, from the Western perspective at least, progress on this extremely contentious issue has been excruciatingly slow. Such a situation in respect of Chinese IPRs, however, should not lead to the conclusion that China simply needs to catch up with the more ‘morally advanced’ West. Rather, the problematic relations of the law and of creativity in China allow one to discern, and to trace through ancient Chinese history and philosophy, a different approach to remix that does not come into view so easily within Western countries. Different materialisms of writing and authorship come into play across global space, with different effects. The resistance to both the introduction and the policing of copyright law in China is, we think, the sign of a culture that retains something related to authorship and creativity that Western culture only loosely holds onto. It provides a different way of looking at remix, in the guise of what the West would tend to label plagiarism, as a practice, especially, of creativity. The ‘death’ of the author in China at law (the failure to legislate and/or police his/her rights) brings the author, as we will argue, ‘alive’ in the writing. Remix as anonymous composition (citing Barthes) becomes, in the Chinese example, remix as creative expression of singular feelings—albeit remix set adrift from the law. More concretely, our example of the Chinese writer/writing takes remix to its limit as a practice of repetition without variation—what the West would be likely to call plagiarism. Calligraphy is key to this. Of course, calligraphy is not the full extent of Chinese writing practice—not all writing is calligraphic strictly speaking. But all calligraphy is writing, and in this it influences the ethics of Chinese writing, whether character-based or otherwise, more generally. We will have more to say about the ‘pictorial’ material aspect of Chinese writing later on. In traditional Chinese culture, writing is regarded as a technical practice perfected through reproduction. Chinese calligraphy (visual writing) is learnt through exhaustively tracing and copying the style of the master calligrapher. We are tempted to say that what is at stake in Chinese remix/calligraphy is ‘the difference that cannot be helped:’ that is, the more one tries, as it were, to repeat, the more repetition becomes impossible. In part, this is explained by the interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’). Now, the order of the characters—Qing 情 (‘feelings’) before Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’)—suggests that Qing creates and supports Yun. To this extent, what we have here is something akin to a Western understanding of creative writing (of the creativity of writing) in which individual and singular feelings are given expression in the very movement of the writing itself (through the bodily actions of the writer). In fact though, the Chinese case is more complicated than this, for the apprenticeship model of Chinese calligraphy cultivates a two-way interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’). More directly, the ‘composed body movements’ that one learns from the master calligrapher help compose one’s own ‘feelings’. The very repetition of the master’s work (its remixing, as it were…) enables the creativity of the apprentice. If this model of creativity is found somewhat distasteful from a Western perspective (that is, if it is seen to be too restrictive of originality) then that is because such a view, we think, depends upon a cultural misunderstanding that we will try to clear up here. To wit, the so-called Confucian model of rote learning that is more-or-less frowned upon in the West is not, at least not in the debased form that it adopts in Western stereotypes, the philosophy active in the case of Chinese calligraphy. That philosophy is Taoism. As Wing-Tsit Chan elucidates, ‘by opposing Confucian conformity with non-conformity and Confucian worldliness with a transcendental spirit, Taoism is a severe critic of Confucianism’ (136). As we will show in a moment, Chinese calligraphy exemplifies this special kind of Taoist non-conformity (in which, as Philip J. Ivanhoe limns it, ‘one must unweave the social fabric’). Chan again: ‘As the way of life, [Taoism] denotes simplicity, spontaneity, tranquility, weakness, and most important of all, non-action (wu-wei). By the latter is not meant literally “inactivity” but rather “taking no action that is contrary to Nature”—in other words, letting Nature take its own course’ (136). Thus, this is a philosophy of ‘weakness’ that is neither ‘negativism’ nor ‘absolute quietism’ (137). Taoism’s supposed weakness is rather a certain form of strength, of (in the fullest sense) creative possibilities, which comes about through deference to the way of Nature. ‘Hold fast to the great form (Tao), / And all the world will come’ illustrates this aspect of Taoism in its major philosophical tract, The Lao Tzu (Tao-Te Ching) or The Classic of the Way and its Virtue (section 35, Chan 157). The guiding principle is one of deference to the original (way, Nature or Tao) as a strategy of an expression (of self) that goes beyond the original. The Lao Tzu is full of cryptic, metaphoric expressions of this idea: ‘The pursuit of learning is to increase day after day. / The pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day. / It is to decrease and further decrease until one reaches the point of taking no action. / No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone’ (section 48, Chan 162). Similarly, The female always overcomes the male by tranquility, / And by tranquility she is underneath. / A big state can take over a small state if it places itself below the small state; / And the small state can take over a big state if it places itself below the big state. / Thus some, by placing themselves below, take over (others), / And some, by being (naturally) low, take over (other states) (section 61, Chan 168). In Taoism, it is only by (apparent) weakness and (apparent) in-action that ‘nothing is left undone’ and ‘states’ are taken over. The two-way interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’), whereby the apprentice copies the master, aligns with this key element of Taoism. Here is the linkage between calligraphy and Taoism. The master’s work is Tao, Nature or the way: ‘Hold fast to the great form (Tao), / And all the world will come’ (section 35, Chan 157). The apprentice’s calligraphy is ‘all the world’ (‘all the world’ being, ultimately in this context, Qing 情 [‘feelings’]). Indeed, Taoism itself is a subtle philosophy of learning (of apprenticeship to a master), unlike Confucianism, which Chan characterises as a doctrine of ‘social order’ (of servitude to a master) (136). ‘“Learn not learn”’ is how Wang Pi, as quoted by Chan (note 121, 170), understands what he himself (Chan) translates as ‘He learns to be unlearned’ (section 64, 170). In unlearning one learns what cannot be taught: this is, we suggest, a remarkable definition of creativity, which also avoids falling into the trap of asserting a one-to-one equivalence between (unlearnt) originality and creativity, for there is both learning and creativity in this Taoist paradox of pedagogy. On this, Michael Meehan points out that ‘originality is an over-rated and misguided concept in many ways.’ (There is even a sense in which, through its deliberate repetition, The Lao Tzu teaches itself, traces over itself in ‘self-plagiarising’ fashion, as if it were reflecting on the re-tracings of calligraphic pedagogy. Chan notes just how deliberate this is: ‘Since in ancient times books consisted of bamboo or wooden slabs containing some twenty characters each, it was not easy for these sentences… to be added by mistake…. Repetitions are found in more than one place’ [note 102, 166].) Thinking of Kathy Acker too as a learner, Peter Wollen’s observation that she ‘incorporated calligraphy… in her books’ and ‘was deeply committed to [the] avant-garde tradition, a tradition which was much stronger in the visual arts’ creates a highly suggestive connection between Acker’s work and Taoism. The Taoist model for learning calligraphy as, precisely, visual art—in which copying subtends creativity—serves to shift Acker away from a Barthesian or Derridean framework and into a Taoist context in which adherence to another’s form (as ‘un-learnt learning’) creatively unravels so-called plagiarism from the inside. Acker’s conscious interest in calligraphy is shown by its prevalence in Blood and Guts in High School. Edward S. Robinson identifies this text as part of her ‘middle phase’, which ‘saw the introduction of illustrations and diagrams to create multimedia texts with a collage-like feel’ (154). To our knowledge, Acker never critically reflected upon her own calligraphic practices; perhaps if she had, she would have troubled what we see as a blindspot in critics’ interpretations of her work. To wit, whenever calligraphy is mentioned in criticism on Acker, it tends to be deployed merely as an example of her cut-up technique and never analysed for its effects in its own cultural, philosophical and material specificity. (Interestingly, if the words of Chinese photographer Liu Zheng are any guide, the Taoism we’re identifying in calligraphy has also worked its way into other forms of Chinese visual art: she refers to ‘loving photographic details and cameras’ with the very Taoist term, ‘lowly’ 低级 [Three Shadows Photography Art Centre 187].) Being ‘lowly’, ‘feminine’ or ‘underneath’ has power as a radical way of learning. We mentioned above that Taoism is very metaphoric. As the co-writer of this paper Cher Coad recalls from her calligraphy classes, students in China grow up with a metaphoric proverb clearly inspired by Lao Tzu’s Taoist philosophy of learning: ‘Learning shall never stop. Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ What could this mean? Before answering this question with recourse to two Western notions that, we hope, will further effect (building on Acker’s example) a rapprochement between Chinese and Western ways of thinking (be they nationally based or not), we reiterate that the infringement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in China should not be viewed only as an egregious denial of universally accepted law. Rather, whatever else it may be, we see it as the shadow in the commercial realm—mixed through with all the complexities of Chinese tradition, history and cultural difference, and most particularly of the Taoist strand within Confucianism—of the never-quite-perfect copying of calligraphic writing/remixing. More generally, the re-examination of stereotypical assumptions about Chinese culture cues a re-examination of the meaning behind the copying of products and technology in contemporary, industrialised China. So, ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ What is this ‘more than the blue of black’? Or put differently, why is calligraphic writing, as learnt from the master, always infused with the singular feelings of the (apprentice) writer? The work of Deleuze, Guattari and Claire Parnet provides two possible responses. In On the Line, Deleuze and Guattari (and Deleuze in co-authorship with Parnet) author a number of comments that support the conception we are attempting to develop concerning the lines of Chinese calligraphy. A line, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is always a line of lines (‘Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight’ [57]). In the section of On the Line entitled ‘Politics’, Deleuze and Parnet outline the impossibility of any line being just one line. If life is a line (as it is said, you throw someone a life line), then ‘We have as many entangled lines in our lives as there are in the palm of a hand’ (71). Of any (hypothetical) single line it can be said that other lines emerge: ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ The feelings of the apprentice calligrapher (his/her multiple lines) emerge through the repeated copying of the lines and composed body movements of the master. The Deleuzean notion of repetition takes this idea further. Repetitive Chinese calligraphy clearly indexes what Claire Colebrook refers to as ‘Deleuze’s concept of eternal return. The only thing that is repeated or returns is difference; no two moments of life can be the same. By virtue of the flow of time, any repeated event is necessarily different (even if different only to the extent that it has a predecessor)’ (121). Now, it might be objected that Chinese calligraphic practices, because of the substantially ideographic nature of Chinese writing (see Kristeva 72-81), allow for material mutations that can find no purchase in Western, alphabetical systems of writing. But the materiality of time that Colebrook refers to as part of her engagement with Deleuzean non-repetitious (untimely) repetition guarantees the materiality of all modes of writing. Furthermore, Julia Kristeva notes that, with any form of language, one cannot leave ‘the realm of materialism’ (6) and Adrian Miles, in his article ‘Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing,’ sees the apparently very ‘unmaterial’ writing of hypertext ‘as an embodied activity that has its own particular affordances and possibilities—its own constraints and local actualisations’ (1-2). Calligraphic repetition of the master’s model creates the apprentice’s feelings as (inevitable) difference. In this then, the learning by the Chinese apprentice of the lines of the master’s calligraphy challenges international (both Western and non-Western) artists of writing to ‘remix remix’ as a matter—as a materialisation—of the line. Not the line as a self-identical entity of writing that only goes to make up writing more generally; rather, lines as a materialisation of lines within lines within lines. More self-reflexively, even the collaborative enterprise of this article, co-authored as it is by a woman of Chinese ethnicity and a white Australian man, suggests a remixing of writing through, beneath and over each other’s lines. Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’) expresses and maximises Qing 情 (‘feelings’). Taoist ‘un-learnt learning’ generates remix as the singular creativity of the writer. Writers get into a blue with the line—paint it, black. Of course, these ideas won’t and shouldn’t make copyright infringement (or associated legalities) redundant notions. But in exposing the cultural relativisms often buried within the deployment of this and related terms, the idea of lines of lines far exceeds a merely formalistic practice (one cut off from the materialities of culture) and rather suggests a mode of non-repetitious repetition in contact with all of the elements of culture (of history, of society, of politics, of bodies…) wherever these may be found, and whatever their state of becoming. In this way, remix re-creates the depths of culture even as it stirs up its surfaces of writing. References Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel. New York: Grove Press, 1978. Anna, Cara. ‘Microsoft Anti-Piracy Technology Upsets Users in China.’ The Seattle Times. 28 Oct. 2008 ‹http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2008321919_webmsftchina28.html›. Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author.’ Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142-148. Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. On the Line. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. ‘Recording Industry Steps Up Campaign against Internet Piracy in China.’ ifpi. 4 Feb. 2008 ‹http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20080204.html›. Ivanhoe, Philip J. ‘Taoism’. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed. Robert Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 787. Iyengar, Jayanthi. ‘Intellectual Property Piracy Rocks China Boat.’ Asia Times Online. 16 Sept. 2004 ‹http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FI16Ad07.html›. Kristeva, Julia. Language: The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Lort, Robert. ‘Kathy Acker (1944-1997).’ Jahsonic: A Vocabulary of Culture. 2003 ‹http://www.jahsonic.com/KathyAcker.html›. Meehan, Michael. ‘Week 5a: Playing with Genres.’ Lecture notes. Unit ALL705. Short Stories: Writers and Readers. Trimester 2. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013. Miles, Adrian. ‘Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing.’ Studies in Material Thinking 1.2 (April 2008) ‹http://www.materialthinking.org/papers/29›. Robinson, Edward S. Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2011. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. ‘Photography and Intimate Space Symposium.’ Conversations: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre’s 2007 Symposium Series. Ed. RongRong, inri, et al. Beijing: Three Shadows Press Limited, 2008. 179-191. Wollen, Peter. ‘Death (and Life) of the Author.’ London Review of Books 20.3 (5 Feb. 1998). ‹http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n03/peter-wollen/death-and-life-of-the-author›.

Drawing on my recent experience of working in collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, I want to explore the potential of an active and resistant - rather than passive and acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a performance-based practice. The article examines how stillness and other forms of non-productive or non-teleological activity might contribute towards the production of a radically dissenting – yet affirmative – model of contemporary subjectivity. It will investigate how the performance of stillness within an artistic practice could offer a pragmatic model through which to approach certain philosophical concepts in relation to the construction of subjectivity, by proposing a practical application of the various ideas explored therein. Stillness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and supposed freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. In one sense, stillness and slowness have been deemed outmoded or anachronistic forms of temporality, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Alternatively, stillness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant – or at least reactive – “counter-culture” for challenging the enforced and increased pace at which we are required to perform. The intent, however, is not to focus on the transcendent possibilities – or even nostalgic dimension – of stillness, where it could be seen as a form of escape from the accelerated temporalities of contemporary capitalism, a move towards a slower, more spiritual or meditative existence by the removal of or self-imposed isolation from contemporary societal pressures. Instead, this article attempts to explore the potential within those forms of stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary capitalism, by reflecting on how they might be (re)inhabited – or appropriated through an artistic practice – as sites of critical action. The article will suggest ways in which habitually resented, oppressive or otherwise tedious forms of stillness, inaction or immobility can be turned into active or resistant strategies for producing the self differently to dominant ideological expectations or pressures. With reference to selected theoretical ideas primarily within the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – I want to explore how the collective performance of stillness in the public realm produces an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour. Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of events, illuminating temporal gaps and fissures in which alternative or unexpected possibilities – for life – might be encountered and encouraged. The act of collective stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to, or refusal of, societal norms, a wilful and collaborative attempt to break or rupture habitual flows. However, collective stillness also has the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol; a model of “communitas” emerging from the shared act of being still. The focus then, is to reflect on how the gesture of stillness performed within the context of an artistic practice – such as that of Open City – might offer an exemplar for the production of an affirmative form of subjectivity, by arguing how the practice of stillness paradoxically has the potential for increasing an individual’s capacity to act. Open City is an investigation-led artistic project – led by Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday – that explores how public space is conceptualised and organised by interrogating the ways in which our daily actions and behaviours are conditioned and controlled. Their research activity involves inviting, instructing or working with members of the public to create discreet interventions and performances, which put into question or destabilise habitual patterns or conventions of public behaviour, through the use of invitations, propositions, site-specific actions and performative events. The practical and theoretical research phase of the Open City project was initiated in 2006 in collaboration with artist/performer Simone Kenyon. During this phase of research Open City worked with teachers of the Alexander Technique deconstructing the mechanics of walking, and observed patterns of group behaviour and ‘everyday’ movements in public spaces. This speculative phase of research was expanded upon through a pilot project where the artists worked with members of the public, inviting them to attempt to get lost in the city, to consider codes of conduct through observation and mimicry, to explore behavioural patterns in the public realm as a form of choreography, and to approach the spaces of the city as an amphitheatre or stage upon which to perform. This culminated in a series of public performances and propositional/instructive works as part of the nottdance festival in Nottingham (2007) where audiences were invited to participate in choreographed events, creating a number of fleeting and partially visible performances throughout the city. Members of the public were issued specific time-based invitations for collective and individual actions such as ‘Day or night – take a walk in which you notice and deliberately avoid CCTV cameras’ or ‘On the high street during rush hour … suddenly and without warning, stop and remain still for five minutes … then carry on walking as before.’ Image 1: Open City, documentation of publicly-sited postcards. As part of this phase of activity, I was invited by Open City to produce a piece of writing in response to their work – to be serialised over a number of publicly distributed postcards – which would attempt to critically contextualise the various issues and concerns emerging from the investigation-led research that the project had been developing in the public realm. The postcards included an instruction written by Open City on one side, and my serialised text on the other. I have since worked more collaboratively with Open City on new research investigating how the different temporalities within the public realm might be harnessed or activated creatively; how movement and mobility affect the way in which place and locality are encountered or understood. My involvement with the project has specifically been in exploring the use of text-based elements, instructions and propositions and has included further publicly-sited postcard texts and the development of sound-based works using iPod technology to create synchronised actions. In 2008, I successfully secured Arts Council of England funding for a practice-based research trip to Japan with Open City in which we initiated our specific investigations around stillness, slowness, obstruction, and blockage. During this phase of research we became interested in how speed and slowness can be utilised within a performance practice to create points of anchor and location within the urban environment, or in order to affect a psychological shift in the way that space is encountered and understood. Image 2: Open City, research investigations, Japan, 2008.On one level, Open City can be located within a tradition of publicly-sited performance practices. This genealogy of politically – and more often playfully – resistant actions, interventions and models of spatial occupation or navigation can be traced back to the ludic practice of Surrealist errance or aimless wandering into and through the Situationists’ deployment of the dérive and conceptualisation of “psychogeography” during the 1950s and 60s. In its focus on collective action and inhabitation of the everyday as a site of practice, Open City is also part of a trajectory of artistic activity – epitomised perhaps by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings – intent on blurring the line between art and life, or in drawing attention to those aspects of reality marginalised by dominant discourses and ideologies. Performed as part of an artistic practice, non-habitual or even habitually discouraged actions such as aimless wandering, standing still, even the (non)event of 'doing nothing' operate as subtle methods through which to protest against increasingly legislated conditions of existence, by proposing alternative modes of behaviour or suggesting flexibility therein. Artistic practice can be seen as a site of investigation for questioning and dismantling the dominant order – or “major” language – through acts of minor rebellion that – whilst predominantly impotent or ineffective – might still remind us that we have some agency and do not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce. Life itself becomes the material for a work of art, and it is through such an encounter that we might be encouraged to conceive other possibilities for life. Through art, life is rendered plastic and capable of being actively shaped or made into something different to how it might habitually be. However the notion of ‘life as a work of art’ is not exclusive to artistic practice. Various theorists and philosophers – including Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari – have advocated the necessity of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting ways in which one’s “style of life” or way of existing might be produced or constructed differently. They urge us to consider how we might actively and consciously attend to the full possibilities of life in order to become more human, by increasing our “affective capacity,” that is, our capacity to affect and be affected in affirming or “augmentative terms” (Deleuze, Spinoza and Us 124). In one sense, Spinoza’s Ethics offers a pragmatic model – or guide to living – through which to attempt to increase one’s potential capacity for being, by maximising the possibility of augmentative experiences or joyful encounters. Here, Spinoza formulates a plan or model through which one might attempt to move from the “inadequate” realm of signs and effects – the first order of knowledge in which the body is simply subject to external forces and random encounters of which it remains ignorant – towards a second order of knowledge. Here, the individual body is able to construct concepts of causes or “common notions” with other “bodies in agreement.” The “common notions” of the second order are produced at the point where the individual is able to rise above the condition of simply experiencing effects and signs in order to form agreements or joyful encounters with other bodies. These harmonious synchronicities with other bodies harness life-affirming affects whilst repelling those that threaten to absorb or deplete power. It is only through the construction of “concepts” – an understanding of causality – that it is possible to move from the realm of inadequate ideas towards the production of “adequate ideas from which true actions ensue” (Deleuze, Spinoza and the Three Ethics 143). According to Spinoza’s Ethics, the challenge is to attempt to move from a state in which existence is passively experienced – or suffered blindly – as a series of effects upon the body, towards understanding – and working harmoniously with – the causes themselves. In his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Gilles Deleuze suggests that this shift occurs through consciously selecting those affects that offer the possibilities of augmentation (an increase in power through joy) rather than diminution (the decrease of power through sadness). Whilst Spinoza appears to denounce affects as simply inadequate ideas that should be avoided, Deleuze argues that there are certain life-affirming or joyful affects that can be seen as the “dark precursors” of the notions (The Three Ethics 144). According to Deleuze, whilst such “signs of augmentation remain passions and the ideas that they presuppose remain inadequate,” they alone have the capacity to enable the individual to increase in power, for the “selection” of affect is in itself the “condition of leaving the first kind of knowledge, and for attaining the concept” (The Three Ethics 144). For Deleuze-Spinoza, the production of subjectivity is a form of endeavour or “passional struggle,” whereby the individual attempts to increase his or her capacity for turning affects or signs into common notions or concepts (The Three Ethics 145). Deleuze argues that the “common notions are an Art, the art of Ethics itself: organising good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting” (Spinoza and Us 119). This is then a life-long project or practice – the making of life into a work of art – focused on increasing one’s potential to affect and be affected by signs that increase power, whilst simultaneously reducing or minimising one’s threshold of affectivity towards those which diminish or reduce it. I am interested in the role that the artist or artist collective could have in the production of this Spinozist model of subjectivity; how they might function as an intermediary or catalyst, creating conditions or events in which augmentative affects – such as those made possible through a dynamic or active form of stillness – are increased and their energies harnessed. Here perhaps, the affective potential of an art practice is in itself the “dark precursor” of common notions, drawing together bodies in agreement by calling into being an audience or community of experience. On one level, the artist performs an analogous role to Spinoza’s “scholia” – the intermittent sequence of polemical notations “inserted into the demonstrative chain” of propositions – within the Ethics, which according to Deleuze:Operate in the shadows, trying to distinguish between what prevents us from reaching our common notions and what, on the contrary, allows us to do so, what diminishes and what augments our power, the sad signs of our servitude and the joyous signs of our liberations (The Three Ethics 146).Certainly the project, Open City, attempts to draw attention to the habitually endured –or suffered – signs and affects of contemporary experience; striving to remedy the sad affects of capitalism through the production of playful, disruptive or even joyful interventions, events and encounters between bodies in agreement. The disempowering experience or affect of being controlled – blocked, stopped or restricted – by societal or moral codes and civic laws, is replaced by a minor logic of ambiguous, arbitrary and optional rules. Such rules foreground experimentation and request an ethical rather than obedient engagement that in turn serves to liberate the individual from habitual passivity. Open City attempts to reveal – and then resist or refuse – the hidden rules that determine how to operate or perform within contemporary capitalism, the coded orders on how to behave, move and interact. It exposes such insidious legislation as constructs whose logic has been put in place or brought into effect over time, and which in turn might be revoked, dislocated or challenged. For Open City, the performance of stillness can be used as a gesture through which to break from or rupture the orchestrated and controlled flow of capitalist behaviours and its sad affects. Image 3: Open City, documentation of performance, Nottingham, 2008. Random acts of stillness produce moments of friction within the smooth, regulated flows of contemporary capitalism; singularised or inconsistent glitches or jolts that call to attention its unnoticed rhythms and temporal speeds, by becoming its counter-point or by appropriating its “language” for “strange and minor uses” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Dawdling or meandering reveals the fierceness of the city’s unspoken bylaws, whilst the societal pressure towards speed and efficiency is thwarted by moments of deliberate non-production, inaction and the act of doing nothing. In one example of collective action – at noon on a shopping street – around fifty pedestrians, suddenly and without warning, stop still in their tracks and remain like this for five minutes before resuming their daily activity. In another, a group of individuals draw to a standstill and slowly sway from side to side; their stillness becomes a device for affecting a block or obstacle that limits or modifies others’ behaviour, creating an infinitely imaginable ricochet of further breaks and amendments to routine journeys and directional flows. Open City often mimics or misuses familiar behavioural patterns witnessed in the public realm, inhabiting their language or codes in a way that playfully transforms their use or proposes elasticity or flexibility therein. Habitual or routine actions are isolated and disinvested of their function or purpose, or become repeated until all sense of teleological imperative is wholly evacuated or rendered absurd. For example, a lone person stops still and holds their hand out to check for rain. Over and over, the same action is repeated but by different individuals; the authenticity of the original gesture shattered and separated from any causal motivation by the reverberations of its uncanny echo. Such performed actions remove or distance the response or reaction from its originary stimulus or excitation, creating an affective gap between – a no longer known or present – cause and its effect. This however, is not to return action back to realm of Spinoza’s first order of knowledge – where the body only experiences effects and remains ignorance of their cause – but rather an attempt to create a gap or space of “hesitancy” in which a form of creativity might emerge. Within the act of stillness, habitually imperceptible rhythms and speeds become visible. By being still it is possible to witness or attend to the presence of different or heterogeneous temporal “refrains” or durations operating beneath and within the surface appearance of capitalism’s homogeneous flow.Open City attempts to recuperate the creative potential within those moments of stillness generated through the accelerated technologies of contemporary capitalism: the situational ennui endured whilst waiting or queuing; the moments of collective and synchronised impasse controlled by technologies such as traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and even – though perhaps more abstractly – the nebulous experience of paralysis and impotency induced by fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Performances attempt to neutralise these various diminutive affects by re-inhabiting or re-framing them; ‘turning’ their stillness towards a form of memorial, protest or social gathering, or alternatively rendering it seemingly empty, unreadable or absurd. This emptiness can also be understood as a form of disinterestedness that refuses to react to immediate stimulus – or lack of – and rather remains open to other possibilities of existence or inhabitation. Stillness is curiously equivocal, an “ambiguous or fluctuating sign” that has the capacity to “affect us with joy and sadness at the same time” (Deleuze The Three Ethics 140). The external appearance of stillness is ultimately blank, its “event” able to affect a “vectorial passage” of contradictory directions, towards an “increase or decrease, growth or decline, joy or sadness” (Deleuze, The Three Ethics 140). Open City attempts to transform the – potentially – diminutive affects of stillness into “augmentative powers” by occupying the stillness of contemporary capitalism as a disguise or camouflage for producing invisible performances that hijack a familiar language in order to misuse its terms. More recently Open City have adapted or occupied the moments of stillness made possible or enabled by everyday technologies: the inconsistent rhythm patterns of stopping, pausing or circling about on the spot exhibited by someone absorbed in a mobile-phone call, text messaging or changing a track on their MP3 player. Here, certain technologies allow, legitimate or even give permission for the disruption of the flow of movement within the city, or are used as a device through which to explore and exploit the potential of collective synchronised action through the use of recorded instructions.Image 4: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008).The alienating and atomising affects of such personal technologies – which are habitually used and isolate the individual from their immediate surroundings and from others around them – are transformed into tools for producing collective action. In one sense, Open City’s performances operate as a form of “minor art” as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, where a major language – the dominant order of capitalism and control – is neutralised or deterritorialised before being “appropriated for strange and minor uses” (17). For Deleuze and Guattari a minor practice is always political and collective, signalling the “movement from the individual to a ‘collective multiplicity’” where there is no longer an individual subject as such but “only collective assemblages of enunciation”(18). The minor always operates within the terms of the major but functions as a destabilising agent where it attempts – according to Simon O’Sullivan – to “stammer and stutter the commodity form, disassembling those already existing forms of capital and indeed moving beyond the latter’s very logic” (73). However, as with all acts of deterritorialisation there is always the potential that they will in turn become reterritorialised; assimilated or absorbed back into the language of the “major”. This can be seen, for example, in the way that the proposed radical potential of the flash-mob phenomenon has been swiftly recuperated through the language of the corporate publicity campaigns of high-profile companies – specifically telecommunication multi-nationals - for whom the terms ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ are developed as Unique Selling Points for further capitalist gain.By contrast, the intent of Open City is to create an event that operates not only as a visible rupture, but which also has the capacity to transform or radicalise the subjectivities of those involved beyond the duration of the event itself. Open City encourage the movement from the individual to a “collective multiplicity,” through performances that produce synchronised action where individuals become temporally united by a rule or instruction that they are collectively adhering to. Publicly distributed postcards have been used to invite or instruct as-yet-unknown publics to participate in collective action, setting the terms for the possibility of imagined or future assemblies. Or more recently, recorded spoken word instructions listened to using MP3 player technology have been used to harmonise the speeds, stillness and slowness of individual bodies to produce the possibility of a new collective rhythm or “refrain” (Guattari, Subjectivities). For example, within the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008) a group of individuals were led on a guided walk in which they engaged with a series of spoken instructions listened to using MP3 player technology. The instructions invited a number of discreet performances culminating in a collective moment of stillness that was at once a public spectacle and a space of self-contained or private reflection. Image 5: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008). Once still, the individuals listened to a further spoken text which interrogated how the act of ‘being still’ might shift in meaning moving from or between different positions. For example, stillness can be experienced as a controlling or restrictive mode of enforced waiting, as an act of resistant refusal or protest, or alternatively as a model of quiet contemplation or idle daydreaming. For Spinoza, a body is defined by its speeds and slowness – by the relationship between motion and rest – and by its capacity to affect and be affected. In attempting to synchronise the speeds and affectivity of individuals through group action, Open City create the conditions for the production of Spinoza’s “common notions” – or second kind of knowledge – through the organisation of a collective or shared understanding of causality by bodies in agreement. Acts of collective stillness also function in an analogous manner to the transitional or liminal phase within ritual performance by producing the possibility of “communitas,” the transient experience of togetherness or even of collective subjectivity. In From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, anthropologist Victor Turner identifies a form of “existential or spontaneous communitas” – an acute experience of community – experienced by individuals immersed in the "no longer/not yet" liminal space of a given ritualistic process, in which “the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (44). Stillness is presented as pure disinterestedness, a non-teleological event enabling nothing but the possibility of a community of experience to come into being.Within Open City then, the gesture of stillness recurs as a device or “event-encounter” for simultaneously producing a break or hiatus in an already existing formulation of experience, at the same time as creating a gap or space of possibility in which to imagine or affirm an alternative mode of being. Referring to the Deleuzian notion of encounter, O’Sullivan reflects on the dual presence of rupture and affirmation within the moment of encounter itself whereby “our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted” (Sullivan,xxiv). He argues that the encounter:Operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However … the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently (Sullivan, xxv).Open City attempts to create the conditions for these dual possibilities – of rupture and affirmation – through the production of joyful encounters between bodies within the event of performed stillness. Stillness operates as a double gesture where it creates a stop or block – a break with the already existing or with the events of the past – and also a moment of pause, the liminal space of projection; a future-oriented or preparatory zone of pure potentiality. Stillness thus offers the simultaneous possibility of termination and of a new beginning, within which it becomes possible to move from a paradigm of resistance – to the present conditions of existence – towards one of augmentative refusal or proposal that invites reflection on a still future-possible way of life. Poised at a point of anticipation or as a prophetic mode of waiting, stillness offers the promise of as-yet-undecided possibilities where options for future action or existence remain momentarily open, not yet known. Collective stillness thus always has a quality of “futurity” by creating the transitional conditions of communitas or the possibility of a community emerging outside or beyond the temporal frame of capitalism: a community that is still in waiting. ReferencesBergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari.“What Is a Minor Literature.” Kafka toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Deleuze, Gilles. “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998.———. “Life as a Work of Art.” Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York: Columbia U P, 1995.———. “Spinoza and Us.” Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Guattari, Felix. “Subjectivities: For Better and for Worse.” The Guattari Reader. Ed. G. Genosko. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.Foucault, Michel. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. L. Kritzman. London: Routledge, 1990.O’Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Trans. A Boyle. London: Everyman, 1989. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

1. A Minor Philosopher According to Guattari and Deleuze's definition, a 'minor literature' is the literature of a minority that makes use of a major language, a literature which deterritorialises that language and interconnects meanings of the most disparate levels, inseparably mixing and implicating poetic, psychological, social and political issues with each other. In analogy, the Japanese media theorist Toshiya Ueno has refered to Félix Guattari as a 'minor philosopher'. Himself a practicing psychoanalyst, Guattari was a foreigner to the Grand Nation of Philosophy, whose natives mostly treat him like an unworthy bastard. And yet he has established a garden of minor flowers, of mongrel weeds and rhizomes that are as polluting to philosophy as Kafka's writing has been to German literature (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka). The strategies of 'being minor' are, as exemplified by Guattari's writings (with and without Deleuze), deployed in multiple contexts: intensification, re-functionalisation, estrangement, transgression. The following offers a brief overview over the way in which Guattari conceptualises media, new technologies and art, as well as descriptions of several media art projects that may help to illustrate the potentials of such 'minor machines'. Without wanting to pin these projects down as 'Guattarian' artworks, I suggest that the specific practices of contemporary media artists can point us in the direction of the re-singularising, deterritorialising and subjectifying forces which Guattari indicated as being germane to media technologies. Many artists who work with media technologies do so through strategies of appropriation and from a position of 'being minor': whenever a marginality, a minority, becomes active, takes the word power (puissance de verbe), transforms itself into becoming, and not merely submitting to it, identical with its condition, but in active, processual becoming, it engenders a singular trajectory that is necessarily deterritorialising because, precisely, it's a minority that begins to subvert a majority, a consensus, a great aggregate. As long as a minority, a cloud, is on a border, a limit, an exteriority of a great whole, it's something that is, by definition, marginalised. But here, this point, this object, begins to proliferate ..., begins to amplify, to recompose something that is no longer a totality, but that makes a former totality shift, detotalises, deterritorialises an entity.' (Guattari, "Pragmatic/Machinic") In the context of media art, 'becoming minor' is a strategy of turning major technologies into minor machines. a. Krzysztof Wodiczko (PL/USA): Alien Staff Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff is a mobile communication system and prosthetic instrument which facilitates the communication of migrants in their new countries of residence, where they have insufficient command of the local language for communicating on a par with the native inhabitants. Alien Staff consists of a hand-held staff with a small video monitor and a loudspeaker at the top. The operator can adjust the height of the staff's head to be at a level with his or her own head. Via the video monitor, the operator can replay pre-recorded elements of an interview or a narration of him- or herself. The recorded material may contain biographical information when people have difficulties constructing coherent narratives in the foreign language, or it may include the description of feelings and impressions which the operator normally doesn't get a chance to talk about. The Staff is used in public places where passers-by are attracted to listen to the recording and engage in a conversation with the operator. Special transparent segments of the staff contain memorabilia, photographs or other objects which indicate a part of the personal history of the operator and which are intended to instigate a conversation. The Alien Staff offers individuals an opportunity to remember and retell their own story and to confront people in the country of immigration with this particular story. The Staff reaffirms the migrant's own subjectivity and re-singularises individuals who are often perceived as representative of a homogenous group. The instrument displaces expectations of the majority audience by articulating unformulated aspects of the migrant's subjectivity through a medium that appears as the attractive double of an apparently 'invisible' person. 2. Mass Media, New Technologies and 'Planetary Computerisation' Guattari's comments about media are mostly made in passing and display a clearly outlined opinion about the role of media in contemporary society: a staunch critique of mass media is coupled with an optimistic outlook to the potentials of a post-medial age in which new technologies can develop their singularising, heterogenic forces. The latter development is, as Guattari suggests, already discernible in the field of art and other cultural practices making use of electronic networks, and can lead to a state of 'planetary computerisation' in which multiple new subject-groups can emerge. Guattari consistently refers to the mass media with contempt, qualifying them as a stupefying machinery that is closely wedded to the forces of global capitalism, and that is co-responsible for much of the reactionary hyper-individualism, the desperation and the "state of emergency" that currently dominates "four-fifth of humanity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 97; cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 16, 21). Guattari makes a passionate plea for a new social ecology and formulates, as one step towards this goal, the necessity, "to guide these capitalist societies of the age of mass media into a post-mass medial age; by this I mean that the mass media have to be reappropriated by a multiplicity of subject-groups who are able to administer them on a path of singularisation" (Guattari, "Regimes" 64). Guattari consistently refers to the mass media with contempt, qualifying them as a stupefying machinery that is closely wedded to the forces of global capitalism, and that is co-responsible for much of the reactionary hyper-individualism, the desperation and the "state of emergency" that currently dominates "four-fifth of humanity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 97; cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 16, 21). Guattari makes a passionate plea for a new social ecology and formulates, as one step towards this goal, the necessity, "to guide these capitalist societies of the age of mass media into a post-mass medial age; by this I mean that the mass media have to be reappropriated by a multiplicity of subject-groups who are able to administer them on a path of singularisation" (Guattari, "Regimes" 64). b. Seiko Mikami (J/USA): World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body An art project that deals with the cut between the human subject and the body, and with the deterritorialisation of the sense of self, is Seiko Mikami's World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body. It uses the visitor's heart and lung sounds which are amplified and transformed within the space of the installation. These sounds create a gap between the internal and external sounds of the body. The project is presented in an-echoic room where sound does not reverberate. Upon entering this room, it is as though your ears are no longer living while paradoxically you also feel as though all of your nerves are concentrated in your ears. The sounds of the heart, lungs, and pulse beat are digitised by the computer system and act as parameters to form a continuously transforming 3-d polygonal mesh of body sounds moving through the room. Two situations are effected in real time: the slight sounds produced by the body itself resonate in the body's internal membranes, and the transfigured resonance of those sounds is amplified in the space. A time-lag separates both perceptual events. The visitor is overcome by the feeling that a part of his or her corporeality is under erasure. The body exists as abstract data, only the perceptual sense is aroused. The visitor is made conscious of the disappearance of the physical contours of his or her subjectivity and thereby experiences being turned into a fragmented body. The ears mediate the space that exists between the self and the body. Mikami's work fragments the body and its perceptual apparatus into data, employing them as interfaces and thus folding the body's horizon back onto itself. The project elucidates the difference between an actual and a virtual body, the actual body being deterritorialised and projected outwards towards a number of potential, virtual bodies that can, in the installation, be experienced as maybe even more 'real' than the actual body. 3. Artistic Practice Guattari's conception of post-media implies criss-crossing intersections of aesthetic, ethical, political and technological planes, among which the aesthetic, and with it artistic creativity, are ascribed a position of special prominence. This special role of art is a trope that recurs quite frequently in Guattari's writings, even though he is rarely specific about the artistic practices he has in mind. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari give some detailled attention to the works of artists like Debussy, Boulez, Beckett, Artaud, Kafka, Kleist, Proust, and Klee, and Chaosmosis includes longer passages and concrete examples for the relevance of the aesthetic paradigm. These examples come almost exclusively from the fields of performing arts, music and literature, while visual arts are all but absent. One reason for this could be that the performing arts are time-based and processual and thus lend themselves much better to theorisation of flows, transformations and differentiations. The visual arts can be related to the abstract machine of faciality (visageité) which produces unified, molar, identical entities out of a multiplicity of different singularities, assigning them to a specific category and associating them with particular social fields (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, Tausend Plateaus 167-91) This semiotic territorialisation is much more likely to happen in the case of static images, whether two- or three-dimensional, than in time-based art forms. An interesting question, then, would be whether media art projects, many of which are time-based, processual and open-ended, can be considered as potential post-medial art practices. Moreover, given the status of computer software as the central motor of the digital age, and the crucial role it plays in aesthetic productions like those discussed here, software may have to be viewed as the epitome of post-medial machines. Guattari seems to have been largely unaware of the beginnings of digital media art as it developed in the 1980s. In generalistic terms he suggests that the artist is particularly well-equipped to conceptualise the necessary steps for this work because, unlike engineers, he or she is not tied to a particular programme or plan for a product, and can change the course of a project at any point if an unexpected event or accident intrudes (cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 50). The significance of art for Guattari's thinking comes primarily from its close relation with processes of subjectivation. "Just as scientific machines constantly modify our cosmic frontiers, so do the machines of desire and aesthetic creation. As such, they hold an eminent place within assemblages of subjectivation, themselves called to relieve our old social machines which are incapable of keeping up with the efflorescence of machinic revolutions that shatter our epoch' (Guattari, Chaosmosis 54). The aesthetic paradigm facilitates the development of new, virtual forms of subjectivity, and of liberation, which will be adequate to these machinic revolutions. c. Knowbotic Research + cF: IO_Dencies The Alien Staff project was mentioned as an example for the re-singularisation and the virtualisation of identity, and World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body as an instance of the deterritorialisation and virtualisation of the human body through an artistic interface. The recent project by Knowbotic Research, IO_Dencies -- Questioning Urbanity, deals with the possibilities of agency, collaboration and construction in translocal and networked environments. It points in the direction of what Guattari has called the formation of 'group subjects' through connective interfaces. The project looks at urban settings in different megacities like Tokyo, São Paulo or the Ruhr Area, analyses the forces present in particular local urban situations, and offers experimental interfaces for dealing with these local force fields. IO_Dencies São Paulo enables the articulation of subjective experiences of the city through a collaborative process. Over a period of several months, a group of young architects and urbanists from São Paulo, the 'editors', provided the content and dynamic input for a database. The editors collected material (texts, images, sounds) based on their current situation and on their personal urban experience. A specially designed editor tool allowed the editors to build individual conceptual 'maps' in which to construct the relations between the different materials in the data-pool according to the subjective perception of the city. On the computational level, connectivities are created between the different maps of the editors, a process that is driven by algorithmic self-organisation whose rules are determined by the choices that the editors make. In the process, the collaborative editorial work in the database generates zones of intensities and zones of tension which are visualised as force fields and turbulences and which can be experienced through interfaces on the Internet and at physical exhibition sites. Participants on the Net and in the exhibition can modify and influence these electronic urban movements, force fields and intensities on an abstract, visual level, as well as on a content-based, textual level. This engagement with the project and its material is fed back into the database and influences the relational forces within the project's digital environment. Characteristic of the forms of agency as they evolve in networked environments is that they are neither individualistic nor collective, but rather connective. Whereas the collective is determined by an intentional and empathetic relation between agents within an assemblage, the connective rests on any kind of machinic relation and is therefore more versatile, more open, and based on the heterogeneity of its components or members. In the IO_Dencies interfaces, the different networked participants become visible for each other, creating a trans-local zone of connective agency. The inter-connectedness of their activities can be experienced visually, acoustically, and through the constant reconfiguration of the data sets, an experience which can become the basis of the formation of a specific, heterogeneous group subject. 4. Guattari's Concept of the Machinic An important notion underlying these analyses is that of the machine which, for Guattari, relates not so much to particular technological or mechanical objects, to the technical infrastructure or the physical flows of the urban environment. 'Machines' can be social bodies, industrial complexes, psychological or cultural formations, they are assemblages of heterogeneous parts, aggregations which transform forces, articulate and propel their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and becoming. An important notion underlying these analyses is that of the machine which, for Guattari, relates not so much to particular technological or mechanical objects, to the technical infrastructure or the physical flows of the urban environment. 'Machines' can be social bodies, industrial complexes, psychological or cultural formations, they are assemblages of heterogeneous parts, aggregations which transform forces, articulate and propel their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and becoming. d. Xchange Network My final example is possibly the most evocative in relation to Guattari's notions of the polyvocity and heterogenesis that new media technologies can trigger. It also links up closely with Guattari's own engagement with the minor community radio movement. In late 1997, the E-Lab in Riga initiated the Xchange network for audio experiments on the Internet. The participating groups in London, Ljubljana, Sydney, Berlin, and many other minor and major places, use the Net for distributing their original sound programmes. The Xchange network is "streaming via encoders to remote servers, picking up the stream and re-broadcasting it purely or re-mixed, looping the streams" (Rasa Smite). Xchange is a distributed group, a connective, that builds creative cooperation in live-audio streaming on the communication channels that connect them. They explore the Net as a sound-scape with particular qualities regarding data transmission, delay, feedback, and open, distributed collaborations. Moreover, they connect the network with a variety of other fields. Instead of defining an 'authentic' place of their artistic work, they play in the transversal post-medial zone of media labs in different countries, mailing lists, net-casting and FM broadcasting, clubs, magazines, stickers, etc., in which 'real' spaces and media continuously overlap and fuse (cf. Slater). 5. Heterogenic Practices If we want to understand the technological and the political implications of the machinic environment of the digital networks, and if we want to see the emergence of the group subjects of the post-media age Guattari talks about, we have to look at connectives like Xchange and the editor-participant assemblages of IO_Dencies. The far-reaching machinic transformations which they articulate, hold the potential of what Guattari refers to as the 'molecular revolution'. To realise this revolution, it is vital to "forge new analytical instruments, new concepts, because it is ... the transversality, the crossing of abstract machines that constitute a subjectivity and that are incarnated, that live in very different regions and domains and ... that can be contradictory and antagonistic". For Guattari, this is not a mere theoretical question, but one of experimentation, "of new forms of interactions, of movement construction that respects the diversity, the sensitivities, the particularities of interventions, and that is nonetheless capable of constituting antagonistic machines of struggle to intervene in power relations" (Guattari, "Pragmatic/Machinic" 4-5). The implication here is that some of the minor media practices pursued by artists using digital technologies point us in the direction of the positive potentials of post media. The line of flight of such experimentation is the construction of new and strong forms of subjectivity, "an individual and/or collective reconstitution of the self" (Guattari, Drei Ökologien 21), which can strengthen the process of what Guattari calls "heterogenesis, that is a continuous process of resingularisation. The individuals must, at the same time, become solidary and ever more different" (Guattari, Drei Ökologien 76). References Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Pour une Litterature Mineur. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1975. ---. Tausend Plateaus. (1980) Berlin: Merve, 1992. Guattari, Félix. Cartographies Schizoanalytiques. Paris: Ed. Galilée, 1989. ---. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. (1992) Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. ---. Die drei Ökologien. (1989) Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994. ---. "Pragmatic/Machinic." Discussion with Guattari, conducted and transcribed by Charles J. Stivale. (1985) Pre/Text 14.3-4 (1995). ---. "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects." Die drei Ökologien. (1989) Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994. 95-108. ---. "Über Maschinen." (1990) Schmidgen, 115-32. Knowbotic Research. IO_Dencies. 1997-8. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://io.khm.de/>. De Landa, Manuel. "The Machinic Phylum." Technomorphica. Eds. V2_Organisation. Rotterdam: V2_Organisation, 1997. Mikami, Seiko. World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body. 1997. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://www.ntticc.or.jp/permanent/mikami/mikami_e.php>. Schmidgen, Henning, ed. Ästhetik und Maschinismus: Texte zu und von Félix Guattari. Berlin: Merve, 1995. ---. Das Unbewußte der Maschinen: Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan. München: Fink, 1997. Slater, Howard. "Post-Media Operators." Nettime, 10 June 1998. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://www.factory.org>. Wodiczko, Krzysztof. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://cavs.mit.edu/people/kw.htm>. Xchange. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://xchange.re-lab.net>. (Note: An extended, Dutch version of this text was published in: Oosterling/Thissen, eds. Chaos ex Machina: Het ecosofisch Werk van Félix Guattari op de Kaart Gezet. Rotterdam: CFK, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Andreas Broeckmann. "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php>. Chicago style: Andreas Broeckmann, "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Andreas Broeckmann. (1999) Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php> ([your date of access]).

Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. Dir./Filmmaker John Little. Netflix DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000. Daidjo, Yuzan. Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Tuttle Martial Arts. Boston: Tuttle, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,1987. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Netflix DVD. Artisan, 2000. Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan. New Haven: Yale UP,1998. Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Jansen, Marius, ed. Warrior Rule in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays. Trans. Donald Richie. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Lanzagorta, Marco. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” Senses of Cinema. Sept-Oct 2002. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/ghost_dog.htm>. Mol, Serge. Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Eubanks, Kevin P. "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>. APA Style Eubanks, K. (May 2007) "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>.