This paper offers a rhizomatic reading of Foucault scholarship in anglophone educational research. It delineates unique parameters of an educational field, the conditions of receptivity for Foucault's work, and identifies three temporary plateau-formations that have erupted in educational research. Indebted to (non-formulaic) principles of connectivity and heterogeneity, multiplicity, and asignifying ruptures the analysis brings to notice the recombinatorial attributes of the discipline of education through attention to what is encamped and what seeps in debates over his work.

Exploring long-term educational change, we investigate our re/construction of research methodology as we moved from a positivist framework to working with ideas drawn from Deleuze and Guattari. We reveal our becoming rhizomatic in data analysis in the metamodelling of the richness flowing horizontally through our practices. We tell of our struggles to escape hierarchical thinking and relations researching between the smooth and striated. A space of interactions, conversations and writings created relations between polyphonic voices, leading us to an emergent methodology. (...) Our struggle against hierarchies in data analysis yielded rich educational possibilities for becoming that Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking offers us. (shrink)

Colonization has traditionally been studied as a monological and definitive period. This article seeks to problematize its analysis by means of the so-called ‘philosophy of desire’ and ‘rhizomatic thinking’, enriching them, in methodological terms, by the Actor-Network-Theory. In this vein, an alternative explanation of the colonial regime is offered by emphasizing how it assembled several worlds—Indigenous and Europeans—guided by a desiring-production that put originary accumulation before anything else; a standpoint that also enables a discussion about the network of colonial education (...) deployed in the Audiencia de Quito, which can be evidenced by a revision of some actions of the Augustinian order during the sixteenth century. In conclusion, education was deeply related to colonial assemblage that was continuously deterritorializing the ‘New World’ and the indigenous cultures that inhabited it. (shrink)

For decades, nursing as a discipline has tried to establish itself within the socio‐professional and the socio‐political arenas. To date, several theorists have attempted to thoroughly define the essence (ontology) of nursing while others have proposed means (syntax) to achieve this ‘collective’ objective. Considering that this preoccupation, rooted in essentialism, is pervasive in the nursing literature, our claim is that these quests should be criticized because they impede innovative and transdisciplinary approaches to nursing theory. Our criticism includes the perspective supported (...) by the so‐called ‘postmodern nursing theorists’. We argue that the oeuvre of some nursing postmodern scholars is as prescriptive and linear as the ones they critique. Like it was done before, the discourse of these thinkers perpetuates the status quo by excluding alternative forms of knowledge that cross the boundaries of the discipline of nursing. Using the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper proposes an alternative way to conceive the development of nursing knowledge, which, we think, could represent an alternative way to explore the discipline of nursing. (shrink)

Recent work in the theoretical humanities has given increasing importance to what has been termed posthumanism and hypertextuality. For many within the humanities, posthumanism and hypertextuality have become accessible as a result of studies which have interdisciplinarily explored concerns that have evident implications for the humanities interest in aesthetics, ethics, politics, mind, cognition, identity, subjectivity and language. The work of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Elaine Graham, George P. Landow and others has been at the forefront of these initiatives. What (...) perhaps needs to be looked at now is the extent to which the interdisciplinary work that has been built up in this new field (which has been called new cultural theory) is a developing episteme, and how it might affect future ways of writing and thinking in the humanities. The paper proposed attempts to explore how new cultural theory, and especially the digitalist strain in the theoretical humanities, might profitably explore ways of integrating certain key concepts and practices in posthumanism and hypertextuality. Familiarity with the literature of both discourses reveals that while the two have obvious affinities, these have not always been approached in ways which would allow the conceptuality of one field to productively merge with those of the other. What seems to be particularly pressing is some speculation on how thought itself is reshaped through interaction with the new modalities of writing and language, and through attunedness to the potentialities of new posthuman ways of being. For this reason, some reflections will be offered on the implications of present and futuristic practices involving Internet culture and cyborg studies. (shrink)

Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections is the first book length collection of essays exploring the relations between the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson. With contributions by established international scholars from cultural studies, philosophy and theology, Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson examines the articulation between their concepts, methods and modes of doing philosophy and how their thought relates to different disciplines. Organized thematically, each essay examines the section themes in the context of the contrasts, differences and conjunctions--the rhizomatic (...) connections--between their shared concepts. Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson will make a significant impact upon and contribution to the scholarship on these philosophers, challenging many of the preconceptions, the "images of thought," through which they are all too often read and interpreted. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 182-207, Autumn 2021.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Games are used as effective pedagogical tools in language classrooms. Gamifying language tasks can motivate learners to actively participate in the learning process. Probing how games in English language classrooms enable rhizomatic learning, this research study explores how the use of collaborative drawing, elements of gamification, and improvisation function as agents for rhizomatic learning. The study also attempts to find the pedagogical implications of developing learners’ speaking proficiency through map-drawing games. In the intervention, a teacher-led map-drawing game adapted from The (...) Quiet Year by Avery Alder was used with 7th-grade learners from India to understand how this game influences their speaking proficiency. The learners in groups engaged in the game by drawing maps, building communities, and creatively responding to the prompt cards facilitated by the researcher. This qualitative study illustrates the non-linear affordances of rhizomatic learning through games in an English language classroom. Post-game activities, such as discussions with hypothetical questioning through prompt cards were analysed. The findings of the study discuss the pedagogical implications of developing learners’ speaking proficiency through games. The results may also assist researchers and educators in formulating more strategies that involve creative practices and gamification of tasks in language classrooms with the informed nature of rhizomatic learning. (shrink)

I appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain for a feminist analysis of the girl because it offers more insight into the ways girls construct themselves as performative networks than the death-by-culture or at-risk model preferred by such feminists as Jean Kilbourne, Carol Gilligan, and even Susan Bordo. I proffer that it costs women everything to practise a politics of difference that is by definition reactionary, a reaction to the cultural refusal of leaky gendered bodies that must be overcome. (...) Girl is mapped through such alternations as powerful aggregates of the tremulous, roaming emissions of monstrous particles most desired and desirous. (shrink)

This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor rep...

Adopting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's formulations of the rhizome, this article will examine a dynamic that lies between the film Japón's (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) vernacular specificities, European modernist aesthetics and cosmopolitan spectatorship. The article aims to reveal that Japón, along with other contemporary slow films from around the world, has the potential to reify a deterritorialising and reterritorialising encounter that rethinks a Eurocentric genealogical reading of world cinema and challenges a capitalist code of filmmaking.

Volume 52, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 217-219.

The past four decades and more have been dominated by the rise of neoliberalism, globalization of economic activities, financialization and the pursuit of profits. There have been major waves of pr...

Viewed from some postcolonial/postmodern perspectives by employing mostly the micropolitics of Homi Bhabha’s and Gilles Deleuze (and other theorists who hold similar conceptions), whose major common interest lies in dismantling the myth of establishing an imagined community by retrieving a shared national history/culture and assuming ethnic purity, this paper seeks to explore the paradoxical aspects of Taiwan’s quest in her decolonizing progress for a “collective” national/cultural identity. Besides, this paper compares mostly Taiwan’s decolonization process with South Korea’s because of their (...) similarity in territorial division due to some civil wars and the intervention of external powers (e.g., the former Soviet Union and U.S.A.). By so doing, this paper aims to propose some solution to Taiwanese’s dilemma in constructing a “collective” national /cultural identity. (shrink)

Currently, global society is delicately poised on a civilisational threshold similar to that of the feudal era. This is a time when outmoded institutions, values, and systems of thought and their associated dogmas are ripe for transcendence by more relevant systems of organization and knowledge (Davidson, 2000). The foundations of the modern era (including modern educational institutions) are under sharp scrutiny; the fragmentation of nature, society and self is evidence of the cracks in the foundations. In times of crises old (...) questions often come to the fore. For example, as environmental problems reach unprecedented levels the perennial existential question of how we should live is emerging once more. So too are educational questions such as what and how we should learn. But, times of crises also present new opportunities, create fresh imaginings and alternative meanings, metaphors and languages.In this paper I wish to appraise sustainability (and its epithets such as development) as a new discourse that emerged in the late 20th century in response to the psycho-socio-environmental crises of the time. I shall also examine the (in)capacity of disciplinary knowledge and traditional scholarship to respond to the complex and pressing problems of contemporary society. Finally, I will critically discuss the role that new modes of knowledge production, an expanded view of scholarship and alternative metaphors might play in (re)imagining the university's role in sustainability education. (shrink)

This essay enacts a philosophy of science education inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's figurations of rhizomatic and nomadic thought. It imagines rhizomes shaking the tree of modern Western science and science education by destabilising arborescent conceptions of knowledge as hierarchically articulated branches of a central stem or trunk rooted in firm foundations, and explores how becoming nomadic might liberate science educators from the sedentary judgmental positions that serve as the nodal points of Western academic science education theorising. This (...) is demonstrated by commencing two rhizomatic textual assemblages that generate questions, provocations and challenges to dominant discourses and assumptions of contemporary science education. The first of these addresses cultural representations of Sir Isaac Newton and the second makes multiple, hybrid connections among the parasites, mosquitoes, humans, technologies and socio‐technical relations signified by malaria. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here (...) we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

This paper takes Deleuze's idea ‘to green’ as a qualitative predicate which becomes a rhizomatic event where Jesper Hoffmeyer's ‘plant being’ contemplates through waves and rhythms, hence affects and percepts. The article then brings forward an intertwined group of Chinese ideograms which are designed with plant-radicals, making up an ecosystem towards the establishment of a new Chinese ecocriticism under the banner of biosemiotics. Such an effort will, hopefully, widen the scope and dimension of the new field of environmental humanities, with (...) an emphasis on the scenario of affective attuning to the agency of vegetal life. The main purpose is to put Deleuze and Guattari's form-event assemblage within the stratification of regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus, in order to establish a ‘natureculture’ continuity not only between science and art, but also between a Western rethinking of language/culture and a Chinese ecosystem/ecocriticism. (shrink)

Introduction: Cartographies in becoming -- The happy depression -- Integrated world capitalism -- Planetary psychopathia -- Postmediatic affect -- User's manual-- Deleuze and the rhizomatic machine -- Why is anti-Oedipus the book of the '68 movement? -- Kafka, hypertext, and assemblages -- The tantric egg -- Chaosmosis -- The provisional eternity of friendship.

Robots equipped with artificial intelligence pose a huge challenge to traditional ontological differentiations between the spheres of the human and the non-human. Drawing mainly from neo-animistic and perspectivist approaches in anthropology and science and technology studies, the paper explores the potential of new forms of interconnectedness and rhizomatic entanglements between humans and a world transcending the boundaries between species and material spheres. We argue that intelligent robots meet virtually all criteria Western biology came up with to define ‘life’ and that (...) it ultimately makes sense to recognize them as a new species that is part of our social universe. Contrasting dualistic concepts of man and nature with a monistic approach, we show that traditional properties of life (agency, self-replication, etc.) may apply to artefacts and that, once we accept the idea that social relationships are ultimately open connections to matter of any kind, the seemingly strict boundaries between species and material spheres can no longer be sustained. Instead, we propose to include ‘matter’ and ideas into the sphere of the social as agents in their own right to form a _relational ontology of multi-species assemblages_ (ROMA). (shrink)

The screen is not a pre established object: it becomes a screen—and that screen—when it interacts with a group of elements and relates to a set of practices that produce it as a screen. In this process of becoming screen, a crucial step is played by the space in which the screen is located and where spectators gather. The confluence of screen and space changes our perception of both: the screen displays the situatedness of its action, and the space its (...) nature of medium. The landscape becomes a screenscape, in which individuals access images through which they negotiate with reality and others. Eventually, the insistence on becoming screen highlights the role of contingency and conjuncture in the process of mediation: screenscapes emerge according opportunities, conflicts, and potentialities. Hence a media archeology that, far from being linear and teleological, follows unpredicted paths and creates surprising links—a rhizomatic media archeology. (shrink)

Deleuze's theory of difference revolves around the idea that fusion and fission--the extreme external limits of functioning systems--represent the death of these systems. In order to maintain their duree, qualitative difference and change, systems internalize the external limits in conditions of repeated contraction and dilatation which constitute the inclusive disjunctive law of their function. This basic idea permits Deleuze to articulate an ontology of difference and repetition, a minoritarian theory of language and a version of materialist politics which support each (...) other and strengthen the cause of radical pluralism. Deleuze's ontology substitutes Difference for Being, introduces the intensive media of space and time, takes intensity to be the sentiendum of quality and extension, holds the synthesizing Ideas to be problematic and problem-setting multiplicities of differentiated elements, and argues that the repetition of the eternal return guarantees different/ciation by dissolving the identity of the "unity of apperception". The minoritarian theory of language is similarly constituted. The external limit of language, represented by self-referential and self-predicative elements, would be the death of language. On the other hand, watchwords and poetic utterances through their self-referentiality and self-predication makes language possible. The former attempt to fuse language and to overcode sign-regimes, whereas the latter highlight the interval, the "estrangement-effects" and the rhizomatic proliferation of lines of escape. Finally, the emancipatory interest which animates Deleuze's theory of difference is grounded on the notion "body without organs". The ontological, schizoanalytic and political appropriation of this immanent-transcendent referance, together with Deleuze's claim that it is the body without organs which renders possible "energetic" desire--both in paranoid and schizophrenic "arrangements"--crown this theory of difference with critical aspirations. (shrink)

Critical reception has made Pablo Neruda's Canto General sacred, in fixed celebratory formulas. In the same way, it has established Spain, Chile and Machu Picchu as semi-sacred places of the poetry of said collection. Starting from the idea of ​​Mario Rodríguez that it is time to stop territorializing Neruda, and from the considerations of Deleuze and Guattari who understand that a book becomes more total all the more fragmented, we will add to these spaces the Caribbean, which does not has (...) been approached in relation to this collection of poems, despite the obvious connections that Neruda had with countries in the area in the years when the Canto General was written. The work addresses the idea that the critical updates of this region, which attribute to the territory the shape of a rhizome, would allow configuring the literary space in Canto General in the same way. Book and Caribbean are connected rhizomatically, facilitating the discursive subject to experience processes of becoming that take him away from the molar position in which his critics have territorialized him. It is intended to introduce a fragmented thought into the collection of poems that allows the displacement of identities and molar, absolute and definitive representations of the spaces to place molecular processes in their place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nature and Freedom, Purity and Impurity in Reconsidering the Life of PowerJames Garrison (bio)My book Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy is not so much about providing a systematic account of what it means to be a self-monitoring, self-regulating subject, the branches of which might resolve down to some single root, despite its clear debt to Judith Butler's 1997 The (...) Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection.1 My book is instead more self-consciously rhizomatic in the [End Page 833] manner of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.2 Describing my rhizomatic approach in this book, Joseph Harroff observes in his preceding article that:Instead of thinking about thinking as being conducive to the construction of totalizing systems, final vocabularies, or epistemic closure, Garrison connects our embodied reflection in the interstices of habit to the always changing life of power—that is, the conditions for the possibility of becoming a thinking, feeling, body-subject—to the dynamic and amorphous nature of the multitudinous processes by which we are constantly being rendered subjectival in daily life by forces working relatively synchronically in the present as "subjectivation" and relatively diachronically in cultural traditions as so many forms of "subjectality"3This is a very nuanced way of saying that my efforts to present subject life as being (1) relational, (2) bodily, (3) discursive, and (4) ritually philosophy. Indeed, thoughmpelled have led to a book that sprawls.4 This sprawl is thus like that of a rhizome (think of ginger), not proceeding from a single source of growth with a single, clear arche. Do I revel in the imprecision? Yes, but only when it is justified by the investigation itself. And in the case of this inquiry—which spans what Judith Butler captures regarding ritual performativity by drawing on figures like Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Foucault and the complex approaches to ritual seen in classical and contemporary Rú 儒 philosophy (Confucianism)—the rhizomatic approach very much is.With my book having hopefully earned its own rhizomatic badge of honor, my response to the thoughtful questions posed by Kelly Coble and Joseph Harroff likewise takes up this spirit and cuts its own course through what has been presented in their articles. Hence, I will proceed in a non-linear fashion that draws links between ideas capriciously and unapologetically.That said, my way of looking at Reconsidering the Life of Power and what I immodestly call its insights is far from the only perspective. I hold a copyright on the book (fact check: ctually, it's SUNY Press), but in the marketplace of ideas, I hold no monopoly, even over what I have authored. Therefore, while I feel a degree of ownership over the ideas presented here, I am delighted to see my thinking challenged and extended by people like Kelly Coble and Joseph Harroff in this forum and by others (like Michael J. Ardoline in the article "Building a Way: Becoming Active in One's Own Subjectivation through Deleuze and Xunzi" from the journal Philosophies),5 all of whom see so much present in the text beyond what I, even in its conception, was able.To wit, Joseph Harroff's characterization of my efforts to reclaim and redefine the term "liberal arts" captures so much of what I tried to convey so much more succinctly and with so much more in the way of provocative connection to a wealth of texts of a decidedly European lineage on the connection between freedom, the arts, and self-cultivation.6 However, as he well identifies, whereas classical European conceptions of liberal arts tend to [End Page 834] be more about self-cultivation of an atomic individual, what I am offering is more about finding freedom while taking the "self" in question to be deeply and constitutively relational along the lines that he very effectively links to the pragmatism of John Dewey and also in Rú, philosophy. Indeed, though not much of this specific pragmatist thread made it directly into this book, the influence of Roger T. Ames from my time at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa pervades Reconsidering the Life... (shrink)

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari launched the concept of rhizome as a critical alternative to the ‘root-book’. However, the environment in which we now cultivate our reading habits is not the printed book, but the rhizomatics of the World Wide Web, which according to some leads to distracted ways of reading. Due to the plasticity of the brain, new habits of shared attention make it physiologically more difficult for us to do a deep reading of books. Are (...) Deleuze and Guattari, who simply wanted to open the way to more experimentation, victims of the irony of history? Has the concept of rhizome finished its task? The article discusses the tortured relationship between the rhizome as a philosophical concept and its success as a way to describe the Internet. The Internet, however, only conforms to what they called the ‘canal-rhizome’: the rhizome in its despotic form. Herein lies the concept’s continued relevance. (shrink)

The interrogation of generative design practice with concepts from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus can lead to an understanding of how creative forces are used by generative designers. The shared notion of hyperspaces, respectively parameter space and rhizomatic space, defined as smooth or striated, allows the construction of analogies producing a framework for investigating the development and presentation of form. Richard Dawkins (together with several designers inspired by his biomorphs) and Marcel Wanders, representative of the divergent forms to which (...) generative design has developed since its conception, are used to illustrate and interrogate this framework. From this interrogation the concept of trajectory (inward or outward), the direction in which smooth spaces are explored and striated space constructed, is proposed as a means to guide generative practice. (shrink)

The lepidopteral imaginary that animates Nabokov's relationship to translation can be understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's notions of ‘apparatus of capture’ and ‘rhizomatic becomings’. On the one hand, Nabokov's scientific fascination with butterflies frames his radically literal approach to translation. The scientific dissection of texts and butterflies ‘captures’ an original and singular content as it flutters, reducing it to the homogenised content of a target source. On the other hand, in Speak, Memory's engagement with ‘multiple metamorphoses, familiar to (...) butterflies’, Nabokov as both literary artist and autobiographical personage becomes-butterfly with translation itself, entering into affective intensities with butterflies that include lepidopteral relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness. (shrink)

Neste artigo, interrogamos os funcionamentos do conceito de platô em "Mil Platôs" (1980), a obra-prima de Deleuze e Guattari. Essa pesquisa esclarece, de forma concreta, duas linhas de pensamento, que são a epistemológica, por um lado, e a ética, por outro, enfocando os parágrafos nos quais Deleuze e Guattari usam efetivamente esse conceito. Do ponto de vista epistemológico, o conceito de platô permite praticar uma maneira de escrita rizomática e a explicação antiteleológica. Do ponto de vista ético, esse conceito, tirado (...) de Gregory Bateson, nos convida a formar a alegria contínua e global, ou a gaieté em termos espinosistas. In this paper, we question the workings of the concept of plateau in "A Thousand Plateaus" (1980), Deleuze and Guattari's chef-d'oeuvre. This research specifically clarifies two lines of thought, which are epistemological on the one hand, and ethics on the other hand, focusing on the paragraphs where Deleuze and Guattari actually employ this concept. From the epistemological point of view, the concept of plateau allows practicing a way of rhizomatic writing and anti-teleological explanation. From the point of view of ethics, this concept borrowed from Gregory Bateson invites us to form the continuous and global joy, or gaiety in Spinoza's terms. (shrink)

This book explores the current forms of social science theorization starting from some federative themes: Agency, Anthropocene, Coloniality, Intersectionality, Othering, Singularization, Technoscience and Uncertainty. The book proposes a reconstruction of contemporary social theory starting from some thematic issues rather than starting from authors or schools of thought. It emphasizes the usefulness of a rhizomatic way of thinking that recognizes the importance of interconnections, heterogeneity and multiplicity in understanding the complexity of global societies. Focusing on federative themes, it highlights some heuristic (...) and conceptual tools that intersect and intertwine in different themes, returning a complex toolbox for the social sciences, adaptable to different contexts and situations, enriched by voices and theoretical perspectives deriving from reflections on the social that the modern and Eurocentric perspective has tended to marginalize. The book is intended for an academic audience interested in social theory. It is also intended for students from a wide range of disciplines undertaking social science studies. (shrink)

Does talking about the triumph of the 1986 People Power EDSA Revolution still make sense nowadays? When the ideals of this glorious revolution are now nothing but contents of Philippine history textbooks and items of the culture industry, do we still need to re-imagine it? These are some of the reflective questions that will challenge and guide this paper‟s architecture. In what follows, the author will push all the possibilities for a Nietzschean re- thinking of the EDSA Revolution as “ (...) the experience of difference and an exemplar of ascending life. ” In the first part, an account of the nature of EDSA revolution will be illustrated; while in the second, the principle of the „ Will to Power ‟ and „ Eternal Return ‟ will be explained using Gille s Deleuze‟s rhizomatic eyeglasses. In the third, the narrative of the revolution, i.e., the process on how the Epifanio Delos Santo Avenue turned into an arena for collective-political action will be delineated. Furthermore, the concept of difference will be utilized in explaining the dynamic occurrences produced by the Dionysian assemblage of Filipino bodies. In the last, the challenge of a different return of the said revolution will be explained. (shrink)

In this essay, digital hibridity stands for the perpetual availability of life as both labour and debt for capital, both in real life and online. At the heart of these reflections is the realization that the digital is a regime in which finance capital believes it is finally free from any dependency on social reproduction. With the move from value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption, and from avant-garde to speculation, the digital evolved as the material (...) of capital and the totality of the social has been replaced by the tidal liquidity of finance; immaterial labor, touching images on the screen, the rhizomatic panopticon of the Internet, shock-work on social media, and cryptocurrencies are all examples of the ways in which the digital and financial shadow each other. This new regime entails a series of conversions that change the ways in which meaning is organized—from the point of production to the point of realization, from strikes to riots, from working class to surplus populations, from solidarity to conspiracy, and from organization to petty sovereignty. (shrink)

: As a form of in vivo knowledge, the transdisciplinary methodology suggests going beyond disciplines. According to Nicolescu, this methodology occurs at different levels of reality, different levels of perception, and within the logic of the included middle axioms that exist simultaneously. In addressing these levels, the researcher is the interlocutor between the external world of the Object and the internal world of the Subject. In architecture, this knowledge emerges through a variety of disciplines that need to be fused with (...) an approach that is rhizomatic and nomadic, leading to thought without an image as characterized by Deleuze and Guattari. By following their “Pink Panther” metaphor for an imageless thought and approach in TR, this article aims to understand the relationship between the TR methodology and the theory of thought without an image - an approach which can enable the comprehension of ambiguous architecture and urban design problems. Resumo: Como um conhecimento in vivo, a metodologia transdisciplinar sugere ir além das disciplinas. Segundo Nicolescu, essa metodologia ocorre em distintos níveis de realidade, em diferentes níveis de percepção e na lógica do terceiro incluído, que existem simultaneamente. Ao abordar esses níveis, o pesquisador é a correspondência entre o mundo externo do Objeto e o mundo interno do Sujeito. Na arquitetura, esse conhecimento surge por meio de uma variedade de disciplinas que precisam ser combinadas e fundidas com uma abordagem rizomática e nômade, levando ao pensamento sem imagem, como tratado por Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Seguindo a metáfora da “pantera rosa” para um pensamento sem imagem e abordagem em TR, que não imita ou reproduz outra coisa, o objetivo deste artigo é compreender a relação entre a metodologia TR, a teoria do pensamento sem imagem - uma abordagem que pode permitir a compreensão de arquitetura ambígua e problemas de projeto urbano. (shrink)

This paper explores what happens to the identity of self when entering a place of protest, and what happens to it on leaving. In short, it explores the relations between identities of self and place. Acknowledging the presence of a multiplicity of identities in relation to both notions, it examines the ways in which aspects of the self influence place, and conversely, how aspects of place influence the self. By using empirical examples from Environmental Direct Action, the paper follows Casey (...) in arguing for the co-constitution of self- and place-identities. It offers two notions: the spatial division of self-identity, and the rhizomatic self, to further understanding of how the where effects whom we are. (shrink)

Clearly in contrast to the sociosymbolic approaches that underlie the positions of Butler or Derrida, this article delves into a materialist and machinic reading of the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari. This ontology is the basis of a posthumanist conception that allows to join political philosophy, technology and biology understood as complex rhizomatic systems. From this point of view, we propose to construct an antagonistic posthumanist politics that is an alternative to the pluriversal ethics defended by Braidotti. We believe that (...) the latter maintains an excessively liberal position that prioritizes inclusion as a new form of consensus in the face of conflict. (shrink)

Resumo: O presente texto tem por objetivo apresentar as potencialidades das pesquisas em educação articuladas com o desenho metodológico cartográfico experimentado durante a realização do mestrado acadêmico em educação. Os dispositivos de pesquisa apresentados ao longo deste texto se articulam com as perspectivas teóricas em torno da filosofia da diferença, com destaque para os estudos de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari e, por conseguinte, do devir e do plano de imanência como potências afirmativas a partir das quais se torna possível (...) apostar em um plano comum da pesquisa, ampliando o sentido da participação coletiva. Argumenta em favor da cartografia como um exercício de pensar rizomaticamente, de estabelecer conexões como agenciamentos coletivos e do movimento criativo e inventivo como possibilidade para criação de um plano de imanência articulado com os processos de transversalidade (Guattari, 2004), da implicação (Passos; Eirado, 2009) e nos modos de “fazer com” (Alvarez; Passos, 2009). Palavras-chave: Pesquisa em Educação; Pesquisa Cartográfica; Devir; Plano de Imanência Cartographies in becoming: the plan of immanence in educational research Abstract: The goal of this text is to present the potential of educational research in conjunction with the cartographic methodological design experienced during the course of an academic master's degree in education. The research devices presented throughout this text are articulated with the theoretical perspectives around the philosophy of difference, with emphasis on the studies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and, consequently, of becoming and the plan of immanence as affirmative powers from which it becomes possible to bet on a common plane of research, broadening the sense of collective participation. It argues in favor of cartography as an exercise in thinking rhizomatically, of establishing connections as collective agencies and of creative and inventive movement as a possibility for creating a plan of immanence articulated with the processes of transversality (Guattari, 2004), of implication (Passos; Eirado, 2009) and in the ways of "doing with" (Alvarez; Passos, 2009). Keywords: Research in Education; Cartographic Research; Becoming; Plan of Immanence Cartografías en devenir: el plano de la inmanencia en la investigación educativa Resumen: El objetivo de este texto es presentar las potencialidades de la investigación educativa en conjunción con el diseño metodológico cartográfico experimentado en el transcurso de una maestría académica en educación. Los dispositivos de investigación presentados a lo largo de este texto se articulan con las perspectivas teóricas en torno a la filosofía de la diferencia, con énfasis en los estudios de Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari y, en consecuencia, del devenir y el plano de la inmanencia como potencias afirmativas desde las cuales se hace posible apostar por un plano común de investigación, ampliando el sentido de participación colectiva. Se aboga por la cartografía como ejercicio de pensamiento rizomático, de establecimiento de conexiones como agencias colectivas y de movimiento creativo e inventivo como posibilidad de creación de un plano de inmanencia articulado con los procesos de transversalidad (Guattari, 2004), de implicación (Passos; Eirado, 2009) y en los modos de "hacer con" (Alvarez; Passos, 2009). Palabras clave: Investigación Educativa; Investigación Cartográfica; Devenir; Plano de Inmanencia Data de registro: 14/03/2024 Data de aceite: 25/09/2024. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

This project reframes the four roots (or elements) in Empedocles in order to challenge the Aristotelian account of the One as undifferentiated sameness. Aristotle credits Empedocles with developing both the theory of four material elements and introducing the conception of dualistic moving causes into philosophy through Love and Strife. Aristotle’s interpretation maintains a singular moment in the evolution of the cosmos when Love dominates the whole and unifies all things into a perfectly spherical One, which he describes as an undifferentiated, (...) qualityless substratum. Based on Fragments B17, B62, and B110, this paper argues that a rhizomatic motion in which each root tends towards its own kind emerges from the roots independently of Love and Strife. Thus, Empedocles actually maintains three different sorts of motion: (1) the motion of unlike towards unlike, motivated by Love, (2) the motion of unlike away from unlike, motivated by Strife, and (3) a rhizomatic motion of like to like. The presence of six sources of motion challenges Aristotle’s assumption that, as the One, the universe enjoys a moment of identity without difference. The presence of rhizomatic motion makes the blending or mixing of the roots impossible in the Σφαῖρος. The paper begins by developing Aristotle’s paradox of Strife in the Metaphysics and his paradox of alteration in On Generation and Corruption, followed by Empedocles’ account of mixture and separation in Fragments B8 and B35. Section three examines the precise functions of Love and Strife in Fragments B17 and B21. The last section considers the Empedoclean Σφαῖρος under these different conditions, arguing that the cosmic sphere should not be viewed as an inconsistent disappearance of the roots, but as god understood as a singular community of difference. (shrink)