Abstracts C

Bernard Cache, Albrecht Duerer and the Anticipation of some Deleuzian Concepts in hisTreatise of Geometry

Parametric design and mechanics are not new in architecture: they were actually there from the very beginning of the written sources of our discipline. To understand this, we must return to classics such as works of Euclid, Plato, and Vitruvius. A renewed reading of those classics has the potential to bring contemporary architecture back into a historical tradition. In order to demonstrate this, I will mainly rely on an intermediary character between our time and antiquity, Albrecht Duerer, the great artist of the German Renaissance, who lived at the turn of the 16th century. Instead of discussing his paintings, however, I will mainly focus on his treatise of geometry, Unterveysung der Messung or Instructiion on Measurement. It is a rather unique case in the history of mathematics, since it is written by a non-mathematician for non-mathematicians. Rather than showing geometrical figures, Duerer often shows mechanical instruments that are intended to be used to draw curves. These instruments take on so such importance that sometimes the curves themselves are not even represented. Thus, in order to read this classical text, we can use a CAD/CAM software, which enables us to establish parametric relations between elements in the figures, model the mechanical instruments, and simulate their movements in order to generate their trajectory. So doing, we might encounter some Deleuzian concepts, such as war machines, animal lines, be they snail, spider or snake, perhaps a few demons and witches also, and, to be sure a false Plato and a too often forgotten rebellion at the core of an aborted German Renaissance.

Bernard Cache, born in 1958, developed the concept of non standard architecture in his book, Earth Moves, published by MIT Press in 1995. This concept was given the name OBJECTILE by Gilles Deleuze in his book on Leibniz, The Fold in 1996. Cache founded the company Objectile together with his partner Patrick Beace in order to conceive and manufacture non standard architecture components. He is currently dedicated to the reading of classical texts (such as Vitruvius De Architectura, or Duerer’s Underweysung der Messung) with the help of CAD CAM software. After teaching nomadically in many universities, he is now Professor at the EPFL where he set up the Laboratory, Digital Culture for Architectural Projects. Next book to be published: Toujours l’ informe….Stetigs, die Ungestalt…

Bernard.cache@epfl.ch



Eduardo Cadava, Forests of Memory

In their wonderfully performative book, A Thousand Plateaus, in a passage in which they delineate the conditions for political action, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write: “We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground.

Eduardo Cadava is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, and, with Fazal Sheikh, of Fazal Sheikh: Portraits. He also has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject?, Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. He has translated several works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot, and recently has introduced and co-translated Nadar's memoirs, Quand j'étais photographe, which will appear with MIT Press in the fall of 2015. A collection of his essays on photography will appear in Spanish under the title La imagen en ruinas in Chile in the spring of 2015, and his book Paper Graveyards: Essays on Art and Photography is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

cadava@princeton.edu





Martin Calamari, Multiplicity, Variability, Heterogeneity: the Physico-Mathematical and Philosophical Pluralism of Riemann and Deleuze 


This paper aims to show the relevance of Bernhard Riemann’s manifold theory in elucidating Deleuze’s claim that ‘pluralism equals monism’. To this end, three aspects are considered. First, Deleuze understands Riemann’s theory as being inherently physico-mathematical. This encloses a key implication, namely, the independence and inseparability between mathematics and physics. This reciprocal presupposition, I suggest, underlies Deleuze’s account in Bergsonism of Riemann’s distinction between discrete and continuous manifolds. Furthermore, it provides a model for Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, his theory of rhizomatic multiplicities and smooth spaces. Second, Deleuze grasps the primary variability of Riemannian manifolds, central to his smooth spaces, the concept of the fold and the plane of immanence. I show the inadequacy of understanding Riemann’s theory, as well as Deleuze’s engagement with it, within the framework of non-Euclidean geometries. I instead propose to conceive of it as affirming a kind of ‘univocity of manifold’, similar to Deleuze’s ‘univocity of Being’. Third, Deleuze discerns the primary heterogeneity of Riemannian manifolds, central to his pluralism and empiricism. Such heterogeneity relates to the contrast between Riemann’s and Felix Klein’s conceptions of geometry. Although Deleuze never refers to this issue, Albert Lautman’s account of Riemannian spaces, quoted by Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus, is framed by such a contrast. I conclude by suggesting how Riemann’s conception overcomes the opposition between pluralism and monism.

Martin Calamari is an Independent Scholar based in Bolzano, Italy. He teaches Philosophy at a School for Adult and Continuing Education. His research focuses on Deleuze’s Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Physics and Mathematics, in particular the work of Riemann, Einstein, Weyl, Cartan, Lautman and Châtelet. He has published in the Deleuze Studies.

Martin.calamari@yahoo.it


Sarah Cefai, Becoming-Mouth

The scream passes the body through the mouth: the screaming body is a body becoming-mouth. Becoming-mouth, the mouth becomes the body’s line of flight. The entrance to and exit from the body becomes its exit from the social. The scream is not something you think through. Screaming reconfigures the subject of thinking, decentring the subject of speech. What kind of speaking is screaming? The mind, vocal chords, lungs and mouth become forces that respond to the historical conditions of oppression; something of the body refuses to be taken. The body screams back, with feeling. Deterritorialised, the subject has no single point of origin. As Donna Haraway (1991) told us, partial perspective is a more hopeful starting point for political engagement than the violence of unitary subjectivity. The unitary subject always instilled in us an irrevocable silence. Concepts scream themselves. They scream themselves to us; they scream of us. Screams are full of pain. Screams scream their feeling. Concepts are full of screams: a thousand tiny screams. The scream has no face. The face is a wall of signification that cannot scream. Aboriginality appears as a “colonial field of power relations” (Nicoll 1992) within the walls of signification that construct the spatial, legal and cultural entity of Australia. The “being of the occupier” (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2014) has a face: white man face is “a state of domination” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). This paper considers the corporeal refrain of freedom in the scream, as a material mode of enquiry into Australia’s topology of dispossession.

Sarah Cefai is interested in questions of desire, materiality and representation. Her forthcoming work Critical Feelings theorises feeling by examining the tensions and exchanges between materialist philosophies and Foucault's problematisation of subjectivity. Sarah's research adopts a cultural studies methodology and has engaged sites such as the popular TV series The L Word, the speeches of Audre Lorde, and the administrative imagination of Australia. She gained her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2012 and is currently an LSE Fellow in Media and Communications. London School of Economics

s.cefai@lse.ac.uk


Marianna Charitonidou, Gilles Deleuze and the nondiscursive arts: from symptomatology to the capture of forces

The interest of Gilles Deleuze in the nondiscursive arts is related to the movement of his thought from language toward the matter of perception. Deleuze’s definition of art as a capture of forces could be interpreted as an attempt to perceive the aesthetic identity overcoming the limits of the linguistic philosophy of the sign. The thesis according to which the effect of art is not reducible to its linguistic dimension could be seen as a movement toward a nonlinguistic philosophy of the sign. The idea that the effect of art requires a semiotics of the affect that is not reducible to the discursive leads to a shift within the fracture between the imaginary and the real. This approach is related to the recognition that there is a nonliterary dimension in the arts that do not first, or exclusively, pass through the medium of language. Thought is conceived as inseparable from images and arts are not seen as reducible to signification. The denial to reduce arts to a symbolic system derives from the recognition that image seeks thought on the level of sensation. Thought is seen as inseparable from images and art produces images that give rise to thought and creates effects of subjectification. The belief that arts contribute to the constitution of new forms of subjectification implies a concept’s pragmatism and elucidates the political dimension of theoretical thought and artistic praxis.



Marianna Charitonidou is a Ph.D Candidate at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens. She holds a Diploma Degree in Architectural Engineering from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, a Master of Science Degree from the Architectural Association and a Master of Philosophy Degree from the Inter-departmental Postgraduate Program "Design-Space-Culture" of the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens. She has worked as Teaching Assistant for the courses of History and Theory of Architecture and for the Design Studios of the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens. She has presented a paper entitled "Revisiting the encounters of the social concern with the utopian aspirations: is pragmatist imagination or utopian realism the way to follow?" at the "I Interantional Conference on Architectural Design and Criticism critic/all” and paper entitled "How is Deleuze and Guattari’s Model for Subjectivity Critical for Architectural Theory and Practice Today? The Diagrammatic or Abstract Machine in Contemporary Theory of Architecture" at the "7th International Deleuze Studies Conference, Models, Machines and Memories”.

charitonidou@aaschool.ac.uk





Dimitra Chatzisavva, Αρχιτεκτονικές μεταφράσεις της σκέψης των Deleuze - Guattari για την έννοια του τόπου

Η έννοια του τόπου στον αρχιτεκτονικό λόγο και πρακτική έχει περιορισθεί σε ερμηνείες που τη συνδέουν με μια φαινομενολογική απόδοση, κύρια ρομαντικής παράδοσης, ως ένα συγκεκριμένο δηλαδή υπαρξιακό πλαίσιο που βρίσκεται σε μόνιμη διαλεκτική αντίθεση και ετεροπροσδιορισμό σε σχέση με τον δυναμικό, αφηρημένο χώρο. Η εισήγηση θα εξετάσει τις καταβολές αυτής της αντίθεσης (τέλη του 19ου αι.) και θα προτείνει την έννοια του ‘τόπου ως δυνατότητα διαφοράς’ ακολουθώντας τη σκέψη των Deleuze-Guattari για μια εννοιολόγηση του αρχιτεκτονικού τόπου πέραν της διαλεκτικής του σχέσης με τον χώρο. Ο τόπος σε αυτή την οπτική δεν νοηματοδοτείται ως άρνηση ή αντιστροφή των χαρακτηριστικών που συνδέονται με τον χώρο, αλλά συναρμόζει με άλλους τόπους και χρόνους που το επισφαλές όριό του επιτρέπει. Οδηγητική για την εισήγηση είναι η σκέψη του G. Deleuze για μια κατανόηση της ‘διαφοράς’ πέρα από την άρνηση και την ταυτότητα. Ο τόπος σε αυτή την οπτική δεν είναι το σταθερό έδαφος που εγγυάται την ταυτότητα του νοήματος αλλά η δυνατότητα της επαναληπτικής διαφοροποίησής του.Σε αυτό το πλαίσιο, θα εξετασθεί η επιρροή που δέχεται η σύγχρονη αρχιτεκτονική από την σκέψη των Deleuze-Guattari και οι διαδοχικές μεταφράσεις αυτής της σκέψης στην αρχιτεκτονική δημιουργία. Αν και το παράδειγμα του ψηφιακού σχεδιασμού αποτελεί το προνομιακό πεδίο αυτής της μεταφοράς, η εισήγηση θα διερευνήσει άλλες δυνατότητες σύνδεσης της σκέψης των Γάλλων διανοητών με την αρχιτεκτονική, δίνοντας έμφαση στο έργο του E. Miralles.Tέλος, θα διερευνηθεί εάν το ‘χωρικό ήθος’ που προτείνουν οι Deleuze- Guattari δίνει έρεισμα στην επινόηση επερχόμενων υπαρξιακών εδαφών και νέων δυνατοτήτων για τη ζωή.

Δήμητρα Χατζησάββα, Δρ. Αρχιτέκτων ΑΠΘ, Λέκτορας Σχολή Αρχιτεκτόνων, Πολυτεχνείο Κρήτης, διδάσκει αρχιτεκτονική θεωρία και σχεδιασμό (αρχιτεκτονικό και αστικό σχεδιασμό). Οι σπουδές της περιλαμβάνουν: αρχιτεκτονική και αισθητική στην Aρχιτεκτονική σχολή του ΑΠΘ και στην Aρχιτεκτονική σχολή ETSAB Βαρκελώνης. Η διατριβή της ‘Η έννοια του τόπου στις αρχιτεκτονικές θεωρίες και πρακτικές - σχέσεις φιλοσοφίας και αρχιτεκτονικής στον 20ο αιώνα’ και η 3η Biennale Νέων Ελλήνων Αρχιτεκτόνων με θέμα ‘Τόποι νομαδικής κατοίκησης΄ (επιμελήτρια) διερευνούν τη σκέψη των Deleuze-Guattari και τη σύνδεσή της με την αρχιτεκτονική θεωρία και πρακτική. Υπεύθυνη σύνταξης του περιοδικού Αρχιτεκτονική ως Τέχνη, έχει πολυάριθμες δημοσιεύσεις σε έγκριτα αρχιτεκτονικά βιβλία και περιοδικά. Το ερευνητικό και εκπαιδευτικό της έργο εστιάζει στη σύνδεση της θεωρητικής σκέψης με τη μεθοδολογία της αρχιτεκτονικής σύνθεσης.

dicha@otenet.gr, e-mail: dchatzisavva@isc.tuc.gr


Theodoros Chiotis, Subsumption and production: Autobiographical discourse, Pessoa and Deleuze

In my paper I investigate how autobiographical discourse far from being a writing practice opposed to becoming could be considered as fertile ground wherein memory becomes a tool effecting becomings. When talking about autobiographical discourse and how this can be applied to Deleuze the mathematical theory of submanifolds seems a particularly useful model: autobiographical discourse might be viewed as a submanifold embedded in the flow which sometimes forms the self. In order to illustrate my argument, I am going to use Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa who invented scores of heteronyms, distinct authorial selves with their own distinct histories and different writing styles and preoccupations. Pessoa published The Book of Disquiet bearing the distinctive subtitle “A factless autobiography”. The memory function driving the narrative of the Book of Disquiet seems to be independent of a self: it refers to no one in particular, creating a rhizome-self in its fragmentary diary “entries”. Memory in The Book of Disquiet does not have a recollecting function but rather a creative, evocative function. The self in Pessoa is nothing more than a set of events and facts embedded within the topography of another topography without ever being subsumed into this other topography. The self in autobiographical discourse is the self that lives through thought: a self that is a thought experiment.

Theodoros Chiotis has studied Classics and Modern Languages and Literatures at the universities of London and Oxford at both undergraduate and doctoral level. He has worked as researcher for the Greek Open University,. His critical work on digital literature, Greek modernism, contemporary poetry and media history has appeared in journals both in Greece and abroad. He has also written critical pieces on autobiographical discourse, modernist poetry and digital literature in both Greek and English and has written on teaching digital literature in the classroom. His literary work has appeared amongst other places in Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins), Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot (English Pen), Otoliths, Shearsman, Tears in the Fence, Ποιητική, [φρμκ], Ποίηση, aglimpseof. He has presented his works at various literary festivals amongst which E-Poetry 2013. He is currently editing a collection of modern Greek poetry to be published in late 2015 by British publisher Penned in the Margins. th.chiotis@gmail.com



Andrew Cole, The Figure: or, Dialectics in Deleuze and Hegel”

Deleuze famously said that “What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics” (Negotiations, 6). I will explore and ultimately question this claim, because Deleuze’s distinction between “figures” and “concepts” in a variety of his works pairs very well with Hegel’s own distinction between Vorstellung and Darstellung, figurative thinking on the one hand and conceptual thinking on the other. Was Deleuze aware of this similarity to Hegel? Are his readers? My admittedly unlikely pairing of Deleuze and Hegel is a productive way to re-open the question of Deleuze and dialectics, most visibly and recently attempted by Jameson in “Deleuze and Dualism” (Valences of the Dialectic), but earlier pursued by others (Somers-Hall; Lambert; Ellrich and Picker). Here I will simply show that the distinction between these two modes (figure and concept) is the preeminent and oldest form of dialectical thinking reaching as far back as Plotinus. Any discussion of dialectics, I claim, must simultaneously undertake a capacious intellectual history that draws together the premodern and the modern, before such a discussion can ever determine what's dialectical and what's not—what's detestable and what's not.

Andrew Cole is a Professor of English at Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2014-15. He is author of The Birth of Theory (Chicago, 2014), which details Hegel’s discovery of the dialectic in medieval philosophy and invites theorists to sharpen their dialectics on a broader intellectual history ranging from Plotinus to Deleuze. The Birth of Theory is the first volume of a three-part study. Elements of the Ideal, the second installment, examines the dialectic of idealism and materialism over many centuries from Plato to the medieval mathematicians, and includes expositions of Proust, Lenin, Adorno, Lacan, and Hegel. Recently, Andrew has edited a special topic of the minnesota review, entitled “The Medieval Turn in Theory” (spring 2013), which includes his paper “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object Oriented Ontologies.” He has also edited with his colleague, D. Vance Smith, The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, with an Afterword by Fredric Jameson (Duke, 2010). Andrew has also written a major study of late medieval literature entitled, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge, 2008).

acole@princeton.edu



Guillaume Collett, IMMANENCE = UNIVOCITY or, the Disjunctive Synthesis

“MONISM = PLURALISM” summarises the articulation of two dynamics: Deleuze’s theory of univocity and his theory of immanence. The theory of univocity holds that being, contra the classical One/Many schema of philosophies of identity, is a numerically single repetition fractured into yet constituted by its intensive instances or differences, i.e. repetition = difference. The theory of immanence holds that being and thinking form what can be best described as a quasi-dualism nonetheless capable of giving rise to a monism-effect nothing more substantial than the absolutely equal which is to say “immanent” articulation of these two powers. Hence epistemology = ontology, thinking = being, or dualism = monism. As such, the “ontological” theory of univocity seems to clash with the “onto-logical” theory of immanence, unless that is we view the former as already onto-logical. For Deleuze, difference = being, but difference is above all the difference between thinking/being. With the disjunctive or third synthesis, Deleuze provides a mechanism explaining how both thinking/being (immanence) and repetition/difference (univocity) can disjunctively merge simultaneously, yielding monism = pluralism. I propose that the repetition in thought of difference in being culminates in the “thought” of the eternal return of difference (third synthesis), expressing an equally onto-logical albeit speculative becoming irreducible to either thinking/being or repetition/difference while depending on them.

Guillaume Collett received his PhD from the University of Kent in conjunction with L’Université Paris-7, which examined Deleuze’s ontology of “sense” as developed during the 1950s-60s. He has been teaching in the Graduate School at the University of Kent and is an Honorary Research Fellow in its Centre for Critical Thought. He is the author of The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School (EUP, “Plateaus” series, forthcoming), which provides a close reading of Deleuze’s engagement with language, structuralism, and psychoanalysis in The Logic of Sense, while offering an interpretation of the overall aims and ontology of the text. He is also editing/co-editing five further books on Deleuze and has co-edited a number of journal issues including a special issue of Deleuze Studies on Philosophical Practice. He has published chapters/articles on continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, and serves on the editorial board of the philosophy journal La deleuziana.

Guillaume.collett@hotmail.co.uk



Jay Conway, Between the Many and the One: Deleuze/Guattari and the Notion of Cultural Identity”


The so-called “magic formula” of Pluralism=Monism can be profitably regarded as one of the “abstract formulas” comprising the “Problem,” “Idea,” or “plane of immanence” of Deleuze’s system. Instead of approaching Deleuze’s work through exclusive disjunctions such as “monism or pluralism,” “philosophy of identity or philosophy of difference,” one should discern the repetition of the following message: the one can be a many, the many can form a one. To say the formula is abstract or immanent, is to say it exists within a series of concrete and heterogeneous actualizations—a series that runs from Deleuze’s books on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, to Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, and his writings with Guattari. The first section of my paper is an account of this series, one that makes clear that the scope of Deleuze’s formula exceeds the issues surrounding the theme of cultural pluralism. Nevertheless, in the second section of my paper, I consider how the formula, in combination with other elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, can help move the often vague and rhetorical language of “cultural identity” in the direction of precision and philosophy. Reference is made to the way Deleuze and Guattari’s thought enters into philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s project of thinking cultural identity—a project advanced as an alternative to specific strands of the Negritude Movement.



Jay Conway teaches history of philosophy at California State University Los Angeles. He is the author of the book Gilles Deleuze: Affirmation in Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), the focus of which is Deleuze’s unqualified identification with philosophy, his unique conception of philosophical systems, and the way his books form just such a philosophical system. Conway’s treatment of Deleuze’s work on Hume’s philosophy may be found in Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy (ed. Stephen H. Daniel, Northwestern University Press, 2006), while his analysis of Deleuze’s novel manner of referencing and utilizing literature and visual art is included in Intensities & Lines of Flight: Deleuze/Guattari and the Arts (eds. Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon, and Steve G. Lofts, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). He lives with his beloved cat, Colette.

Jay.t.conway@gmail.com



Pascale Criton, Intensive difference and subjectivations

Intensive difference is not external, nor rational or probabilistic: it proceeds by reciprocal attractions and captures. We will discuss consistency operations at work in disparate series environments and their actualization in unexpected individuations. We will discuss in particular the virtual / actual double aspect of differenciation at work in the “material-strengths” couple, a concept employed by Deleuze to describe musical spaces and times without identity (cf. « Rendre audibles des forces non-audibles par elles-mêmes », Le temps musical, Ircam 1978, in Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens, 1975-1995, D. Lapoujade (ed.), Paris, Minuit, 2003). Direct “material-strengths” relations - active in the thought-music corpus - cover all fields of thought and open new connections. The production of an heterogeneous transversality, significant in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s writings beginning with Thousand Plateaus (1980) and subsequent works, is determined in the field of processual and subjectivating creativity. Singular space-times and autonomous signs practices redistribute the order of sensation in view to form free enunciations: they produce a difference able to confront the irreality of media and capitalistics signs regimes.

Pascale Criton is a composer, and has a PhD in musicology. Her works explore sound variability, multi-sensoral receptions and the spatialization of listening. Artistic director of Art&Fact, she initiates concerts combining music, architecture and building materials inviting the public to experience new sound representations (Ecouter Autrement, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2015). She is currently an associate researcher at the Lutherie Acoustique Musique laboratory (Pierre and Marie Curie University, CNRS), where she conducts research on sound transmission through touch ("Listening Otherwise. Playing with vibrations", Proceedings ICMC, Athens, 2014). She recently edited Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Libération du son, Ecrits 1916-1979, Symétrie, (Prix des muses, 2014, awarded by Singer-Polignac Foundation). Her encounter with Gilles Deleuze in 1974 around music determined her interest in philosophy. She recently edited Gilles Deleuze, la pensée-musique, co-dir. J-M Chouvel, CDMC, Symétrie (2015) and numerous articles including: “L’invitation,” in Deleuze épars, approches et portraits, Hermann (2005); “Bords à bords, vers une pensée-musique,” Le Portique (2007); “La ritournelle et le galop,” Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique, Synthélabo (1998); "Nothing is established forever" in The Guattari Effect, E. Alliez & A. Goffey (dir.), Continuum (2011), and two revues publications under her direction: Chaosmose, penser avec Félix Guattari, Chimères, n° 77, (2012) and Chaosmose, temps pluriels, Chimères, n° 79, (2013).