Zeynep Gambetti, Arendt, Deleuze, and ethics as “what
happens to us”
This paper communicates with but also partially
disputes feminist constructions of the self as composite, embedded, and
embodied. I am particularly concerned with the disappearance of action in favor
of movement within the multiple lines of flight of minor politics. By mapping
(tracer) the routes leading to and from the Woman-in-Black of the 2013 Occupy Gezi
protests in Istanbul, I propose to engage with the triple question of selfhood,
ethics and action without eradicating the singularity of the actor, the “who.”
Hannah Arendt’s take on agonistic politics opens a promising path in this
respect, provided that it can be creatively appropriated and bent to serve this
purpose by being brought into conversation with Gilles Deleuze. I suggest that
the Woman-in-Black captures the appeal of the Arendtian perspective: an actor
is she who (willingly or unwillingly) inscribes herself into the course of
events in such a way as to modify the initial circumstances under which she
acts without, however, becoming the author of the whole story. I thereby deploy
Arendtian notions to hook onto Deleuzean ethics, exploring what Deleuze calls
becoming “the offspring of one’s own events,” perhaps for the benefit of both.
Zeynep Gambetti is associate professor of political
theory at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Her work focuses on collective agency,
ethics, and public space. She has published several articles on Hannah Arendt,
the Kurdish question in Turkey, and on violence in the neoliberal era. She is
the co-editor with Marcial Godoy of Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and
Violence in the Neoliberal Era, New York, SSRC/New York University Press, 2013.
Her forthcoming publications include Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden
(eds.), The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, London/New
York, Routledge, 2015; and Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay
(eds), Rethinking Vulnerability: Towards a Feminist Theory of Resistance and
Agency, Durham, NC., Duke University Press, 2015.
Bogazici University, Istanbul gambetti@boun.edu.tr
Marie-Dominique Garnier, An Introduction to V-losophy
: Gilles Deleuze’s “single voice for the many-coursed multiple”
On the last page of Différence et répétition occurs a
stylistic, literal blueprint of what was to resurface, in the opening pages of
A Thousand plateaus, as the capitalized equation PLURALISM=MONISM. More imperceptibly,
the earlier version of that equation brought up a pair of homophones in French,
VOIES=VOIX, WAYS=VOICE (or VOICES), so imperceptible that Paul Patton’s
translation leaves it out altogether and renders the syntagm as : a “single and
same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple” – a translation which misses
out the French homophonic variation on voies and voix, ways and voice (or
voices, x operating as an equivocal marker, both singular and plural, a marker
able to accommodate the the “state of excess” [“l’état d’excès”] called for in
the last sentence. In addition to this admittedly minor, near-imperceptible
effect, other literal corridors operate at what could be termed a nano-approach
to the “letter” of the text: one of the many “ways” (voies) in which Deleuze’s
voice (voix) makes itself heard is through the use of repeated (yet
differential) v-effects, “v” operating between arithmetic and geometry. Without
giving in to the temptation of codes and ciphers, one can establish a number of
recurrent stylistic habits and familiar soft spots in Deleuze’s style, in an
attempt to sound the multiple “voice” of univocity. “V-effects” operate as one
of the signs emitted by Deleuzian textuality – v being approached in this essay
as an anexact variable : a letter as well as less than a letter, a Roman
cipher, an inflexion, a valley fold in the art of origami, a swiveling moment,
a metastable non-signifier, an invitation to read in haptic fashion. The
“style” of the concluding page of Difference and Repetition emits a quasi-code,
a collection of stray signs, a pack of insistent, restless graphic formations
that relate to the book’s non-image of a cone/dice/ pointed shoe/stylus. The
earlier v’s in voie/voix happen to multiply in the midst of most of the terms
found on the last page of Différence et répétition: revenir, renversement,
individuant, univocité (DR 388), growing, after the v of devenir, after Henry
Miller’s grass, mostly, in the midst of words. Once turned into a v-effect, a
property of speed-writing, a factor of linguistic velocity, a “pointe mobile”
ceases to be metaphorical. The v in the recurring concept of “répétition vêtue”
[clothed]; the strangely inverted v’s of Deleuze’s myriad circumflexed words;
the v in “vrai coup de dé” and “véritable” (387; 388), the two v’s of “le
véritable universel” (387), the v of “ouvrir” (387), dérivé (386), “divise”
(387) and “distributive” (387). The many uses of “investir” (213) and of the
vestiary. What is at work or at play here is a nomadic inveighing or conveying,
a Deleuzian “voice” or style with a vested interest in the powers of a
“letter/non-letter” to distribute itself across a corpus and contribute to its
“readability”, to its velocity or degree of transitivity. No computer-analysis
would serve the purpose of a taxonomy of “v-effects” in Deleuze: in a “v”
formation are assembled a (reversible) letter (V into A), a cipher (V for
five), a diacritical sign [the circumflex accent], and a cross-linguistic
formation that invites an English phoneme [vi:] to “become” a French word: vie
(for life), in a scene of differential repetition. Towards V-losophy: The style
of Deleuze is peopled with v-effects, a v-effect being defined as not
necessarily having to look like one, being free to thrive in an image-free environment,
freed from representation. V-effects rather than V-words capture the flow of
Deleuze’s writing, acting as V-engines, vectors of speed possessing the power
to accelerate reading, create corridors or vortexes of acceleration or
“vitesse”, or locally speed up reading. V operates as a portable, anexact,
quasi-concept: as a pair of searching, tentative antennae feeling their way
about – in an attempt to solve, literally as well as literarily, the
pluralism=monism equation.
Marie-Dominique Garnier is professor of English
literature and Gender studies at the University of Paris 8-Vincennes, France,
where she teaches contemporary literature, philosophy and gender studies. She
has recently co-edited two volumes on Hélène Cixous, Cixous sous X (Paris, Presses
de Vincennes, 2010) and Partie de lectures (Peter Lang, 2014). Her main field
of research bears on the intersection of philosophies of difference (Lyotard,
Deleuze and Guattari, Schérer, Derrida) with literature and gender studies.
Recent publications include articles on Derrida and the animal, (in The Animal
Question in deconstruction, ed. Lynn Turner 2013), on Deleuze’s style, “ V For
Style : Gilles Deleuze on a ‘Mobile Cusp’ ”, Style in Theory, ed. Ivan Callus,
James Corby and Gloria Lauri-Lucente, Bloomsbury 2013), on Sophie Calle («
Corps calliens : suite deleuzienne », Tangence, 2013/103, ed. A. Oberhuber),
and on Deleuze and Virginia Woolf (“Following suit(e): Woolf, Carlyle, Deleuze
», Le Tour critique, Vol. 2, 2013) http://letourcritique.u-paris10.fr/index.php/letourcritique/issue/view/3 She is also working as a translator (recently, of
Madeline Gins’s Helen Keller or Arakawa, Burning Books, 1994). (excerpt online
: http://proceduresjournal.com/from-helen-keller-ou-arakawa-trans-by-m-d-garnier/ University of Paris 8, France
marie-dominique.garnier@univ-paris8.fr maridogarnier@gmail.com
Akis Gavriilidis, The desire for the non-state:
De-territorialization as an alternative lens to read late and post-Ottoman
becomings
The beginning of the 20th century has seen the
dissolution of a centuries old Empire, founded by former nomads, and its
substitution by the “axiomatic of the nation state”. The territory formerly
controlled by the Ottomans has been under constant turmoil ever since,
including the endemic conflicts in Palestine and Kurdistan and the civil wars
in Greece and former Yugoslavia. Established scholarship usually tries to
explain (away) this permanent instability through the tautology of “Balkan
mentality”, or through an evolutionist-Eurocentric reading frame based on
“oriental backwardness” and the survival of “Ottoman corruption” or other
"pre-modern residues". In my presentation, I will suggest that we
adopt the inverse vantage point and try to see this violence as a result of the
One rather than the "multiple". In the course of my political
anthropology research, over the past 5 years, on the unusual phenomenon of the
survival -or maybe the invention?- of a peculiar Pontic identity in Greece,
articulated around the new signifier of an alleged "Pontic genocide",
I was increasingly led to the conviction that notions introduced by Deleuze
& Guattari –especially in One Thousand Plateaus- are much more apt to help
us understand the late and post-Ottoman world, than the straightjacket of a thought
emanating from the advent of the state as the end of history.
Akis Gavriilidis is a writer and translator based in
Brussels, Belgium. He has done a PhD on Spinoza’s law philosophy (published by
Ellinika Grammata, Athens 2000) and post-doctoral research on political
anthropology (published by Isnafi, Yannina 2014, under the title We settlers.
The nomadism of names and the pseudo-state of Pontus). Other publications (in
Greek as well):- The incurable necrophilia of radical patriotism.
Ritsos-Elytis-Theodorakis-Svoronos, futura, Athens 2006- The continuation of
civil war with other means, Kapsimi, Athens 2007- In a world of authenticity we
are all strangers, Panopticon, Thessaloniki 2007- Billy Wilder: the (self)
criticism of the Hollywood spectacle, Aigokeros, Athens 2009- They say no, I
say yes: three essays on Akis Panou, Eneken, Thessaloniki 2013 He has published
many articles on theoretical and practical political questions in Greek,
English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian and Albanian, in journals
and on the Internet, and translated articles of others.
Cr33396@telenet.be
Gary Genosko , Urban Subjectivation: Félix Guattari
in/on the City
What are the sources for Guattari’s urbanism? From
Lewis Mumford he borrowed megamachines as examples of machinic enslavement,
with some elements of social subjection. Guattari referenced Fernand Braudel’s
important arguments in Civilization and Capitalism, extending them into the
context of his own theory of Integrated World Capitalism. Guattari also wrote
impressionistically about the cities that fascinated him, and his writing about
Brazil is dotted with references to street scenes, some involving himself.
Guattari often mentions the most economically depressed and socially
marginalized areas of cities as exemplary sites for novel self-positing
solutions to the challenges of their populations. Guattari’s own urban
pilgrimages – like his journey to Sanya in Tokyo – are legendary. I want to
initiate a Guattarian investigation of urban subjectivation through his
suggestive concept of the ‘subjective city’ that is defined through a machinic
ecology.
Gary Genosko is Professor of Communication and Digital
Media Studies at University of Ontario Institute of Technology. He has
published extensively on Félix Guattari, including co-editing Machinic Eros:
Guattari and Japan (2015), editing The Guattari Reader (1996) and Deleuze and
Guattari: Critical Assessments (2001). He is the author of Félix Guattari: A
Critical Introduction (2009) and Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction
(2002) and The Party without Bosses: Lessons on Anti-Capitalism from Félix
Guattari and Luís Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva (2003). In 2012 he edited a special
issue of Deleuze Studies on 'Félix Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism'. He
is co-contributor of the Guattari entries in the The Deleuze and Guattari
Dictionary (2013). His recent articles include studies of post-media theory,
post-autonomia politics focused on Bifo Berardi and Anontio Negri, and his
current project is Critical Semiotic Theory from Information to A-Signification
(forthcoming) .
gary,genosko@uoit.ca
Larry George, Sovereign and scapegoat: Abstract
machines of mediated violence in contemporary Greco-Abrahamic theo-political
assemblages”
This paper theorizes the emergence of liminal,
non-sovereign concrete theo-political assemblages like the Islamic State as the
actualizations of virtual resonance machines whose attractors shape incorporeal
political transformations and corporeal modifications as these congeal within a
shifting and evolving power convection system whose elements include a
multiplicity of aspiring hegemonic state actors, molar religious organizations,
reterritorialized sovereignties, molecular theo-political movements, and
deterritorialized quasi-state political formations, ingenerated and animated by
reciprocally reinforcing acts of symbolic hegemonic and counter-hegemonic
violence. These abstract machines and concrete assemblages can be diagrammed as
a double articulation of the sovereignty-scapegoat semiotic dyad informing
Greco-Abrahamic political history. This diagram draws on D&G’s account in
the fifth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus (“On Several Regimes of Signs”) of how
the sovereignty-scapegoat dyad articulates the paranoid, signifying, despotic regime
of signs with the passional, subjective, postsignifying, authoritarian regime
in terms of the face and body of the “despot-god,” the interpretive priests or
temple bureaucrats, the counter-body of the tortured and excluded, the crowd,
and the principle of the scapegoat. This account of the ambivalent line of
flight pursued by the scapegoat as it deterritorializes sovereign power is
supplemented with a discussion of the ambiguity of the pharmacotic scapegoat
(the sacrificial pharmakos who functions as a pharmakon – i.e. as
simultaneously medicine and poison -- for the body politic) that Derrida
alludes to in the “Plato’s Pharmacy” chapter of Dissemination.
Larry George is Professor of Political Science at the
California State University at Long Beach. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton
University, where he studied with Sheldon Wolin and Richard Falk. His research
and writing interests bring classical and contemporary political theory to the
field of international politics. His early writings concerned democratic
foreign policymaking, executive war powers, and US-Latin American relations
following the Spanish-American War. More recent publications include works on
"pharmacotic war" (war as human sacrifice, and as simultaneously
medicinal and toxic for the body politic); the tensions between Leo Strauss’
philosophical zeteticism and his support for rightist political movements; the
ontopolitics of American hegemony in the 21st century; and Deleuze’s regimes of
signs and recurring conflicts among agnatic Helleno-Abrahamic political
cultures. He lives with his family in Santa Monica, California, and can be
contacted at
Larry.George@csulb.edu
Jeremy Gilbert, Freedom After Snowden
The ‘Snowden revelations’ have raised crucial
questions about the possibility of privacy in the era of ‘control societies’.
But is ‘privacy’ really the name for the thing that we most need to defend from
state and commercial institutions, especially considering that the actual
content of specific communications seems generally to be of little interest to
the security services, who are more concerned with know who is talking to whom
than with what they might be saying? At the very least we can say that a
thought of freedom allied to or drawing inspiration from the work of Deleuze
and Guattari ought to be sceptical of the inherent value of such a bourgeois
liberal concept as ‘privacy’. And yet the intuition that something is to be
defended here is surely justified. This paper will suggest that what is at
stake here, and what is implicitly expressed by the most radical (by no means
all, but the most radical) activists in fields such as open-source
cryptography, is actually a positive notion of freedom as the maximisation of
productive, creative and unpredictable relations. This libertarian but entirely
non-individualist conception of freedom can look to Deleuze’s work in
particular for crucial sources of normative and metaphysical elaboration and
justification, and indeed may become an increasingly necessary element of
political discourse.
Jeremy Gilbert is a writer, researcher and activist
whose work has appeared in various British, continental, American and
Australian publications and has been translated into French, Spanish and
German. His most recent book is, Common Ground: Democracy and
Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto 2013) and he has written widely on cultural theory,
politics and music. His 2008 book Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical
Theory and Popular Politics is
available for free legal download HERE. Lots of information, free work, a blog, links to
social media, and other material can be found at www.jeremygilbert.org
Jeremy.gilbert@ntlw.ald.com
Michael Goddard, Excommunicating Deleuze:
Ex-Communication, the Post-Secular Post-Digital and Non-Philosophy
The recent appearance of the book Excommunication, by
Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark suggests amongst other
things a philosophically informed re-articulation of media theory in the 21st
Century (post)digital era. This is done via a probing of both media and
mediation that doesn’t shy away from deeper engagements with philosophy,
metaphysics and even religion that are usually singularly lacking on
conventional media theory. The suggestion is clearly taken up in the volume
that to really think outside of mediation, communication and media as they are
conventionally understood, other modes of thought such as non or maybe
ex-philosophy are needed. This paper will take up this challenge looking at the
various theoretical moves in Excommunication, and taking seriously the
challenge that Deleuzian immanence may have encountered its limits and lost its
explanatory power in relation to 21st Century post-digital media environments.
Nevertheless by contrasting this account with some post-autonomist
perspectives, especially the recent work by Lazzarato Signs and Machines, it
will aim to problematize just what can be usefully retained, not only from
Deleuzian but also from Guattarian thought for thinking the contemporary
condition of excommunication diagnosed by Galloway, Thacker and Wark.
Michael Goddard is Reader in Media at the University
of Salford. He has published widely on Polish and international cinema and
visual culture as well as cultural and media theory. He recently completed a
book on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes
of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and
Laibach and culminating in editing two books on noise. Another strand of his
research concerns Italian post-autonomist political thought and media theory,
particularly the work of Franco Berardi (Bifo). Most recently, his research
focuses on contemporary audiovisual popular culture and urban space. He is
currently a CAPES/Science without Borders Special Visiting Researcher, working
with a team of researchers at Unisinos on the project, “Cities, Creative
Industries and Popular Music Scenes.”
goddard@salford.ac.uk
Sotiria Gounari, Παθηματική πολιτική και κρίση
Στην παρουσίαση αυτή θα αποπειραθώ να μιλήσω για την
παθηματική πτυχή του νομαδισμού, όπως αυτός έχει οριστεί από τους Deleuze και
Guattari αλλά και την Rosi Braidotti. Το νομαδικό μοντέλο, προσφέρει μια μέθοδο
ανάλυσης που αφορά την ενεργό εκφόρτιση των συγκινήσεων, η οποία έρχεται σε
αντίθεση με την κρατική διαχείριση των συναισθημάτων ως καθυστερημένων
συγκινήσεων. Χρησιμοποιώντας τον νομαδισμό, θα επιχειρήσω να αναλύσω
προεξάρχοντες τρόπους αντιμετώπισης της κρίσης στο ελληνικό παράδειγμα, όπως
τον στιγματισμό και τη διαχείριση πληθυσμών που θεωρήθηκαν
"πλεονάζοντες" ή "επικίνδυνοι" (οι οροθετικές, οι
μετανάστες), ως παθηματικές πολιτικές. Δηλαδή, ως πολιτικές κατά τις οποίες η
γράμμωση του πραγματικού και δυνητικού χώρου, βασίστηκε κεντρικά στην
αιχμαλώτιση της ικανότητας για δράση των ανεπιθύμητων πληθυσμών και ταυτόχρονα
στην κυκλοφορία αισθημάτων φόβου και πανικού στο ευρύτερο κοινωνικό πεδίο. Το
εργαλείο της παθηματικότητας, μας επιτρέπει να δούμε ενικές μεθοδεύσεις
παραγωγής ανεπιθύμητων σωμάτων ως μεθόδους αιχμαλώτισης των κοινωνικών
συναισθημάτων στις γραμμομοριακές αποσπασματικότητες της υγείας, της φυλής, της
τάξης, του φύλου. Ως αποτέλεσμα η επανεδαφικοποίηση των επιθυμιών στο
φιλελεύθερο οικονομικό μοντέλο και στα κανονικοποιημένα έμφυλα, φυλετικά και
σεξουαλικά πρότυπα, με λίγα λόγια η εμπέδωση της νόρμας τοποθετεί την κρίση στο
χρόνο του ακίνητου, απαράλλαχτου, στατικού. Ο νομαδισμός θα είναι ένα μοντέλο
μέσα από το οποίο θα επιχειρήσουμε την κυκλοφορία συγκινήσεων και επιθυμιών για
νέα μοντέλα ύπαρξης πέραν του φιλελεύθερου ανταγωνιστικού προτύπου.
Η Σωτηρία Γούναρη γεννήθηκε στην Αθήνα το 1984.
Σπούδασε αρχιτεκτονική στο Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης, όπου και
έγραψε την ερευνητική της εργασία πάνω στο έργο του ντελεζιανά εμπνευσμένου
Αμερικάνου αρχιτέκτονα, Greg Lynn. Μετακινήθηκε στην Αθήνα, όπου σπούδασε στο
μεταπτυχιακό πρόγραμμα "Πολιτικής Επιστήμης και Κοινωνιολογίας" του
Εθνικού και Καποδιστριακού Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών. Η διπλωματική της εργασία
αφορά την πολιτική διάσταση της φιλοσοφικής έννοιας του νομαδισμού, όπως αυτή
αναπτύχθηκε από τους Deleuze και Guattari αλλά και την Rosi Braidotti.
xotiria@yahoo.gr
Christina Grammatikopoulou, An approach to cultural
hacking: Creating repetition and difference in the digital, hybrid and urban
space
The broad adoption of information technologies into
contemporary living and the prevalence of neoliberal values in the political
sphere have had a strong impact on the cultural sphere. Technology has
encouraged a stronger participation in the creation of culture and greater
interaction among the public, whereas the expression of political dissent has
often been channelled through cultural activism. Within this context, the
current proposal deals with the politically active branch of contemporary
artistic production that encourages intervention in virtual, augmented and
urban spaces through Cultural Hacking, a term that describes a wide range of
practices: artworks based on hacking (as an artistic medium, as a cultural
practice or as a subject), cultural actions in the urban space (artworks based
on augmented reality that somehow hack the use of the urban space) and
technology-based artworks that propagate free information flow. At the same time,
the participatory process behind those artworks facilitates an understanding of
virtuality in the Deleuzian sense, as the basis for the production of real
experience, that holds all the possible forms and meanings this art can take.
Moreover, as hacking is based on the subversion and remix of previous forms and
ideas, it produces alternate visions of the digital, hybrid (augmented) and
urban space through repetition and difference. Bearing in mind the cultural and
ideological framework of the Information Age, with an eye towards the thought
of Gilles Deleuze, this proposal aims to provide a new approach to computer
based and participatory art.
Christina Grammatikopoulou is an art theorist living
in Barcelona. Her doctoral thesis (2013) focused on the concept of the
Immaterial in contemporary art. Currently, her research is centred on the
perception of the body and space in contemporary art, as well as participation
within the immaterial sphere created by digital technologies. Since 2008 she
has been the managing editor of the online magazine Interartive
(interartive.org). She has collaborated with numerous artists as an independent
curator and has previously worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art of
Barcelona (MACBA). She is also a member of the group ‘Art, Architecture and
Digital Society’ of the University of Barcelona and has also collaborated with
the group ‘Urban Conflicts’ of the Aristotle University.
