Helen Palmer, The Duplicity of the Snark: Dynamic
Formalisms and Queer Multiplicities
This paper investigates the formula ‘pluralism =
monism’ from the perspective of linguistic and philosophical formalism, and
suggests how this perspective might be creatively used within queer studies. As
the study of supposed linguistic ‘invariants’, formalism is seen as the search
for structural staticity in language, but this paper will use the work of
Deleuze and Guattari to posit formalism in terms of both dynamism and
creativity. The fact that formalism celebrates a limit at the same time as its
explosion is a paradox elucidated by the philosophical practice of Deleuze and
Guattari and the literary practice of James Joyce. Deleuze’s differential ‘dark
precursor’ is both one and many, word and thing, floating signifier and floated
signified, Snark and Phlizz, and Joyce’s ‘chaos-cosmos’ of synaesthetic
linguistic experimentation presents language as formal experiment but as a form
that is multiple, dynamic , messy and vital. One way that language can be an
emancipatory force is the liberation from preconceived structures of meaning.
One area in which this is particularly pertinent is queer studies. Using some
creative examples drawn from my own writing project ‘Heifers of Eos’ (a queer
rewriting of Joyce’s ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter from Ulysses) I will explore the
relationship between philosophical, linguistic and literary ‘formalisms’ as
potential manifestations of the paradoxical formula ‘pluralism = monism’.
Helen Palmer teaches in the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author
of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2014) and is now
working on a book called Queer Defamilarisation: A Reassessment of
Estrangement. Her work focuses on language, philosophy, creative writing,
feminism and queer studies.
h.palmer@gold.ac,uk
Dana Papachristou, Locative media soundwalks: a
rhizomatic approach to urban public space sound art
Soundwalking as an artistic practice encourages
conscious listening and interaction with the sound environment in a non-linear
manner. There is a theoretical relevancy with promenadology (Burckhardt) and
flâneurie (Baudelaire and Benjamin), as the user/listener is invited to wander
within an “aurally augmented” urban public space. This artistic practice uses
field recordings and soundscape composition, and creates new spatio-phonic
routes that question the concept of linear urban planning in order to escape
from the model of the -prominently visual- panoramic city. Most soundwalks and
geo-located installations (like noTours, Soundscapes/Landscapes, SonicMaps,
Urbicolous Disport, AffeXity etc) use open-source platforms that combine
locative media (gps) with music / sound / performative compositions, by
applying them onto a mapped area. The roles of the artist and the listener
often coincide, both in cases where sounds are recorded while crossing the area
and in those where the path chosen by the walker / listener determines the
artistic result. In this approach I will suggest that soundwalks establish
rhizomatic maps and lines of sound/audio routes in negotiation with the city,
as perceived and aurally captured by the artist. I will connect such
contemporary artistic practices (soundwalks, site-specific sound compositions
and geo- located sound interventions in urban public space), with the concept
of rhizome, as introduced and explained by Deleuze and Guattari and highlight
the relevance of the rhizome concept with the practice of soundwalking as an
artistic gesture.
Musicologist and artist, focusing in the combination
of the Arts through the use of new technological media.
I was born in Athens in 1979. I studied music in the
Hellenic Conservatory, Musicology in the Kapodistrian University of Athens, and
Music Culture and Communication in the departments of Media and Music Studies,
leading to my dissertation which looks into the relation of music and painting
within Modernism throughout the correspondence of Schoenberg and Kandinsky. At
the moment I am working on my doctoral thesis in the discipline of Philosophy
of Music in regards with Deleuze and Guattari, the Aesthetics of New Media Art
in their works Anti-Oedipus and Mille Plateaux in Paris 8 – Vincennes and the
Ionian University. In addition, I am a senior student in composition in the
class of Theodoros Antoniou, and a piano studies graduate (student of Vicky
Chistophilou).
I have participated in some interdisciplinary research
projects about contemporary music and its relationship with other forms of art
(Einander zuhören – Stadt-(Ge)Schichten, Goethe Institut, Athens 2014). I am a
co-organiser (together with George Samantas) of “sound circles” workshop in
TWIXTlab. Finally, I have participated in several music projects (Delos project
– Tango with lions), and I have worked as a musician in education.
EndFragment
ntaniela@gmail.com
Dimitris Papalexopoulos, Locality Destabilized
As we move from the digital paradigm to the network
paradigm, destabilized locality, considered through the Deleuzian
deterritorialization, is proposed to be see as a machine of becoming. back in
the '70, the very important critical regionalism of Slexander Tzonis and Lisne
Lefaivre proposed a critical role for locality, through a Kantian perspective
of continuous self-critique and reorientation of objectives. Today, with the
hegemony of the network paradigm, we have to turn towards Deleuze and Guattari,
in order to foster our tools to surpass a totslity's insoluble internal
tendion: Εach locality experiences the tension between the constant search for
its own and unique identity and the different identities assigned to it from
the bundles of networks it participates in a networked world. We are witnessing
a relocalization of globalization, the main question being who has the control
of distributed and decentralized activities. I a deterritorialization's
perspective localities are to be considered through their constant agen- cement
of events, in continuous tension, as symptoms of ephemeral equilibrium of
forces in presence. What seems stable should be read as containing the
possibilities of its change. On an evolving local ground, any intention to
define a stable approach directly related to an a priori given form led to
theoretical impasses. A way to conceptualize locality as a machine of becoming,
seems to be to consider the local as it evolves through the networked digital.
To conceive conditions where localities are continuously evolving and not
trying to seek the Ultimate Form of control. in other words, to think of a
digitally existing local, which in fact is a networked local in a translocal,
invented by collective intelligence produced by
deterritorializations-reterritorializations.
Dimitris Papalexopoulos: Born 1953, Architect,
PhD. Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of
Athens. Director of Architectural Technology Research Unit (ATRU) (http://atru.arch.ntua.gr/ ). Director of Fab Lab Athens (http://fablabathens.gr/ ). Researches on interaction design, parametric design and building
knowledge management. His post - graduate course on “Architecture and
Information Technology” (since 1998) won prices at international competitions and
participated in international exhibitions and conferences. A redefinition of
locality through I.T. is researched. At Archsign,
his architectural work (www.archsign.gr ) includes renovations and new
buildings projects in the private and public sector. Author of articles on
architecture and I.T. Co-author (with
Eleni Kalafati) of Takis
Zenetos, Visioni digitali, architetture construite, EdilStampa,
2006. Author of Digital
Regionalism, Libro, 2008. Sites: www.ntua.gr/archtech , www.archsign.gr.
Dplxs@otenet.gr
Brook WR Pearson, The Only Enemy is Two: The War
Machine in an Era of Planetary Crisis
Taking my inspiration from an earlier version of the
‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ dictum being explored in this conference (from one of
Deleuze’s Vincennes lectures, ‘dualism, monism and multiplicities’,
26/03/1973), in this paper I consider the notion of calling forth a people yet
to come by way of the dissolution of dualisms in thought and in modelling thought:
‘There is only one form of thought, it’s the same thing: one can only think in
a monistic or pluralistic manner. The only enemy is two… Wherever we leave the
domain of multiplicities, we once again fall into dualisms, i.e., into the
domain of non-thought, we leave the domain of thought as process.’
If this model is viable—and I think that it is not
only viable but fundamental in our current struggles to produce the conditions
for life to continue on our swiftly changing planet—then Deleuze and Guattari’s
model of the war machine as something that, in the hands of nomads, produces a
war that ‘simultaneously create[s] something else, if only new nonorganic
social relations’ (ATP, p. 423) is an important conceptual and practical
application of the notion that ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’.
Examples in this paper will rely primarily on those
drawn from current opposition to carbon extraction.
Brook is a poet and a philosopher, currently teaching
in the Humanities Department at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
He has recently completed two books of poetry—Between Blue & Leek-Green,
and Documents in Vanishing Ink: Love in a Police State—and is currently working
on a third, Bronze. He holds a PhD (2001) from the University of Surrey, UK in
philosophy, classics and religious studies, is the author of Corresponding
Sense: Paul, Dialectic and Gadamer (Brill, 2001), and the editor of numerous
books in religious studies. He is currently working on a philosophy book
entitled Slow Think—applying primarily poststructuralist political thought
(particularly that of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Derrida, with
recourse to Wittgenstein) to crisis-induced models of resistance, and on a
project examining the influence of Diderot and de Sade on poststructuralist philosophy.
His scholarly work has appeared recently in Rivista di Estetica, Contours,
Spanner, The Philosophy of David Cronenberg, Dune and Philosophy, and his
poetry in Repurposed Magazine, and Rising Tide's Galvanizing Resistance.
Eftichis Pirovolakis, Deleuze and Derrida on Drawing
and Painting: The Visible and the Non-Visible
In this paper I will investigate Deleuze’s and
Derrida’s approaches to drawing and painting, with a view to reflecting on the
contentious relation between the two thinkers. Their philosophical contiguity
is almost self-evident, as both resist conventional representational
interpretations of drawing and painting. Several concepts of Deleuze’s
aesthetics attest to his construal of painting as a creative process whereby
difference is affirmed as a state of permanent revolution. ‘Sensation’,
‘percepts’ and ‘affects’ bear witness to the force of an artwork, and question
the ability of art to reveal an intelligible order. Simultaneously, Deleuze
endorses the idea that painting can render visible the invisible forces that
structure the relation between sensation and the world. The hypothesis I wish
to test is that there is a tension between his affirmation of heterogeneous
forces and the demand that these forces be ‘harnessed’ or ‘rendered visible’,
even momentarily, in the painting. Although this movement from the invisible to
visibility does not lead to an actual and full present, I will explore whether
the way Deleuze formulates it still appeals to a conceptuality that undermines
his emphasis on difference and becoming-other that painting epitomizes. It is
precisely in order to displace any neat organization of the visible and the
non-visible that Derrida grants a strategic priority to non-visibility and its
absolute irreducibility. By insisting on non-visibility as the condition of a
visibility that is at the same time possible and impossible, Derrida allows for
a thinking of drawing and painting in terms of radical heterogeneity. The
latter complicates any decision regarding an artwork’s even fleeting ability to
render the inchoate visible.
Eftichis Pirovolakis works on twentieth-century
continental philosophy and, more specifically, on the relation between
hermeneutics, phenomenology and deconstruction. He is the author of Reading Derrida
and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics
(SUNY Press, 2010), which also includes his translation into English of
Derrida’s essay ‘La parole: Donner, nommer, appeler’. He has published articles
in, among other journals, Philosophy Today and Literature, Interpretation,
Theory, and has recently been working on two texts on forgiveness in Derrida,
Arendt and Ricoeur, as well as on an essay on the value of friendship in
Aristotle. Pirovolakis has also co-organised two international conferences at
the University of Sussex, UK: ‘Encounters with Derrida’ in 2003, and
‘Philosophy and Literature/Literature and Philosophy’ in 2008. Since 2001, he
has taught a range of courses at the Universities of Sussex and Brighton in the
UK, and the Universities of Crete and Patras in Greece. Currently, he teaches
philosophy at the Hellenic Open University.
epirovolakis@yahoo.co.uk
Patricia Pisters, Metallurgic Noology: Bending
World-Memory
Metal is not only the basic material for both weapons
and tools, Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, but also the
conductor of all matter in a continuous variation. The smith, the
artisan-metallurgist is its first transformer. This lecture will consider
filmmakers and artists as metallurgists of our time, repeating and recreating
history, shaping collective memory with a difference. I will argue that,
typical for cinema in the digital age or neuro-images, filmmakers “mine” our
audio-visual archives, uncovering forgotten images, hidden sounds, and
unconscious thoughts that they transform into a new aesthetic whole. Bending
“world-memory” both on a cognitive and affective level these artist are
metallurgic noologist, addressing the past looking for refrains of freedom for
“a people to come.”. I will focus on one particular “metallurgic filmmaker”
Tariq Teguia, whose Zandj Revolution (2013) revives not only a past revolution,
the ninth century revolution of the Zandj slaves in Iraq, but also takes us on
an ambulant journey from contemporary Algeria, to Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and
Greece.
Patricia Pisters is professor of film studies at the
department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam and (per February
2015) director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one
of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies. She is programme director of the research group Neuraesthetics and Neuocultures and co-director (with Josef Fruchtl) of the research
group Film and Philosophy at ASCA (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis).
Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film
Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian
Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012).
See for articles and more information also: www.patriciapisters.com .
P.P.R.W.Pisters@uva.nl
Arkady Plotnitsky, From Chaos to the Brain:” The
Quantum-Field-Theoretical Model of Thought in What is Philosophy?
This paper argues that What is Philosophy? represents
a shift in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking concerning the nature of thought and
cognition, from that grounded in a geometrical, specifically Riemannian, model,
corresponding to the physics of Einstein’s relativity, to that grounded in a
quantum-theoretical, specifically quantum-field-theoretical, model. The main
reason for my argument is that, while Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of
thought as a confrontation between the brain and chaos is not surprising, their
conception of chaos, as the virtual, is unusual and even unique in the history
of philosophy. This conception, I argue, is borrowed from quantum field theory
and the concept of the virtual there, which also changes Deleuze and Guattari’s
understanding of the virtual. It is this shift that defines their innovative
conjecture concerning the architecture of the brain in the conclusion, “From
Chaos to the Brain,” of What is Philosophy?
Arkady Plotnitsky is a professor of English and
Director of Theory and Cultural Studies Program at Purdue University. He has
published extensively on Romanticism, continental philosophy, the philosophy of
science, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science. His
most recent books are Epistemology and Probability: Bohr, Heisenberg,
Schrödinger and the Nature of Quantum-Theoretical Thinking, and Niels Bohr and
Complementarity.
Jean-Claude Polack, Felix Guattari, Jean Oury et la
psyhanalyse
Mon apport au panel serait de parler du travail de
Guattari avec Jean Oury à la clinique de La Borde.Donc de l'élaboration commune
(avec Tosquelles à l'horizon) de la "Psychotherapie
institutionnelle".Mais en même temps,je voudrais montrer comment Felix
passe de la P.I. à la schizoanalyse, après sa rupture avec Lacan..,et
comment,de mon point de vue, ce passage n'est pas une rupture avec la
Psychanalyse,mais une expansion du projet freudien initial.
jcpolack@hotmail.fr
Yannis Prelorentzos, Quelle articulation entre le
Bergson et le Spinoza de Gilles Deleuze?
Bergson, Spinoza et Nietzsche sont les philosophes qui
ont le plus influencé Deleuze –on doit plutôt parler ici de «rencontre» ou de
«discours indirect libre» avec eux. Bergson est même le premier des trois sur
lequel Deleuze a publié des écrits (dès 1956). J’essaierai d’abord de mettre en
évidence : les deux jugements apparemment opposés portés par Bergson sur
Spinoza ; quand et à quelle(s) occasion(s) Deleuze a étudié les deux penseurs ;
quel était le niveau de sa connaissance de leur œuvre ; quel rôle ils ont joué
dans son enseignement et dans son œuvre ; quels rapprochements entre Bergson et
Spinoza avaient été opérés en France avant les décennies 1950 et 1960. Ensuite
j’étudierai les rares endroits de ses ouvrages où Deleuze insiste sur la
parenté profonde entre les deux philosophes (notamment à propos de l’immanence,
du monisme caché derrière un dualisme apparent et de la joie), ceux où il met
en valeur l’affinité de certaines thèses de Bergson et de Spinoza avec celles
d’autres philosophes, et ceux où le spinozisme de Deleuze semble l’emporter sur
son bergsonisme, et l’inverse. J’examinerai les références explicites ou
implicites de Deleuze à Spinoza dans ses écrits sur Bergson et celles à Bergson
dans ses textes sur Spinoza, et l’apport de Deleuze dans la mise en relief des
rapports intimes entre la philosophie de Spinoza et celle de Bergson. Je
terminerai par un examen des écrits des commentateurs de Deleuze qui ont
rapproché, diversement, son bergsonisme et son spinozisme, et des commentateurs
de Bergson qui récusent toute parenté entre Bergson et Spinoza.
Yannis Prelorentzos (PhD, Paris-IV-Sorbonne) is
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Ioannina
(Greece), where he is teaching since 2000. He was invited Professor at the
University Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne (on november 2014). He is the author of
Temps, durée et éternité dans les Principes de la philosophie de Descartes de
Spinoza (P.U.P.S., Paris, 1996), and Knowledge and Method in Bergson (in Greek,
Eurasia, Athens, 2012). He has also published a long series of substantial
articles, in French and in Greek, on topics in the history of 17th, 18th, 19th
and 20th c. philosophy. He has translated and commented the central books of
Plato’s Republic in French (3rd ed., Hatier, Paris, 2007), and Descartes’
Passions of the Soul, Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Deleuze’s Bergsonism and
Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe and other novels in Greek. His principal interests
lie at the main aspects of the work of 17th century rationalist philosophers
(especially Descartes and Spinoza), of Rousseau’s, Bergson’s, Sartre’s,
Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s philosophy, at philosophical approaches of
passions and emotions, at the various interpretations of Socrates in Modern and
Contemporary Philosophy and, most recently, at 19th and 20th c. French
philosophy. He is finishing a book on the relations between philosophy and
literature in France (1930-1960).
Y. Prelorentzos has been nominated Chevalier dans
l’Ordre des Palmes académiques on January 2015.
iprelore@uoi,gr
Constantinos V. Proimos Tectonic Signification and the
Human Condition. Gilles Deleuze’s Concept of the Fold
This papers seeks to employ Gilles Deleuze’s concept
of the fold as this was elaborated in his The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque in
order to interpret recent developments in contemporary architecture having to
do with the so called intensification of the architectural signifier,
attributed to deconstructionist architects such as Frank O Gehry, Zaha Hadid
and Daniel Libeskind. The fold or pleat of matter is a trait of baroque,
according to Deleuze as well as an operative function which entails
perspectivism and implies the individual and her/his primitive forces of
desire. Associated with animality and inorganic life, the fold encapsulates all
which are against societal conventions and cultural restrictions and confirms
the power of instincts over civilization. The joint or the tectonic detail
which according to Marco Frascari’s 1984 essay “The Tell-the-Tale Detail” is
the generator of meaning in architecture as well as the site for invention and
innovation has, in recent decades, become liberated from any restrictions
imposed by need, form, reason, economy and all the like considerations that
architects follow in design. Deleuze’s concept of the fold may allow for a
conceptualization of architectural meaning as a product of tectonic
intensification following the liberation of architectural desire. This very
idea and use of Deleuze’s fold will be discussed and critically scrutinized.
Constantinos V. Proimos received a Ph.D. in philosophy
from the New School for Social Research, NY, NY, USA (2001) after studying
sociology, art history and philosophy in Athens, New York and Paris. He has
published widely on aesthetics, philosophy of art and art history, his fields
of interest and expertise, in Greek and foreign venues. He received a state
scholarship (IKY) for his postgraduate studies and was a 1993-1994 Helena
Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His first
book, On the Limits of Aesthetics. The Role of Art in the Writings of Martin
Heidegger and Jacques Derrida was published in Athens in 2003 by Kritiki
editions. He has taught at the University of Crete, the University of Cyprus
and the Technical University of Crete and in 2003 was awarded a state
scholarship (IKY) for his postdoctoral work. He currently teaches at the
Hellenic Open University while being an art critic and curator. Adjunct
Lecturer at the Hellenic Open University cproimos@otenet.gr
