Felix Guattari

Moving architectures. Visualizing and Analyzing Relationships in 19th century Architectural Competitions in Switzerland

by Sofia Paisiou

Paisiou, S., Boyandin, I., Lalanne, D. and Van Wezemael, J.E. (2011),  Conference proceedings  “ADS-VIS2011: Making visible the invisible: Art, Design and Science in Data Visualisation,” University of Huddersfield.

Our cities are changing and this implies changes in many fields of our activities, research and everyday life.... more Our cities are changing and this implies changes in many fields of our activities, research and everyday life. Architecture, urban design and planning are the main tools for making design decisions, which structure and articulate these transformations.  The problem we are dealing with, when we are talking about the creation of our cities, is to visualise the complexity of urban procedures and the “urban futures” that they “produce”.

In our collaboration between the disciplines of human geography and informatics we worked on the collection of historical data about architectural competitions held in Switzerland in the 19th century.  We analysed these historical data in order to better understand how cities were created and developed; in other words, we addressed this complex problem using architectural competitions as an epistemic vehicle. Competitions are platforms for communication where different people (architects, clients, engineering and financial specialists etc.) and objects (designs, models, competition briefs etc.) come together, and where decisions are made about the future urban environment. We have developed a visualisation tool, which is able to represent the disparity of an architectural competition in space and in time: the networks it brings together, the actors it involves, their role and their spatiotemporal trajectories. Our visualisation tool presents the information as a navigable landscape enabling the interactive manipulation of the visual interface and leading to a deeper understanding and knowledge discovery. 

In the article, we discuss the challenges associated with the analysis of the data on architectural competitions, present our visual analytics tool and the findings it enables. Finally, we elaborate on the advantages and potentials of our interdisciplinary collaboration.

A love letter to the Other: Xenophily and radical politics

by Marco Cuevas-Hewitt

Forthcoming. Draft available for viewing.

Opening paragraphs:

"What better way to get myself in the mood to write an essay on love, I figured,... more Opening paragraphs:

"What better way to get myself in the mood to write an essay on love, I figured, than to listen to some of my favourite love songs? The smooth and sensual vocals of Cody Chestnutt’s ‘No One Will’ seem to be doing the trick right now. However, my wish here is not to write of romantic love (at least not exclusively), but of love in a political and ethical, though I would hope no less erotic, sense.

I begin by posing the question of love in relation to the under-examined concept of community. Beyond the ‘community of two’ that is the romantic couple or pair of friends are communities of interest, political persuasion, class, gender, culture, nation, and so on. Implicit in each kind of self-identified community are particular values concerning who it is admissible to associate with, to become friends with, to love.

‘Some of them might be nice people’, conceded the xenophobe to her more immigrant-friendly colleague one evening on my television screen, ‘but it’s not as if I’m going to become friends with them. That’s not how the world works’.

It is scarcely questioned that we should so often be drawn to people in whom we find something of ourselves. Communities have become a veritable extension of the self. Love, meanwhile, becomes reduced to the love of Same."

Ecology and the art of the possible

by Marco Cuevas-Hewitt

Forthcoming. Due for publication in mid-2012. Draft available for viewing.

First paragraph: "Evocative images, wispy like memory, light up the walls of a sunless room in an old colonial... more First paragraph: "Evocative images, wispy like memory, light up the walls of a sunless room in an old colonial era mental asylum turned art gallery. In their glow, an odd array of objects: Time-worn furniture, an antique French stereoscope, a bouquet of native flowers, jars of assorted bush tucker. Binding them are the invisible threads of stories, gathered up and re-woven by artists Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe of the Sydney-based collective, Makeshift, during their two sojourns in Esperance in the autumn and spring of 2011. The black and white projection at the focal point of the installation conveys an eighteenth century dining scene, seemingly plucked out of Europe and parachuted into the dry salt lake where it was filmed, save for the bloodroot, wattleseed, and other edible native plants comprising the spread. Adding to its curiousness is the artists’ unusual choice to film it as a tableau vivant or ‘living picture’. This now-quaint convention, once popular as a form of entertainment at the soirees of aristocratic elites, involves the presentation of a scene by a silent and motionless cast of characters as if imitating a painting or photograph. The effect achieved by Makeshift is a film reel resembling a slideshow of images from the colonial frontier, eerily still but for the tablecloth flapping in the breeze..."

Like a Kid in a Candy Shop: Truth and Discourse in DeLillo’s White Noise

by Beau Wuthrich

During the Enlightenment Period of the 19th Century, Immanuel Kant rejected the belief in the ability of the human... more During the Enlightenment Period of the 19th Century, Immanuel Kant rejected the belief in the ability of the human mind to understand the universe in its entirety with his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s claim was that human perception was in fact a unity of manifolds which determinately synthesized experience, binding the human subject into time, space and causality and separating him or her from the ontological, or “real” world. For Kant, there were aspects of the universe entirely indecipherable to and unintelligible by human subjects. Kant termed this transcendental spirit numen. In his breakout novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo explores Kant’s numen and the role it plays in the postmodern age. The perceptions of DeLillo’s characters reflect a certain detachment from and estrangement to the world of the objective. In this era, it is the signs and symbols man has created for himself which transcend and override the ontological cosmos and in effect replace it, attaining a higher order of valence for the individual. For DeLillo’s protagonist, Jack Gladney, the antithesis of this world of Baudrillardian simulacra is the abyss, death, the intangible and unsignafiable state of human consciousness. Death is a state of non-existence, hostile and intangible to the psyche; in other words, the perfect historical expression of Kant’s undetected numen or, as allegorized by Jack’s son Heinrich via scientific narrative, the invisible “neutrinos [that] go right through the earth” (DeLillo, 34), imperceptible “waves and radiation” (38). DeLillo’s novel gestures toward the authoritative systems and structures erected to barricade humanity against death: the abstract and discursive institutions Mark Conroy describes as the “master narratives of cultural transmission in Jack Gladney's universe: the familial, the civic, the humanist and the religious” (“From Tombstone to Tabloid.” 97), or, to use a more concrete example, the psychically-invested dams against death, the Pyramids of Giza or the Great Wall of China invested in by their dead erectors (DeLillo, 159). The rising question relates to the actual nature of truth and whether there truly is a Real-Real to go back to.

Dominant Vertebrates or The Bound Book which Binds Into Bondage: McLuhan’s Constellations and Nebulae in Resonant Acoustic Space

by Beau Wuthrich

Michel Foucault has said that power is “constructed and functions on the basis of particular powers, myriad of issues... more Michel Foucault has said that power is “constructed and functions on the basis of particular powers, myriad of issues and myriad of effects of power" (1980, 188). In other words, power is divined from multifarious institutions, practices and categories. To speak briefly, “Forms”. Macluhan states that "The Gutenberg Galaxy is intended to trace the ways in which the forms of experience and of mental outlook and expression have been modified, first by the phonetic alphabet and then by typographic printing." (1) The mosaic approach becomes the only relevant one, for in order to attain an auditory field beyond the phonetic alphabet and print, McLuhan must fragment the looking glass of print media, which values and enforces a theoretical, linear, individual approach. To do otherwise would be to sabotage his own project. The form of McLuhan’s book is, in a sense, its essence. Following this device, this essay will take a critical applicative approach rather than a reflective one, entering the auditory field and resonating with McLuhan’s text, as opposed to observing it from a unitary point of view.

O manjšinskem avtorju

by Matej T. Vatovec

Polityka poza formą. Ontologiczne uwarunkowania poststrukturalistycznej filozofii polityki

by Joanna Bednarek

Guattari's on Facebook?! Affects, Refrains, and the Digital Cloud

by Alexander Monea

Published in 'Selected Papers of Internet Research (12.0)'.

Autour du concept

by Pierre Bonneels

Review of Soft Subversions

by Maxwell Kennel

Symposium 16.1

Teleindividuation

by Rafał Ilnicki

FCJ-121 Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Felix Guattari's Ecosophical Perspective

by John Tinnell

Published in The Fibreculture Journal (Issue 18, 2011)

The_Alcoff_Question_and_the_Deleuze_Answerx 12-6 windows

by Nicholas Locke

Extended Carbon Cognition as a Machine

by Ingmar Lippert

published as: I. Lippert. Extended carbon cognition as a machine. Computational Culture, 1(1), 2011.

By way of exploring ethnographic data on carbon construction practices by agents of ecological modernisation in a... more By way of exploring ethnographic data on carbon construction practices by agents of ecological modernisation in a multinational corporation, this paper seeks to problematise the distributed and heterogeneous intelligence assembled by human and non-humans to make intelligible their carbon footprint.
Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at a leading multinational in the financial services sector over a period of more than 12 months, I focus on everyday work practices as taking place in a capitalist context. It is through practical work that the presences of carbon emissions are imagined and brought into being. Thus, carbon emerges as co-constituted by thought. I will focus on instances in which the corporate machinery, i.e. automated thought, had to be supplemented by immediate human practices of 1) thinking themselves, 2) organising materials to think through and 3) ordering others to think. At another layer of analysis, I am to scrutinise carbon construction practices through the tension between creatively thinking / envisioning – and calculating / number crunching. Tracing members' practices allows to reconstruct how their usage of dichotomies renders carbon emissions intelligible.
As a result of this analysis carbon accounting emerges as enabled through an extended system of cognition. The paper concludes by tentatively suggesting a view on this machinery as co-constituting a wider – to borrow Guattari's term – Universe: A Universe of references to carbon.
Following these relations of thinking allows to question the conceptualisations of the actors involved and how their practical interactions render carbon, nature and our society (un)sustainable. This, I hope, provides a chance to better conceptualise individuals, their social and material contexts, and through that, corresponding room for manoevre.

Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory

by Dr Hillegonda Rietveld

published in: 'Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture'. 2 (1): pp 4–23. ISSN 1947-5403

©2011 Dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net

This article addresses the role of house music as a nomadic archival institution, constituted by the musical history... more This article addresses the role of house music as a nomadic archival institution, constituted by the musical history of disco, invigorating this dance genre by embracing new production technologies and keeping disco alive through a rhizomic assemblage of its affective memory in the third record of the DJ mix. This exploration will be illustrated through a close analysis of a specific DJ set by a Chicago house music producer, Larry Heard, in the setting of Rotterdam, 2007, in which American house music is recontextualised. Refining the analysis through close attention to one of the tracks played during that particular set, Grand High Priest’s 2006 “Mary Mary”, the analysis shows how DJ and music production practices intertwine to produce a plurality of unstable cultural and musical connections that are temporarily anchored within specific DJ sets. The conceptual framework draws on the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, as well as Baudrillard’s sense of seduction, with the aim to introduce a fluid notion of mediated nomadic cultural memory, a type of countermemory, enabled by the third record and thereby to playfully re-imagine the dynamic function of a music archive.

Keywords: house music, DJ practices, third record, cultural memory, nomadology

Reading in the Future: Literacy and the Time of the Internet

by David R Cole

Abstract: David R. Cole’s “Reading in the Future: Literacy and
the Time of the Internet” locates the literacies... more Abstract: David R. Cole’s “Reading in the Future: Literacy and
the Time of the Internet” locates the literacies of the internet
– itself read as “the end game of western technology” or the
Machina Mundi, the Great Chain of the World that has a centre
that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere – in a
contradictory space. But Cole also self-consciously locates his
own writing at a moment in time when the initial technological
hype of the internet is subsiding in the face of the boredom of
informational overload and the internet is emerging as both an
“unlimited realm of resource” and the site of a brand of “western
nihilism containing a sense of relativism, collapse of meaning
and cultural schizo-cynicism”. Remarkably, in the course of his
argument, Coles does not appropriate the internet, does not
simplify it according to his own vision of its potential or
mission – but allows it to remain a place of cultural
schizophrenia, to be navigated only by means of the corresponding learning, acceptance, and practice of “schizo literacy”.

GILLES DELEUZE, FELIX GUATTARI AND THE PROBLEM OF CITY (Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari a problem mesta)

by Andrej Gogora

GOGORA, A. 2009. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari a problém mesta. In Filozofia. ISSN
0046-385 X, 2009, roč. 64, č. 4, s. 362-369.

The paper tries to shed light on philosophical consequences of the concept of risoma, employed by G.Deleuze and... more The paper tries to shed light on philosophical consequences of the concept of risoma, employed by G.Deleuze and F.Guattari. At the same time it shows that the concept could contribute to the discussion of the city, architecture and urbanism problematics.

In Your Face

by Tim Morton

Published in Nicholas Groom, ed., Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Macmillan, 1999), 79–95.

Thomas Chatterton's poetics of food plays with simulation and violence. Thomas Chatterton's poetics of food plays with simulation and violence.

Urban Play: Imaginatively Responsible Behavior as an Alternative to Neoliberalism

by Fred Landers

(forthcoming), Arts in Psychotherapy. This draft submitted on June 7, 2011. Small edits made on October 15, 2011.

Urban Play is a budding form of social activism in which groups of friends engage in improvised play with each other... more Urban Play is a budding form of social activism in which groups of friends engage in improvised play with each other and with strangers in public places. This work may contribute to social justice by helping participants discover opportunities for change. If neoliberalism encourages the pursuit of narrowly defined self-interests, neoliberal institutions may be maintained by the fear that these interests are threatened. By allowing participants to define the actions that are uniquely possible among them, play appears to offer an alternative to neoliberalism. What has been learned so far from playing in public also suggests a fresh perspective on Developmental Transformations, the form of drama therapy that inspired Urban Play.

POR UNA ARQUEOLOGÍA MENOR: DE LA PRODUCCIÓN DE DISCURSOS A LA PRODUCCIÓN DE SUBJETIVIDAD; Minor Archaeology: from discourses production to subjectivity production, Revista Arkeogazte Nº1, pp. 21-36, año 2011

by Pablo Alonso González

Resumen:

Este artículo pretende plantear de una forma teórica y propositiva lo que hemos denominado... more Resumen:

Este artículo pretende plantear de una forma teórica y propositiva lo que hemos denominado “arqueología menor”. Este término busca denominar el espacio dejado por una arqueología pública importada de contextos anglosajones claramente vinculada a las “políticas de la identidad”. Una “arqueología menor” considera la socialización de la arqueología y su hibridación con otras disciplinas como un paso ineludible para integrar la mercantilización del patrimonio en procesos de construcción de subjetividades locales. Así, no pretende fijar un modelo exclusivista de gestión – una arqueología pública también puede ser “menor” – sino mostrar el potencial de la arqueología de cara a la transformación social y democratización a nivel territorial. Varios análisis de casos ilustran someramente las reflexiones expuestas.

Palabras clave:

Arqueología menor; Arqueología pública; Gestión del patrimonio; Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari.

Abstract:

The aim of this article is to set out what we have called “Minor Archaeology” from a theoretical standpoint. The term seeks to give a name and stand for the space left by a Public Archaeology imported from the English-speaking world, whose roots are clearly related with the “politics of identity”. Within a “Minor Archaeology” framework, the socialisation and hybridization of Archaeology with other disciplines is regarded as an unavoidable step in order to incorporate the commodification of heritage in processes of local subjectivity building. Thus, our aim is not to set a fixed and exclusivist model of archaeological and heritage management – a Public Archaeology can also be “Minor Archaeology” – but to show the potential archaeology holds to foster social change and favour a more democratic stance at a wide territorial scale. The cases of study presented aim to illustrate the reflections exposed.

Key words:

Minor Archaeology; Public Achaeology; Heritage Management; Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari.