Eugene W. Holland - Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and Slow Motion General Strike (Minnesota University Press, Usa, 2011)

Pub. Date: November 29, 2011

Exposes social and labor contracts as masks for foundational and ongoing global violence

Nomad Citizenship argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, Eugene W. Holland looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the ideas of nomad citizenship and free-market communism.

Nomad Citizenship argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. It changes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology into a utopian project with immediate practical implications, developing ideas of a nonlinear Marxism and of the slow-motion general strike.

Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, Eugene W. Holland looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the ideas of nomad citizenship and free-market communism. Holland’s nomadology seeks to displace capital-controlled free markets with truly free markets. Its goal is to rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism—to enable noncapitalist markets to coordinate socialized production on a global scale and, with an eye to the common good, to liberate them from capitalist control.

In suggesting the slow-motion general strike, Holland aims to transform citizenship: to renew, enrich, and invigorate it by supplanting the monopoly of state citizenship with plural nomad citizenships. In the process, he offers critiques of both the Clinton and Bush regimes in the broader context of critiques of the social contract, the labor contract, and the form of the state itself. 

Contents

Preface 
Introduction: Assays in Affirmative Nomadology

1. From Political Philosophy to Affirmative Nomadology 
2. Death-State Citizenship 
3. Nomad Citizenship 
4. Free-Market Communism 
Conclusion

Appendix: Nomadological and Dialectical Utopianism  

Eugene W. Holland is professor and chair of comparative studies at Ohio State University. He recently coedited Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text.


Read more

Hayek (and anarcho-capitalists) got it half right by emphasizing the complex and dazzling benefits of free markets. Marx (at least in one careful reading of him) got it half right by emphasizing the problem of wage-labor. Put these two basic insights together--instead of assuming or insisting that they must be opposed--and what do you get? A truly free free market... a "nomad market"... a market free from the State and emptied of wage-labor. And in certain respects, as Holland demonstrates, such a market already exists today alongside the capitalist market. It not only exists, it provides a way to think through, and possibly a way to reach the beyond, of capitalism and its worst problems. Perhaps we really can work to achieve the best of both worlds (markets, well-intentioned concern for the common good). Refreshingly, Holland develops the argument thoroughly, offering a wide-reaching, historically-informed analysis that is never romantic or naive. In arriving at his conclusions, he never presupposes anything (good or bad) about "human nature" or "society" or "governance" (or even "nature") in the abstract. Neither does he offer any guarantees. He fully embraces the complexity and unpredictability of history.
There is in fact much more going on here, which isn't surprising given Holland's interest in the interrelatedness of psychology, politics, and economics. The book is also a rethinking of "belonging." It provides a conceptual map for a third-way (not reform, not revolution) toward a better future. It offers a lens for seeing important differences between the George W and Clinton presidencies as well as ways they were interconnected in their support of the "infinite debt" that plagues most of today's markets.
If nothing else, after reading this book, you will never make the mistake of equating "market" with "capitalist market." ELB @ Amazon website

This is a brilliant and important book which provides both vital insight into our contemporary political situation and, through a novel synthesis of nomad Marxism and complexity theory, ways for thinking the future differently. Eugene W. Holland’s conceptions of an affirmative nomadology and free market communism make a fresh and invigorating contribution to the contemporary critique of capital and attempts to produce small and large-scale, long-lasting alternatives to its dominion. A superb achievement and essential reading.

—

Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick

Amore Pacific Research & Design Centre - Alvaro Siza, Carlos Castanheira, Kim Jong Kyu

Location: Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea

Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy - D. N. Rodowick, editor -(Minnesota University Press, Usa, 2009)

A critical debate on the importance—and usefulness—of Deleuze’s film theory

The first new collection of critical studies on Deleuze’s cinema writings in nearly a decade, Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophyprovides original essays that evaluate the continuing significance of Deleuze’s film theories, accounting systematically for the ways in which they have influenced the investigation of contemporary visual culture and offering new directions for research.

Contributors: Raymond Bellour, Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques; Ronald Bogue, U of Georgia; Giuliana Bruno, Harvard U; Ian Buchanan, Cardiff U; James K. Chandler, U of Chicago; Tom Conley, Harvard U; Amy Herzog, CUNY; András Bálint Kovács, Eötvös Loránd U; Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin U; Timothy Murray, Cornell U; Dorothea Olkowski, U of Colorado; John Rajchman, Columbia U; Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, U Paris VIII; Garrett Stewart, U of Iowa; Damian Sutton, Glasgow School of Art; Melinda Szaloky, UC Santa Barbara

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was one of the most innovative and revolutionary thinkers of the twentieth century. Author of more than twenty books on literature, music, and the visual arts, Deleuze published the first volume of his two-volume study of film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, in 1983 and the second volume, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, in 1985. Since their publication, these books have had a profound impact on the study of film and philosophy. Film, media, and cultural studies scholars still grapple today with how they can most productively incorporate Deleuze’s thought.

The first new collection of critical studies on Deleuze’s cinema writings in nearly a decade, Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy provides original essays that evaluate the continuing significance of Deleuze’s film theories, accounting systematically for the ways in which they have influenced the investigation of contemporary visual culture and offering new directions for research.

 D. N. Rodowick is professor of visual and environmental studies and director of Graduate Studies in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of many books, including The Virtual Life of Film and Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine.

Read more 

Ways of Knowing A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine - John V. Pickstone (Chicago University Press, Usa, April 2001)

In Ways of Knowing, John V. Pickstone provides a new and accessible framework for understanding science, technology, and medicine (STM) in the West from the Renaissance to the present. Pickstone's approach has four key features. First, he synthesizes the long-term histories and philosophies of disciplines that are normally studied separately. Second, he dissects STM into specific ways of knowing—natural history, analysis, and experimentalism—with separate but interlinked elements. Third, he explores these ways of knowing as forms of work related to our various technologies for making, mending, and destroying. And finally, he relates scientific and technical knowledges to popular understandings and to politics.

Covering an incredibly wide range of subjects, from minerals and machines to patients and pharmaceuticals, and from experimental physics to genetic engineering, Pickstone's Ways of Knowing challenges the reader to reexamine traditional conceptualizations of the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, technology, and medicine.

A note to the reader
1. Ways of knowing: an introduction
An outline of the method
Missions for this book
An outline of the story
2. World-readings: the meanings of nature and of science
Variety in modern Western medicine
Meanings and readings
Renaissance cosmologies
Disenchantment?
Natural theology and natural diseases
Revolution, respectability and evolution
Science, progress and the State
Modernist human-natures
Nature and culture
3. Natural history
'Historia' and representation
New worlds, new properties and new creators
Natures for pedigree people
Natural empires
Popular natural history
Displays of technology, new and old
'Natural history' now
4. Analysis and the rationalisation of production
Rationalisation and identities
Production and analytical sciences
5. The elements of bodies, earth and society
Medical analysis: corpse and patient
Analysing plants and animals
Sciences of the earth
Analysing the social
Reflections on the institutions of analysis
6. Experimentalism and invention
Meanings of experiment
Experimental histories
Experimentation and the age of analysis
Synthesis in chemistry
Experimentation in biomedical sciences
Experimentation in physical sciences
On clouds, dust and control
Experimentalism and hierarchies of knowledge
Experiment and invention
7. Industries, universities and the technoscientific complexes
Analysis and established technologies
Electrical analysis and synthesis
Electrotechnics and industrial laboratories
Dyestuffs and pharmaceuticals
Remedies for/from microbes
Science and industry in and after the First World War
Technosciences in and after the Second World War
Coda
8. Technoscience and public understandings: the British case c.2000
'No one understands us'
Science back in business
The study of 'public understanding of science'
The politics of technoscience
Understanding public science
Analysis and the bounds of 'science'
Publics and natural histories
Public understandings and world-readings
Science, values and history

Read more

Digital Baroque New Media Art and Cinematic Folds - Timothy Murray (Minnesota University Press, Usa, 2008)

A surprising and original application of theories of new media art

Making an exquisite and unexpected connection between the old and the new, Digital Baroque analyzes the philosophical paradigms that inform contemporary screen arts. Examining a wide range of art forms, Murray reflects on the rhetorical, emotive, and social forces inherent in the screen arts’ dialogue with early modern concepts.

 In this intellectually groundbreaking work, Timothy Murray investigates a paradox embodied in the book’s title: What is the relationship between digital, in the form of new media art, and baroque, a highly developed early modern philosophy of art? Making an exquisite and unexpected connection between the old and the new, Digital Baroque analyzes the philosophical paradigms that inform contemporary screen arts.

Examining a wide range of art forms, Murray reflects on the rhetorical, emotive, and social forces inherent in the screen arts’ dialogue with early modern concepts. Among the works discussed are digitally oriented films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker; video installations by Thierry Kuntzel, Keith Piper, and Renate Ferro; and interactive media works by Toni Dove, David Rokeby, and Jill Scott. Sophisticated readings reveal the electronic psychosocial webs and digital representations that link text, film, and computer.

Murray puts forth an innovative Deleuzian psychophilosophical approach—one that argues that understanding new media art requires a fundamental conceptual shift from linear visual projection to nonlinear temporal folds intrinsic to the digital form.

Timothy Murray is professor of comparative literature and English, director of the Society for the Humanities, and curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University. He is the author of Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, and Art; Like a Film: Ideological Phantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas; Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France; the coeditor of Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998); and editor of Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought.


Read more 

On Representation. Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject - Grant Hamilton (Rodopi, NY, 2011)

In this important new study, Hamilton establishes and develops innovative links between the sites of postcolonial literary theory, the fiction of the South African/Australian academic and Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee, and the work of the French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Centering on the key postcolonial problematic of representation, Hamilton argues that if one approaches the colonial subject through Gilles Deleuze’s rewriting of subjectivity, then a transcendent configuration of the colonial subject is revealed. Importantly, it is this rendition of the colonial subject that accounts best for the way in which the colonial subject is able to propose and offer instances of resistance to colonial structures of subjectification. In elucidating this claim, the study turns to the fiction of Coetzee. Offering unique Deleuzean readings of three of Coetzee’s most theoretically beguiling novels – Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe – On Representation will prove to be essential reading to those interested in Coetzee studies, the literary terrain of Deleuze’s philosophy, and those engaging with contemporary debates in postcolonial literature and theory.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Absurdity and the Outside
The Body of Dusklands
Structures of Subjectification: The Enlightenment
Bodies, Incorporeals, and Becoming
Infinite Identity
Simulacra and Simulation
Suspension: The Body without Organs
Judgment
The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians
A Strong Geography
A Weak Geography
Smooth and Striated Space
The Nomad and the War Machine
The Language of Foe
The Structure-Other
The Collapse of the Structure-Other
A Missing People
The Exhaustion of Language as a New Condition of Struggle
A Minor Language and a Minor Literature
Conclusion: The Other Question

Grant Hamilton is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has published in the fields of African literature, postcolonial literature and theory, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Deleuze and Ricoeur Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self by Declan Sheerin (Continuum, Uk, 2011, Paperback)

Pub. date: 20 Oct 2011 (Paperback)

Pub. date: 03 Aug 2009 (Hardcover)

A highly original analysis of Paul Ricoeur's 'narrative self', specifically in relation to the philosophy of difference articulated by Gilles Deleuze, thus bringing together two giants of twentieth-century Continental philosophy for the first time.

What is the self? Is it the impregnable cogito of Descartes or the shattered self of Nietzsche? Or has it become serendipitously constituted from pieces of fairy tales and novels, childhood comics and soap operas - a multitude of forces culled from fashion, modern myth, culture and recreation? Or must we still convince ourselves, like Rousseau, that the self can never be tainted; that it is, above all else, irrefrangible? 

Paul Ricoeur proposed that the self is formed within the narratives we tell of ourselves, that it is itself a form of narrative. But is this enough? Could a self cohere in a multitude of potential narratives or find unity among its stories? 
In this book, Declan Sheerin challenges the theory that the self is narrative alone or that concordance reigns over discordance in the self. Drawing upon the works of Gilles Deleuze, he proposes that deep to the sense of a unified, represented self is a more fundamental self of difference, a self that is more than merely coherent narrative.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction to an Enigma

2. Problematizing the Field of the Self

3. Critique on the Kantian Self

4. The Narrative Self

5. Questioning the Narrative Self through its Progenitors

6. Interlude

7. In the Land of the Larval Selves

8. Dis/solving the Narrative Self

9. From Debt to Excess

10. Interzone

11. From Excess to Debt: Evolving Constraints to Narrative Identity

12. The Poetic Imagination within the Evolving Constraints of Narrative Productivity

13. Conclusion

Declan Sheerin has a PhD in Philosophy from University College Dublin. He currently lives and works as a consultant child psychiatrist in Ireland.

DUE PIEGHE E UN RITORNO di Davide Nota @ Nazione Indiana (28.12.2011)

«Il Barocco non connota un’essenza, ma una funzione operativa, un tratto. Il Barocco produce di continuo pieghe. […] Il suo tratto distintivo è dato dalla piega che si prolunga all’infinito.» (Gilles Deleuze, La piega).

L’alternarsi di un metro classico composto di settenari, endecasillabi ed alessandrini può consentirci lo svolgimento potenzialmente infinito della piega.
La riconquista metrica, o di ciascuna variante di linearità ritmica, è la funzione espressiva di uno sguardo obliquo, che attraversa con naturalezza le dimensioni e i piani sovrapposti di un’esperienza storica e personale di passaggio (la fine della fisica moderna, la crisi dell’economia capitalistica, lo smottamento produttivo verso oriente, le premesse ad una New economy o a una guerra mondiale) che da traumatica e rimossa, rigettata come corpo estraneo, deve tornarci limpida e sentimentale.

Il tratto classico è lo sguardo dell’esperienza umana, in cui i generi letterari e gli ambiti della conoscenza (le filosofie decostruzioniste, il neo-positivismo, la fisica quantistica, la semiotica della comunicazione, le scienze politiche, la storia, le esperienze umane e del vero personale, il sogno e l’archetipo, il senso religioso o del sacro) non sono più percepiti come aree separate e non comunicanti ma come regioni di una stessa avventura.
Gli oggetti del dissidio, separati e in conflitto, si incontrano in un unico sentiero. Ma questo “unico” non è il pantano consolatorio del “disordinismo” (definizione di Mario Perniola, in Contro la comunicazione), l’indistinto e pseudo-esoterico lago della pacificazione degli opposti nel Bello che si ha in molta letteratura neoorfico-performativa degli ultimi anni, dove la voce si dilata bulimicamente per amare e riconoscere ogni cosa allo stesso modo, e cioè per non amare né riconoscere niente.
La lingua poetica sarebbe altrimenti un paradigma del linguaggio della comunicazione di massa e in particolare una funzione della sua religiosità “New age” volta ad un’estensione orizzontale di un neutralismo nei confronti della vita e dei suoi conflitti, cioè a quella amputazione dell’umano e censura della dimensione storica che è stata l’estetica attigua alla dottrina della “Fine della Storia” degli anni ’90 ma che a dieci anni dall’11 settembre, una volta esplosa la grande bolla speculativa di Fukuyama (The End of History, 1992), non ha più senso né mandato.

Nel movimento della piega non si dà armonia ma una “continuità della discontinuità”, in cui ogni verso chiama al successivo e in cui ogni fine chiama al quanto non è dato e che manca.
All’interno di questa “piegatura” l’opposizione può esplodere nella sua durezza naturale. Il lavoro di cut-up, indispensabile, serve a trarre dalla melassa della decorazione moderatrice, dalla placenta del caos che ci circonda e ci inonda come una sordina cognitiva, gli oggetti crudi da esporre ad un confronto immediatamente diretto.
Per questo, anche, la geometria del dittico, o del trittico o, nella strofa, la divisione in quartine, terzine e distici, e in generale ogni reiterazione ritmica e formale, sono funzioni di questo confronto finalizzato al conflitto, che può avvenire solo all’interno di un ordine come logica di relazione.

Ora la necessità non è quella di parlare di un contenuto rispetto ad un altro. Il metodo estetico può essere riferito a qualunque oggetto, perché è esso in sé che ci interessa e coinvolge in un mutamento.
Certamente la “piegatura” implica la presa visione di una moltitudine di materiali visivi e linguistici forniti sia dalla realtà (da ogni sfumatura di essa) che dall’artificio culturale tramandato.
Essa cioè non è più inibita dal bipolarismo estetico del Novecento che limita l’espressione a biforcarsi nelle categorie di poetico ed impoetico, lirico e narrativo, personale ed impersonale o diretto e mediato. Senza preferenze di sorta la piega si svolge obliquamente, cogliendo da ciascuna di queste diversità ciò che può servirle a proiettare altrove (in una differenza) il proprio orizzonte e scopo.

Per maggiori approfondimenti @ Nazione Indiana

Friedrich Kittler : The Big Ideas podcast: Kittler's computer wars @ Guardian 28.12.2011

• 
  
  
  

  

  
  
  Benjamen Walker
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 December 2011 14.00 GMT

• Subscribe via iTunes
 
• Download mp3
 
• Podcast feed URL

When Friedrich Kittler, the German philosopher of media and technology, died in October this year, it wasn't a big international story – in fact, the Guardian published the only obituary in the Anglophone press.

In Germany Kittler's death made bigger waves: for weeks, newspapers published memorials and testimonials. The philosopher had generations of disciples and accolytes who compare the importance of his work to that of Hegel and Heidegger. Kittler, they say, was the first thinker to grasp the true nature of our relationship with modern technology and media. Typewriters, radios, computers: these innovations were not extentions of man, but they defined us and our behaviour.

In the latest episode of The Big Ideas, Benjamen Walker talks to philosopher Avital Ronell, novelist Tom McCarthy and Guardian writer Stuart Jeffries about the legacy of the man who has been called "the Derrida of the digital age".

Read more on Guardian website