Differences & Repetitions

I’ve been thinking lately about Deleuze’s essay “Postscript on Control Societies,” published in the book Negotiations. I’m wondering if anyone knows why the essay announces itself explicitly as a postscript.

Now, I realize that Deleuze frames the essay as a response — or really a critical rejoinder — to Michel Foucault’s explication of the “disciplinary society” in Discipline and Punish. It may well be, therefore, that Deleuze offers the piece on control societies as a postscript to Foucault’s work.

I am, however, mistrustful of that interpretation. I trace my suspicion mainly to the last few lines of the “control societies” piece. There, Deleuze states that it’s the job of “young people” to “discover whose ends these [aspects of control societies] serve, just as older people discovered, with considerable difficulty, who was benefiting from disciplines” (p. 182).

It seems to me that Deleuze, rather than composing a postscript, is actually outlining a research program. This conclusion would also seem to follow from the proliferation of critical research on control, neoliberalism, governmentality, etc. So would it be more apt, then, to call the essay a “prolegomenon ” on control societies? If so, then what might have been Deleuze’s motivation for labeling the piece a postscript in the first place?

Gilbert Simondon: Transduction, Translation, Transformation
A Two-Day International Conference at the American University of Paris
May 27-28, 2010
Paris, France

In recent years, the work of Gilbert Simondon has received greater attention both in France and internationally following the re-publication of his work over the past decade. The importance of Simondon’s thought to the work of French philosophers including Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler has become increasingly discussed and analysed both in France and in the English-speaking world. At the same time, Simondon’s work has been taken up on its own terms, recognized for the unique contributions that he made to the philosophy of technology, phenomenology and social philosophy. Forthcoming translations of his major works into English will surely instigate a long-overdue introduction of his work within a much broader international community of scholars.

We are currently accepting submissions that examine how Simondon’s work has intersected with other projects in critical theory, cultural studies, contemporary social theory and beyond. Thus, in keeping with the theme of “transduction, translation and transformation,” we are not looking for papers that merely rehearse the writings of Simondon, but projects that transform and translate his concepts and thoughts into new areas of work and new forms of engagement. We equally invite participation from experts on Simondon’s work, as well as those interested in discovering it for the first time.

Confirmed Keynote: Mark Hansen (Duke University)

Possible presentations could engage with Simondon’s work connected with various themes including:

- Media, technology and technics;
- Information, its history and futures;
- Theories and practices of individuation and affect;
- Bio-social ontologies;
- Post-representational philosophy;
- Phenomenology and materialism;
- Systems Theory;
- Simondon and other thinkers (Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Baudrillard,
Stielger, Stengers…)

The conference format will primarily consist of paper presentations, roundtable discussions and keynotes, but interested participants are welcome to propose alternative forms of involvement. Those interested in participating are asked to submit at 300 word abstract, outlining the subject of their contribution. Please send these abstracts to the attention of the conference organizers by January 30th, 2010 via email to the address, simondon.conference@gmail.com. Accepted proposals will be considered for inclusion in a future publication drawn from the conference proceedings.

Conference Organizers: Bernard Geoghegan (Northwestern University, USA), Mark Hayward (American University of Paris, France), and Robert Mitchell (Duke University, USA)

Looks great…

4th Biennial Philosophy and Literature Conference at Purdue University
April 9-10, 2010
Purdue University, West Lafayette

Deadline for Paper Submission:
January 15, 2010

The philosopher Michel Serres once described Gilles Deleuze as “an excellent example of the dynamic movement of free and inventive thinking.” Without a doubt, Deleuze was one of the most singular and prolific philosophers of the 20th century. It is no surprise then, that the impact of Deleuze’s thought continues to reverberate throughout a host of diverse disciplines including Philosophy, Literature, Political Theory, Law, Visual Arts, Film Studies, and Education. With recognition of Deleuze’s influence in these various fields, and in the spirit of Serres’ assessment, this conference seeks to motivate an exploration of Deleuze’s inventive thinking in the particular areas of politics and ethics.

Thus, this conference will serve as a platform, bringing together graduate students and faculty interested in engaging, developing, or critically examining the political and ethical dimensions of Deleuze’s work. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: immanent vs. transcendent criteria in ethics, political theory, law and jurisprudence; the role of the State in relation to capitalism; the possibility of social forms of organization radically exterior to the State forms; the positive or productive function of desire as a creative force directly invested in the social field; the problem of micro-fascism with respect to individual and collective processes of subjectivation; the forms of resistance enabled by minor literature and other processes of becoming-minor; the conception of cartography as a critical and transformative social analytic of power relations. This two-day conference will consist of four panels, each with three to four accepted graduate students presenting, three keynote addresses, and a wine and cheese reception.

Keynote Speakers
We will host three preeminent Deleuze scholars as keynote speakers: Daniel Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, from Purdue University, and Eugene Holland, from Ohio State University. Dr. Smith is known for national and international projects including translations of Deleuze and Klossowski and several works on Deleuze leading up to the forthcoming publication of his book on Deleuze’s philosophical system. Dr. Holland specializes in social theory and modern French literature, history, and culture. He has published widely including a 1999 volume on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and a forthcoming book on Nomad Citizenship. Dr. Plotnitsky has contributed numerous publications on Deleuze and on the topics of science, literature, and philosophy. He is currently working on a book entitled Space-Time-Matter-Thought: Non-Euclideanism from Riemann and Deleuze, and Beyond.

Conference Eligibility and Submission Process
We welcome submissions from graduate students of any discipline working on the political or ethical facets of Deleuze’s philosophy. Submissions will be accepted via email at phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2010. Authors should attach both the paper and an abstract (500 word limit) as a Word document. The author’s name and affiliation should be omitted from the body of the paper. In addition, the author should include the text of the abstract in the body of the message. Be sure to include the following information in the email: full name, departmental affiliation, degree program, and the title of your paper. Accepted authors will receive notification no later than February 15, 2010.

Contact Information
For updates, please visit http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/phil-lit/conference/. All additional questions can be directed to Erin Kealey or Rocky Clancy via email at: phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu.

I’m feeling a little like a deadbeat dad these days, given my neglect of D&R. I’ve been having a blast over on my book blog, The Late Age of Print, but unfortunately that’s taken up a bit too much of my attention. Case in point: Monday, September 14th was the fourth anniversary of the launch of this blog. I’ve been pretty good about marking the occasion in the past, but this year I’m ringing in the new year belatedly. As any deadbeat dad worthy of the name would say, “Hey, at least I remembered.” Sigh.

Anyway, it’s nice to have an occasion in which to reflect a little here. I’ve missed D&R, honestly. Late Age is wonderful in that it gives me ample opportunity to explore issues relating to books, publishing, and reading. Nevertheless, I miss the eclecticism that has come to characterize D&R over the last four years. I wouldn’t say that anything has been fair game for me to address here, but as the tag cloud appearing below and at right shows, this little blog of mine does indeed have quite a range. Sometimes I just prefer broadcasting over narrowcasting.

I’ve been puzzling over something of substance that would be interesting for me to share on this, the belated fourth birthday of D&R. Mostly I have half-formed thoughts about monism and dualism, inspired in part by my reading of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, which I reviewed here this past summer.

Much of my philosophical training in graduate school was spent reading, studying, and discussing the work of Gilles Deleuze. In this I learned to abhor the negative ontology characteristic of dialectical philosophies and to celebrate monism, whose principles of singularity, affirmation, and holism at the time resonated strongly with me. They still do.

Yet, as I myself grow older, and as I grow older with this blog (whose name I cherry-picked from Deleuze’s masterwork, Difference and Repetition), I find myself becoming less patient with monism. I am beginning to see its cracks. Mostly I am concerned with its penchant for disengagement, for its tendency toward monologue, for its unwillingness to let itself be shaken to the core by some other. I see in monism a profound insularity or desire to turn inward (what Deleuze would call “involution”), whereas in dualism I increasingly perceive a desire to experience the world outside of oneself. Could it be that monism is a kind of philosophical agoraphobia?

Again, as I said, these are only half-formed thoughts–significantly a result of my not having given D&R its due this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back on course in the coming weeks or months. For now, thanks to everyone for your contributions here over the last year. Your comments and questions challenge me, your readership inspires me.

I’m beginning a new project that explores the relationship of religious book publishing to mid-century (i.e., the 20th) liberalism in the United States. What better way to begin, I thought, than to read Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950)? There he makes the controversial claim that liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” prevalent in the United States at the time that he was writing. That much I expected to find in the book; what I got was so much more — an education, really, and a glimmer of one of the paths-not-taken of U.S. cultural studies.

One of Trilling’s themes is untimeliness, and indeed the term aptly describes his own work. He perceptively anticipated many theoretical developments whose “discovery” most would attribute to English and French intellectuals working decades later. Take his definition of culture, for instance: “Culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate–it is nothing if not a dialectic” (p. 9). Sounds a lot like E. P. Thompson to me. Or consider this passage, which almost could have come from Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge:

Yet another thing that we have not understood with sufficient complication is the nature of ideas in their relation to their development and in relation to their transmission. Too often we conceive of an idea as being like the baton that is handed from runner to runner in a relay race. But an idea as a transmissible thing is rather like the sentence that in the parlor game is whispered about in a circle (p. 191).

Trilling also argues that literature produces ideas, or philosophy, an argument that brings him within shouting distance of Deleuze. There’s more: he was anti-relativist, believed in the activity of audiences, and understood well the relationship of knowledge production and social control.

But it’s not enough simply to locate Trilling as an unacknowledged forebear of some of our more contemporary theoreticians. It’s also crucial to understand his intellectual style. Trilling could say more in a single, pointed sentence than most highly skilled writers can say in an entire essay, maybe even a volume. What’s more, he did so with the barest minimum of theoretical terminology or jargon.

So, for example, while it’s clear that he drew near to what, two decades later, would become the Foucauldian understanding of discourse, never did he long to coin a phrase to describe self-propagating communication. Trilling insisted that we engage not with catchy theoretical words that one could either “use” or “reject” depending on one’s allegiances. Instead, he demanded that we engage with the full substance of his arguments and reasoning.

Is his having done so a cause of the present abandonment of his work? Did Trilling expect too much of us, his readers and interlocutors?

A partisan of liberalism Trilling may have been, but in all affairs of the heart, mind, and politics he seems not to have been an ideologue. This is reflected, for example, in his discussion of literary criticism, where he deftly navigates the Scylla of historicism (or conditionalism) and the Charybdis of New Criticism. Ultimately he upholds the value of both, but in a masterfully dialectical way in which the one exposes the weaknesses in the other, ultimately opening up both to repair.

Trilling worked at a time when academics, for better or for worse, still were able to write “without apology or self-consciousness” (p. 253). There is evident in his work a deference to tradition and a sense of accountability to what others may hold dear, culturally or politically. Yet there remains a boldness to his work, even a brashness, that would seem almost unimaginable in academic discourse today.

In Trilling’s worst moments, as in his discussion of homosexuality and the Kinsey Report, the change of tone is a welcome one. But in Trilling’s best moments, which are far more numerous, one can register not only the tenderness with which he approached those with whom he disagreed, but also the lack of graciousness endemic to our own critical conversations today.

1944 was the year in which the world we inhabit today was born.¹

I arrived at this hypothesis in the course of the conversations I’ve had with the bright group of graduate students enrolled in the seminar I’m teaching this term, “The Social Matrix of Mass Culture.” The class is about many things, but lately its focus has been the “countercultural” response to mass culture in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. (For more on this theme, check out this post from a few months back.)

So why 1944? It was the year in which two path-breaking books were published–one from the left, the other (ostensibly) from the right. The first was Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. The second was Friedrick von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Though operating at different ends of the ideological spectrum, and though arriving at rather different conclusions, both share a surprising amount of common ground. Of particular concern for this odd group of authors are the social, economic, and political problems stemming from centralized mass production. It’s no surprise that the horrors of Nazi Germany loom large in both works.

What’s fascinating about Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Road to Serfdom is that they are also touchstone works in the “revolt” against mass culture. Put differently, in rejecting centralized mass production, Horkheimer/Adorno and Hayek collectively helped set the stage for the highly individuated mass culture that has emerged today–a culture supposedly populated no longer by estranged “cultural dopes” but by “active” and “empowered” consuming subjects.

Clearly there’s much more to say about the consonance of Dialectic and Road. More to come anon as I continue gathering my thoughts.

¹ Clearly it’s hyperbole to say “the world”; really I mean, the United States.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written something “academic” here on D&R. I’m not altogether sure why this is the case, given the title and origins of this blog. In any event, I thought it might be nice to close out the month with a more thoughtful post, or really to audition an idea.

Some time ago I read Mark Andrejevic’s wonderful book iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (University Press of Kansas, 2007). Ever since I’ve been preoccupied with an idea he introduces there: “the recession of causality.” Mark borrows the phrase from Thomas L. Haskell, who uses it to describe the experiential change in scale that accompanies the rise of indistrial socieities. In a nutshell, as populations grow and spread out, and as socieities become increasingly complex, it becomes ever more difficult to determine why something happens. In other words, the causes of something happening here always seem to come from some generalized–perhaps unascertainable–elsewhere. Causality recedes, as if with the outgoing tide.

I’ve also been doing some reading on the topic of “self-organizing systems.” From my sniffing around I gather a major proponent of the idea was the economist Friedrich Hayek, who coined the term “catallaxy” decades ago to characterize the self-organizing properties of markets. More recent books, ranging from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds to Pierre Lévy’s Collective Intelligence and beyond, build upon and extend the idea, whether paying homage to Hayek or not. (Of course there are other lines one might follow here as well, from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Gabriel Tarde’s The Laws of Imitation, or Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.)

My question is this: do “systems”–be they markets, traffic patterns, the internet, or what have you–truly self-organize, or come togther orginically, emergently? Or do claims such as these actually evidence the accuracy of Haskell’s insight, namely, that today causes seem so remote that many researchers have simply given up looking for them?

I’m intrigued by, but increasingly doubt, the idea of self-organizing systems, for reasons implicit in the latter question. I should add that this is only speculative doubt at this point, as I haven’t undertaken the sort of research that would disprove the supposedly self-organizing properties of social, economic, or communicative systems. But that does raise a further, methodological question: how would one go about undertaking that type of research? How, in other words, would one chronicle causes in an age of diffuse, recessive causality?

My initial response is to begin thinking along the lines of symbolic interactionism, but that will have to be a post for another time.

New to the blog roll is Catherine Grant’s Film Studies for Free. Catherine is “a full-time researcher and writer on film and culture, affiliated with the School of Film and Media at the University of Sussex [England] as a Visiting Research Fellow.” What’s great about her site, beyond all the Film Studies resources and smart commentary she provides, is her steadfast commitment to open access. The tag line of Film Studies for Free reads, “commentary on and links to online open-access film studies resources of note.” Catherine is one of a growing contingent of humanities scholars who have recognized that scholarship is only as good as its instruments of production, exchange, and propagation.

Her latest post is about Daniel Frampton’s book Filmosophy (Columbia University Press, 2007), which I blogged about back in March 2007. There I expressed concern about a disclaimer that accompanied the book’s advertising. It indicated that the term “filmosophy” was a registered trademark of Valentin Stoilov. At the time I wondered how the literal ownership of ideas would affect the production of scholarly knowledge and critique. Catherine’s blog shows us a better way in its embodiment of the principles of open access.

Enjoy.

Adam Curtis is my favorite documentary filmmaker–and one of my favorite filmmakers, period. I was introduced to his work a few years ago by my good friends Elaine Vautier and Timothy Roscoe. My thinking hasn’t been the same since.

Last December I blogged about his 2002 feature, The Century of the Self. This weekend I had the good fortune of discovering his most recent production, The Trap, which aired on the BBC in 2007 but of course never made its way to the United States. I’ve embedded some video, below, for those of you who’d like a peek at the first 10 minutes or so. You can watch the entire documentary in delicious snack-size portions on YouTube.

If I had to describe Curtis’ work as a whole, I’d say he’s an intellectual historian who happens to work in the documentary genre (which is to take nothing away from his skills as a documentarian). He has an uncanny knack for bringing complex ideas and systems of thought to life.

In The Trap, for example, Curtis demonstrates how game theory, anti-psychiatry, existentialism, Isaiah Berlin’s “two concepts of freedom,” and more converged and connected with one another to produce the highly circumscribed notion of “freedom” prevalent in the West today.

What Curtis’ work also then shows is just how much ideas can and do matter. This is at once encouraging and frightening.

Many critics have suggested that anti-intellectualism now runs rampant in the United States and elsewhere. In an age of punditry, game shows like Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, Vice-Presidential debates in which “avoiding nuance” is a clarion call, etc., they claim that people no longer possess a tolerance for complex, long-form ideas.

Curtis’ work blows that bit of doxa wide-open. His productions chronicle how, time and again, government officials, corporate CEOs, policy makers, management consultants, and others not only listen to and are guided by “esoteric” theories, but also how they find ways to translate those ideas into everyday practices and products.

And this, I suppose, is the rub: you can never know how bodies of thought–even well-intentioned ones–will get taken up and deployed, let alone by whom.

Collapse is one of the most intriguing scholarly journals available. It’s independently published, which means, on the positive side, that it’s not part of the corporate journal-industrial complex. I really admire that. On the flip side, though, independence has resulted in Collapse‘s flying somewhat under the radar of readers and scholarly groups for whom the journal is less well known than it should be.

Now in it’s fourth issue, Collapse consistently has published cutting-edge theoretical work within and beyond the orbit of post-structuralist philosophy. I’ve blogged about Collapse before, when the editors published an issue featuring what’s probably Gilles Deleuze’s first known scholarly work. The original contributions from contemporary authors are consistently provocative as well.

If I had to find an analogue, I’d say, think Semiotext(e) from the 1970s, when the journal helped to introduce English-language readers to the likes of Deleuze, Guattari, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Negri, and many others. Or, better yet, just think. Because that’s exactly what Collapse will always make you do.

FROM THE EDITORS OF COLLAPSE
We are delighted to announce that Collapse Volume IV will be published May 2008 and is now available for advance purchase online.

Contributors to this volume include: Kristen Alvanson, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Michel Houellebecq, Oleg Kulik, Thomas Ligotti, Quentin Meillassoux, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Rafani, Steven Shearer, George Sieg, Eugene Thacker, Keith Tilford, Todosch, James Trafford.

Collapse IV features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror. Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse’s pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought.

George Sieg’s Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of the primacy of victimhood for the affect of horror, tracing its origins to the Zoroastrian concept of Druj.

In The Shadow of a Puppet-Dance, James Trafford tracks weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti’s anticipation of the radical thesis of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger’s book Being No-One: namely, that ‘nobody ever was or had a self’.

In Thomas Ligotti’s own contribution to the volume, Thinking Horror, he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of pessimistic thought. As a counterpoint to Ligotti’s deflation of human hubris, Oleg Kulik, the internationally-acclaimed Ukrainian contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series Memento Mori: Dead Monkeys.

Eugene Thacker’s Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the ‘teratological noosphere’, discussing the way in which a certain horror has perenially accompanied the concept of ‘life’, from Aristotle to Lovecraft.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his evocation of the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld contribute a set of drawings created exclusively for Collapse. The cartoon-horror of I Can See continues their investigations into the connection between laughter and horror through the programmatic impoverishment of the aesthetic.

In the third of a ‘trilogy’ of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Quentin Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the ‘necessity of contingency’, through an examination of the problem of ‘infinite mourning’ for the dead.

Kristen Alvanson’s photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré’s sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous, as demonstrated in Alvanson’s diagrammatic presentation of the Arbor Deformia.

German artist Todosch’s meticulous sketches seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation, making them a perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant’s Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of the work of nineteenth century naturephilosopher Lorenz Oken – according to whom the generation of the universe from a ‘primal zero’ corresponds to its coagulation from a ‘primaeval mucus’ – puts an entirely new slant on Badiou’s notion of ‘founding on the void’.

Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.

In Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.

Canadian artist Steven Shearer contributes a new series of his Poems – striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.

China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire, interrogating the dyad of the weird and the hauntological, and introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal … behold the Skulltopus!

Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.

Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of ‘weird realism’, Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit. Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford’s series of images – deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of ‘pulp’ – anticipate and shadow Harman’s invocation of the weird inner life of objects.

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay // May 2008 // 390pp // Limited Edition 1000 copies // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99

Buy or Subscribe at: http://blog.urbanomic.com/urbanomic/archives/2007/08/buysubscribe.html