The explosion of real time and the structural conditions of temporality in a society of control: durations and urgencies of academic research

In the context of ongoing debates about the distinctive temporalities associated with contemporary regulative regimes, this paper explores the interpretive trajectories initiated in contrasting conceptualisations of the politics of time. This exploration is developed through analysis of interview data from a study of unconscious relations in academic practice. Section one uses one moment of data to contrast phenomenological, Deleuzian and Lacanian theorisations of the relation between time and subjectivity. Section two is an exegesis of Lacan’s paper on Logical Time. This outlines the way temporality is structured in relation to the subject’s guess about the expectations of the Other. Section three uses this to develop an interpretation of three temporalities that constitute the space of contemporary academic subjectivities. The final section considers the intensification of the juxtaposition of these incongruent temporalities, contrasting Lacanian and Deleuzian theorisations of time in the Real/virtual and their implications for both methodological and political strategy.     

Exhausted philosophy and islands-to-come

Abstract

Drawing on an array of sources, from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy (schizoanalysis) through to non-philosophy (cinema, literature), this paper concerns itself with the manifestation of the concepts of hope and despair in utopian thought and continental philosophy and the experience of hopelessness, despair and exhaustion in the contemporary moment. I aim to demonstrate such pressing concerns through a comparison of Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani and Japanese fiction writer Ryū Murakami with the American science fiction-thriller film directed by Michael Bay, The Island. What is explored in these works is the dialectic of exhaustion and possibility. The focus of the paper is on the fecund moment inhering in the incapacity of thought to think the possibility of utopia. In terms of the philosophy of education, this hones in on the perceived lack of vision of such a possibility among youth and the failure of the university qua institution to proffer an alternative world to its cohort. To demonstrate this, the paper contrasts both ‘affirmative, transcendent, and authoritarian utopias’ (‘ignoble’ utopias as philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls them) and the possibility of ‘immanent, revolutionary, libertarian utopias’—which we shall consider in terms of ‘absolute reterritorialization’.     

Aesthetics,Affect, and Educational Politics

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the aesthetic distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics.     

Materialism and the Mediating Third

This article proffers a critical reading of multiliteracy pedagogy and a materialism of the multimodal and machinic. A critical stance is taken against the mesmerising modes of representation that run rampant across our ocular territories. The article assesses the dangers of fetishizing technologies. To this end, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) is read through a Guattarian theoretical prism to emphasise four chief points: (1) the role of the unconscious, (2) the role of affect (affectus in the Spinozian sense; contrary to feeling which immobilises, affect moves us), (3) the apparent becoming cyborg of the human race and (4) the desire to desire repression. The author contends that while qualitative multiplicities play a central role for MLT, it is neither inconsistent nor contradictory to consider the role of the machinic in greater detail. It is argued that more research must be directed into the cartographic, ethological and noological mechanisms at work in plastic universes of reference (new technologies and the arts) which transform the virtual and transfigure the dynamic of affect.     

面向他者的生成:德勒兹的“生成-动物”理论探析

生成-动物作为德勒兹生成理论的一项具体实践,是德勒兹哲性诗学和文学批评中的重要概念,同时也是他反对西方传统的同一性和存在理念的有力工具。它通过物质身体对异质项的感知,生产出人与动物之间的解辖域化倾向,挑战了二元对立的权力机制。从这一角度而言,"生成-动物"被赋予了鲜明的政治色彩,暗示了由强势群体向弱势他者的政治生成,并成为引领弱势群体体认并反抗权力压迫的方式,呈现出后现代语境中差异化和多元化的价值取向,为当下的现实政治及文化思考提供了借鉴与启示。