Hansel and Gretel are alive and well
And they're living in Berlin
She is a cocktail waitress
He had a part in a Fassbinder film
And they sit around at night now
Drinking schnapps and gin
And she says, 'Hansel, you're really bringing me down.'
And he says, 'Gretel, you can really be a bitch.'
He says, I've wasted my life on our stupid legend
When my one and only love was the wicked witch
She said, What is history?
And he said, History is an angel
Being blown
Backwards
Into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel
Backwards
Into the future
Critical Thinking as Creative Practice
Practice the embodied/embedded/relational material methodology. Where is knowledge today? Inter/Trans/Post | Relational & Collaborative nature of KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION - NO more solitary genius.
Posthuman Subjects
What who when and where are the posthuman subjects of knowledge? Why is subjectivity overlooked in the mainstream? What does it means to be a subject today? Nomadic heterogenous accountable - rooted, accountable but multiple, otherness & alterity includes nonhuman (organic & inorganic) BECOMING SUBJECTS OTHERWISE | Experimenting with different WAYS OF BECOMING. We are major actors to finding solutions that the world is facing. RESPONSIBLE SUBJECTS
The Critical Posthumanities
Who are subjects? What are the assumptions? How does it effect teaching, practice, methodologies - HOW? How do we do Posthumanities? CRITIQUE IS CREATIVITY: What kind of practices? Scientific knowledge? Mutual respect between sciences & art etc. WAYS OF KNOWING. DEMAND RESPECT.
NEW MATERIALISM
The creation of NEW CONCEPTS and PRACTICES. Starting with EMBODIED EXPERIENCE. What kind of Posthuman emerges from those who were never fully human? The naturalized others / Critique of Anthropocentrism | PEDAGOGY - COLLABORATIVE - SHARING KNOWLEDGE - COLLECTIVE ENUNCIATIONS| BOLD & EXPERIMENTAL BUT ALSO ACCOUNTABLE | CRITIQUE AS CREATION - How can we do this better? What is our contribution? Assemblages of humans and nonhumans ADEQUATE TO DEGREES OF INTENSITY.
POSTHUMAN IS A VECTOR OF ALTERNATIVE BECOMING
About the Pandemic: COVID-19 is a Man Made Disaster. Advanced tech as both part of problem & solution. Environment + Ecology. 4th INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION + 6TH EXTINCTION = POSTHUMAN CONVERGENCE - Simultaneity of these opposite effects. Underlying Mood - EMOTIONAL. Intense suffering mixed with hope, fear, resilience, border and vulnerability.
THINKING IS A WAY OF ACTING IN THE WORLD
Develop different ways of caring, of being with the world. Taking in and on the suffering planet and develop ways of knowledge and relational ethics. Do you have a heart? KNOWLEDGE IS CARING FOR WOUNDED SPECIES OF ALL KINDS
Challenge 1: Find appropriate language to engage with the world in a caring manner. Thinking with and affirmatively on behalf of.
Challenge 2 - Be creative critical and humble. Immanent to the conditions we are analyzing. Become animal in sense of having a territory. In a relational manner
PRINCIPLES for the Posthumanities
Anthropogenic nature of the Pandemic = HUMAN IS PRIViLEGED SUBJECT | Structural distinctions among humans, Humanistic idea of MAN as MEASURE OF ALL THINGS. Based on assumption of superiority. Degrees of access to power - marginalized others. What kinds of posthuman futures are engineered or imagined by those considered less than human?
““rhizomatic writing, being, and/or becoming is not simply a process that assimilates things, rather it is a milieu of perpetual transformation.””
Rhizomatics emphasizes connections rather than separations, heterogeneity rather than conformity, fluidity rather than rigidity, and constant evo/revo/lution and flux rather than the static, “finished” class reality of neoliberalism. The rhizomatic figuration resists the singular individual, promoting instead multiplicities and assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Although neoliberal paradigms are limiting, narrowing, restrictive, meritocratic, and characterized by a refusal to examine structural sources for inequity (Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011), rhizoanalysis, a methodology based on rhizomatics, created possibilities for us to connect and relate our praxis to larger social forces that influence classroom events. Through our online dialogs, we hoped to deterritorialize the thinking processes that unknowingly led to maintenance of dominant power relations in our classrooms.
“Problem posing,” or critical inquiry, together with dialog can lead to critical consciousness-raising or concientizaca˜o (literally translated as conscientization). Questioning the world to raise critical consciousness, collectively generating solutions, and putting these solutions into action constitute a liberatory pedagogy that leads to not only knowledge development but also empowerment
Teaching for social justice often assumes that students will happily accept that they are all equal, have a voice, and should work together to interrupt the status quo, overlooking students’ different positionalities, historically situated oppressions, and the deep societal conditioning that accompanies both (Ellsworth, 1989)
The co/autoethnographic approach, a method of self-study (LaBoskey, 2004), entails a process whereby we each contributed our own intellectual resources attending to the psychogenic dimensions of ourselves to create our data.
Rhizoanalysis extends the philosophical and conceptual explorations of Deleuze and Guattari’s figuration of the rhizome, a plant tubular, expressing the interconnectedness of subjectivities, experiences, life forms, matter, time, and space. Due to the inherent linkages in this conceptual framework, an interpretive understanding of oneself, others, observable events, and experiences cannot be isolated into discrete, fixed, or static representations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Lather, 1992).
This dynamism is captured in the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of becoming, or the continuously shifting/transformative fluctuations through which all life forms and organic/ inorganic material change. Therefore, becoming provides an alternative to fixed notions of existence or the striated methods of data analysis (St. Pierre, 2011). B
offer emergent connections and becomings
A rhizomatic paradigm facilitates a thought mode that acknowledges social complexity in relation to the individual. Rather than conceptualizing life through classification systems or discrete domains of thought, the rhizome problematizes the individual and her/his subjectivity in relation to social norms and discourses. The individual is acknowledged to be influenced by and to influence her/his context. Such relational existence is expressed through rhizomatic multiplicities, expressing this network. Deleuze and Guattari enumerated
Six characteristics that aid in the identification of the rhizome and rhizomatic connectivity: (a) connectedness, (b) heterogeneity, (c) multiplicity, (d) asignifying ruptures, (e) cartography, and (f) decolcomania.
Solution to Molar/Molecular: LINES OF FLIGHT:
Lines of flight lead to escapes and subversions of the traditional, highlighting the possible
AFFECT IN RHIZOMATICS
Affect in rhizomatics differs from psychological definitions. In rhizomatics, emotions and feelings are not the same as affect, but are affective productions. For Deleuze, affect is the most productive frame for discussing bodies, not by naming what we are, for we have no static identities, but through exploring our capacities to affect and be affected by (AlbrechtCrane & Slack, 2003). Affects are unstructured forces, movements, becomings. It is prepersonal, preconscious, and unpredictable, occurring as bodies, objects, and ideas collide. According to Albrecht-Crane (2003), “we must find better ways to address the amalgam of feeling, intensity, richness, playfulness, desiring, passion, excitement, rage, suffering, life, becoming – in short, affect – that characterizes teaching and learning moments” (p. 563, original emphasis).
“thinking from the middle”
TRANSVERSION: a turning across, or into, something else.
Posthuman Literary & Cultural Studies
FRUSTRATION AS METHOD
Critical Studies - Women Studies / Media Studies / Cultural Studies / Softwares Studies etc. Whats the correlation between critical studies and the coming of the posthumanities? There is a reterritorialization from studies and the humanities… comes with investments of capital. They seldom include the “old humanities” - they have taken over the term “Humanities”: They claim to be the NEW PROPER HUMANITIES responding to contemporary socio-poilitical concerns. They are claiming the social relevance card. Environmental and Digital Humanities are popular in the corporate sector (Management) They are everything the old humanities ARE NOT. (EXAMPLE: DOUBLED COST OF HUMANITIES STUDIES IN AUSTRALIA) Something is afoot between Old Humanities and the NEW humanities the Posthumanities claiming to be post-anthropocentric. … “It can be AND AND not just EITHER OR”
Literary theory is the core of the OLD HUMANITIES. What is your relationship to your discipline? Dis-identification of your discipline…
To what extent are you identified with the interests and concerns of the INSTITUTIONS.
WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO THE HUMANITIES?
The “New Vulgarism” : In the post-corona world humanities will either disappear or become localized. WILL YOU GO IN AND FIGHT FOR THE HUMANITIES AND ON WHAT GROUNDS WILL YOU FIGHT FOR THIS FIELD?
Posthuman Studies: more than just including the nonhuman (object of inquiry can be nonhuman ie Latour) IS THAT ENOUGH TO MAKE THE DISCOURSE POSTHUMANIST? NO WE NEED QUALITATATIVE SHIFTS - and that includes the concept of the KNOWING SUBJECT. Do not assume the subject is MAN (HOMO). The knowing subject is a complex, heterogeneous assemblage the zoe-geo-techno mediated subject. [Connected to elecriticy - food - air - roof - materially embdedded parameters not all of which are human. AI MEDIATED - GEO MEDIATED - OXYGEN MEDIATED. Not one liberal notion of the subject - it is the ASSEMBLAGE]. MUST HAVE A VISION OF THE SUBJECT (not just connection to the nonhuman) WHO IS THE SUBJECT THAT LEGISLATES OUR KNOWLEDGE? Gossip / fake news: HOW DO WE TELL? Function of science and reasoning - look collectively for parameters for verifiable truth. Who says this is truth and this is fake news? How do we tell truth from lies and fictions? How to find verifiable truth - beyond self interest and fanaticism. NOT SPONTANEOUSLY GENERATED GESTURES or INSURRECTIONS NOR CYNICAL CORPORATE INVESTMENTS = A continuum of multiple practices generated by communities of scholars activists artistsNew domains of knowledge result of people like ourselves - we are looking for other ways to produce knowledge and to canonize the production of knowledge.
Curiosity and wonder are the great forces of the humanities: IT IS A DESIRE FOF DIFFERENT WAYS OF KNOWING.
The thirst for understanding WHO WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF BECOMING!!? What is happening to the human subject in their diversity? How can we have social justice? FOCUS ON THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENTS as ways of tracking the multiple modes of investment into this transversal posthumanities.
THE TRANSVERSAL POSTHUMANITIES
Cyberfeminism is one of the generators of the DIgital Humanities (but it is completely diffrerent from the APPLE or Facebook Digital Humanities) GOD BLESS KATHY ACKER Situated, Grounded and Accountable - Immanence + Perspectivism are crucial issues. It’s not about relativism its about MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES. It’s about Multiple, potentially CONTRADICTORY perspectives. NO IDENTITY POLITICS AS SUCH - MULTI-PERSPECTIVISM. Alternative Cosmologies. POSTHUMANISM IS A WORK IN PROGRESS - do not preempt the CONCLUSION OF that process!! Don’t be a conceptual luddite, don’t be a technophobe. Technology has to be part of the solution! It is a part of the solution. We need to work with it. Do not create the conclusion. EXPERIMENT WITH the TRANSVERSALITY of these new ways of knowing can support processes of different subject formation. DO NOT SAY Technology is DOOMED BECAUSE OF APPLE FACEBOOK ETC. We need to work with technology.
What constitutes subjectivity? It is a structural relational capacity - a degree of relation or force, the ABILITY TO EXTEND towards and in proximity WITH OTHERS to TAKE IN AND ON MORE OF THE WORLD.
Subjects are Transversal-Relational-Entities defined by their own specific ability to take on much of the world. We are capable of different things! We are all capable of different things. Subjectivity is both post-personal and pre-individual and is essentially a structural-relational-capacity.
The posthumanities accept nonhuman life as a matter of fact - geo, environmental, digital etc.
ZOE - nonhuman life, is central to the worldview (not the traditional disciplines of the humanities)
Cartography of the NEW VS OLD HUMANITIES:
Thematic - what is the object of study?
Mythological - what kind of mythological approach do they use to the study of the object? how much social constructivism is still at work in the posthumanities? (SC= a binary system that poses a Subject/Object relation, keeping the binary) LIFTING ThE Social Constructivist methodology and looking at a continuum where you do your QUALITATIVE DISTINCTIONS on the basis of RELATIONAL FORCES. How much does this or my approach do to increase my ability to understand the phenomenon? Not just me looking at an object but a new assemblage. In terms of its SCALE - THE POSTHUMAN CONVERGENCE IS THAT OF THE UNTHINKABLE (how you deal with nonhuman scales)
Conceptual - What defines the Posthumanities? Supra or Post Disciplinary characters. Cut across disciplines - a big risk for new researchers (especially in Europe). Interdisciplinary is not SUPRA OR POST. what are the implications of that? look at how funding is organized… where would you submit a SUPRA DISCIPLINARY PROPOSAL - how will you present this as the NEXT STEP to the funding panel? We need a new cocktail? Where do you stand to make that Supra disciplainary mix?
The strength of the posthumanities gives an alternative and a renegotiation of the TERMS OF ACADEMIC CAPITALISM> do not stay in the institution to fight - stay to repurpose and renegotiate the terms of governance of neoliberalism over the universities. STAY IN AND REPURPOSE. A horizon of becoming to a diversified materialist approach to cynical defeatism. A manner of ethics of becoming AFFIRMATIVE ETHICS to REPURPOSE POSSIBLE FUTURES. Mixing digital and old humanities with the views of the MISSING PEOPLE- the ones empirically missing - on the margins… the marginalized subjects. They are virtual missing and need to be constituted in the process. Transversal Alliances.
WHERE AM I IN YOUR POSTHUMAN UNIVERSE?
THE ROAD TO CROSS HERE IS THE RECOMPOSITION OF A UNIFIED HUMANITY
Pan-humanities are trouble. The rebirth of nationalism and pan-humanities (go hand in hand) as a result of coronavirus. No one humanity could could completely unify in fear and vulnerability. Vulnerability deserves a better treatment… We need materially embedded differential posthumanities
WE NEED MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES OF WHAT KIND OF POSTHUMAN WE CAN BECOME
Carrying across the old critical theory genealogy into this new world:
“CARRY OVER THE OLD WORLD ACROSS”
The “old humanities” is not a monument. OUR PAST IS TOO GLORIOUS TO BECOME MONUMENTALIZED, TO BECOME A NATIONALISTIC FETISH: ACTIVATE IT. RETERRITORIALIZE IT. Activate the intelligence of the forgotten (marginalized or nonhuman, dehuman) traditions [ie. WITCHES]. MAKE KNOWLEDGE FAIR AND ACTIVE AND DIVERSE. MAKE YOUR CONTRIBUTION! GO! GO! GO!
The positioning of the universal man is the problem- and where the universalist function gets relocated. The dominant ethos of neoliberal politics: give me the rebels, the weirdos, the anarchists etc. Not a 19th century model of rationalist man… these are radical thinkers in the reactionary sense of radical (like the fascists in the 1930s - smash things for progress).
ASSUME DETERRITORIALIZATION. FLOWS OF CHANGES.
Nobody can afford to stand still. Those who stand still will perish.
The genetic definition of extinction is self replication in a shrinking territory. Everything else will move. Within this speed, how do more critical alternative voices intervene? DO we accelerate? Wait for it to pass? Stand still? Try to intervene and affect the speed - affect it. Can we have academic cyberfeminism in the capital academics. ANYBODY WHO STANDS STILL DIES. Negotiate this on the GROUND. [Methodological Nationalism is a methodology Braidotti fights against.]
SPINOZA’S AFFECT - The degree of relational-geometric force that any entity can master/mobilize/activate. How much of the world can you take in? Always relational collective and heterogeneous. IT IS POST-EGO & POST-IDENTITY. EXAND HOW MUCH YOU CAN TAKE IN OF THE WORLD.
We need a new vocabulary: personal identifications, DESIRES, political passions, reflect on your PATHOS + PASSIONS and how they connect in your research. Self must always be open, porous, flexible… Desires are always related to others, they are multiple heterogenous, unnatural relational connectives. What do you aspire to? BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS READ READ READ. THIS is an ethical LIFESTYLE choice. PASSIONS - DESIRES - IDENTITFICATIONS - not always conscious, unconscious mechanisms where you simulate models you have incorporated. Collective dialogical exchanges. Do we want to resurrect the humanities or resurrect enough of them to construct a new one? Do we want to save the world? It is a profoundly relational choice. The only question that matters is: Am I prepared to pay the price to do this? How much can my body take? Is this the kind of intensity that I can live with and that can make me function? [Self is multiple others…]
PASSION IS A MOVEMENT OF THE SOUL
PASSION: the state or capacity of being acted on by external agents or forces; : intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction; ardent affection
The opposite of universalism if MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES - there are boundaries and limits, the limits of our positionally - the limits of space/time The limits of what bodies can do. Being anthropomorphic is the opposite of being anthropocentric. Accepting you cannot defeat gravity. Accepting the limitation of a specific type of embodiment. EMBODIMENT AS A REAL ENGINE OF POSITIONING: relational, complex but limited - accepting what our embodiment cannot do.
Lecture 7
What is your relationship to materialism? What is materialism for you?
What is new about new materialism is the relationship to matter: A meta-realism: something that goes beyond the social constructivism condition where nature is opposite to culture, mind is outside of matter, outside the dualistic oppositional binary distinctions that have structure modern critical theory. A new alliance between the 2 cultures: humanities/social sciences / life sciences + nano/info technologies that constitute the 4th Industrial revolution.
Best critical theory emerges from the people who understand science.
The Forum for Critical Studies today is Science Studies: the zoe-political…
A culture of mutual respect and reach out for a better understanding of MATTER - what is life?
The new materialist: EMERGES FROM THE POST-STRUCUTRALIST GENERATION, ASSESS SERIOUSLY what remains of the great deconstructions of dualisms that were made during the postmodern, poststructuralist era. Post-marxism, post-hegelian. Does not reflect the state of
Advanced Capitalism is rhizomatic, nonlinear, axiomatic. Not linear Hegelian, teleogicial view of history.
Looking again at the American interpretation of poststructuralism - FOUCAULT READ PERFORMATIVELY: Looks at the linguistic paradigm - the LACANIAN system of thinking whereby there is one location of power. HEGELIANISM is a PSYCHIC DUALISM with a MASTER SIGNIFIER - THE LAW the ONE CARDINAL POINT AROUND WHICH EVERYTHING REVOLVES.
THIS IS WHAT GOES WRONG: SOCIAL LINGUISTIC (LACAN) the framework for understanding the human system: the masculine carries the universal. Woman is NOT. Gender is not part of this discussion. Gender is the social construction of differences, the code.
This discussion goes right in AUSTRALIAN CRITICAL THEORY: the real hubs of understanding what is the matter with matter. American Feminism is the Lacanian -Derridian framework confusing Sexual Difference with Gender making Gender a social coding and a social performance— you can’t change it just by changing your performance. We do not agree what is the matter with matter - French Theories are reductive- American Critical theory discovers Deleuze in the mid-90’s SPINOZAS nature culture continuum. Nature is Culture - SPINOZA - the nature culture continuum means that people are capable of running their own affairs. GOVERNMENT DOES NOT NEED TO RUN PERSONAL AFFAIRS.State of nature is a state of violence/rape/war STATE OF DANGER - and the state of GOVERNANCE is a state of protecting man from the natural order. So we give up freedoms for LAW AND ORDER.
Spinoza - people are perfectly fine to self organize. RADICAL DEMOCRACY (Toni Negri, Michale Schwartz) Spinoza as the antecdote to the Hegelian.
1972 - AntiOedipus - a fully fledged understanding of nature/culture continuum. We have only ONE STATE - despotic, dictotorial and divisive. Capitalism is a system capable of attaching itself to any state formation because they are all the same: despotic. RADICAL CRITIQUE of the DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM.
Spinoza: The ethics of AFFIRMATION as the only response to decadence, violence and the end of freedom. That moment is lost in translation when the Americans “invent” French Theory - take Derrida and Lacan and make the meta stars of the Linguistic Turn/Cultural Studies in the 1990’s. The genealogical line goes thru Australia (Jenny Lloyd- leading Spinozist) writes of Spinoza in the 80’s - but she keeps working on an alternative way of looking at the body/mind relationship: HER QUESTION: Our culture had the option of choosing Spinoza’s continuum of nature/culture as opposed to Cartesian Dualism of Mind/Body and Western Culture chose Dualism because you can DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
Elizabeth Grosz - Brian Massumi - everyone is going to Australia to study!!! Aurelia Armstrong - Claire Colebrook - Felicity Coleman - all of this happening alongside of and independently from the American School of Deconstruction (Derridianism)
CRUCIAL GEOGRAPHICAL SIGNPOSTS - ROADMAPS FOR YOU TO MAKE PATHWAYS THROUGH LITERATURE THAT OTHERWISE MAY SEEM PUZZLING
AN EXPLOSIONS OF WORKS on NEW MATERIALISM by Neo-Spinozian, Deleuzian and alongside Donna Haraway (studied in French theory- still working with the Originary Matrix of Power)
YOU NEED TO KNOW WHAT YOU’RE WORKING WITH SO YOU CAN MIX AND MATCH THEM IN A MANNER THAT DOES JUSTICE TO YOUR WORK. Don’t waste time repeating the OLD PROBLEMS! Make your own LINKS! But you need to know what ingredients you’re working with or you will spoil the meal. You need to know your roadmaps very CLEARLY.
VERY DIFFERENT VIEWS: “ONE ORIGINARY MATRIX OF POWER” (Derrida & Lacan/Linguistic) - It’s the ORIGINARY TECHNICIY ARGUMENT (DERRIDIAN) as opposed to “A RHIZOMICS OF POWER” saying Always and already Nature/Culture Continuum : What we call Nature is a Heterogeneous Assemblages of Relation: New Materialism is not linguistically mediated - language is one of the tools one of the elements of it: NOT THE PRIMACY OF THE LINGUISTIC SIGNIFIER. Not Phallologicentric MASTER SIGNIFIER. THATS THE DIFFERENCE!!
We can have a linguistic space of BIO-SEMIOTICS.
We don’t need to have a linguistic based on Saussarian System that poses the primacy of ONE Signifier.
I have insisted on two things:
The Feminist Tradition with the Poststructuralist line running through it + Philosophical Tradition where the French Philosophers are interesting is in their understanding of MATTER. The materialism that you read in French philosophy goes to 18th century - Elizabath DeFOntanay work on animals - The term Criticism was invented by a French feminist (DuBonne) in the 70’s. A tradition of Dynamic nonessential materialism in French Philosophy back to DIDEROT - SADE - BACHELARD - DELEUZE - MATTER IS NOT NARROWLY CONFINED TO AN OPPOSITE - it is ENCHANTED MATERIALISM - It is DIABOLOCAL - TROUBLESOME - JOYFUL - All the Line of racialize ontologies - how matter is always already racialize. Pure matter does not get CODED (Sylvia Winter) TO an understanding that black lives are inscribed in the chain of being where White Man is at the Top - Indegenous Philosophies/Cosmologies - Socialist Constructivist Divide - don’t assume a separation of nature (Western conception)
FOCUS ON THE MYTHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS of THIS : IMMANENCE IS THE CRUCIAL TURN, NOT TRANSCENDTALISM
THINKING IS THE STUFF OF THE WORLD (Stacy Alaimo)
in Deleuze: New forms of Empiricism if you are taking the New Materialist approach.
Cartographies of FLOWING RELATIONS that give you the ways to intervene on what is necessarily a CONTINUUM
Vibrant Matter (Jane Bennet)
Displacement of Anthropocentrism - Man breaking down into a number of faculties, entities, capacities
OPEN THE SUBJECT AND THINK OF IT AS A WEBSITE! A body that is ANTHROPOMORPHIC- along a scale or range of diversities
The BODY IS OPENINGS: it has HOLES IN IT - sensorial plug through which reality feeds information (MOUTH NOSE PORES)
Open to reality processing information constantly - What a body can do - a machine that stores and transforms information constantly
PEAK AREAS - where info is directly coming into - HUBS OF KNOWLEDGE
CAPABLE OF DIFFERENT THINGS: What can you do? We are all capable of different things. A differential material way of coding what bodies can do.
HEGEL HATED SPINOZA because he misread his Nature/Culture idea as a passive acceptance of what is - Spinoza looks at conflict and pain - ETHICS AS RELATIONAL FORCES - PURSUING JOYFUL AFFIRMATIVE AFFECTS - Spinoza + Us (essay) - Transformation of Negative into Positive - NO FLAT ONTOLOGY - IT IS DIFFERENTIAL MATERIALLY EMBEDDED - SITUATE THEM - BUT DO NOT INSCRIBE THEM INTO THE HIERARCHY OF MAN OF REASON / DOMINATION
Differences that Differ without Hierarchy: PROCESS ONTOLOGY
Modulations within the same matters
Lyn Marguilis: Gaia Hypothesis, earth is a Self Organizing organism + John DuPree - Process Biology + (?) Process Genetics
This is the ERA OF PROCESSES!! GET A LIFE!!!
Negativity is SO POWERFUL - REMEMBER TO DETOX. Producing Alternatives. Problem of the LEFT is OVERDOSE OF NEGATIVE. We need alternatives with VISIONS and not just BEING AGAINST. BE AGAINST BY PROPOSING ALTERNATIVES: “Spinoza Ethical Democracy”
Language railroads you into saying things you may not even want to say!
WE NEED WORD ACCURACY + UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONCEPTS OF WHAT WE ARE WORKING WITH
Work very carefully on your concepts - study carefully. You do not engage LIGHTLY, passionately and rigorously.
THE STUDY AND CREATION OF NEW CONCEPTS: “Take Language and SHAKE IT UP”
Deleuze in AO - He is “denazifiying” European philosophy - the holistic ideas of nature/culture were a naturalization of differences in colonial and classical fascist discourse. High European Fascism + Nature was Hierarchical and Humans have the right to control everything that lives
The notion of disconnecting the nature/culture continuum - this work of DeNazifying Philosophy was not done after the 2nd World War
Taking on the question of Fascism HEAD ON (AOE) - (at this time Greece Spain and Portugal were under Fascism)
THEY SEE THE RISING IMPORTANCE OF THE LIFE SCIENCES AND SYSTEMS
They see a new phase of capitalism coming and that we need a new philosophy of life minus fascism - D+G read Spinoza in light of this. 1000 Plateaus - read chapter on Linguistics : argument is caught between dominant language as transcendental thing that separates us from everything else (language as unique to our species) TRIVIALIZATION OF language is communication (sound bites) FOR D+G: COMMUNICATION = SOUND BITES and THEREFORE THE END OF LANGUAGE / REAL COMMUNICATION (essentially communication becomes advertising) - Language has been CODIFIED by a set of structures, rules and principles. “As long as you believe in grammar you believe in God”