Affecting
DELEUZE
A Conference on the Ethics of Gilles Deleuze
18-20 October 2012
The University of Auckland
Auckland
New Zealand
I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics
to be written in France in quite a long time. … The Christian moralists sought out traces of the flesh
lodged deep in the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in
the body.
Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus.
This requirement persists in [Spinoza’s] Ethics, albeit understood in a new way. In neither case can it
suffice to say that truth is simply present in ideas. We must go on to ask what is it that is present in a
true idea. What expresses itself in a true idea? What does it express?
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Spinoza.
What is that peculiar insistence on ethics that Foucault glimpsed early on? And is it at
all engaged with the complications Deleuze makes with Spinoza and Leibniz — a
curious ethics expressed in active affectivity of joyous passions contrasted with the
passivity of sad passions?: “Most men remain, most of the time, fixated by sad
passions which cut them off from their essence and reduce it to the state of an
abstraction” (E in S, p. 320). Would we want to say that the sad passions that for the
most part afflict most men are the micro-fascisms by which we coerce each other,
reducing each to a state of abstraction? How is ‘ethics’ complicated by Deleuze?
When we read Deleuze and apply his thinking in myriad fields how do we keep a
Deleuzian ethics in sight? How does Deleuze not become a state of abstraction or
theoretical strata, cause of its own fascisms?
Affecting Deleuze is a two-day conference that aims to focus on the practical
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and on practices that engage the philosophy of
Deleuze. We aim for papers that foreground a questioning of Deleuzian ‘ethics’ in
relation to a thinking that might otherwise approach Deleuze as method or procedure
in practical, or one might say, creative assemblages. How would ‘ethics’ differentiate
itself from a politics and, more acutely, from a theory of the ethical?
Affecting D E L E U Z E
is convened by
Laurence Simmons
The University of
Auckland
&
Mark Jackson
Auckland University of Technology
Affecting
DELEUZE
PROGRAMME
Thursday 18th October
5.00 PM — 7.00 PM
Conference Registration (Pat Hanan Room 501 Arts 2 Building)
Opening Drinks and Canapés
Meeting with delegates and participants
Friday 19th October
8.30 AM — 9.00 AM
Conference Registration (Foyer of Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
University of Auckland
9.00 AM — 9.15 AM
Welcome (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
9.15 AM — 10.30 AM
Keynote Address (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
Stephen Zepke
The Ethics of Affirmation; Nietzsche, Art and Biopolitics.
10.30 AM — 11.00 AM
Morning Tea
11.00 AM — 12.30 PM
Panel Session 1: Ethics, History, Politics (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
Brett Nicholls
Two Spinozas: Reading Deleuze Back Against Negri
Henry Gardner
Deleuze, History, Ethics and Colonialism
Glen Fuller
On the Ethics of Enthusiasm
12.30 PM — 1.15 PM
Lunch
1.15 PM — 2.45 PM
Panel Session 2: Indiscernible Ethics (Room 315 Arts 1 Building)
Alan Jenkins
Ethical Accountability in the De-territorialisation of Trauma
Chris Smith
The Bare Life of Architecture
Terrence Handscomb
Ill-founded Worlds and Differential Ethics
2.45 PM — 3.15 PM
Afternoon Tea
3.15 PM — 4.45 PM
Panel Session 3: The Matter of Affect (Room 315 Arts 1 Building)
Misha Kavka
Involuntary Spasms of Caring: How Affect Matters
Andrew Jampol-Petzinger
“Recurrent, Eddying, Troublant”: Gilles Deleuze and Eve Sedgwick on the Temporality of Death
Greg Minissale
Microscopic Desires
5.00 PM — 6.30 PM
Keynote Address (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
Rex Butler
Gilles Deleuze: From Aesthetics to Ethics
6.30 PM — 7.30 PM
Drinks & Canapés
Saturday 20th October
8.45 AM — 9.00 AM
Conference Registration (Foyer of Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
9.00 AM — 10.15 AM
Keynote Address (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
Jan Jagodzinski
Counteractualization: The Art of Wafaa Bilal
10.15 AM — 10.45 AM
Morning Tea
10.45 AM — 12.15 PM
Panel Session 4: The Genealogy of Ideas and the Ethics of Images (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
Ruth Irwin
Professor Challenger and the Style of Truth Telling
Ian Jervis
The Responsibility of Forgetting
Eu Jin Chua
Deleuze, Cinema and the Ethics of Expansiveness
12.15 PM — 1.00 PM
Lunch
1.00 PM — 2.30 PM
Panel Session 5: Affecting Controls (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner
Ethics, Construction, Seismotics
Eve Mayes
Rhizomatic Figurations of Student Participation in School Reform
Wendelin Küpers and Christopher Howard
Inter-Passion: Embodied Affection in Merleau-Ponty & Deleuze & Organisational Life-Worlds
2.30 PM — 3.00 PM
Afternoon Tea
3.00 PM — 4.30 PM
Panel Session 6: ‘A New Earth’ (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
Cathy Smith
The Surfaces and Spaces of a Sentient Planet: The Geophilosophy and Geoethics of Reza Negarestani’s
Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials
Mike Linzey
Standing Up
Daniel Coombes
Thinking the After-Thought
5.00 PM — 6.15 PM
Keynote Address (Room 220 Arts 1 Building)
Ian Buchanan
The Smooth Space of ‘Occupy Wall Street’
6.15 PM — 7.00 PM
Closing Drinks and Canapés
8.00 PM
Conference Dinner
Arts 1 Building is stepped back from the corner of Symonds St and Grafton Rd. The entrance is down
the ramp off Symonds St or straight through the Symonds St underpass if you are coming from the
campus on the other side of the road.
Arts 2 Building is on the street corner of Symonds St and Grafton Rd. The entrance is off Symonds St
at street level.
Affecting
DELEUZE
ABSTRACTS & BIOS
Ian Buchanan
The Smooth Space of ‘Occupy Wall Street’
The events of September, 2011 will probably go down in history in much the same way as did the
events of May 1968, with no-one being able to decide what, if anything, actually happened. Zuccotti
Park in New York City briefly flickered in the global consciousness as the spark that threatened to
ignite a global revolution, just as the Latin Quarter of Paris had four decades earlier. Within a month,
over 150 ‘Occupy’ events were taking place all over the world. The message was simple: we are the
99%, they said, the part that has no part because the other 1% control a profoundly disproportionate
share of national – global – wealth (the top 1% in the U.S. have a greater net worth than the bottom
90%). They demanded nothing except to be noticed. The Occupiers confounded virtually every attempt
the mainstream media made to understand what was going on. Their silence about what they wanted
made the point that there is no democratic agency in the U.S. to which their concerns could be
addressed, because all of them are in one way or another beholden to the corporate world. And it was
this basic fact of American – global – life about which they wanted to draw attention, and initiate a
change in what environmental activist, Bill McKibben, usefully refers to as “the political
consciousness.” I will argue that ‘Occupy Wall Street’ created a new kind of smooth space, the
political effects of which are still emerging.
Ian Buchanan joined the University of Wollongong in 2011 as Director of the Institute for Social Transformation
Research. His previous position was Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at the Centre for Critical and
Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. He is the author of the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory and the
founding editor of the international journal Deleuze Studies. He is also the editor of four book series: Deleuze
Connections (EUP), Critical Connections, Plateaus (EUP) and Deleuze Encounters (Continuum).
Rex Butler
Gilles Deleuze: From Aesthetics to Ethics
What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics for Deleuze? The answer to this question lies in
the relationship between art and philosophy in his work. This paper will look at how art leads to
philosophy in Deleuze’s writings, starting with his collaboration with Guattari, What is Philosophy?
and then looking briefly at A Thousand Plateaus, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Proust and
Signs and the two volumes on cinema. Aesthetics as a kind of experience is the necessary prior
condition for ethics as another kind of experience.
Rex Butler is Director of Research at the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of
Queensland. He lectures in Art History and has written extensively in the field of critical theory including Jean
Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (2005), What is Philosophy? A Reader's
Guide (forthcoming).
Eu Jin Chua
Deleuze, Cinema, and the Ethics of Expansiveness
The initial premise of this paper is that Deleuze’s cinema books, in some way, constitute a high point in
what is actually a rather longstanding trope in film theory, namely the idea that the power of the
cinematic image lies in its ability to explosively open out on to great expanses of space, time and
thought. Call it the “expansiveness thesis.” This idea appears, for example, in Bazin’s notion that a
cinematic image, due to the simple fact that the camera is able to move and reframe, is fundamentally
“centrifugal” in character — its energies are outward expanding. The idea also appears in Lindsay,
Balázs and, most substantially, in Kracauer’s concept of the “endlessness” of the film image, i.e., that
film images, being able to depict great expanses of space and time, always seem to suggest an
“inexhaustible universe.”
In its account of cinema as a cosmically expansive art form, Deleuze’s film philosophy takes the
expansiveness thesis to its highest pitch. One of the great take-home points of the cinema books is, of
course, the idea that all cinematic sequences, being comprised of time, cannot help but open on to the
durational Whole. In the same cosmic vein are all those other famous concepts of the cinema books:
the time-image (an image which expands into the dimension of the virtual owing to the severing of
sensory-motor connections), the crystal-image (the image or “seed” within which is laminated “the vast
crystallizable universe”), the “shock to thought” that causes us to think the Whole, and so on.
Just as the expansiveness thesis in Bazin is connected to an ethics — an ethics of reality — so too the
expansiveness thesis in Deleuze’s account of film is connected at all points to the ethical ramifications
of the cinema books (the need to believe in this world, the Nietzschean transvaluing of true and false,
and so on). I take the opportunity in this paper to unpack the reasons that cinematic images said to be
cosmically expansive might also be said to be ethical.
Eu Jin Chua is a Lecturer and Programme Leader of the Master of Design by Research Project, in the
newly founded Graduate School of Practice-Based Research at Unitec Institute of Technology. [more
information at http://bbk.academia.edu/EuJinChua ]
Daniel Coombes
Thinking the After-Thought
Gilles Deleuze’s texts have been present in architecture discourse for some time, though more recently
his material has appeared in fields relating directly to landscape conditions, specifically contributing to
an ethics for landscape urbanism.1 Deleuze’s presence can be seen in landscape urbanism’s ambition to
shift away from notions of representation and abstraction.2 Predominantly, this shift is described as a
transition from concern for the visual and formal qualities of landscape to a focus on its material
operations.3 When the terms ‘death of theory’4, ‘post-criticality’5 and ‘horizontality’6 enter into this
reading of landscape urbanism, they are largely deployed as synonyms for ecology where it is accepted
that the problematic of representation is successfully negotiated. 7
This paper claims that assimilating landscape urbanism within an ecological framework does not move
beyond visual and formal accounts of landscape because both positions conserve an ethics of
representation. Landscape urbanist, Martin Prominski, and philosopher, Spyridon Koutroufinis, model
this sideways move in their paper Folded landscapes: Deleuze’s concept of the fold and its potential
for contemporary landscape architecture. Here they cite Deleuze to authorize their argument that
formal understandings of landscape are conceptually flawed, while ecological tendencies conceptually
align with a Deleuzian ethic.8 Charles Waldheim’s critique of landscape urbanism’s complicit
relationship with notions of ecology9 will also be drawn upon, along with reference to Prominski and
Koutroufinis among others. A brief look at ecological urbanism, landscape urbanism’s offspring, will
further illustrate the systemic yet spurious conflation of landscape with productive ecology.
To operate on the outside of thought is the latent project of landscape urbanism. 10 To investigate this
agenda, this paper resists the contemporary currency of an ecological conception of urbanism and
formalistic critiques of formalism in order to divest the conventionalism that employs Deleuze’s work
to inadvertently support and ethics of abstraction and representation.
Notes
1. Christopher Hight, “Portraying the Urban Landscape: Landscape in Architectural Criticism and Theory, 1960 –
Present.” in Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle
(London: AA Print Studio, 2003).
2. Ibid.
3. Roel van Gerwen, “Force Fields in the Daily Practice of a Dutch Landscape Architect.” in The Mesh Book
Landscape/Infrastructure, ed. Julian Raxworthy and Jessica Blood (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2004),
233.
4. Christopher Hight, “Meeting the New Boss: after the Death of Theory,” Architectural Design 79, no. 1 (2009):
42.
5. Charles Waldheim, “Indeterminate Emergence: Problematised Authorship in Contemporary Landscape
Practice,” Kerb no. 15 (2006/2007): 17.
6. James Corner, “Landscape Urbanism.” in Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, ed.
Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle (London: AA Print Studio, 2003), 59.
7. Ibid.
8. Martin Prominski and Spyridon Koutroufinis, “Folded Landscapes: Deleuze’s Concept of the Fold and its
Potential for Contemporary Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Journal 28, no. 2 (2009): 162,163.
9. Waldheim, “Indeterminate Emergence,” 17.
10. Hight, “Portraying the Urban Landscape.” 32.
Daniel Coombes is an early career researcher, graduating with a Master’s by Project in landscape architecture
from Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland at the beginning of this year. Since then, as an independent
researcher, he has presented his work at the Arch Hist. conference in Istanbul and the International Society for the
Philosophy of Architecture (ISPA) conference at Newcastle University, in the U.K. Later this year he will be
speaking at the annual Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) conference, at the University of
Sydney, on the theme of 'Materialities'. Daniel's research is focused on using his speculative design investigations
as a mode of inquiring into the texts associated with the interdisciplinary projects of landscape and ecological
urbanism.
Glen Fuller
On the Ethics of Enthusiasm
This paper has two aims. The first aim is to resuscitate a specific conceptualisation of enthusiasm,
following the recent work of Erin Manning, as a pre-individual affective mode of affirmation. The
second aim of this paper is to describe and explore the ethics of how enthusiasm can be captured and
exploited as a political and commercial resource. Enthusiasm has traditionally been understood as a
religious-political mode of engagement. Kant bucked the Enlightenment trend to a certain extent and
used the enthusiasm of spectators for the French Revolution as an example of the collective judgement
of a moral good. Following from Kant, Lyotard argued enthusiasm is an “energetic sign, a tensor of
Wunsch,” which “produces an Affekt of the vigorous kind” that is both a ‘passage’ and ‘impasse’.
Enthusiasm presents an interesting example of the relation between passive and active affections that
are experienced as a co-assembly of positive and negative affects; the active affection of enthusiasm
can be experienced through a co-assembly of negative affects (frustration, etc.).
Part of the process of enthusiastic mobilisation is the way ‘challenges’ are individuated, what Antonio
Negri has identified in a different context as kairos. This is repeated in different ways through the work
of an amateur ‘tinkerer’ toiling away in a backyard shed and the discursive work of the contemporary
mass-media apparatus. A Deleuzian conceptualisation of enthusiasm begins at the molecular level and
needs to be assembled into social assemblages to effect collective individuations, which in turn can be
aggregated at an institutional level. An ethics of enthusiasm is concerned with the way affect circulates
at a pre-personal level within institutional assemblages. Enthusiasm is harnessed as a resource when
the subjects mobilised do not individuate their own challenges and instead mobilise to engage with the
challenges of others. The U.S. political group the Tea Party and the Australian Men’s Shed movement
will be used as negative and positive examples respectively.
Glen Fuller is in the Department of Journalism and Communication, Faculty of Art and Design University of
Canberra. Glen’s professional background includes working in the specialist magazine industry for a number of
years. His PhD investigated the relation between enthusiasm and specialist media. His current research is working
on developing a media archaeology of ‘know how’.
Henry Gardner
Deleuze, History, Ethics and Colonialism
It is well accepted that Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence and his vitalist praxis advocate
‘transformation’ over ‘common-sense’, where difference is upheld over the one, singular identity. Do
the key notions of Deleuzian ethics such as expression and immanence incidentally sweep aside
concepts integral to a critical overturning of colonialism? For fear of over-simplifying, the notion of
terra nullius, as used in Australia, is rejected only with a reinstatement of native title, that is, where
native title is the acknowledgement of traditional connection to, or occupation of, land prior to colonial
invasion. With this focus, how is Deleuze’s conceptual ‘tool-kit’ able to acknowledge the connection of
land to personhood, and territory to cultural identity? It is well noted that Deleuze, with Guattari, uses
Marx as a touchstone for his criticism of capitalism in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia books.
However, this use of Marx carries with it the conceptual baggage of teleology as well as various
misconceptions of indigenous cultures. My focus therefore is: at what juncture is Deleuzian ethics free
from this Euro-simplified over-coding of history? Is it possible that Deleuze’s project is hamstrung by
this conception of history and does his focus on difference undermine an essential connection of
indigenous persons to their land? How does Deleuze’s historicism affect (or effect) his ethics,
especially when several of Deleuze’s concepts embody clichés of primitivism and romanticism towards
indigenous persons?
Henry Gardner is currently writing a postgraduate thesis on the connections and implications of Deleuzian
philosophy and Australian settler colonialism. His work also includes recent papers on William Faulkner,
philosophy as cartography and Deleuze’s philosophy of creativity.
Terrence Handscomb
Ill-founded Worlds and Differential Ethics
Alain Badiou’s minimalist ethics and theories of bodies and subjects are deeply embedded in his wellfounded set-theoretical ontologies and the non-well-founded ontological inconsistencies that lead to
events. Subjects are constituent of events inasmuch as they embody an ethics of disruptive fidelity that
retroactively “re-founds” world orders that follow events. However, a differential ethics of “illfounded” subjects and worlds is plausible if the disruptive inconsistency of events is maintained well
after their momentary appearance. Thereby, the inductive “constructor” principles of Badiou’s theories
of multiple being and the count-as-one are replaced by certain differential coinductive “destructor”
principles implied by the writings of Gilles Deleuze.
Under the mathematical principle of coinduction, Badiou’s notion of a subjectivizable body, that
faithfully hypostatizes truth, will be recast as a differential mutation with non-normative ethical
characteristics. Such mutations constitutively depose the axiomatic ontological determinism of
consistent world orders. In contradistinction to Badiou’s theory of a transcendental world order, world
orders may be effectively deposed by dynamic subject-mutations that occupy what we term “nondeterministic state space,” whereby the objectifying consistency of normal language fails. Subjects that
occupy such space embody a Beckettian drive we call “going-on,” which differentially localizes
language in an “everywhere dense” proximity to the void (Real).
Such subjects are described as abstract machines, or mutant automata, that depose the unconscious on
the level of the symptom (sinthôme) and thereby instigate a nominal ethics of “nothingness.” Badiou’s
minimalist ethics of the event and the body/subject will be restructured as abstract mutant automaton
machines under the coinductive logic of the trace we call sinthôme. This discussion draws primarily on
Lacan’s famous subject, “Joyce-the-symptom,” some ethical ramifications implied by Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of a machinic unconscious, and recent advances in theoretical computer science.
Terrence Handscomb is a New Zealand born video artist currently based in Los Angeles. Critical theory,
psychoanalytical theory and mathematics are reoccurring themes in his work. He recently completed a doctorate in
philosophy and pure mathematics under French philosopher Alain Badiou, his doctoral supervisor. He also has a
M.F.A., from The University of California, Santa Barbara, in video and critical theory.
Ruth Irwin
Professor Challenger and the style of truth telling
Deleuze and Guattari play with style and form to challenge the Idealist articulation of progress, and
absolute truth, whether situated in subject or object. By presenting the ‘Geology of Morals’ through a
fictional character, the scientism of the strata, and schist, the objective truth of rock and sediment is
immediately reformed as a narrative. The narrative of science has a belief form in much the same way
that an atheist would critique the bible as a narrative for belief. Deleuze and Guattari try to dissolve the
distinction between subject and object but their transition of speech from the molecular to the molar is
not quite as successful. The paper looks at Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to explore the zones of
consistency, the epistrata, and the disjunctions within their genealogy of ideas.
Ruth Irwin is a Senior Lecturer in Ethics at AUT University. She writes on Continental Philosophy, Climatechange, globalisation, and education. She is engaged with UNESCO's work on climate change and biodiversity,
and engages with an international group trying to incorporate ethics into the global climate change debate. Her
current research is a comparison of Heidegger with Deleuze and Guattari on Techne and governance. She is the
author of Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, (2008) and Climate Change and Philosophy (2010) both
published by Continuum.
Andrew Jampol-Petzinger
“Recurrent, Eddying, Troublant”: Gilles Deleuze and Eve Sedgwick on the Temporality of Death
Gilles Deleuze’s considerations of mortality in Difference and Repetition introduce a central aspect of
his philosophy of time, showing how a reversal occasioned by a confrontation with the “impossibility”
of death opens the subject to a mode of temporality organized around the future, in which only the
absolutely new returns. Deleuze discusses such conditions in which time is thrown “out of joint” as
characteristic of historical crisis points, suggesting that the metaphysical dimensions of political
possibility and social change may be related to the kind of temporal distortions that surround an
intensified experience of mortality. However, the way in which these elements relate—the visibility of
death and the opening of historical possibility—remains at best theoretically opaque; at worst, it is an
element of tragic romanticism. This paper investigates the role of mortality in Deleuze by way of the
work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who explores such a relation between the political energies of queer
activism in the 1980s and the catastrophic “foreshortening” and de-routinizing effects of the AIDS
epidemic. In this context, Sedgwick theorizes the distorted temporality that she calls “the long
moment” extending between diagnosis and death, and shows how this “queer” time is related to the
emergence of a host of novel political phenomena—among them, a shift from paranoiac to reparative
affect, the collective emergence of new practices of identification and being “available for
identification” to others, and the liberation of political energies and potencies characteristic of an
“intertwining of temporality and force.” Read together in this way, these thinkers are shown to extend
and illuminate the political and affective dimensions of a “time out of joint,” and present a theoretical
framework from which to conceptualize the unique character of political energy and action.
Andrew Jampol-Petzinger received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 2009, with a major in Philosophy and
a minor in Interpretation Theory. He is currently a second-year PhD student in the philosophy program at Fordham
University in the Bronx, where he studies 20th century continental ethics and political philosophy. He has a
particular interest in the "metaphysics" of political action, and the relation between ethics and politics.
Jan Jagodzinski
Counteractualization: The Art of Wafaa Bilal
This presentation addresses the conference theme of ethics via the performative artwork of Wafaa Bilal
by exploring the Deleuzian concept of counteractualization. I argue that Bilal is an exemplary artist
who counter-actualizes the ‘events’ of his life, as someone who was able to flee Iraq after the
unintended killing of his brother by friendly fire. Wafaa addresses the problematic of mediated
technological violence; as well he questions identity politics that position him as an ‘enemy of the
United States’, and exemplifies the ‘open wound’ of the thousands of Iraqi civilians who have lost their
lives during the war.
Jan Jagodzinski is a Professor in the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta in Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada, where he teaches visual art and media education. He is the author of The Anamorphic I/i (1996
(Duval House Publishing Inc, 1996); Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art&Art Education (Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1997); Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experifigural Writings in Art&Art Education (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997);
Editor of Pedagogical Desire: Transference, Seduction and the Question of Ethics (Bergin & Garvey, 2002);
Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (Palgrave, 2004); Musical Fantasies: A Lacanian
Approach, Palgrave, 2005); Television and Youth: Televised Paranoia, Palgrave, 2008); The Deconstruction of the
Oral Eye: Art and Its Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism (Palgrave, 2010); Arts Based Research: A
Critique and Proposal, with Jason Wallin (Sense Publishers, in progress), Misreading Postmodern Antigone:
Marco Bellocchio’s Devil in the Flesh (Diavolo in Corpo) (Intellect Books, 2011), and Psychoanalyzing Cinema:
A Productive Encounter of Lacan, Deleuze, and Žižek (Palgrave, 2012).
Alan Jenkins
Ethical Accountability in the De-territorialisation of Trauma
“If any ethics is possible it is this … not to become unworthy of what happens to us.” (Deleuze, 1990)
This presentation explores a concept of ethical accountability in psychotherapeutic practices with men
whose lives (and the lives of others) have been affected by violence and trauma. A striving for ethical
accountability reaches for a politics of engagement beyond moral imperatives and neo-liberal concerns
about individual rights and entitlements, that is, interests that tend to inform community reactions to
violence and abusive behaviour. If moral judgements serve to reproduce hierarchical structures that
promote reactive sentiments and limit possibilities for new becomings, how might we seek affective
possibilities that are responsive rather than reactive?
A striving to become worthy of the event with a passionate interest in otherness might ground a
different politics that opens out to an ethical position of wonder. This can promote a shift from moral
preoccupations—what kind of person am I? How should I be in the world?— toward the ethical: what
else might be possible? What might I be capable of? How might we productively address a distinction
between the moral and the ethical? Can a concept of accountability refuse judgement, to bring forward
passionate affects rather than reactive sentiments?
Alan Jenkins has worked in a range of multi-undisciplinary teams addressing violence and abusive behaviour for
25 years. Rather than tire from this work, he has become increasingly intrigued with possibilities for the discovery
of ethical and respectful ways of relating. The valuing of ethics, fairness and the importance of protest against
injustice has led him to stray considerably from the path prescribed in his early training as a psychologist, towards
a political analysis of abuse. He is the author of Invitations to Responsibility (1991). His most recent book,
Becoming Ethical, was published in 2009. He is currently a director of Nada, an independent service that provides
intervention in family abuse, violence and workplace harassment. He manages the Mary St. Program, located in
Adelaide, South Australia, providing for young people who have sexually assaulted, as well as for their caregivers
and communities.
Ian Jervis
The responsibility of forgetting
In Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation Deleuze discusses how, in the mind of a figurative painter at
the outset of painting, an image is already preconfigured “in the form of clichés and probabilities” 1, and
how, through the action of painting, these clichés are reconstituted and recreated as the pictorial image:
a painting. From the perspective of a painter who approaches an apparently blank canvas, this paper
examines how the cliché constitutes a necessary dissatisfaction, which provides an impetus for painting
to begin. I examine how the pursuit of a solution to cliché is, in actuality, a pursuit seeking to invent
new terms for dissatisfaction, and discuss this in relation to the rules for intuition as set out by Deleuze
in Chapter 1 of Bergsonism, where he cites Henri Bergson, stating “truly great problems are set forth
only when they are solved.”2 An analogy is drawn with Maurice Blanchot’s allegory of The Sirens’
Song3, where singing appears to emanate from the future, although it actually comes from the past. The
artist also imagines such a phantasm, as if a path leading to the painted image already penetrated the
future. Nevertheless, along this imaginary path the artist hopes to be led astray, and so at each turn
must forget the ‘song’ to which he is drawn, in order that new modes of singing might emerge. The
paper considers how a painter proceeds blindly in a suspension of disbelief, attempting to intuit or
divine a path into the future while looking backward, and simultaneously endeavouring to forget the
past. In particular, the paper discusses the ethics of forgetting and remembering when framing method,
where trajectory might more accurately be presented as an alibi for that which was lost in forgetting.
1. Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation (p.79). (D. Smith, Trans.). London: Continuum.
2. Deleuze, G. (1991). Bergsonism (p.16). New York, NY: Zone.
3. Blanchot, M. The Song of the Sirens: encountering the imaginary. In Quasha, M. (Ed.) (1999) The Station Hill
Blanchot Reader (pp.443-450). New York, NY: Station Hill.
Ian Jervis is Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at AUT University, where he coordinates the Painting programme. He
is currently undertaking doctoral research into the question ‘Where is the image?’ as it relates to ‘approach’ and
‘trajectory’ when painting, and as it relates to the reception of painting. He originally studied at the University of
Auckland, where he graduated with a B.Sc. in 1975, and an M.F.A. in 1984. Since that time he has been a
practicing painter, holding regular exhibitions in public and non-commercial or alternative galleries. He was a
founding coordinator for the artist-collaborative series of annual exhibitions ‘Project Preview’, and has previously
taught at the Unitec School of Design in Auckland, and at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.
His work is held in public and private collections.
Misha Kavka
Involuntary Spasms of Caring: How Affect Matters
Deleuze distinguishes between morality as a matter of judgement constrained by universal values, and
ethics as a set of ‘facilitative’ rules for evaluating human operations ‘according to the immanent mode
of existence’ (Daniel Smith in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical). Although Deleuze
addresses media only in terms of cinema, I aim to extend the function of ethics to the evaluation of
popular media products, transcending the often-negative judgements of their value, based on a moral
dichotomy of Good and Evil. Specifically, this paper will attempt to distinguish my understanding of
the ethical evaluation of media, which I take to be based in the materiality of affect, from Deleuze’s use
of ethics, affect and materiality, which operate on a plane of immanence. For Deleuze, ‘affect’ refers to
the bodily flux of forces, intensities and becomings on the immanent plane of consistency. Together
with 'percepts', which refer to singularities or essences prior to realized ‘perceptions’, affects form
blocks of impersonal sensation, as evidenced in the close-up that suspends the individuation of the face
in favour of its non-subjective material traits (The Movement-Image). What is lost in this desubjectivised account of affect, however, is the actual material body, individuated not only by its own
matter but also by the affective relations, which cause other bodies to matter to it. In place of
impersonal affect, this paper will focus on the involuntary affect frequently mobilized by popular
media, where we are made to care about faces, bodies and beings prior to making sense of their
symbolic attributes. Far from an ontological insistence on an impersonal, non-organic life force, I see
‘matter’ as necessarily interpersonal and situated, even if involuntary. A Deleuzian dis-aggregative
ethics here provides an entry point for elaborating the ethical conditions of care understood as affective
mattering.
Misha Kavka teaches film, television, and media studies at the University of Auckland. She is the author of two
books on reality television, Reality Television in the Edinburgh UP ‘TV Genres’ series (2012) and Reality
Television, Affect, and Intimacy (Palgrave 2009). She is also the co-editor, with Jennifer Lawn and Mary Paul, of
Gothic New Zealand: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture (Otago 2006) and, with Elisabeth Bronfen, of Feminist
Consequences: Theory for the New Century (Columbia 2001). Misha is currently working on a book project about
'care' considered as a site of mediation between ethics and affect.
Wendelin Küpers & Christopher Howard
Inter-Passion: Embodied Affection in Merleau-Ponty & Deleuze & Organisational Life-Worlds
Through spiraling lines of flight, in this presentation, affects will be interpreted as bodily and embodied
inter-relational phenomena and events, which have specific pathic, ecstatic and e-motional qualities.
Discussing critically Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, processes of affects are understood as “interpassion” and ontologically situated in an inter-affective inter-corporeality of the flesh of wild,
elemental ‘be(com)ing’. Especially those multi-folded resonances, con- and divergences between
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze (Lawlor, 1998; Reynolds & Roffe, 2006) will be discussed which are
helpful for ‘inter-standing’ the Ereignis of affect-ing as pre-conceptual intensity of bodily suspense and
disruption (Massumi, 1996, 2002). In a de-centering way, both Merleau-Pontyian and Deleuzian
pathways of thinking are undermining Cartesian categories and dichotomies, sharing a ‘becomingphenomenology’ (Ming-Qian Ma, 2005). Furthermore, they both are recognizing a plea for
immanentism (Reynolds & Roffe, 2006) and sensual continuum of body and world as part of an
ambiguous, non-coincident, layered and folded Being (Wambacq, 2011: 272, 2011a). However, they
do part ways in relation to the status of the affective body as living versus one ‘without organs’
(Olkowski, 2012) and the status of embodiment, as well as differing ontological, epistemological and,
importantly, ethical issues with regard to so called ‘affectivity’.
For illustration, and in responding to the call for interdisciplinary studies on affect (Blackman & Venn
2010: 8), inter-passions and inter-affective happenings will be related to emotionalities in liminal
organisational life-worlds (Küpers 2011; Küpers & Weibler, 2008) which are situated in what can be
interpreted as ‘Deleuzian capitalism’ (Vandenberghe, 2008). For this ‘application’, different
phenomena and effects of positive, negative and ambiguous ‘affect at work’ (respectively affective
labour and its ethical dimensions) are explored. Accordingly, the potentials of affects and affection as
part of the nexus of an in-corporated and responsive responsibility and sustainability (Küpers 2011a)
are discussed and critical perspectives of affective be(com)ing and ‘inter-com-passion’ outlined.
Through considering the varying affective compositions, vibrating intensities, dynamics, and relations,
(an affective and effective, that is, ‘inter-a + effective’ of living), it becomes possible to cultivate an
ethical virtuosity as well as corresponding communities and creative practices, by which inter-passion
can unfold as a ‘birthing’ of a wise art (Küpers, 2013) of living in-between.
References
Blackman, L. & Venn, C. (2010) Affect, Body & Society, 16: 7-28.
Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Light Books.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill, London: Verso.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2004) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group.
Küpers, W. (2011) Dancing on the Limen - Embodied In-Between as Inter-place of Liminality in Organisations,
Tamara, Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry Special Issue on Liminality, Vol. 9(3-4), 45-59.
Küpers, W. (2011a) Integral Responsibility for a Sustainable Practice in Organisations and Management, In
Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management Journal 18, 137-150.
Küpers, W. (2013) The Art of Practical Wisdom ~ Phenomenology of an Embodied, Wise Inter-practice in
Organisation and Leadership, in Küpers, W. & Pauleen, D. (2013). A Handbook of Practical Wisdom.
Leadership, Organization and Integral Business Practice. Imprint: London: Gower.
Küpers, W. & Weibler, J. (2008). Emotions in Organization – An Integral Perspective”, “International Journal of
Emotion and Work, Vol. 2. No.3, pp. 256-287.
Lawlor. L (1998) The end of phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, Continental
Philosophy Review 31: 15–34.
Massumi, B. (1996) The Autonomy of Affect, in P. Patton (ed,) Deleuze: A Critical Reader. pp. 217–39 Oxford:
Blackwell.
Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Eye and Mind, J. Edie (ed.) Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1995) The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2003) Nature. Course notes from the College de France (R. Vallier, Trans.) Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press
Vandenberghe, F. (2008) Deleuzian capitalism. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 34(8) 877–903.
Olkowski, D. (2012) Deleuze’s Critique of phenomenology: Is the Body Without Organs Superior to the Lived
Body?” Chiasmi International,
Reynolds, J. & Roffe, J. (2006). Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology. Journal
of the British Society of Phenomenology 37 (3): 228-51.
Ming-Qian Ma (2005) Becoming Phenomenology: Style, Poetic Texture, and the Pragmatic Turn in Gilles Deleuze
and Michel Serres, Analecta Husserliana, 1, Volume 84, Phenomenology of Life. Meeting the
Challenges of the Present-Day World, Section II, Pages 97-116
Wambacq, J. (2011) Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze as Interpreters of Henri Bergson Analecta
Husserliana, 1, Volume 108, Transcendentalism Overturned, Part 5, Pages 269-284
Wambacq, J. (2011a) The Layered Being of Merleau-Ponty versus the Being Layered of Deleuze. University Gent
https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/941199
Wendelin Küpers is an Associate Professor in the School of Management, Massey University, Auckland, where
he teaches in the areas of management, organisation studies and research methodology. In his phenomenological
(Merleau-Pontyian) and interdisciplinary research he explores an integral and processual understanding of
leadership and organisation, especially focusing on embodied, affective, emotional and aesthetic dimension.
Christopher Howard is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology and senior tutor at Massey
University, where he is writing a thesis on western travellers in the middle-Himalayan region. He has an
interdisciplinary background in history, religious studies, linguistics and philosophy, with special interests in
phenomenology, the body and technology.
Mike Linzey
Standing Up
An ethical imperative is laid down in What is Philosophy (1994, p. 164): “The only law of creation is
that the compound [of affects and percepts] must stand up on its own.” By making a work “stand up on
its own,” Emily Dickinson can construct a monument contained in a few lines, and Carlo Scarpa
inscribes whole volumes in the thickness of an architectural plane. Standing up is properly ethical
rather than an aesthetic metaphor. A poetic image stands up “like a sudden salience on the surface of
the psyche” (Bachelard 1964, xv), prior to any concept or aesthetic idea. But it is not the grander kind
of ethics of ethnicity or gender, as Janell Watson (2008, 200) describes cultural minorities standing up
to the power of the State, or women in the workforce standing up to the glass ceiling. Nor is it a
question of art standing up for its own sake as an aesthetic object. Zagala (2002, 26) comments that
post-Kantian considerations of art’s autonomous role brought with it a number of changes in the
understanding of high culture, heralding a “truly modern” conception of art. But the ethical imperative
of Deleuze and Guattari’s “standing up” is as much archaic and classical as it is post-modern in this
Kantian sense.
The paper explores a possible relationship between “standing up” and the Greek term, sunkatathesis,
that Cicero caused us to call ‘assent’. An alternative (more literal) interpretation of sun-kata-thesis as
gathering-under-standing is proposed. An artist must gather the first tentative percept of an ontic affect
into a new kind of compounded understanding. Examples are discussed of artists confronting this
ethical imperative from the sculptor Polykleitos to the contemporary Czech architect Vladimir Milunic.
Michael Linzey is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Auckland University. His research focus is the cultural
logic (logos) of architecture: our buildings and cities speak volumes about who we are as people. Some of Dr
Linzey’s architectural publications include: “The duplicity of Imhotep stone,” Journal of Architectural Education
(1995); “The cosmopolitan city,” Proceedings of the 6th Australasian Urban History Conference (2002); “Making
our place: The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa,” in S. Menin, ed., Constructing Place, Mind and
Matter, Routledge (2003).
Eve Mayes
Rhizomatic figurations of student participation in school reform
This paper questions current conceptions of student participation in school decision-making and
reform. Within social inclusion policy rhetoric, participation of ‘all stakeholders’ is asserted to result in
improved engagement and educational outcomes. These declarations potentially reinforce existing
binaries of adult/child, teacher/student, voice/voiceless, reforming/reformed in the school institution.
Using Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the rhizome (1987) and societies of control (Deleuze, 1992),
this paper challenges this rhetoric and points to cracks through which rhizomatic versions of
participation might irrupt.
Deleuzian thought and the rhizome in particular have recently been applied in educational research to
sociological debates about conceptions of children as “beings”/ “becomings” (Dahlbeck, 2012; Lee,
2001; Prout, 2005), to conceptions of classroom interactions (de Freitas, 2012), to examinations of
teachers’ use of policy documents in their daily practices (Honan, 2007). In this paper, I extend these
productive lines of thought in searching for alternative ways in which the place of the learner in
educational decision-making and educational reform might be considered. The rhizome, as a
“subterranean stem” that assumes different forms and directions, has multiple points of entry and exit,
and is perpetually “becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 6-12, 21) presents an alternative to the
arborescent “Ladder of Participation” (Hart, 1992) that is frequently referenced as the conceptual
foundation of student participation. Rhizomatic versions of student participation might move outwards
in all directions without origins—multiple, divergent, as well as aware of their own historical
contingency, partiality, and the discursive difficulty of their categorization. These rhizomatic versions
of student participation might complicate ethical discussions surrounding the roles of young people in
education, but also might form into creative assemblages or “new weapons” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 4) that
challenge present binaries and dramatically alter adult conceptions of human development, schooling
and social inclusion.
References
Dahlbeck, J. (2012). On children and the logic of difference: Some empirical examples. Children & Society, 26, 413.
de Freitas, E. (2012). The classroom as rhizome: New strategies for diagramming knotted interactions. Qualitative
inquiry, 18(7), 557-570.
Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3-7.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hart, R. (1992). Children's participation: From tokenism to citizenship. Florence, Italy: Unicef.
Honan, E. (2007). Writing a rhizome: An (im)plausible methodology. International journal of qualitative studies
in education, 20(5), 531-546.
Lee, N. (2001). Childhood: Growing up in an age of uncertainty. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University
Press.
Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood: Towards the interdisciplinary study of children. Oxon: Routledge
Falmer.
Eve Mayes is currently a doctoral student in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of
Sydney and a former high school English teacher. She will be returning in 2013 to the high school where she
previously initiated a ‘students-as-co-researchers’ school reform initiative to ethnographically explore students’,
teachers’ and parents’ constructions of student participation in school decision-making. Eve is interested in how
key Deleuzian-Guattarian concepts might inform alternative assemblages of students, teachers and schools that
consider discontinuity, multiplicity, rupture, and perpetual becoming.
Greg Minissale
Microscopic Desires
Visual art, the entertainment industry and advertising are saturated with images of normative
heterosexist desire, most often objectifying women’s bodies. Easily available without seeking them
out, they form a highly visible surrounding territory that rarely cedes ground and makes visible queer
bodies and their desires. It could be argued that, even when this majoritarian society of the spectacle
does allow queer ‘anomalies’ to become visible within its territory, these bodies must first be
neutralised or made part of a self-congratulating narrative of liberal tolerance. Importantly, this tells us
something about how masculinity defines itself vis-à-vis what it claims it is not: an ‘effeminate’,
‘weak’, ‘gay’, ‘perverted’, not-quite-masculine minority. Many prefer the word ‘queer’ to mean “a
thousand tiny sexes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 278) a molecular flow that may pass through any
body without the assignment of stigma, gender or subject position.
Masculinity territorializes by tracing others and dualisms, yet Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becomingwoman’ cuts across this territory, creating rhizomatic connections between a wide range of fluid and
imperceptible affects, undermining the arborescent hierarchy of masculinity that towers above like a
panopticon. Deleuze and Guattari write: “There is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity
par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular” (1987: 291). This paper discusses minoritarian,
molecular and microscopic artworks where contemporary artists attempt to encroach upon the vast
territory of heterosexist masculinity, the boundaries of which are inherently scopic.
By embarking on experimentation with the body understood, pace Spinoza, as a flurry of affects,
speeds, movements and potentialities that loosen the particles of the molar entities of the masculine and
feminine, various artistic spatial practices create a sociality of becomings-woman. As Deleuze and
Guattari affirm, “Every becoming is a block of co-existence” (1987: 292). Dispersing subjectivity and
identity as exacting disciplines fixed on the docile body, this co-existence is not reactive, but inherently
productive and relational, strengthening the flow of each conatus, acting and being acted upon in “a
promiscuous and humid heterogenesis in which art and life are indiscernible” (Zepke 2005: 183).
References
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988).
Stephen Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine (New York: Routledge, 2005).
Gregory Minissale is a lecturer in contemporary art and theory at the University of Auckland. He has
published several essays on Deleuze and art, psychology and philosophy and is currently completing a
book entitled, The Psychology of Contemporary Art for Cambridge University Press (due for
publication in 2012).
Brett Nicholls
Two Spinozas: Reading Deleuze back against Negri
Toni Negri is often understood as the thinker who politicized Deleuze, or more accurately, drew
Deleuze into a more fitting relationship with recent developments in the productive capacities of
capitalism. This relationship between the two thinkers is premised on the shared concept of the “plane
of immanence.” But, is Negri’s plane of immanence all that compatible with Deleuze’s? Does
Deleuze’s thought precisely fail to offer crucial insights on capitalism today, whereas Negri’s does?
This paper aims to dispel Negri’s understanding of Deleuze, and to show that Deleuze’s thought
anticipates and expresses misgivings about the antagonistic ontology that Negri champions. Focusing
upon their respective readings of Spinoza, specifically the ethical dimensions of his thought, the paper
will draw out crucial distinctions between Negri’s ethics of excessive joy and Deleuze’s affective
capacities. For Negri, an ethics of excessive joy supplements politics and enables people to collectively
organize and ward off chance encounters that might diminish capacities (sadness). Deleuze, on the
other hand, sees joy opening up an encounter with the other and with an undetermined future. The
difference between the two is decisive. Negri remains wedded to a teleology that Deleuze rejects. The
paper will conclude by considering how Deleuze’s ethics grounds a compositional politics at odds with
Negri’s compositional antagonism.
Brett Nicholls is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media, Film and Communication at the University of
Otago in New Zealand. He is involved in research on critical theory, film and media, and surveillance studies, with
a particular interest in questions of media and politics. He has published work on Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak,
and, more recently, on conspiracy theory and Giorgio Agamben. He is currently attempting to relate Toni Negri's
work to current developments in the study of media.
Cathy Smith
The Surfaces and Spaces of a Sentient Planet: The Geophilosophy and Geoethics of Reza
Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia—Complicity with Anonymous Materials
This paper deploys Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a ‘new earth’ and attendant ethics as a conceptual
framework for exploring a creative textual work: Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Cyclonopedia is a complex text due to its
blurring of religion, fiction, philosophy and narrative. The text draws heavily from Deleuze and
Guattari’s geophilosophical writings, including references to their notions of ‘Earth’, ‘territory’ and
‘holey space’. The paper will focus on the way in which spaces and surfaces of desert landscapes are
used to both support and undermine the notion of the ‘Earth’ as the conceptual ground for ethics,
established ideologies and dogma. Of particular interest is the way in which Negarestani positions the
Sun and the Earth’s geological core as sentient entities operating independently of human-centred
politics and ethics, such as the complex ‘petropolitics’ of the Middle East. 1 Deleuze and Guattari’s reconception of the earth within their collaborative text, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Szhizophrenia,2 will be engaged to explore the processes and operations of cosmic bodies within the
Cyclonopedia text, including that of the Earth’s geological core—otherwise known as the ‘Earth
Insider’. Importantly, by positioning humans alongside, and yet connected to the productive and
sentient operations of the ‘Earth Insider’, Cyclonopedia suggests a way of rethinking customary
conceptions of human morality and politics, invoking a geoethics of flow, exhumation and oil.
1. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia—Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 18.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ed./trans. Brian
Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 373.
Cathy Smith is a registered architect (QLD, Australia), interior designer and academic teaching design studio,
architectural technology and construction, and history and theory. She is particularly interested in the ways in
which interdisciplinary thinking and materials-focused practices can challenge habitual modes of architectural
production and occupation. Cathy’s research focuses on the relations between geophilosophy, architectural theory,
and design practice and process, with a specific concentration on the geophilosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari. Her doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Sydney, developed a theoretical account of
DIY architecture, deploying Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical notion of the artisan to explore and engage the
DIY manuals of North American architects Ant Farm and Paolo Soleri.
Chris Smith
The Bare Life of Architecture.
In this paper I want to play. I want to play in the architecture of a zone referred to as either the ‘zone of
indistinction’ or as the ‘zone of indiscernibility’. Giorgio Agamben, the Italian political philosopher,
refers to it as a ‘zone of indistinction’. Gilles Deleuze refers to it as the ‘zone of indiscernibility’. For
Agamben a ‘zone of indistinction’ is most simply stated as a region where two generally thought to be
opposing terms fall together. This could be the animal and the human, the body and the world, the man
and the woman, etc. This zone of indistinction becomes a zone in which the relation between what one
is and how one defines the self is brought into correspondence with the necessary overflow or excess or
‘openness’ necessary for the inevitable connection with others and that which we are not. It is the zone
where the Homo sacer negotiates what Agamben refers to as ‘bare life’.
In the work of Deleuze the ‘zone of indistinction’ is presented as a unity of a kind. Indeed, as is the
philosopher’s tendency, he wants to return us to the Real complexity and chaos of the world, thereby
attempting not to depart from dualism but rather to swallow us into the zone as the Real (from which
dualisms might be extracted). For Deleuze, much of the world is a zone of indiscernibility; if only we’d
recognise it as such. For Deleuze “[t]he point is that each [element brought into relation] partially
overlaps, has a zone of neighbourhood, or a threshold of indiscernibility, with another one” (D & G,
1991, 19-20/25). Architecture, too, occupies such a zone, neighbourhood or threshold. In this paper, I
aim to explore current architectural preoccupations with elaborating and amplifying the indiscernible—
that which may be closer to the ‘bare life’ of architecture.
Chris L. Smith is Associate Professor in Architectural Design and Techné in the Faculty of Architecture at the
University of Sydney. Chris has lectured internationally. His research is concerned with the interdisciplinary nexus
of philosophy, biology and architectural theory. He has published on the political philosophy of Deleuze and
Guattari (also the subject of his doctoral thesis); technologies of the body; and the influence of ‘the eclipse of
Darwinism’ phase on contemporary architectural theory. His most recent work, Architecture in the Space of Flows
was a book co-edited with Professor Andrew Ballantyne (London & New York: Routledge, 2012). Presently Chris
is concentrating upon the changing relation that the discourses of architecture, philosophy and biology maintain in
respect to notions of matter and materiality.
Sean Sturm & Stephen Turner
Ethics, Construction, Seismotics
This paper considers the university in terms of ‘space, design and ethics.’ In line with Deleuze’s
‘pedagogy of the concept’ (from What is Philosophy) we investigate the construction of the university
itself as a preeminent site of knowledge transmission. By pedagogy, Deleuze means the construction of
concepts rather than the teaching of them which, we contend, must also include its setting. We take
Deleuze’s interest in Spinoza’s optical geometry as an opening to the architectonics of the university:
in his reading of Spinoza, ‘common notions (concepts)’ are revealed by a ‘light that traverses bodies
and makes them transparent’ and that refers to ‘geometrical structures or figures . . . in a projective
space’ (‘Spinoza and the Three Ethics’, p.148). In the ‘pure luminosity’ of Deleuze’s idea of Spinoza’s
thought, we contemplate the university setting as something we proactively construct, or diagram, as
we teach and learn, rather than something we simply experience as a pre-constructed object. In our
teaching practice we consider this designed space as an ensemble or structure of forces. If the
university is defined in its statements from the point of view of the visible, objectified in ramped up
building plans nested within Auckland’s ‘learning quarter’, our method traces the lines of
‘subjectification’ and ‘enunciation’ from the point of view of the invisible university, where ‘critical
thinking’ and ‘creativity’, taken as given and located as ground by the university itself, are badly posed
problems. A ‘seismotic’ rupture and suspension of university strategy, its aims, objectives and actions,
and of the ground of the classroom, is necessary to trace the lines of force in terms of which this regime
is assembled, a ‘groundwork’ or ‘working on the ground’ (‘What is a Dispositif’, p.159), which
disinters the drivers of education and design of the current university. The classroom, then, is set in
operation as a place for the ethical construction of concepts, and liberation of life from strategic
calculation.
References
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’, Gilles Deleuze: Essays, Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W.
Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1997), pp.138-151.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia
University Press: New York 1994).
Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a Dispositif’, Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (Harvester
Wheatsheaf: Hertfordshire, 1992), pp. 159-168.
Sean Sturm teaches writing and teaching in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland.
He writes (often with Stephen Turner) about writing and the place of learning in the University.
Stephen Turner teaches in the English Department at the University of Auckland. He has published numerous
articles on the settlement and history of Aotearoa New Zealand, and is currently working on a manuscript
concerned with Indigenous law and settler society. With Sean Sturm, also at Auckland, he has also co-written
articles about issues of pedagogy, disciplinarily and the university.
Stephen Zepke
The Ethics of Affirmation; Nietzsche, Art and Biopolitics.
Deleuze takes from Nietzsche an ethico-aesthetics, by which he understands art to be the ethical act of
affirmation. This act is at once ontological and aesthetic, inasmuch as it gives a plastic expression (a
body of sensation) to the living principle of will to power, and ethical – or selective – inasmuch as this
expression also constructs the world anew (overcoming the human, all too human). Art’s ability to
create a new future therefore becomes the ontological horizon of the everyday, and the ethical
affirmation of overcoming becomes what Nietzsche calls—and Deleuze after him—a ‘grand politics’.
This is a bio-politics, inasmuch as it involves the revaluation (or perpetuation) of our human
sensibility. Our question today is whether such an ethico-aesthetics can still provide us with strategies
of resistance, when contemporary capitalism seems to have inserted itself precisely at the interface
between transcendental creative processes and their embodiment, instrumentalising the forces of
invention—and perhaps the energy of becoming itself—in its drive for innovation and the ‘new’. What
then, can Deleuze’s Nietzsche teach us today, when the fight is no longer between a (bad) human
subject and a (good) ‘dissolved self’, but between different versions of subjective dissolution and
fragmentation, and the values these create?
Stephen Zepke is an independent researcher living in Vienna. He is the author of Sublime Art; Towards an
Aesthetics of the Future, forthcoming (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Art as Abstract Machine, Aesthetics
and Ontology in Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2005), and the co-editor (with Simon O'Sullivan) of Deleuze,
Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh
University Press, 2010).