Academic (I wish I had a better word) blogging is an adventure in deterritorialization.  Let us suppose that academic disciplines are systems.  For Luhmann, systems constitute themselves by distinguishing themselves from an environment as depicted in this (less than ideal) graphic:

The distinction between system and environment is self-referential in the sense that it is an activity (this distinction is an ongoing process that has to reproduce itself from moment to moment in the order of time in a temporality constituted by the system) that only occurs on one side of the system.  It is the system that distinguishes itself from its environment, producing an outside and an inside.  For the environment, by contrast, this distinction does not exist.  Here it’s necessary to note that Luhmann uses the term “environment” equivocally.  There is, on the one hand, the environment that exists as such.  This environment is what Deleuze and Guattari…

What can be said of Halloween as a symptom or form of surplus-enjoyment?  Perhaps that it is queer or a repudiation of what Lacan called the university discourse, or what we might call the dream of a big Other that exists.  It is unfortunate that Lacan referred to this discourse as the “university” discourse, for naturally this evokes connotations of universities (for a discussion of how Lacan’s discourse theory works, cf. the appendix to my article “Zizek’s New Universe of Discourse”).  While certainly we can draw on this discourse to understand what transpires in universities or what Kuhn referred to as “normal science”, it would perhaps be better to refer to it as the “universal discourse”.  Within the universal discourse, we have S2, the big Other or system of signifiers, addressing the objet a or anomalous; naming it and situating it in a system of social categories and identities.  In…

STATUE BY Linda Bergkvist
PHOTOGRAPH BY A.D.

I’ll be giving a seminar on Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus through The New Centre beginning October 13th.  Enrollment is open to anyone.  Come join us!  Enrollment information can be found at The New Centre website.

Deleuze and Guattari were exceptional among the French thinkers of 1968: they did not embrace the linguistic turn, correlationism or anti-realism, nor did they champion social constructivism. Rather, they developed a robust realist and materialist naturalism that spoke profoundly to science, ethics, art, and politics. However, the realist singularity of their thought in a setting dominated by anti-realist, linguistic idealism has often been overshadowed by attempts to assimilate their work to postmodernist thought. With the advent of New Materialism and Speculative Realism, it has become possible to read their thought anew through a realist lens. Through a close reading of A Thousand Plateaus, this two-part seminar does just that.

Part 1 is…

Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.
……………– Karl Marx, Capital

the civilized capitalist machine

“The only universal history is the history of contingency.”1

In developing their theory and the practice of decoded and deterritorialized flows Deleuze and Guattari will surmise that capitalism in its present form may be the exterior limit of all societies (p. 230). They’ll go on to tell us following Marx that  “capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it” (p. 231). So that this continuous cycle of schiz and flow from break to barrier and return through the movement of displacement “belongs essentially to…

Every philosophy is populated by a conceptual persona that functions as its transcendental unity of apperception or the principle by which it is struck by questions and problems and through which it forges and links concepts and grasps phenomena.  That persona might be the scientist, the priest, the artist, the doctor, the analyst, the revolutionary, the dancer, the judge, the vulnerable person, or any number of others.  New ones are always being invented.  Questions and problems flash into being in response to the subject or persona.  Concepts are created and linked in new ways.  Phenomena become visible or invisible.  The subject of a philosophy is not the philosopher, but rather the conceptual persona.  Indeed, the philosopher is often horrified by the conceptual persona that inhabits the philosophy she gropes towards and the becoming into which it draws her despite herself.