Ethical injunctions: the University of the Western Cape in the face of the ‘here and now’

This essay poses the question of the ethical in relation to the work of memorialising the University of the Western Cape (UWC) after apartheid. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s statement on the ethical in The Logic of Sense and reading its implications through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and Jeremy Cronin’s ‘Even the Dead’, I argue that the ethical entails becoming adequate to the fracturing of event, leading to an understanding of the subject effect prior to its stamping by race, gender and identity. The ethical, in this formulation, reckons with the materiality of the past as its weight orders the present. It is this possibility of becoming adequate, of ‘not being unworthy of what happens to us’, which is offered in Ingrid Masondo’s photo-essay on UWC. I read Masondo as offering an encounter with images of the Leibnizian world as they appear at UWC, an encounter that registers alternate trajectories as they are expressed in ‘point of view’. Becoming adequate, here, involves registering the role of UWC (both conscious and unconscious) in the subjectification of persons during and after apartheid. This essay punctuates the rhythm of the memorialisation of UWC, by asking that this weight of the past be reckoned with while articulating alternate trajectories for both the university (and particularly the disciplines of the humanities) and for the understandings of subjectivity that attend to it, a demand that cannot be settled cheaply.     

唯有“生成”:德勒兹、惠特曼和《自我之歌》

沿用德勒兹内在性理论,对惠特曼的诗歌,尤其是《自我之歌》进行解读。惠特曼无意识中追求的是流动无我的纯粹情感和欲望,主要关注了惠特曼诗歌中罗列的语言现象,分析了惠特曼诗歌中破碎的语言现象的深刻含义、精神分裂症式的游牧主体、惠特曼对纯粹情感的追求。     

Privacy encounters in Teledialogue

Privacy is a major concern when new technologies are introduced between public authorities and private citizens. What is meant by privacy, however, is often unclear and contested. Accordingly, this article utilises grounded theory to study privacy empirically in the research and design project Teledialogue aimed at introducing new ways for public case managers and placed children to communicate through IT. The resulting argument is that privacy can be understood as an encounter, that is, as something that arises between implicated actors and entails some degree of friction and negotiation. An argument which is further qualified through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The article opens with a review of privacy literature before continuing to present privacy as an encounter with five different foci: what technologies bring into the encounter; who is related to privacy by implication; what is entailed by the spaces of Teledialogue; how privacy relates to projected futures; and how privacy is also an encounter between authority and care. In the end, it is discussed how privacy conceptualised as an encounter is not already there surrounding people or places but rather has to be traced in the specific and situated relations between implicated actors, giving rise to different normative concerns in each case.     

‘Blowing up the pylon’: the limitations to Lacanism in organization studies,seen from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari

We critically engage with the Lacanian notions of fantasy and lack through an understanding of desire as ontologically productive. The introduction of the Lacanian psychoanalytic notions of fantasy and lack into organizational studies has helped to widen the understanding of the mechanism that makes employees desire the idealized images of identity provided by the organizations for which they work. Our claim is that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s conception of desire as productive contributes to the understanding of the role that desire plays in producing and organizing the social setting in which such fantasies and a sense of lack emerge in the first place. Furthermore, we argue that Deleuze and Guattari can help point to the inherent danger of Lacanism’s blunting its own analytical and critical potential when trying to understand such social settings.     

"以物"如何"观物"

<鸟鸣涧>有三种解读方法,从儒、释、道角度都解决不了以"物"如何"观物"的问题,王国维和邵雍的"以物观物"的理论也没能解决这个问题.只有通过生态学的解读方法,才能实现"以物观物".生态学考察有机非有机物的"转变"(becoming)与"差异"(difference),以及"邻野生境"(milieus),实现了真正意义上的"以物观物".生态学的方法为解读中国山水诗带来了新的思路.     

HOME: TERRITORY AND IDENTITY

Beginning with a story from Deleuze and Guattari of a child in the dark who hums to comfort himself, this essay presents a spatial theory of everyday life through an exploration of the idea of home. The song the child sings brings order out of chaos, a space of comfort amidst fear, in other words, home. Through song, repetition, and other ways of marking we establish personal territories in a search for a place of comfort. This essay explores the nature of these markings, of this territorialization, and how such processes are cultural. Indeed, the essay argues that subjectivity is a product of territorializing, identity is territory. Identity is grounded in habit; the repetition of action and thought establishes home. The essay concludes by returning to the idea of culture on a more general level and how a theory of home and everyday life as territorialization may help better explain how cultures move, adapt, and resist.     

德勒兹:于悖论处寻找流动的生命

以德勒兹对流动内在性的关注为中心,探索了德勒兹的生活、学术和社会活动诸方面的悖论性表现,涉及到德勒兹游牧思想和非游牧身体的对比、从哲学向非哲学的转移、从概念到非概念的发展和从解构到建构的发展等悖论问题。德勒兹一生都在寻求着内在性,而正是在这些流动的内在性中,蕴含着他孜孜以求的生命。     

The surveillant assemblage

George Orwell's 'Big Brother' and Michel Foucault's 'panopticon' have dominated discussion of contemporary developments in surveillance. While such metaphors draw our attention to important attributes of surveillance, they also miss some recent dynamics in its operation. The work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is used to analyse the convergence of once discrete surveillance systems. The resultant 'surveillant assemblage' operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings, and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled in different locations as discrete and virtual 'data doubles'. The surveillant assemblage transforms the purposes of surveillance and the hierarchies of surveillance, as well as the institution of privacy.     

Minoring Shakespeare: Deleuze’s Storm – Caliban or the last of the Palestinians

ABSTRACT

There will be no more thinking with Shakespeare, only transposition of his corpus into a minor mode. Transposition and no more thinking ever: but transposition from Major to Minor, for ‘when one sees,’ writes Gilles Deleuze, ‘what Shakespeare is subjected to […], his magnification, normalization, one clamors at present for another treatment that would rediscover in him an active minoritarian force’. One must now rediscover this force both dissident (Hamlet) and minor, and regress with Shakespeare through the legacy of his Tempest, that is: a parcel of earth, an island situated precisely in the Orient, in the Middle East, and its inhabitant, as savage as legitimate, that creature, race-people, ‘oppressed, bastard, inferior, anarchic, nomadic, irremediably minor […] summoned forth by art and philosophy’: Caliban.     

“How to wind the clock of the day?” Solo living phenomena and the various stabilities of home

The domestic home is usually theorized as negotiated and structured space-time and as an emotional attachment to people and places. However, the increasing number of people living on their own brings about the question of how home is experienced, embodied, and narrated by solo-living individuals, especially in terms of ordering and stability under the flexible and fluid nature of some other realms, such as paid work. Following the affordance approach in studies of home, our aim is to integrate research on practices, materialities, and narratives of domestic homes. Our main question concerns how home is perceived, experienced, and performed by childless solo-living people and how they understand the stability of their dwelling—one of the main characteristics of home in social theory. To broaden this “traditional” concept of home, we build upon the emphasis on stability with the notion of flow, as presented by Deleuze and Guattari, along with the concept of boundary work, to describe the processes of delineation between these two from the level of mundane “doings.” Through in-depth interviews conducted using the go-along technique, combined with walking through the dwellings and some of the neighborhoods, we explore the ambivalence of stability, permanence, and temporariness, and the interconnection between materialities and meanings. The appropriation of space and time enables solo-living people to dwell comfortably, while also materializing and stabilizing the sometimes unwanted state of singleness or living alone. In contrast, the unfinished nature of some homes indicates a provisional state of being, pointing out that the current situation is still not satisfactory, being more open to change; however, it might lead to permanent living in unpleasant or even un-homey homes.