Who are our nomads today?: Deleuze's political ontology and the revolutionary problematic

This paper will address the question of the revolution in Gilles Deleuze's political ontology. More specifically, it will explore what kind of person Deleuze believes is capable of bringing about genuine and practical transformation. Contrary to the belief that a Deleuzian program for change centres on the facilitation of 'absolute deterritorialisation' and pure 'lines of flight', I will demonstrate how Deleuze in fact advocates a more cautious and incremental if not conservative practice that promotes the ethic of prudence. This will be achieved in part through a critical analysis of the dualistic premises upon which much Deleuzian political philosophy is based, alongside the topological triads that can also be found in his work. In light of this critique, Deleuze's thoughts on what it is to be and become a revolutionary will be brought into relief, giving rise to the question of who really is Deleuze's nomad, his true revolutionary or figure of transformation

Travelling and sticky affects: : Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian- Guattarian lens

In this paper we combine the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1987) with Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004, 2009) work to follow the rhizomatic becomings of young people’s affective relations in a range of on- and off-line school spaces. In particular we explore how events that may be designated as sexual cyberbullying are constituted and how they are mediated by technology (such as texting or in/through social networking sites). Drawing on findings from two different studies looking at teens’ uses of and experiences with social networking sites, Arto in Denmark, and Bebo in the UK, we use this approach to think about how affects flow, are distributed, and become fixed in assemblages. We map how affects are manoeuvred and potentially disrupted by young people, suggesting that in the incidences discussed affects travel as well as stick in points of fixation. We argue that we need to grasp both affective flow and fixity in order to gain knowledge of how subjectification of the gendered/classed/racialised/sexualised body emerges. A Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian frame helps us to map some of these affective complexities that shape sexualized cyberbully events; and to recognize technologically mediated lines of flight when subjectifications are at least temporarily disrupted and new terms of recognition and intelligibility staked out. Keywords

Datocracy

Datocracy is a compound neologism that embraces transhistorical liberations and reconfigurations of data, in its multiple perceptual-linguistic forms, into new value relations and systems of governance, democratic or otherwise. Datocracy evolves from the often-violent separation of data from its habitual matrices, by virtue of dispositifs, or apparatuses, as defined by Michel Foucault and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. This paper examines material examples of the functioning of such dispositifs through Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, François Rabelais (through Mikhail Bakhtin), and William Burroughs. These examples demonstrate how emancipated data is readily recuperated into new relations of governance, as liberatory socio-political tools (or apparatuses), or vehicles of tyranny. In its passage between liberation and recuperation, in its state of utterance, perhaps, data experiences a protosemantic moment, a pre-definitional state, which offers the promise of a momentary escape from, or rather within, value relations

Le roman d'entreprise: breaking the silence

This article looks at three recent French novels novels in order to explore key themes in what has become known as the roman d’entreprise: Pierre Mari’s Résolution (2005), Nathalie Kuperman’s Nous étions des êtres vivants (2010) and Thierry Beinstingel’s Retour aux mots sauvages (2010). The figure of the entreprise functions both as a fictional representation of the post-Fordist workplace environment in companies such as France Télécom, and also as a means of tackling wider issues of work and social organisation in an era of neoliberal managerialism. The concepts of capitalist realism, organisational miasma and virtuality are used to analyse the ways in which the three novels convey the distinctive affective landscape of the contemporary entreprise. Fiction is used to consider the prolix and self-referential nature of the managerialist entreprise, which enables it to exert a significant influence on the individual and collective subjectivities of employees. The three novels focus on the capacity of the entreprise to capture language and impose an affect of silence on employees

Expressive free speech, the state, and the public sphere: A Bakhtinian–Deleuzian analysis of ‘public address’ at Hyde Park

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 Taylor & Francis.In this paper I explore how struggles around free speech between social movements and the state are often underpinned by a deeper struggle around expressive images of what counts as either ‘decent’ or ‘indecent’ discussion. These points are developed by exploring what is arguably the most famous populist place for free speech in Britain, namely Hyde Park. In 1872 the state introduced the Parks Regulation Act in order to regulate, amongst other things, populist uses of free speech at Hyde Park. However, although the 1872 Act designated a site in Hyde Park for public meetings, it did not mention ‘free speech’. Rather, the 1872 Act legally enforced the liberty to make a ‘public address’ and this was implicitly contrasted by the state of an expressive image of ‘indecent’ speakers exercising their ‘right’ of free speech at Hyde Park. Once constructed, the humiliating image of ‘indecent’ free speech could then be used by the state to regulate actual utterances of public speakers at Hyde Park. But the paper shows how in the years immediately following 1872 a battle was fought out in Hyde Park over the expressive image of public address between the state and regulars using Hyde Park as a public sphere to exercise free speech. For its part the state had to engage in meaningful deliberative forms of discussion within its own regulatory framework and with the public sphere at Hyde Park in order to maintain the legal form, content and expression of the 1872 Act. To draw out the implications of these points I employ some of the theoretical ideas of the Bakhtin Circle and Gilles Deleuze. Each set of thinkers in their own way make valuable contributions for understanding the relationship between the state, public sphere and expressive images

Pashto Border Literature as Geopolitical Knowledge

In this article I read a selection of Pashto literatures as critical thought about geopolitics. Drawing on Michael Shapiro’s concept of aesthetic subjects, as well as on border theory, I argue that the authors, the content, and the literary networks of these works all comment on global relations of power, ranging from the local bordering effects of geopolitics, to systems of knowledge embedded in the spatiality and temporality of empire. I argue that past and current imperial processes have led to fragmenting effects in Afghan society, and literature both reflects and analyzes this. Beyond that, I argue—through the examples of authors’ lives as well as their work—that literary activity in Pashto has actively negotiated such processes throughout its history, and offers strategies for countervailing notions of global connectivity in action as well as thought. The decentralized and multiperspective images of life in these works sit in counterpoint not only to the systems-oriented views that drive military and other policy in Afghanistan during the ongoing US moment, but also to universalist perspectives upon which disciplines like world history and geopolitics traditionally rely. Additionally, though, Pashto literary networks themselves also produce alternative structures. This contributes to the aesthetic turn in IR by arguing that it is not only the aesthetic vision in works that challenges dominant knowledge; the shape of the Pashto literary formation itself, organic with its content, is an alternate form of knowledge-in-practice about the contemporary world