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An Athens yet to Come
No full textThe massive and ongoing influx of refugees to Athens that started in the beginning of the century would meet a radical change that occurred after the Olympic Games of 2004, producing the germ that would transform the Athenian urban ecologies: an absolute retreat to the private, understood not in financial or market terms but in terms of stratification and rigidification. Examined from that point of view, the urban unrests of the past decade can be approached as the gradual formation of a black hole: before the formation of molar fascist assemblages in the Athenian urban ecologies, there is the formation of infinite micro-fascists. The immense proliferation of micro-fascist subjectivities is no other than the emergence of infinite reactive subjects out of the Athenian urban ecologies and their technicities themselves. Precisely for this reason, any attempt to speak of an Athens yet-to-come should not involve the production of yet another narrative (of urban change, social justice or political emancipation) but rather the affirmative production of a futurity through the actual and virtual potentials of an environmental manipulation that occurs here-and-now while aiming at a not-here-and-not-yet.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Theory, Territories & Transition
Reclaiming vital materialism’s affirmative, anti-fascist powers. A Deleuzoguattarian and new materialist exploration of the fascist-within
Full text linkGeneric Mediality: On the Role of Ciphers and Vicarious Symbols in an Extended Sense of Code-based 'Aphabeticity'
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The significant changes that have dominated the social and the scientific world over the last thirty years have brought about upheavals and critical re-appraisals that have proved quite positive in fostering 21st century thought. This interdisciplinary collection of state-of-the-art essays offers innovative and thought-provoking insights concerning contemporary philosophical and cultural reflection on the nature-culture interaction. Starting from the assumption that the binary opposition between the two terms has been replaced by a continuum of the two, the volume explores both the terms of this new interaction, and its implications.
Technology occupies a central place in the shift towards a nature-cultural continuum, but it is not the only factor. The consequences of economic globalization, notably the global spread of digital mediation, also account for this change of perspective. Last but not least the climate change issue and a renewed urgency around the state of the environmental crisis also contribute to bring the ´natural´ much closer to home. Digital mediation has by now become a standard way to live and interact. The electronic frontier has altered dramatically the practice of education and research, especially in the Humanities and social sciences, with direct consequences for the institutional practice and the methodology of these disciplinary fields. This book aims to explore the implications of these complex shifts for the practice of critical thinking
The Healing Practices Of Language: How Life Matters In Antonin Artaud’s Later Writings
No full textThe life of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) has been tormented by physical and mental illnesses, by the inexorability of the avant-gardists and modern times but most of all by language. Already in the early twenties, Artaud tried to express his physical and mental suffering, but perceived the obstructive and sick making role of language. After his failed career as a poet, a playwright and a scenarist. Artaud travels to Mexico where he hopes to find an organic culture in which one engages with hitherto unexplored forces of the body. This organic culture is a culture of absolute immanence where the mind is intricately related to the body. His Mexican experiences change his personality, because, after his return, Artaud’s writings develop from messianistic, occult and Kabbalistic texts to more mystical and religious texts that are traversed by dramatized complaints of his various internments, demands for drugs and critiques to, following his words, an advanced civilization. During the nine years of his various internments, Artaud more and more sustainably focuses on language with which he starts to play, that he starts to twist, torment and on which he inflicts a torsion and with which he creatively engages in order to express the vital forces of life and matter, or what he calls ‘the true nature of evil.’ This research focuses on Artaud’s later writings in particular – that are somewhat neglected or understudied in the Anglo-Saxon literature on his works – in which we investigate, through a critical textual analysis, based on a close reading, the constitutive role of an affirmative language. Asserting that there are still active forces at work in Artaud’s writings, a revaluation of his later works in particular is interesting, healing and even necessary if we consider and analyze the subjugating structures that are still at work in our society. In this new materialist or schizoanalytic reading of Artaud’s later writings – that focuses on the ruptures and the cracks within his use of language –, we analyze the vital forces with which Artaud’s language engages, the form of this language and the significance of this language. Focusing on a postsecular religion of immanence – the word ‘religion’ is etymologically understood as ‘reconnecting’ or ‘rereading’ – that reconnects man to the vital forces of his body, matter and life, we contend that Artaud’s later writings engage with the ungraspable and joyous as well as terrible forces of life that we can only accept as an inevitable submission to its necessity. This life is modelled, subjugated and codified by a language that permits communication from which the functioning of society is regulated. At the same time, this language also restricts the infinite capabilities of the singularities of our bodies, expressions and desires. Following Artaud’s later writings, the reader perceives how life matters in writing through a creative play with language, that we will eventually call the art of ‘crescive writing,’ through which we can reengage sustainably with the joyous as well as the terrible forces of life
Living the Coast: On Property and Possession, the Netherlands and Indonesia, and the Free Sea
Full text linkWhen Sigmund Freud visited the Netherlands in the 1920s, he oversaw the Dutch landscape while travelling by rowing boats, carriages, and on foot. The reclamation of the Zuyderzee especially made an impression. He concluded that this drive for culture to control nature was similar to how the Ego wanted to control the Id. Of course, this was not a recent phenomenon in the Netherlands. During two earlier visits (in 1908 and 1910), Freud visited the major museums of the Netherlands where he was especially interested in the landscape painters of the seventeenth century. Landscape is actually one of those Dutch words that was adopted in many other languages. Embodying the scaped land, or, exploring the ways in which nature is scaped by men, painters like van Jacob van Ruisdael, Albert Cuyp, and Rembrandt van Rijn, may be seen as part of a particularly Dutch tradition of engineering that also included creative thinkers like Simon Stevin, Antonie van Leeuwenhoeck, and Christaan Huygens. The Dutch not only felt the need to control the sea (ergo the unknown, the Id) in the Netherlands but also in their former colonies, in particular, Indonesia. Overcoding its islands and seas with their ideas of control had major consequences for how the land and the sea could be lived. Nowadays, we need to imagine a life otherwise. With Amitav Ghosh, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and especially the stories and songs of those who live at the coast, we need not to control but to understand the sea again. It is time, once more, to understand the ways all the organic and non-organic forms of life transcode themselves into each other, resonate together, and offer us the sonorous hum of life
What is the Matter with Macao? Exploring A Materialist and Nomadic Theory of Game and Play
No full textIn contrast to the dominant ideas of how 'game and play' work, which I label 'transcendentalist' and 'sedentary', my study on Macao proposes an alternative, 'materialist' and 'nomadic', perspective. This comes down to thinking 'game and play' not as an 'artificial' activity that takes place in a safe, enclosed environment, but as an elementary part of life, crucial to how imagination works, and to how imagination is entangled in the materiality of the urban sphere. After mapping an alternative history of how to think 'game and play' differently, working with anthropologist Karl Goos, architect Aldo van Eyk, artist Constant, and in the end philosopher Gilles Deleuze, I engage with the city of Macao, its architecture, its politics, and its gambling practices. I use fiction authors Leslie T Chang and Louis Borges to show, finally, how Macao, in contemporary China, equals the infinite game of chance, materialized; the much needed other in its contemporary urban landscape
The In/Visible City: Cinema, Control and Contemporary Hong Kong
Full text linkIn his prophetic essay ‘Societies of Control Gilles’ Deleuze introduces us to the new system of domination that he sees emerging in post-war Europe. Breaking down the sites of confinement that dominated nineteenth-century modernism, installing free flows of control “forming a system of varying geometry whose language is digital”, the role of technology in this form of government is essential. Largely hidden from Western media sources, the Chinese Communist Party has, over the last decade, realized a control society that shows remarkable resemblance to the system Deleuze saw coming. In this chapter my aim is not so much to analyse the society of control, but rather to explore how the people of Hong Kong are resisting its upcoming dominance, in other words, what the ‘new weapons’ are (as Deleuze calls them), that allow people to resist. Bruce Lee’s famous adagio, “be water,” is practised in how these protesters creatively reinvent the streets of their city (analogically and digitally), and it is an interesting methodology of establishing a new weaponry. Obviously, these new weapons of resistance are not developed in hidden, state-funded labs, but often concern everyday objects that are distributed on the streets. The safety helm, the gas mask, the laser pen and above all the umbrella are revolutionary technologies in how they offer an alternative to the Chinese/Hong Kong police state, to military intervention of the People’s Liberation Army, to facial recognition cams and surveillance systems. Lacking the budget and the research facilities of their military and state-run counterparts, but with ample creativity and commitment, my aim is to map in what way this shows us how protesters from all over the world are always searching for new techniques of resistance, practicing another materialism, and explore the technobodies to come
The Cracks of the Contemporary
No full textEn aquest article em proposo meditar sobre l’art i la filosofia amb relació al temps. Vull pensar en allò que uneix art i filosofia en aquest sentit, que és un fet que considero de màxima importància (la seva finalitat comuna). Amb aquest objectiu, llegiré tres llibres en què aquesta estètica i aquesta filosofia del temps "succeeix": Divendres o els llimbs del Pacífic, de Michel Tournier, i 1Q84 i Kafka a la platja, ambdós de Haruki Murakami. Tinc la convicció que els tres llibres que m’ocupen poden materialitzar nombroses intervencions diferents en els conflictes econòmics, socials i polítics que conformen el present. I que, per consegüent, poden oferir-nos un món completament diferent del qual hem estat cecs fins ara. Un món en el qual, per algun motiu o altre, no hem tingut tirada a pensar anteriorment.In this paper, I want to think about art and philosophy in relation to time. I want to think about what art and philosophy have in common in that respect, which I consider to be something of the greatest importance (their common purpose). I do this by reading three books in which this aesthetics and this philosophy of time ‘happens’, namely Michel Tournier’s Friday and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore. It is my belief that the three books in question are able to realise many different interventions in the economic, social and political entanglements that make up the present. And that they, consequently, are able to offer us a wholly different earth to which we had been blind. An earth that we, for some reason, were unable to think before.En este artículo me propongo meditar acerca del arte y la filosofía en relación con el tiempo. Quiero pensar en lo que une al arte y a la filosofía en este sentido, que es algo que considero de la máxima importancia (su finalidad común). Con este fin voy a leer tres libros en los que esta estética y esta filosofía del tiempo “sucede”: Viernes o los limbos del Pacífico, de Michel Tournier y 1Q84 y Kafka en la orilla, ambos de Haruki Murakami. Tengo la convicción de que los tres libros que me ocupan pueden materializar numerosas intervenciones diferentes en los conflictos económicos, sociales y políticos que conforman el presente. Y que, por consiguiente, pueden ofrecernos un mundo completamente diferente ante el cual hasta ahora hemos sido ciegos. Un mundo que, por algún motivo, éramos incapaces de pensar anteriorment
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