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A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
... This term refers to, in addition to the obvious notion of "moving" from one territory to another, decomposing the established territories and boundaries, both physical and spiritual. In the case of deterritorialization, according to Deleuze and Guattari (2004), territories, or social relations, experience a mode of mutation that gradually and continuously changes their existing organization. Hitchcock (2008) points out that "deterritorialization is desire as flow; it opens up possibility of multiple ways and directions at once, regardless of socially sanctioned boundaries that only seek to domesticate the flow of desire" (p. ...
... The tension created between forgetting and remembering is considered identical to what Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 22) call "lines of flight". According to Deleuze and Guattari (2004), when individuals face external pressures, they tend to establish new paths in response. In Barakat's case, remembering is a possible "line of flight" that can be used to reclaim a lost sense of self: "I do not know how long it will take before I return to all of myself [...] I will never regret that I chose to remember (Barakat 2007: 169). ...
This paper examines Deleuzian nomadism and its role in understanding the Palestinian experience as reflected in Ibtisam Barakat’s Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (2007). The article draws on key Deleuzian concepts, including rhizomatic narratives, fluid identities, and deterritorialization. While Barakat’s novel focuses on childhood experiences in Ramallah during the Israeli occupation, the lens of Deleuzian nomadism that this study applies helps unveil the intricate ways in which Palestinian identity evolves amidst political conflict. The study shows how the memoir’s non-linear storytelling, aspects of fluidity, and deterritorialization create an immersive experience for the readers, allowing them to explore the complexities of community life and break free from fixed structures and established hierarchies. By engaging with Deleuzian concepts, the reader gains a richer understanding of the Palestinian experience, one that recognizes the crucial role of fluidity, resistance, and diverse cultural narratives in shaping Palestinian identity.
... In this mode of production, desire operates like a machine that rips codes apart. When the Oedipal law is broken, the torrents of desire flow and produce, releasing desire into what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call "a permanent inventiveness or creativity" against all attempts of capture and enclosure (214). Desiring-machines produce and their production is a subject that is in a perpetual movement of becoming. ...
... It designates also the ability to represent the cultural differences and variations pertinent to postcolonial societies without being attached to any essentialist discourse-colonial, anti-colonial or nationalist. Nonetheless, it is not an attempt to simply reverse such binary oppositions for, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) warn, continually confronting "the great dualism machines" of history, society, philosophy and science will only emphasize and reinforce binary relations rather than liberating the colonized form them (276). In that sense, becoming-postcolonial reconstitutes our understanding of resistance. ...
The main objective of this paper is to examine the formative and transformative role of the concept of desire in one of the foundational texts of postcolonial theory: The Intimate Enemy (1983) by Ashis Nandy. The paper investigates the concept of desire by emphasizing its role not in baptizing the traditional forms of postcolonial identification but in constituting a mode of transformative resistance which relies upon the becoming of identity. The paper, first, discusses the prohibitive function of desire in the psychoanalytical register. Second, it examines the homology colonial discourse constituted between psychological identification and political domination. Finally, by adopting a Deleuzian perspective, it offers a critical analysis of the book’s central theme: the psychology of resistance, using Deleuze’s concept of becoming. It stems primarily from engaging Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming with Nandy’s perception of the psychology of resistance.
... In this vein, there was a colonial system of representation that overcoded Indigenous peoples and their meanings through several signifiers, such as religion, language, knowledge, art, and violence. As a result, the colonial order was a 'signifying regime of the sign' in which, as discussed in the following sections, the ancestral cultures of the Americas became nothing more than a sign (Deleuze and Guattari 2005) and a desire of the despot's desire (Deleuze and Guattari 2000, 206). Thus, Indigenous cultures, in a deterritorialisation process, were overcoded by those colonial signifiers that acted as 'repressing representations' and the 'displaced represented', after which, the Indigenous signs and meanings were trapped in the colonial signifying regime with modified significations; dubbed by Deleuze and Guattari as the 'circularity of the deterritorialised sign'. ...
... The colonial representations of the indio were eventually reinscribed into a new plateau whose symbolic system of representation referred to the imperial/colonial power/desire without direct mediation of theological discourse and Christian anthropology. 31 The exoticisation of the Indigenous peoples completed the 'circularity of the deterritorialised sign' (Deleuze and Guattari 2005) from which they could not escape: the indio was no longer just the inhabitant of the New World but a colonial representation of the 'other'. As Dussel (1995) states, the Spaniards constituted themselves as the 'Same', and violently reduced the 'Other' to themselves through conquest. ...
The article proposes a historical-philosophical analysis of the long-running debate about the Indian condition in the Real Audiencia de Quito (RAQ), i.e., the colonial discussion on the human or non-human condition of America’s Indigenous peoples. Archival documents, manuscripts, and artworks are analysed by applying the categories of the so-called ‘system of representation’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Thus, diverse and ambiguous discourses on the indio are identified in colonial Quito which are classified into four main moments passing from a ‘condescending stance’ to an ‘inferiorist stance’, the later structuring of a ‘merciful position’, and ending with a ‘symbolic exoticisation’. In conclusion, this long-term debate and its different articulatory practices were deeply related to the colonial overcoding of Indigenous peoples, everything guided by the desire of originary accumulation in which the indios were represented as inferior, defenceless, helpless, and even exotic to justify exploitation and colonisation.
... For ontological analysis, this shift from value to valuing then suggests design scholars understand ontology as an active state: a state of becoming, as opposed to being [35,69]. Barad [10] eloquently Does the output/architecture make room for multiple of ways of grasping reality or does it offer a single (generalizable) entry point? ...
Amid the recent uptake of Generative AI, sociotechnical scholars and critics have traced a multitude of resulting harms, with analyses largely focused on values and axiology (e.g., bias). While value-based analyses are crucial, we argue that ontologies -- concerning what we allow ourselves to think or talk about -- is a vital but under-recognized dimension in analyzing these systems. Proposing a need for a practice-based engagement with ontologies, we offer four orientations for considering ontologies in design: pluralism, groundedness, liveliness, and enactment. We share examples of potentialities that are opened up through these orientations across the entire LLM development pipeline by conducting two ontological analyses: examining the responses of four LLM-based chatbots in a prompting exercise, and analyzing the architecture of an LLM-based agent simulation. We conclude by sharing opportunities and limitations of working with ontologies in the design and development of sociotechnical systems.
... By contrast to object-oriented notions, we will turn ourselves to relational readings (Deleuze and Guattari 1988;Ingold 1986Ingold , 2010Ingold , 2011 of human-environment interactions and those biological studies focused on flows and motion of fugitive species that escape from regional-oriented classifications, making room for a spatial continuity outlined by assemblages. Such a spatiality is the outcome of active and fluid relationships connecting the environment of rivers, lagoons, estuaries and the Pacific coastal sea. ...
This article analyses the rise and the constitution of the public in fisheries. From a relational view, the public is conceived around issues in their connections to human and non-human actors, who are affected by a shared experience of harm to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically taken care of. To do so, we focus on the conflict nodes that emerge when different fisheries compete for access to fishing resources within a context of species depletion. We examine how these controversial issues have connections to politics and the public. By exploring these issues and their human and non-human connections, we discern the biopolitical nature of the conflict, as actors tend to disrupt how the State regulates the appropriation of marine spaces. We also propose the ontological composition of the public. In doing so, we bring differences in fishing technologies, purposes and ways of appropriation to the attention, leading us to conclude that the clashes of various ontologies are enacted in overlapping marine zones. Ultimately, we argue that the ontological conflicts shaping the public are deeply intertwined with the tensions between relational fishing engagements and object-oriented fishing practices, which, in turn, significantly influence fishing policies.
... For example, Urry (2007, p. 22) uses metaphors of network, flow and travel extensively, while Castells (2000) and Bauman (2000) refer to flows, networks, and liquidity, and nomadism, respectively. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also emphasise nomadism in their work on deterritorialisation and rhizomatic transgression and Deleuze (2006, p. 158) describes a wayfaring process of folding, unfolding, and refolding. Similarly, Braidotti (2006) incorporates the concept of nomadism in her critical post-humanist ethics and politics (Braidotti 2013) in relation to the pursuit of sustainable alternative futures. ...
This paper adopts a phenomenological and interdisciplinary approach to explore the embodied dimensions of place and movement as they pertain to travel and tourism. By drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, this study examines how the living body intermediates experiences of place and performed mobility across various touring modalities. In particular, it introduces the concept of embodied “detouring” as a distinct form of relationally placed mobility. The paper further explores the notion of “heterotouropia” and its connection to detouring in addition to addressing the ideas of “other-placing” and “other-moving” as ways to engage in indirect pathways. The paper concludes by presenting the implications, open questions and perspectives related to detouring and sustainable forms tourism and mobilities.
... Materiality is not to be seen as opposed to or in conflict with religion, much less spirituality, but in a perspective of overcoming of things: "matter matters" because it is alive, because it generates practices and relationships because it has agency. He refers to the theory of assemblage of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), which re-thought the relationship between subject and object: the agencement in French understood as a network of objects, bodies, expressions and territories, configuring a variety of forces, trajectories, feelings and organizations (Giardini 2017: 2). ...
The sanctuary of St Anthony of Padua (Kisha e Shna Ndout) in Laç, northern Albania, is one of the
most visited religious places in Albania. The small church, built there and ministered by Franciscans, is now an impressive place of worship frequented by Catholics, Muslims and Christian Orthodox. Throughout the year, pilgrims from across the country, but also from Kosovo, visit the sanctuary. On the 12th and 13th of June of each year, an official pilgrimage is held, which reaches its climax on the night of the 12th when many thousands of Albanians sleep in the shrine seeking blessings and healing. This article aims to explore pilgrimage-related practices, wherein arises materiality as a privileged means of reaching out to the divine and as a reaction to silencing during the communist era (1945–1991). Such practices are overshadowed by nationalist discourse, in which ethnic-linguistic membership outweighs the religious one, even undermining procedural and terminological normativity.
... 3 See(Boler, 2016: 23) and(Robinson & Kutner, 2019: 115) who raises some doubts in passing concerning the appropriateness of the notion of affect delineated by Massumi to its alleged original sources.[p. 16]4 For Deleuze's books, I use the following abbreviations: F:(Deleuze, 1993), WP:(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994), ATP:(Deleuze and Guattari, 2005), SPP:(Deleuze, 1988), PI(Deleuze, 2005): N(Deleuze, 1995), D(Deleuze and Parnet, 2007), CC(Deleuze, 1997), LS(Deleuze, 1990), DR(Deleuze, 1994), MI(Deleuze, 1986), AO(Deleuze and Guattari, 1983), NP(Deleuze, 2006a), PS(Deleuze, 2000), DI(Deleuze, 2004), TRM(Deleuze, 2006b), FB(Deleuze, 2003), B(Deleuze, 1991). ...
A salient tradition in contemporary affect theory heavily relies on distinguishing between emotions and affects. The former refers to structured categories of socially coded affective states, while the latter denotes the pre-social libidinal flow underlying emotions. This distinction is commonly attributed to Spinoza and is thought to have been further developed by Deleuze. In this article, I argue that this overall historical picture is misleading and inaccurate. Deleuze radically transforms Spinoza’s theory of affect for the ends of his own ethical-political philosophy. Moreover, I argue that Deleuzian and similar conceptualizations of affect fail to fulfill their political and ethical promises due to two critical problems. In the last section, I show that a unified notion of emotion inspired by Spinoza, which does not create a sharp rift between emotions and affect, can perform the same explanatory function intended by the emotion-affect distinction while allowing us to circumvent these problems.
... This dwelling perspective, centred in the partaking in her environmental relationships by the "organism-person" (2000), was complemented in later writings by the concept of "meshworks" or "bundle of lines " (2011; 2015), in which he progressively moved his focus from practices, materials, techniques and enskilment (2000) to processes of "making-in-growing" and creative experiences of "doing-in-undergoing" (2015). Thus, relying on the post-structuralist critical philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) and on recent writings of Erin Manning (2016), amongst others, Ingold reconceived the notion of agency in a profoundly relational, ecological and non-volitional sense as "agencing" (Ingold 2018) or fields of "agencement" (Ingold 2021b: 259-261). The concept of education becomes central in his anthropological thinking: people get skilled and educated by exposing themselves to the world out there, engaging attentively but actively in open-ended dynamics of extended agencement 5 .This is how, inspired by John Dewey and Jan Masschelein, he moved on from "the perception of the environment" to the notion of "education by attention", deepening the political reach of his work (de Munter 2022). ...
In this article, as a part of an ongoing dialogue, we reflect on the relevance of Tim Ingold’s recent theoretical propositions for our own anthropological experiences with indigenous people in Andean Bolivia and Argentina. First, we briefly retrace the development of some of his central concepts, homing in on “correspondence” and “attentionality” as a possible basis for an integrated socioecological theory and its concomitant ethics. Then, we explore how these concepts can help us arrive at an understanding of the way in which attentive correspondence, based on care and respect, allows people to carry on their lives through Andean temporalities and relational environments, considering specifically their “troubledness”: discrepancies, ambiguities and conflicts, both in connection with local cosmopraxis (our main focus) as it is evolving amidst postcolonial scenarios and the global ecological crisis. In this sense, the abilities of human groups to correspond can be seen as ways of coping with ecological and social turbulences. Finally, we discuss Ingold’s vitalism as a form of “organic materialism”, and as a non-anthropocentric “new humanism”, one which considers the lines of life of humans and non-humans as they entangle with each other.
This essay seeks to stress the importance of the American poet Walt Whitman to Gilles Deleuze, using how love is variously explored to think about their methods in relationality. I firstly consider how many classic responses to Whitman express division regarding his work. This is indicated by how D.H. Lawrence stresses the satisfactions and exhilarations of reading Whitman but also refers to the sense of embarrassment and shame which readers might experience on doing so, not least because of Whitman’s own apparent shamelessness. For Lawrence, this is exemplified by Whitman’s proclamation that he “aches with amorous love”, as if he were a Deleuzian desiring machine existing only to ache and nothing but. Yet there is no such embarrassment detectable in Deleuze’s responses to Whitman’s work, and his responses are characterized by their insistence that Whitman always insists upon a dimension to experience beyond such conventional desires. He is more than a poet of the body with organs, which in turn enables an understanding of his work as an anticipation of Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs as it was first expounded in Anti-Oedipus. To explore this further, direct and indirect correspondences between Deleuze and Whitman are explored, with particular attention to a range of poems from the 1855 Leaves of Grass. These readings show that if there is a conceptual relationship in their work, their style and syntax are also a way in which they relate thought and action. To triangulate the consideration of the varieties of love that are manifest in Deleuze and Whitman, I use Hannah Stark’s essay on Deleuze and love, showing how different aspects of Deleuze’s writing and thought either consciously or unconsciously relate to the American poet. I reflect upon Deleuze’s claim in his essay on the poet that Whitman’s sustained advocacy of “comradely love” represents a practice of radical relationality, and that this also offers a sense of social and political transformability that is key to both. To provide a final shape to this discussion, I refer to Fredric Jameson’s posthumously published seminars on Deleuze, in which he gives particular attention to the philosopher’s particular interest in American literature. Ultimately, the essay finds that Whitman is given a unique status in Deleuze, one which even threatens to jeopardize his own philosophical system, and that the reason for this may well be love.
Current debates on AI harm primarily focus on issues directly associated with AI systems, such as algorithmic harm or bias. In this article, I argue that AI harm should be analyzed through a power-aware lens using a systemic and multidimensional approach that accounts for the multiple scales at which harm unfolds—macro, meso, and micro. Reducing AI harm to mere technical failure or a lack of representation in data risks oversimplifying the issue. AI is not just a set of technologies, but a sociotechnical assemblage—a complex interplay of communities, markets, resources, labor, processes, practices, regulations, institutions, and knowledge systems. Its current form not only impacts society at multiple levels but also actively reproduces harm and structural violence at scale, exacerbating power asymmetries both within and across nations. This raises the question of who should be held accountable for harm across multiple scales and what frameworks should be established to address it. A feminist critique of AI frames harm through an ethics of care, emphasizing the need to place human rights at the core of AI governance, ecosystems, and systems.
This paper examines secondary rock art practices in southern Africa and how they served as mechanisms for expressing and negotiating identity through iterative engagement with existing artistic traditions. Often dismissed as mere 'graffiti' or vandalism, these practices of modifying, adding to, or reinterpreting historic rock art represent sophisticated forms of engagement with inherited cultural landscapes. Through detailed analysis of mode, placement, and technique, this article demonstrates how secondary artists used existing imagery as both physical and symbolic resources, selectively mobilising earlier artforms to articulate their own positions within changing social worlds. With their technical choices encoding specific attitudes towards inherited traditions, secondary artists appear as one of many audiences-a range which includes contemporary researchers-engaging with these artistic traditions as subjects of common interest, their modifications creating material epistolaries that capture how different communities understood and positioned themselves relative to their own imaginations of the past. By reconceptualising these practices as meaningful interpretive acts rather than degradation, this paper contributes to broader discussions about how African identities have been articulated, contested, and preserved through active engagement with cultural heritage across time.
Through the extensive use of anthropomorphism, phytomorphism, and zoomorphism, rhetorical devices grounded in an ethic of multi-species care, the Japanese manga Doraemon envisions a world where animals, plants and humans share equal agency and autonomy. Its Cantonese translation, serialized in a children’s magazine in 1970s Hong Kong, achieved tremendous success, cementing its place in the local cultural landscape. However, the pervasive domestication in the translation remains underexplored, particularly as a cross-cultural mechanism through which texts are reshaped in response to practical concerns about target audience and the complexities of the original narrative. Focusing on the domestication approach, this paper examines the Cantonese renditions of anthropomorphic, phytomorphic, and zoomorphic beings as they are reframed within the target context of Chinese culture. It argues that the reconfigured juxtapositions between vegetality, animality, and humanity, though minimizing cultural differences through domesticated expressions, communicate the original anti-anthropocentric narrative in a manner more familiar and accessible to Chinese children in Hong Kong. Assimilating cultural otherness into Cantonese and its affiliated Chineseness, this target-oriented approach can be perceived as a defensive reaffirmation of Chinese identity against the backdrop of British colonization, despite the exclusivity inherent in domestication.
The dominant understandings of space that inform International Relations (IR) theories struggle to account for the material dynamism of the natural environment. From neo-realism through to constructivism and post-structuralist IR perspectives, the natural environment is relegated to the background of analysis as the seemingly stable backdrop against which humans do global politics. Supporting this relegation is an associated tendency among IR theorists to view nature abstractly, rather than materially, in alignment with the cartographic imagination. Meanwhile, realist scholars adhering to the tenets of classical geopolitics foreground the natural environment as a factor in global politics yet view it as ontologically static and materially deterministic in its effects. In an era of unprecedented spatial flux amid human-induced climate change, this article seeks to contribute to ongoing efforts in IR and political geography to develop alternative spatial frameworks that can account for the natural environment’s material dynamism and instability. To do so, the article adopts a post-humanist framework that centres matter’s ontological fluidity and mobility. By affording primacy to matter-in-motion, it is argued, a richer understanding of space as performatively produced through relational processes can be developed, where attention is attuned not only to what matter ‘does’, but also how it moves.
Posthuman understanding of music and bodies as matter highlights otherwise forms of musical embodied learning. In this paper, we focus on an early childhood classroom music event and think diffractively with cognitive and posthuman theories in order to extend our insight into it. Accordingly, we explore cognitive approaches to music and movement, as well as posthuman concepts such as agency, embodiment, affect and desire, (de)territorialisations and assemblages. As music educators, we acknowledge the relationship between music and movement in early childhood, but our posthuman reading of the event enables a more equitable understanding of children's music learning.
This article will explore how configurations of the student in Kafka's literature represent a specific relation to knowledge. The central argument will be that their attitude represents a form of rendering knowledge inoperative, therefore representing a disruption of power structures. The emblematic figure of this posture will be the worst student in Kafka's Abraham. This disruptive posture will be denoted as a form of stupidity. The interest in stupidity comes from its abundant presence as a motif in contemporary social and political issues. Stupidity is a form of otherness and belongs always to the other: the accusation of stupidity is always directed at the alternative position. The text will use the student in Abraham to challenge the common-sense framing of stupidity as constituting an unwarranted invasion, deemed inconsistent with the age of enlightenment and political progress, and that must therefore be eradicated.
Fences and Biosecurity explores the role of fencing as a mechanism of control, exclusion, and power in the name of biosecurity. While biosecurity is broadly understood as the set of measures taken to prevent the introduction and spread of harmful organisms – thereby protecting humans, animals, and plants – this volume critically examines how fencing has become a key tool in these efforts. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the chapters reveal the ways in which fences, both physical and symbolic, shape social, political, and ecological landscapes.
This volume brings together scholars from different regions to investigate the ways in which biosecurity fencing is deployed across different contexts in Europe and North America. As fencing practices increase in scope and intensity, it becomes imperative to assess their effects – both intended and unintended – on human and non-human life. More than passive structures, fences actively participate in the governance of space, reinforcing borders, and regulating mobility. They embody biosecurity concerns, turning abstract discourses into tangible barriers that impact everyday life. Yet, fences are not merely practical tools; they also serve as powerful symbols of fear, control, and exclusion. While they may provide protection, they also create division, evoking a range of intellectual and emotional reactions and raising questions about their long-term implications.
Fences and Biosecurity highlights how fencing, as a manifestation of biosecurity anxieties, is not only about managing biological threats but also about organizing the world into hierarchies of value. By delineating spatial boundaries, fences impose distinctions between what is considered safe and what is framed as dangerous or invasive. This separation of differently valued species and biological matter is not neutral; rather, it is deeply entangled with political imaginaries, economic interests, and global trade dynamics. Fences facilitate the circulation of capital while simultaneously restricting the movement of certain species and populations, making them instruments of governance rather than mere physical barriers. While fences physically separate spaces, they also reshape cultural understandings of risk, security, and belonging. By shifting the focus from biosecurity as an abstract policy concern to fencing as a material and discursive practice, this volume reveals the ways in which security measures are enacted on the ground.
Annika Pohl Harrisson is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark. Michael Eilenberg is an associate professor of anthropology at Aarhus University.
In this essay, I engage the makings and evolution of queer Chicana theorist and feminist philosopher of science Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s generative engagements with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and syncretized spiritualities, as well as her (re)visionary disidentifications with the biosciences for matters of speculative visioning and social justice. Stitching together the rich insights of the fields of Chicanx/Latinx studies and queer feminist science and technology studies, I survey how Anzaldúa treads the boundaries between the humanities and biosciences as a means of complicating and rewriting new narratives of identity and belonging. Borrowing from the lexicon of the animal, plant, and other life sciences, Anzaldúa risks repurposing vexed evolutionary metaphors—namely, for the purposes of this essay, the “tree of life” image—to instantiate one part of what I call her “affiliative biofuturities.” Thinking from and through a border/nepantla space, Anzaldúa sifts through and remixes humanistic, scientific, esoteric, and spiritualized modes of inquiry to fashion alternative ways of knowing, seeing, and being in the world. Ultimately, I suggest that Anzaldúa’s Chicanafuturist œuvre radically reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of identity and our relationality to other beings/species while taking seriously the liberatory potentialities of “unruly” knowledge-making practices in times of socioecological crises.
In the arena of postcolonial literature, narratives carry immense significance in portraying the complex experiences of individuals within the context of postcolonialism. Works such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah and Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street make valuable contributions to this genre, as they delve into the postcolonial subject's struggles with identity, migration, and cultural shifts. However, traditional literary analyses often fail to fully capture the intricate connection between language, cognition, and the portrayal of postcolonial themes. In particular, there is a need to decipher how characters' 'self' concepts and mind style, intricately intertwined with linguistic choices, contribute to a nuanced understanding of their identities and the broader postcolonial contexts depicted in Americanah and On Black Sisters‟ Street. The main focus of this study is to use cognitive stylistic analysis in order to delve into and illuminate the complex relationship between 'self' concepts, mind style, and how postcolonial themes are portrayed in Americanah and On Black Sisters' Street. The ultimate goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the identities of the characters, narrators, and authors, as well as their postcolonial backgrounds within the narratives. Furthermore, this study aims to assess the capability of cognitive stylistic analysis in delineating the multi-faceted dimensions of identity, specifically the conceptualizations of 'self' and the neoliberal mind style as depicted in Americanah and On Black Sisters' Street. A descriptive analytical approach is employed in this investigation. This study delves into the concept of "self" in postcolonial novels, utilizing well-established theories from cognitive stylistics such as Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Schema Theory. Then, it closely examines the author's depiction of the neoliberal mind style, drawing on the same principles as well as incorporating lexico-semantic
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analysis and critical discursive analysis. Through the analysis, it becomes apparent that there is a connection between language structures and the development of themes found in both Americanah and On Black Sisters' Street meaning that the postcoloniality of the texts serve as context that fosters the rise of specific linguistic manifestations. This offers valuable insights into how cognitive stylistics can shed light on the multifaceted nature of postcolonial identity. In the first part of the study, the prevalent use of metaphors related to the self, as well as the force and container schemas, is revealed to be intricately linked to traumatic events, the fragmentation of identity, and the experience of diaspora. This reveals the profound impact of postcolonial experiences on the characters' sense of self and identity. The following phase delves into the relationship between the narrative voice, which is anti-neoliberal, and the individual characters' unique mental frameworks. Here, the study uncovers how the narrative's structure reinforces the cognitive and emotional journeys of the characters. Furthermore, this narrative engages readers while influencing their information processing, ultimately shaping their perspectives on neoliberal ideology within a postcolonial context.
While informal settlements have been extensively studied in the Global South, their counterparts in the Global North remain under-researched, despite their critical role in shaping urban morphology. This paper introduces “Resident-Centered Narrative Mapping”, a framework designed to uncover micro-morphological knowledge through the lived spatial experiences of marginalized residents. By examining the epistemological question “whose morphology?”, this study critiques conventional urban morphological methods, which often disregard spatial practices embedded in the everyday lives of marginalized communities. Focusing on a marginalized lilong settlement in downtown Shanghai, this research work integrates critical cartography with ethnographic fieldwork to develop a micro-morphological mapping process centered on resident narratives. This process, structured around the phases of finding, inscription, and simplification, demonstrates how residents’ daily practices actively shape and reconfigure their built environment. This study offers an alternative perspective to understand the dynamic processes of urban renewal in informal settlements and emphasizes the dialectical relationship between resident-driven spatial practices and the transformation of the urban form. By broadening urban morphology’s methodological framework, this research provides insights into how resident-driven mapping can inform localized regeneration strategies. The findings highlight the potential for marginalized communities to shape urban regeneration policies, advocating for inclusive, resident-centered development.
This game analysis experimentally transposes Louis Hjelmslev's linguistic methodology, for logically deducing semiotic schema from a given text, to the analysis of games. Roger Caillois' fourfold model of game type rubrics is therefore reconceptualized, as a logically coherent analytic framework, from which an analysis might proceed indefinitely. Such analysis was practiced on a Dutch translation of the board game Lord of the Rings, to observe how this game manifests Caillois' rubrics of agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (role-playing), and ilinx (disruptive play). Game studies methods akin to Hjelmslev's work already exist, and Caillois' efforts are often reconceptualized. However, this present work finds valuable avenues of inquiry in synthesizing these two thinkers. In extending Hjelmslev's work, stratified images of interlinked categories and components now appear at play in games. By reconceptualizing Caillois' efforts, those two axes, along which his four rubrics seem divided, now point to valuable lines of future inquiry.
Spaces and bodies are not what they used to be. They are no longer merely isolated and static in their physicality but extended, plastic, virtual, augmented, mixed, and networked. When physical spaces lost their accessibility during recent critical times, spatial computing technologies and SocialVR platforms have not only entered and transformed our built environments into places of remote socialization with their ability to stimulate telepresence but also afforded new online modes of experiencing spatiality and spatial production strategies which build upon the notions of telepresence, and sociability. Consequently, the sociospatial impacts of SocialVR platforms fundamentally redefine the spaces we inhabit. Following this, the paper introduces the mixed reality experience of Bodies Without Organs, which investigates online modes of spatial production, including physical and digital objects in the physical/virtual overlap. The project examines the notion of embodied telepresence, tactility, avatars, and sociality through assembling a series of intelligent API (Application Programming Interface) such as Pose Estimation API, Hand-Tracking API, and Passthrough API as building blocks that constitute a spatiotemporal and tactile mixed reality experience which turns the built environment into a telecommunication medium where proprioceptive bodies and spaces are streamed across a spatial network.
Participation has become the keyword in museum and gallery education during the past decades. However, the focus on participation might contain neoliberalist tendencies, creating more entertainment and consumerism than art. In this study based on practice-based research, I explore a gallery educational method to mediate contemporary art to primary and high school students inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s process philosophy and new materialist theory–practice. What kind of roles can the method of Concept Play Workshop create for the participating body and how can it challenge neoliberal tendencies in museum and gallery education? In the workshops, children and young people create philosophical concepts with contemporary art, dialogue-based practices and artistic experiments in the exhibition space of Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, Norway. I argue that the method can create philosophizing, critical, uncomfortable, resting, dictatorial and protesting bodies. Representational logic becomes challenged, and discomfort and resistance become educational potential. The method creates multiple and overlapping roles for the participating body, shifting the focus towards multiplicities instead of the passive/active binary. Humans are not the only participating bodies, but attention is given to agential matter, contesting human-centeredness. The study is a contribution to the field of post-approaches in gallery and museum education.
In this chapter I discuss Lorna Gibb’s _A Ghost Story_ (2015), which offers a different take on the story of the spirit celebrity, Katie (and John) King. In this novel the narrator is the disembodied voice of the ghost, a first-person narrative voice that moves in and out of time and place, and it plays a part in people’s lives, as well as it possesses the body of several mediums and spiritualist believers in their seánces and theatrical acts, like those of the Davenport brothers. The novel shows a clear rejection of binaries such as human/nonhuman, matter/spirit, embodiment/disembodiment, and in so doing it underlines the fluidity of the multiple elements (bodies, parts, terms) involved in Spiritualism, and in séances particularly. My aim is to examine the shifting relations between those elements, as well as the tension between human-nonhuman, matter-spirit through an assemblage lens, drawing on social theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Bruno Latour.
המפנה האונטולוגי הביא אל קדמת במת המחקר את סוכנותן של ישויות לא-אנושיות ונתן תוקף לידע של קולקטיבים לא-מערביים על ישויות כאלה ועל המציאות בכללותה. מכך נגזרת גם החשיבות שבניתוח חברות מערביות ופרקטיקות מודרניות באמצעות המושגים של חברות ילידיות, כפופות או מודרות – מהלך שהאנתרופולוג רוי וגנר כינה "אנתרופולוגיה הפוכה". נקודת המוצא במאמר זה היא אתנוגרפיה של האַנְדוֹקֶה, אחד מ"עמי המרכז" הילידיים באמזונס הקולומביאני, וסקירה של חשיבתו ועמדותיו האונטולוגיות. הגישה המתודולוגית הננקטת במאמר זה שונה מגישות רפלקטיביות נפוצות, ששוללות או מגבילות את היכולת של החוקר מן החוץ לומר דבר מה על נחקריו. בהיותה מבוססת על אידיאל האחרוּת העומד בבסיס החשיבה האמרינדיאנית, היא חותרת למהלך הפוך שמתבטא באוטואתנוגרפיה רדיקלית יותר: ניתוח החוקר ותרבותו באמצעות המושגים של החברה הנחקרת. המאמר מתמקד בבית המתים, מושג שהוא בעת ובעונה אחת אזוטרי ומרכזי בקוסמולוגיה הילידית, במטרה להבין את תפיסות הכוח של האנדוקה. חקירה מדוקדקת הרואה את תפיסות הכוח כנטועות בגוף האדם החי ובטריטוריה הילידית מסבירה את תפיסות החולשה הילידיוֹת, שבתנאי הגלובליות הקולוניאלית קשורות לבלי התר להיהפכותם של הילידים ל"לבנים". הגישה המשמשת במאמר מצטרפת לגישות שמייצרות ידע על גלובליזציה ומודרניות מהדרום הגלובלי, אך מנקודת מבט ילידית אמזונית, שמייחסת קדימות לגוף ולמרחב על פני התודעה והזמן.
The architectural design studio, with its dynamic and expanding scope, challenges traditional academic boundaries and bridges academia and practice by providing an integrated structure. A pedagogy based on experimentation transforms the studio into a laboratory where research and design merge, exploiting the unpredictable benefits of hands-on experience. Accordingly, this study explores experimental pedagogical fictions and tools aimed at integrating material experimentation into studio education, expanding its scope to encompass various craft mediums. It adopts a descriptive and exploratory qualitative methodology, combining theoretical and practice-based methods. It takes atelierz, a vertical architectural design studio, as a case study. Firstly, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of creative experimentation, a philosophical interpretation of the pedagogical fiction of the studio is made on contexts, tools, and actors. Secondly, focusing on the experimental possibilities offered by tools of installations and prototypes, and analyzing their pedagogical use in the architectural studio, the thematic frames of materials, methods and tools, interdisciplinary connections, engagement modalities, and field of discovery are used to evaluate material experimentation. Based on two semesters of atelierz’s visual and physical outputs and process documentation, the findings demonstrate the impact of installations and prototypes on understanding, designing, and applying materials, developing technical skills, transforming non-disciplinary knowledge, mediating exploration, and structuring specialized field of inquiry. This research highlights the pedagogical value of material experimentation and contributes to architectural education by providing knowledge and experience of the studio fictions developed, the pedagogical tools employed within these fictions, and their use for material experimentation.
Moving towards the social-semantic performance of conversations, Cordula Daus and Charlotta Ruth propose a technique for a “searching” narration. As a form of live fictioning, “talking with each other apart” reveals hidden potential in knowledge that is encoded in the language of experience and expertise.
Art psychotherapy training programmes traditionally emphasise evidence-based practices focused on interpersonal and psychological change, often sidelining socio-political dimensions and critical research pedagogies. To address this gap, this paper presents a posthuman feminist approach to research pedagogies in art psychotherapy. This approach leverages arts-based practices and digital technologies as critical tools for examining complex entanglements between human, nature, and technology (techne) rendering insights into data collection and analysis beyond conventional paradigms. This pedagogical theorisation draws on examples from collective arts-based workshops rendering posthuman theoretical concepts into practical, tangible learning experiences. The workshops presented in this paper utilise artistic processes as both methodological and critical vehicles, inviting students to explore a research workshop through the lens of two Deleuzian concepts, those being the situated material assemblage and the Body Without Organs (BWO). The key rationale is to develop critical reflexivity through using conceptual tools that that disrupt normative hegemonies in art psychotherapy data analysis by positioning data as a co-constructed material-semiotic inscription shaped by intersecting human and non-human forces. The outcomes of this posthuman pedagogical framework, employing digital and arts-based diffractive methodologies and ethological assemblage in enacted data analyses, were a facilitated non-hierarchical synthesis in data relations between human, nonhuman and digital bodies and the stimulation of a more inclusive transdisciplinary inquiry, generating insights into systemic issues in healthcare beyond a patriarchal logic and purely anthropocentric reach. The approach positions students as active agents in co-producing knowledge that challenges dominant socio-economic structures in health research.
Lennard Davis, in his work on visualizing the disabled body, argues that at root the body is inherently and always already fragmented. The unified “whole body” is, therefore, hallucinatory in nature—an imaginary figure through which the body’s multiplicity is repressed. There is much in this view that is consonant with posthumanism, which so often seeks to destabilize the “whole” and singular one in favor of the multiple, the fragmentary, and the hybrid. Yet despite these considerations of the body as fragmentary, little attention has been paid to the value of considering the body not only as fragmentary, but also as potential fragment. What might we learn by rejecting anthropocentric assumptions about the body-mind’s inherent completeness, and exploring the radically plural ontologies offered by visions of shared, joint, or group body-minds? This paper turns to science fiction as a source of such visions, considering depictions of symbiotic and hive minds through the non-traditional models of ontology and agency. While science fiction has traditionally represented plural being as a troubling and fearful injury to wholeness, this paper aims to highlight the symbiotic Tok’ra of television series Stargate SG-1 as a model of excess being that not only challenges the naturalization of the “complete” body, but also asks us to interrogate presumed boundaries between self and other.
This chapter addresses the experimental potential of the eco-weird, offering a refreshing angle from which to study the intersection between weird fiction and environmental thought. In contrast to traditional weird fiction, contemporary weird texts increasingly engage with the environmental crisis via techniques such as humor and self-reflexivity, targeting the reader’s positionality and ethics vis-à-vis the text and, by extension, vis-à-vis the sociopolitical and ecological context. As a way of situating this potential within the broader ecocritical conversation, I take my cue from literary scholar Nicole Seymour (2018), who proposes a less instrumentalist approach to environmental art, opening up the (according to Seymour) self-limiting sanctimoniousness of ecocriticism in productive ways. Similarly, in this chapter I discuss weird texts, such as Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne (2016), that use explicitly experimental narrative techniques to challenge traditional weird poetics on the one hand and environmental thought on the other. Seymour asks what it means when a work employs the “wrong” (i.e., nonnormative) tone or adopts the “wrong” (i.e., nonnormative) disposition toward the environment. This chapter is, in part, a proposition that the weird is well-equipped for this kind of “bad” environmentalism.
In his essay entitled Philippine Hermeneutics and the Kingpins of the Hill poet, fictionist, and critic Edel Garcellano talks about the “depoliticization of literary discourse” which, he says, serves as “a strategic/tactical interpellation to allow certain modes of unity and, in effect, certain philosophies to function as though literature were outside social, economic and political imperatives in human discourses” (59). This line underscores not only the apparent failure of dominant modes of critical practice to address exigent literary issues but also the systematic marginalization of Marxist/ dialectical criticism in favor of the “non-ideological” methods of textual analysis such as American Formalism/New Criticism whose logic of operation is best exemplified in T.S. Eliot’s essay The Function of Criticism (1923), where he explains that the role of the critic is “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste” (24). French philosopher and literary theorist Pierre Macherey, in his book, A Theory of Literary Production, calls those who share Eliot’s dictum as “technicians of taste,” and exposes a fundamental flaw in the interventions of critics who perform their textual readings with the idea of correcting artistic taste in mind, primarily, by sticking to defining and explicating, they necessarily fail to engage in the production of knowledge: “in the attempt to define the average realities of taste they are always inevitably mistaken because their work evades rationality and does not produce a knowledge in the strict sense of the word” (14). Furthermore, Macherey argues that such a form of criticism “treats literature as a commodity” and hence, could only but establish “rules of consumption” (14). While Edel Garcellano was not the first and certainly not the last critic to go against the New Critical tide and combat the critical formulations of the so called “technicians of taste,” his sustained engagements with the works of the leading proponents of belles lettres is significant because his critiques take the form of highly theoretical, politically reflexive, and most of the time defiant and belligerent critical essays that sadly elicited from his contemporaries not similarly theoretical ripostes but outright silence. This paper is an attempt to engage with Garcellano’s critical oeuvre by examining the following: his notion of the text (the object of literary analysis) vis-a-vis the formalist notion of the text, the writing style prevalent in his works, and the possibility that as a committed critic who has produced four books of criticism in his more than three decades of practice, a programmatic method of literary criticism could be derived from his critical project which could help guide the new generation of literary critics and even casual readers in their foray into the locus of literary production and interpretation.
Deleuze’s philosophy, celebrated for its affirmation of life, also offers a profound and nuanced exploration of death, challenging conventional understandings of individuality and existence. Through key concepts such as the “death drive,” the “virtual,” and “assemblage,” Deleuze frames death not as a terminus, but as an integral process within life itself. This article critically examines Deleuze’s conception of death in three main stages. First, I explore how Deleuze characterizes the ego as a metastable entity – inherently fragile and prone to disintegration. This implies that we are always already embedded in processes that draw us into larger becomings, dissolving fixed identities. Next, I differentiate this perspective from spiritual traditions that emphasize ego dissolution. I argue that Deleuze’s framework, while grounded in a secular, intellectual engagement with worldly involvement, offers insights that could enrich spiritual discourse. Finally, I also identify limitations in his approach. Deleuze’s intense focus on the creation of the new often overlooks what he terms the “first death,” which aligns with traditional conceptions of mortality as an absolute end. He appears to neglect the possibility of a final cessation of all processes, such as the heat death of the cosmos. After presenting the practical implications of these considerations for religious life, I conclude by addressing various points of contact between these reflections and other intellectual currents. While Deleuze’s philosophy may not serve as a definitive framework for understanding death, engaging with his ideas provides insightful and novel perspectives on existence. It encourages a reexamination of the boundaries between life and death from an immanent standpoint, enriching traditional perspectives.
У овом раду аутори испитују феномен заборављеног и тишине у романима јужноафричког аутора Џ. М. Куција. Предмет ис- траживања обухвата романе Ишчекујући варваре (1980), Живот и вре- мена Мајкла К (1983), Фо (1986) и Срамота (1999). Готово сви ликови у Куцијевим романима имају проблем с памћењем и говором. У роману Фо, на пример, године и самоћа на пустом острву оставиле су трага на памћењу Робинзона Крусоа, а Петко није у стању да говори јер су му ро- бовласници одсекли језик; ипак, и поред тог недостатка, Сузан Бартон упорно покушава да пронађе начин помоћу кога би Петка подучила говору. Мајкл К, протагониста романа Живот и времена Мајкла К, не само што је због трауме изазване грађанским ратом у стању да упамти само фрагменте неке целине, већ није у стању ни да говори због физич- ког дефекта – зечје усне, која му квари изглед и ограничава комуника- цију с другим људима. У роману Ишчекујући варваре, осим проблема с говором неименоване девојке, јавља се и проблем с памћењем, односно феномен колективног заборављања, везан за Начелника и друге ликове романа. Проблем колективног заборављања присутан је и у роману Срамота, у коме, осим професора Дејвида Лурија, исти проблем имају и његова ћерка Луси, његови студенти, као и други ликови романа.
Куци у својим романима указује како на инхерентну поделу соп- ства, а тиме и на вишеструку субјективност ауторске персоне, доводећи на тај начин у питање како претпоставке западњачке рационалности, тако и, захваљујући тотализирајућим наративима постколонијалне јужноафричке историје, реалистичког романа. Одбијајући да препо- зна границу између фикције и историје, Џ. М. Куци је у својим рома- нима развио сложену естетику која укључује алегорије, алузије, интер- текстуалности и метатекстуалности.
This chapter merges the postcolonial theory of liminality with anthropocentric concerns of animal rights, thus conceptualizing and challenging the boundaries between self and other, and humans and non-humans. It positions “the story” as a possibility in overcoming these theoretical barriers. The strategies of ecological “lateral thinkers” are shown, in part, to uncover the precarious nature of the present moment, enacting action and activism, all the while presenting alternative perspectives to engage with. In doing so they walk the tricky line between nihilism, brought on by eco-grief, and a re-imagining process “to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 1). I argue that these ecological theorists advocate for an interstitial present as a modus of abnegation of the discursive limits placed on the human/nature binary. As such, there is a plea to embrace the perpetuity of change and “to build dialogical bridges between knowledge systems,” in recognition of the delicate and ever shifting connectivity that operates all life on this planet” (Rose 1). By outlining the cohabitation of species, a world of mutual flourishings is mapped. This process allows for the story of the biosphere to emerge, a story where human-animals, as a species, are players in the outcome. Shifting the perspective away from the individual presents risks of apathy, however, if this can be overcome it also opens up possibilities for collective collaborations. From this perspective, humanities scholars, artists, scientists and cultural custodians can cooperate in trans-disciplinarian assemblages. The story of earth and its entangled lives provides the necessary corridors for these connections to take place.
מאמר זה קורא תיגר על הספקות הרווחים בשיח הפמיניסטי בנוגע לכוח ולאופק הפוליטיים של מחאת #MeToo, שלפיהם התקבלותם של סיפורי פגיעה מינית בנשים כטענות אמת היא תוצר של תנאי הזמן הנוכחי, המאופיין כעידן פוסט-אמת, שממילא שוחקים את מעמדה של האמת. כנגד עמדה ספקנית זו טוען המאמר כי בשעה שהיא מתחזקת את שיח הפוסט-אמת, שכינונו מותנה בהדרה מתמדת של דרכי תיאור המציאות של רבות, היא מחמיצה את המפנה הפרדיגמטי של ה"אישי הוא פוליטי" (הא"פ), כפרקסיס ותיאוריה פמיניסטית, שאותו מגלמת #MeToo. כדי לעמוד על האופן שבו התממשותו העכשווית של הא"פ מאפשרת את הפוליטיזציה של תיאור המציאות, מתחקה המאמר אחר תנאי האפשרות של הא"פ והתמורות שחלו בו מאז הופעתו בשנת 1969. מהלך זה משמש מצע לטענה המרכזית שלפיה נישוי האמת, כפרקטיקה פוליטית ואנליטית, הוא שהופך את #MeToo לנקודת מפנה המכוננת את הפוליטי כבלתי-אישי. הפוטנציאל הפוליטי של #MeToo טמון אפוא בקטיעת יחסי הכפיפות האפיסטמיים כמעשה פוליטי שמתבצע בפומבי ובהטרמת הניסיון הקולקטיבי של נשים לניסיונן האישי. אלה מומשגות ונדונות במאמר באמצעות המושג "הבלתי-אישי הוא פוליטי".
This article suggests that dance practice-led exploration of avatar embodiment and telematic performance in 3D virtual environments (such as those generated in real-time graphics engines) can be a meaningful mode of philosophical discovery—a mode of affective doing, creating, becoming, and embodied thinking. By exerting kinaesthetic agency and shared expression within corporeal forms that are both of our body and yet virtual as well as in avatar representations that do not necessarily correlate to our actual anatomical articulation, can we explore a new remote relationality of extended, non-human, or alien embodiment within virtual space? I explore the possibility that, if this experience is indeed philosophical, it can be expansive and joyous, critically and socially engaged, and even ethical in nature, despite the techno-political forces of capture and control which are understood to be at work in so-called volumetric regimes. To consider this I draw upon a proposed alignment of ideas from Ian Bogost (from “procedural rhetoric” to alien phenomenology) and from Laura Marks (unfolding-enfolding aesthetics and the “talisman image”) to think about virtual media forms that enhance dance’s inherent virtuality and its propensity for kinaesthetic metaphorism, ethical intersubjectivity, and play.
This text has three parts. The first introduces Marx’s concept of critique—or rather, how he struggles to find an adequate mode of criticizing capitalist society; the second reconstructs in Marx’s work the central concepts and strands that culminate in the concept of capitalist money; the third shows the philosophical implications and consequences of this concept. One aim is to show that we find in Marx's work a twofold "materialist turn" of philosophy and Hegelian Spirit, and two social subjects. The two 'turns' and the two subjects are struggling, in a hidden conflict, in Marx’s work, but also in the history of the critique after Marx: The working class and capitalist money. The former was already a kind of revolutionary subject: for it has produced capitalist society; the latter is yet to become such a revolutionary subject—produced by that capitalist form of money which it must overcome.
In this essay, I explore how Milan Kundera in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, delineates the tyrannical biopolitics of a totalitarian state. I argue that the Soviet invasive biopolitics renders the Czech citizens alienated from their life, resources, and independence. Firstly, the obnoxious face of biopolitics manufactures exiles and fugitivity and, secondly, it destroys the dignity of an independent nation and turns it into a community of dissidents. Here, I build on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, which in turn embarks on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower or biopolitics. Mbembe critiques the racist, fascist, and nationalist forces that institutionalize the resurgence of “othering” a community to exclude it from the nation-state and kill it. Likewise, Foucault’s
biopolitics interrogates the brutality of the nation-state that exercises the right of life and death over its subjects. Th is power takes hold of the human life: seizes that life, ends, impoverishes, and enslaves it. Th us, I focus on the all-pervasive impacts of biopolitics on the lives of individuals and argue that Kundera’s strategic biopolitics against the historical backdrop of the totalitarian surveillance and exile, at length, works as a subversive tool that stages resistance through his writing.
Keywords: biopolitics, necropolitics, exile, invasion, resistance
This essay focuses on the impossibility of considering food as ‘a thing.’ It addresses the legal profiles of food from an interdisciplinary perspective by treating the production, signification and consumption of food as semio-spatial categories. The argument starts from the foundational premise that the dynamics of food, as a magmatic flow, comprehensively connect and transform all human activities and ecological aspects of life. Like a stream of radial projections in a mass of fluid, food functions as a semiotic membrane, embodying the fundamental relationality of each human body to the whole globe. The main implication subsequently drawn from this view of ‘food’ is that to eat is always and everywhere to incorporate the entire world. Since food is the epitome of the space and time proactively and enactively involved in its production, in terms of both human activities and natural resources, by the mere fact of eating no human being can avoid recognizing themselves as a space–time cannibal. The consequences of this conclusion for food justice and its spatial dynamics are enormous, and even more so in light of the current ecological crisis. The essay thus critiques many categories related to the food politics of the ecological footprint, including sustainability, bio-diversity, food systems, and the circularity of food and resources. One proposed alternative offered is a chorological reading of human rights and their possible use as semantic-spatial transducers of the activities and phenomena inherent in the ‘food-as-omnilateral-relationship.’ The dynamic and transformative relationship between space, human rights and ecological change emerges clearly. Human action, and thus law are, then, constitutive ‘ingredients’ of food, which comes to the fore as a ubiquitous icon of the interpenetrative relationship between humanity and the becoming of the Earth; being and becoming blur. In the same vein, spaces and actions, facts and values are transformed into moving elements of an overall evolving situation that makes each a means of the other and thereby a generative factor of its significance.
This article presents the concept of a ‘haptic aurality’ in soundscape composition, an aesthetic and perceptual model derived from visual art theory, media studies and phenomenology that extends the haptic beyond its common association to vibroacoustic phenomena in the sonic arts. Included in this framework are both the standard haptic arguments, from psychology and engineering, including notions of kinaesthesia and proprioception, and varied definitions of the haptic as a not necessarily tactile mode of knowing touch that involves synaesthesia, transmodal perception and philosophical notions of sensory dedifferentiation. In adapting this survey of sometimes contradictory accounts of the haptic as parameters for compositional analysis and application, the article simultaneously creates novel engagements between soundscape composition and acousmatic practice.
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