Reconceptualising Pathological Demand Avoidance as a neurodivergent phenomena using the Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.
Tag: Guattari
The object of study for my stage three project is track and trace. In late 2019 the COVID-19 pandemic was reported as an unusual virus. At the beginning of 2020, the virus, now identified as a novel coronavirus began to spread throughout the entire world. Aside from a lockdown and a vaccine that had to be developed, the UK government invested heavily into a contact tracing system called track and trace. The aim of this system would be to trace who had come into contact with those that had testing positive for the virus so they could isolate and quarantine. Despite being heavily funded, track and trace has only a “marginal impact on transition of the virus”. This essay will be investing track and trace and what affected the way it was organised. By understanding it with reference to Deleuzian and Guattarian thought, it will be considered why track and trace was organised the way it was with a historical approaching using quantitative data and then why this meant track and trace was unsuccessful using an axiological approach. The territory in which the object will be considered is from political responses to catastrophes and centralisation.
In order to make this invested, this essay will attempt to give a broad description of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of state form thought and nomad form thought and the rhizomatic, and then discussing whether it is relevant into track and trace. State form and nomad form thought is the outlining how the state has power not only explicitly through laws but also by giving itself a rational justification for its framework. By considering the war machine, an entity that exists outside the state, Deleuze and Guattari develop nomad thought in order to offer an alternative to state thought, which is used to critique how the UK state organised track and trace. The rhizome is Deleuze and Guattari’s description metaphysics where the world operates as a rhizome, meaning it is fundamentally decentralised. This will be used to critique the fact track and trace was centralised. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is used primary to develop these concepts and understood with reference Eugene Holland’s A Thousand Plateaus: a reader. Moreover, the essay uses information from the BBC and The Guardian to understand how track and trace worked and how successful it was. By considering this information, it will be investigated whether Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are relevant to track and trace, considering how neoliberal policy affected how track and trace was organised, how sources advocated for centralisation in facing the COVID-19 pandemic, and finally whether Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are relevant.
Aim: To analyse whether or not the internet can be said to form a functional rhizomatic system and from this analysis to discuss what this implies for the future management or control of the structures that exist therein. Sources: Deleuze and Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus, Manuel Castells – The Internet Galaxy
TERRITORY: Banksy is an infamous stencil graffiti artist, using the urban scenery for his canvas, painting on everything from walls, over the top of other art and even animals. Banksy’s work, from the walls of London Zoo to the Segregation Wall of Palestine, evokes strong reactions in the minds of those who look upon it. This is arguably one of his many aims, evoking reaction and controversy, awakening the often numb souls of the urban jungle. The city streets of the world can be transformed, his work acting as a catalyst within the minds of creativity; attempting to corrupt the already corrupted world of corporation, government, advertising and capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari, the War Machine. In this study, I will evoke what the a war machine essentially is, and what it actually encompasses with a close reading of A Thousand Plateaus, which I will use as my primary reading source. I will consider Banksy as a war machine, and throughout the study will relate the characteristics of the war machine to Banksy’s thought and art. In developing this I will explore what I believe the war machine has created, and whether these movements are useful, or perhaps more appropriately whether they are beneficial, to modern society. Furthermore, I will also argue as to whether one, or whether the war machine, can maintain a level of creativity within our society, which as it evolves appears to be suffocating the creative flows with the engulfing arms of capitalism, systems of government, and society itself. One question that I believe is crucial to ask is can a war machine truly exist? Are all attempts at creativity inevitably condemned to fail and become part of the system that they originally rejected? It is these, amongst other questions that will form the structure of Weapons of Mass Creation.
To explore noise and its theoretical underpinnings. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I wish to argue that noise appears as a perpetual deterritorialization of music. Over the course of the twentieth century there arose an increased difficulty to distinguish music from its counterparts of silence and noise. It was not until Luigi Russolo’s 1913 essay The Art of Noises that noise was encouraged to be used in musical composition, consequently liberating musicians from the antiquity of harmony and rhythm which dominated musical discourse for centuries. Noise today can be found permeating numerous musical acts. However, my intention was to examine those artists whom present noise with no melodic retrieval, who remain with noise as noise. My main referral was the work and philosophies of Masami Akita (Merzbow) a quintessential figure within noise music. Attali suggested that music, the codification of noise and silence “prefigures new social relations.” Likewise, I wanted to examine noise as a possible marker of temporal and cultural difference. Territories and Change: Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I argued that noise is a perpetual deterritorialization of music. Capitalism brings with it both restrictions but also the possibility to escape such restrictions. Just as the human is encouraged to live creatively within capitalism, noise artists likewise attempt to exist creatively within music, challenging conceptions of how music is to be defined and created. That is, noise artists such as Merzbow trace lines of flight in an attempt to resist stratification. In this sense I also examined noise as an example of a smooth space and a rhizome. Noise however cannot escape musical strata entirely; rather it remains within music, forever on its periphery challenging what it is we define as music. It thus seems that the ethos or idiom of noise is dependent upon musical strata. Noise therefore must remain within music as extra-idiomatic, that is, a sense from within music that it is uncontainable. In examining noise as a perpetual deterritorialization of music, I was examining a change in musical conceptions as they have been hitherto and as they may come in the wake of the possibilities opened up by noise.
The initial reception of D&G’s C&S was coloured by the twin presences of its authors and the situational context of the ’68 riots. Until Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy in ’74 the political interpretation seemed to close around an orthodox reading of Deleuze and Guattari rather than a reading of C&S. LE puts into play the structuring processes of desire on the political economy at micro-economic level. Stand must be taken: to side with which aspects of C&S? * Marxist interpretation of a capital (hard left) * Psychoanalytic relation of schitzo/capital (soft left) * Micro-economies of desire (libertarian) * Pro-capital destruction of despot (neo-cons). Current battle plays itself out across intellectual topographies (journal, academic publishing) and also Capital rips up every stable political settlement, but where does it head next… CCRU track capital-war-machine path of flight: 1. 1500. Leviathan. Command core: Northern Mediterranean . Target area: Americas. Mode: Mercantile. Epidemic opportunism, selective intervention, colonial settlement. 2. 1756. Capital. Command core: Britain . Target areas: Americas-South Asia. Mode: Thermo-industrial. Imperialism control. 3. 1884. Spectacle. Command core: USA-Germany . Target areas: Africa-Russia-Nodal:periphery. Mode: Electrocorporate. Cultural overcoding / selective extermination. 4. 1948. Videodrome. Command core: USA / Target areas: Expanded:nodal:periphery. Mode: Info Satellitic-supercorporate. Cultural programming / general extermination. 5. 1980. Cyberspace, Command core: USA-Japan-Germany / Target areas: Totalized extra metropolitan space. Mode: AI-hyper corporate. Gross-neurocontrol / intermittent media-format exemplary extermination, virtual biocide. 6. 1996. Babylon. USA-EU:2-China (metalocal command centres) / Totalized planetary space. Photonic-Net Hypercapital Neo-Organic. Neuroprogramming / AI:Capital:Media:Military fusion, constant entertainment extermination process.
A Rhizome, as in the Botanical definition means a plant which grows horizontally and in a discontinuous manner by sending out runners. Deleuze and Guattari’s comes from this idea of roots of becoming divergent. The Rhizome is different to the arborescent root. The growth is vertical not horizontal. This is a tree like structure which, in terms of within the music press represents a hierarchy of opinion or influence. With the rapid growth in different music publications the structure of the business may be changing as technology and the demands of the consumer change. Also with the creation of different genres or sub cultures comes the demand for attention and often publications specific to that genre or style. With this interest in turn comes the capitalist interests and the potential for what Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialization; a move from the minor to the major due to capital. The importance of having an independent music press for the consumer and for bands/artists. Is an independent and honest music media something that we should be concerned about or something which the masses really want- The need for some direction, for leaders. What are the arborescent papers or programmes now? Has the shift changed, or is it changing and do organs such as NME and channels such as MTV still exert the massive influence over the music press. The change is a change from totalities and uniformity, the power structure of the arborescent in which everything derives from the same homogenous, commanding trunk. The change is a change towards a decentred production of information which resists any temptation to coagulate around a power source, around uni-polar modalities, in favour of a free associating heterogeneity of all, a true multiplicity, a rhizome.
Aim: To explore Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s arguments on Capitalism as an axiomatic and socially repressive system, in the book ‘Anti-Oedipus.’ Concepts to be explored: -An analysis of the concepts ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘paranoia’ as two opposing poles of the dynamics of capital. -A reference to the criticism of psychoanalysis and Freud’s Oedipus complex. -An investigation of the ‘three syntheses’ and the ‘five paralogisms.’ -An exploration and history of ‘social production’s’ repression of ‘desiring production.’