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Books by stephen zepke

Research paper thumbnail of Sublime Art, Towards an Aesthetics of the Future

Sublime Art, Towards an Aesthetics of the Future, 2017

This book has been a long time coming and many people have helped me in what has sometimes been a... more This book has been a long time coming and many people have helped me in what has sometimes been a difficult process. Most practically, my sincere thanks to

Research paper thumbnail of Towards a New ‘New Brutalism’, Wandering Around Robin Hood Gardens/Hacia un "Nuevo" Nuevo Brutalismo Encuentros con los Jardines de Robin Hood

Hacia un "Nuevo" Nuevo Brutalismo Encuentros con los Jardines de Robin Hood, 2022

A short book about Brutalism and Robin Hood Gardens with lots of photos. In Spanish and English.

Research paper thumbnail of Head in the Stars, Essays on Science Fiction

Head in the Stars, Essays on Science Fiction, 2020

for the energy and ideas you have contributed to this book. All of the chapters in this book bega... more for the energy and ideas you have contributed to this book. All of the chapters in this book began life as essays published in books or journals. They have all been polished and updated, and in some cases completely rewritten for this volume. Chapter

Research paper thumbnail of Introduction Art History after Deleuze a

Research paper thumbnail of La sensación más allá de los límites. Ensayos sobre arte y política

Research paper thumbnail of Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

Collection of recent essays on D&G, in relation to Aesthetics, Art, Politics and with a special e... more Collection of recent essays on D&G, in relation to Aesthetics, Art, Politics and with a special emphasis on the work of Guattari.

Research paper thumbnail of Art as Abstract Machine, Aesthetics and Ontology in Deleuze and Guattari

Research paper thumbnail of The Guattari Affect

Research paper thumbnail of Deleuze and Contemporary Art

Research paper thumbnail of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art

His essays have appeared in a number of journals, books, art magazines and catalogues (including ... more His essays have appeared in a number of journals, books, art magazines and catalogues (including in Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New and Deleuze and Contemporary Art as well as the journals New Left Review and Angelaki). He also works collaboratively, for example, with Simon O'Sullivan in the production of the 'Performance Fiction' Plastique Fantastique. Lorna Collins is a painter, critic and arts educator based in Cambridge, where she completed her PhD as a Foundation Scholar in French Philosophy, at Jesus College. She was the founder and co-organizer/curator of the trans-disciplinary Making Sense colloquia, co-editor of a series of Making Sense books, and has a forthcoming monograph on Making Sense: Art Practice and Transformative Therapeutics, with Bloomsbury. Her (Deleuzian) philosophy is guided and informed by her provocative art practice.

Research paper thumbnail of TIME AND (IN)COMPLETION Images And Per formances Of  Time In Late Capitalism

Sometimes, as in modern cinema, the cut has become the interstice, it is irrational and does not ... more Sometimes, as in modern cinema, the cut has become the interstice, it is irrational and does not form part of either set, one of which has no more an end than the other has a beginning: false continuity is such an irrational cut. [. . . and this cut is] disjunctive. 7 3 Ibid.

Research paper thumbnail of Deleuze Gilles Image and Text

Papers by stephen zepke

Research paper thumbnail of Lotta Ingman Works • Teoksia Essays / Esseet

Lotta Ingman, Works, 2022

A book about the painter Lotta Ingman with essays in English and Finnish by Stephen Zepke and Mar... more A book about the painter Lotta Ingman with essays in English and Finnish by Stephen Zepke and Martta Heikkilä

Research paper thumbnail of Resistiendo el presente: Félix Guattari, arte conceptual y producción social

Nómadas, 2006

a través del desarrollo de las implicaciones del vanguardismo, de acuerdo con su lectura del "rea... more a través del desarrollo de las implicaciones del vanguardismo, de acuerdo con su lectura del "ready-made". Dicha lectura revitaliza las ambiciones políticas del proyecto vanguardista, postula una genealogía alternativa que surge en el trabajo de algunos artistas conceptuales latinoamericanos y de la artista norteamericana Adrian Piper, y ofrece estrategias políticas claras y efectivas para la práctica del arte contemporáneo. Palabras clave: estética, ready-made, práctica política, pragmática, genealogía. Este artigo explora a compreensão da estética de Félix Guattari como prática política através do desenvolvimento das implicações do vanguardismo, de acordo com sua leitura do "ready-made". Tal leitura revitaliza as ambições políticas do projeto vanguardista, postula uma genealogia alternativa que surge no trabalho de alguns artistas conceptuais latinoamericanos e da artista norte-americana Adrian Piper, e oferece estratégias políticas claras e efetivas à prática da arte contemporânea. Palavras-chaves: estética, ready-made, prática política, pragmática, genealogia. This essay explores Guattari's understanding of aesthetics as a political practice, by developing the implications for the avant-garde found in Guattari's reading of the readymade. Such a reading re-vitalises the political ambitions of the avant-garde project, and launches an alternative genealogy of the readymade that emerges in the work of some Latin American Conceptual artists and the American artist Adrian Piper, and offers clear and effective political strategies to contemporary art practice.

Research paper thumbnail of „Ein Kunstwerk enthält nicht die geringste Information“. Deleuze, Guattari und die zeitgenössische Kunst

Performance Philosophy, 2017

Deleuzes und Guattaris Zurückweisung der Konzeptkunst ist allgemein bekannt und passt so garnicht... more Deleuzes und Guattaris Zurückweisung der Konzeptkunst ist allgemein bekannt und passt so garnicht zur derzeitigen Hegemonie der “post-konzeptionellen” Kunstpraktiken. Genauso unpassend erscheint Deleuzes ontologische und politische Abneigung gegen die Photographie, die „Schnappschüsse“ oder Repräsentationen des Werdens liefert, indem sie Klischeebilder unmittelbar in unserer Gehirne pflanzt, die dann unsere Handlungen und Reaktionen kontrollieren, indem sie uns der Fähigkeit zum kreativen Denken berauben. In Cinema 2 weitet Deleuze diese Argumentation auf das neue “elektronische Bild” aus das, wie auch die Konzeptkunst, die Ebene der Komposition in eine „Schneidetischebene“ oder einen „Bildschirm“ verwandelt, welche Informationen und mit ihnen unsere zu Schnittstellen gewordenen Gehirne einfach nur formatieren. Heutzutage werden Konzeptpraktiken, Photographie und digitale Technologien von der zeitgenössischen Kunst als selbstverständlich angesehen, die auch fröhlich „D&G“ anwendet. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Eco-Estética: Más Allá De La Estructura en La Obra De Robert Smithson, Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari

Universitas philosophica

This paper shows that there is one and the same break in the artistic creative process of Robert ... more This paper shows that there is one and the same break in the artistic creative process of Robert Smithson and in the philosophical creative process of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Smithson it takes place between Site-Nonsite works (1966-9) and Earthworks (1970-3). For Deleuze and Guattari it happens in the transition from Difference and Repetition (1968) to Anti-Oedipus (1972). Smithson's break marks his abandoning of the institution in favour of an art of direct intervention, the Earthworks confronting one of the most pressing political concerns of his (and our) time, the destruction of the earth. Deleuze and Guattari's break happens as they take us from a conceptual mapping of structures to a material machinery of production that allows thought to engage with real political processes.

Research paper thumbnail of The City of Nowhere Laruelle and Urban Studies

ORAXIOM: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, 2023

What happens to urban studies when it is confronted with the radical, yet nonrelational immanence... more What happens to urban studies when it is confronted with the radical, yet nonrelational immanence of François Laruelle's non-philosophy? This is not a simple question of illuminating the and of our title, because for Laruelle this and is a non-, forcing us to ask how we engage with the relations constituting both the urban and its various forms of study through an approach that denies and rejects the constitutive possibility of relation itself. This question gives us a sense of the radicality of Laruelle's thought, but also of the wreckage left in non-philosophy's wake. Non-urban studies, if there should be such a thing, does not have, or emerge from, a relation to urban studies, but from its denial and destruction. This is a process that does not produce romantic objects of aesthetic appreciation, as in Derrida's love of ruins, but is instead a violent ruination that seeks a tabula rasa, a scorched-earth-policy applied to the very foundations of philosophy. This will be the story told here, one that begins with non-philosophy's unusual version of radical immanence. Laruelle offers a unique approach to immanence, detaching it from its previous philosophical examples, which, he argues, are unable to articulate the reality of the One, and in fact deny it. The problem is that the correlation of thought and being that for Laruelle invariably defines philosophy, "is not an addition of reality, but a subtraction."1 This correlation or auto-positioning of thought and being places Western philosophy in a prison of its own making, one that until now it has been unable to escape. Yet, as Laruelle points out, prison walls have always been "the great support for political writing,"2 and non-philosophy over-writes the structural limits of human thought and feeling to produce an "unreflected experience"3 of the Real/One, an experience

Research paper thumbnail of Memories of the Future: Chaosmosis and Contemporary Art

Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2022

Thirty years on from the publication of Chaosmosis, Guattari's words invite an evaluation: 'The a... more Thirty years on from the publication of Chaosmosis, Guattari's words invite an evaluation: 'The aesthetic power of feeling seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective Assemblages of enunciation of our era.' While this privilege can be seen today in the realms of social networks, mass media and populist politics, its place in contemporary artistic practices is more ambiguous. Guattari is careful to separate 'aesthetic power' from 'institutional art', but the ontology of Chaosmosis nevertheless seems to find its model in the artistic avantgarde, and artistic affects and percepts are its privileged and recurring examples. Tracing the path of Guattari's prophecy through the last thirty years of contemporary art involves two distinct approaches: first, to analyse Guattari's reading of Duchamp, and to follow its trajectory through a generation of thinkers who utilised Guattari's approach to art, most notably Nicolas Bourriaud, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Maurizio Lazzarato and Eric Alliez; second, to confront Guattari's prophecy with the post-conceptual modes of art that now appear hegemonic, and that would seem to deny its efficacy. This we might say, is to approach our problem twice-once philosophically, and again from the point of view of contemporary art. As we shall see, these approaches lead in quite different directions.

Research paper thumbnail of UNCONDITIONAL BUT CONTINGENT LOVE: YVES METTLER’S EUROPE SQUARE PROJECT

AtlasEuroSquare - Yves Mettler, 2020

Following the Treaty of Rome in 1958, the council of Europe called upon all its municipalities to... more Following the Treaty of Rome in 1958, the council of Europe called upon all its municipalities to dedicate a space to Europe. This sparked a boom in Europe Squares, and when Yves Mettler last counted there were over a thousand of them, mostly in Europe. Mettler is fascinated by how Europe Squares both express and construct an idea of Europe, or what he calls the 'abstract site or entity that is "Europe"'.1 How, in other words, these squares architecturally embody a wider mode of organisation, materialising global forces and relations on a local level in a way that also expresses abstract European ideals. As public space (based on the Italian piazza) the squares not only

Research paper thumbnail of Una pedagogía de la sensación, Deleuze y el concepto kantiano de lo sublime

Deleuze: una pedagogía desde la inmanencia: Apuntes para otros modos de enseñar y aprender

Research paper thumbnail of Sublime Art, Towards an Aesthetics of the Future

Sublime Art, Towards an Aesthetics of the Future, 2017

This book has been a long time coming and many people have helped me in what has sometimes been a... more This book has been a long time coming and many people have helped me in what has sometimes been a difficult process. Most practically, my sincere thanks to

Research paper thumbnail of Towards a New ‘New Brutalism’, Wandering Around Robin Hood Gardens/Hacia un "Nuevo" Nuevo Brutalismo Encuentros con los Jardines de Robin Hood

Hacia un "Nuevo" Nuevo Brutalismo Encuentros con los Jardines de Robin Hood, 2022

A short book about Brutalism and Robin Hood Gardens with lots of photos. In Spanish and English.

Research paper thumbnail of Head in the Stars, Essays on Science Fiction

Head in the Stars, Essays on Science Fiction, 2020

for the energy and ideas you have contributed to this book. All of the chapters in this book bega... more for the energy and ideas you have contributed to this book. All of the chapters in this book began life as essays published in books or journals. They have all been polished and updated, and in some cases completely rewritten for this volume. Chapter

Research paper thumbnail of Introduction Art History after Deleuze a

Research paper thumbnail of La sensación más allá de los límites. Ensayos sobre arte y política

Research paper thumbnail of Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

Collection of recent essays on D&G, in relation to Aesthetics, Art, Politics and with a special e... more Collection of recent essays on D&G, in relation to Aesthetics, Art, Politics and with a special emphasis on the work of Guattari.

Research paper thumbnail of Art as Abstract Machine, Aesthetics and Ontology in Deleuze and Guattari

Research paper thumbnail of The Guattari Affect

Research paper thumbnail of Deleuze and Contemporary Art

Research paper thumbnail of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art

His essays have appeared in a number of journals, books, art magazines and catalogues (including ... more His essays have appeared in a number of journals, books, art magazines and catalogues (including in Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New and Deleuze and Contemporary Art as well as the journals New Left Review and Angelaki). He also works collaboratively, for example, with Simon O'Sullivan in the production of the 'Performance Fiction' Plastique Fantastique. Lorna Collins is a painter, critic and arts educator based in Cambridge, where she completed her PhD as a Foundation Scholar in French Philosophy, at Jesus College. She was the founder and co-organizer/curator of the trans-disciplinary Making Sense colloquia, co-editor of a series of Making Sense books, and has a forthcoming monograph on Making Sense: Art Practice and Transformative Therapeutics, with Bloomsbury. Her (Deleuzian) philosophy is guided and informed by her provocative art practice.

Research paper thumbnail of TIME AND (IN)COMPLETION Images And Per formances Of  Time In Late Capitalism

Sometimes, as in modern cinema, the cut has become the interstice, it is irrational and does not ... more Sometimes, as in modern cinema, the cut has become the interstice, it is irrational and does not form part of either set, one of which has no more an end than the other has a beginning: false continuity is such an irrational cut. [. . . and this cut is] disjunctive. 7 3 Ibid.

Research paper thumbnail of Deleuze Gilles Image and Text

Research paper thumbnail of Lotta Ingman Works • Teoksia Essays / Esseet

Lotta Ingman, Works, 2022

A book about the painter Lotta Ingman with essays in English and Finnish by Stephen Zepke and Mar... more A book about the painter Lotta Ingman with essays in English and Finnish by Stephen Zepke and Martta Heikkilä

Research paper thumbnail of Resistiendo el presente: Félix Guattari, arte conceptual y producción social

Nómadas, 2006

a través del desarrollo de las implicaciones del vanguardismo, de acuerdo con su lectura del "rea... more a través del desarrollo de las implicaciones del vanguardismo, de acuerdo con su lectura del "ready-made". Dicha lectura revitaliza las ambiciones políticas del proyecto vanguardista, postula una genealogía alternativa que surge en el trabajo de algunos artistas conceptuales latinoamericanos y de la artista norteamericana Adrian Piper, y ofrece estrategias políticas claras y efectivas para la práctica del arte contemporáneo. Palabras clave: estética, ready-made, práctica política, pragmática, genealogía. Este artigo explora a compreensão da estética de Félix Guattari como prática política através do desenvolvimento das implicações do vanguardismo, de acordo com sua leitura do "ready-made". Tal leitura revitaliza as ambições políticas do projeto vanguardista, postula uma genealogia alternativa que surge no trabalho de alguns artistas conceptuais latinoamericanos e da artista norte-americana Adrian Piper, e oferece estratégias políticas claras e efetivas à prática da arte contemporânea. Palavras-chaves: estética, ready-made, prática política, pragmática, genealogia. This essay explores Guattari's understanding of aesthetics as a political practice, by developing the implications for the avant-garde found in Guattari's reading of the readymade. Such a reading re-vitalises the political ambitions of the avant-garde project, and launches an alternative genealogy of the readymade that emerges in the work of some Latin American Conceptual artists and the American artist Adrian Piper, and offers clear and effective political strategies to contemporary art practice.

Research paper thumbnail of „Ein Kunstwerk enthält nicht die geringste Information“. Deleuze, Guattari und die zeitgenössische Kunst

Performance Philosophy, 2017

Deleuzes und Guattaris Zurückweisung der Konzeptkunst ist allgemein bekannt und passt so garnicht... more Deleuzes und Guattaris Zurückweisung der Konzeptkunst ist allgemein bekannt und passt so garnicht zur derzeitigen Hegemonie der “post-konzeptionellen” Kunstpraktiken. Genauso unpassend erscheint Deleuzes ontologische und politische Abneigung gegen die Photographie, die „Schnappschüsse“ oder Repräsentationen des Werdens liefert, indem sie Klischeebilder unmittelbar in unserer Gehirne pflanzt, die dann unsere Handlungen und Reaktionen kontrollieren, indem sie uns der Fähigkeit zum kreativen Denken berauben. In Cinema 2 weitet Deleuze diese Argumentation auf das neue “elektronische Bild” aus das, wie auch die Konzeptkunst, die Ebene der Komposition in eine „Schneidetischebene“ oder einen „Bildschirm“ verwandelt, welche Informationen und mit ihnen unsere zu Schnittstellen gewordenen Gehirne einfach nur formatieren. Heutzutage werden Konzeptpraktiken, Photographie und digitale Technologien von der zeitgenössischen Kunst als selbstverständlich angesehen, die auch fröhlich „D&G“ anwendet. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Eco-Estética: Más Allá De La Estructura en La Obra De Robert Smithson, Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari

Universitas philosophica

This paper shows that there is one and the same break in the artistic creative process of Robert ... more This paper shows that there is one and the same break in the artistic creative process of Robert Smithson and in the philosophical creative process of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Smithson it takes place between Site-Nonsite works (1966-9) and Earthworks (1970-3). For Deleuze and Guattari it happens in the transition from Difference and Repetition (1968) to Anti-Oedipus (1972). Smithson's break marks his abandoning of the institution in favour of an art of direct intervention, the Earthworks confronting one of the most pressing political concerns of his (and our) time, the destruction of the earth. Deleuze and Guattari's break happens as they take us from a conceptual mapping of structures to a material machinery of production that allows thought to engage with real political processes.

Research paper thumbnail of The City of Nowhere Laruelle and Urban Studies

ORAXIOM: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, 2023

What happens to urban studies when it is confronted with the radical, yet nonrelational immanence... more What happens to urban studies when it is confronted with the radical, yet nonrelational immanence of François Laruelle's non-philosophy? This is not a simple question of illuminating the and of our title, because for Laruelle this and is a non-, forcing us to ask how we engage with the relations constituting both the urban and its various forms of study through an approach that denies and rejects the constitutive possibility of relation itself. This question gives us a sense of the radicality of Laruelle's thought, but also of the wreckage left in non-philosophy's wake. Non-urban studies, if there should be such a thing, does not have, or emerge from, a relation to urban studies, but from its denial and destruction. This is a process that does not produce romantic objects of aesthetic appreciation, as in Derrida's love of ruins, but is instead a violent ruination that seeks a tabula rasa, a scorched-earth-policy applied to the very foundations of philosophy. This will be the story told here, one that begins with non-philosophy's unusual version of radical immanence. Laruelle offers a unique approach to immanence, detaching it from its previous philosophical examples, which, he argues, are unable to articulate the reality of the One, and in fact deny it. The problem is that the correlation of thought and being that for Laruelle invariably defines philosophy, "is not an addition of reality, but a subtraction."1 This correlation or auto-positioning of thought and being places Western philosophy in a prison of its own making, one that until now it has been unable to escape. Yet, as Laruelle points out, prison walls have always been "the great support for political writing,"2 and non-philosophy over-writes the structural limits of human thought and feeling to produce an "unreflected experience"3 of the Real/One, an experience

Research paper thumbnail of Memories of the Future: Chaosmosis and Contemporary Art

Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2022

Thirty years on from the publication of Chaosmosis, Guattari's words invite an evaluation: 'The a... more Thirty years on from the publication of Chaosmosis, Guattari's words invite an evaluation: 'The aesthetic power of feeling seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective Assemblages of enunciation of our era.' While this privilege can be seen today in the realms of social networks, mass media and populist politics, its place in contemporary artistic practices is more ambiguous. Guattari is careful to separate 'aesthetic power' from 'institutional art', but the ontology of Chaosmosis nevertheless seems to find its model in the artistic avantgarde, and artistic affects and percepts are its privileged and recurring examples. Tracing the path of Guattari's prophecy through the last thirty years of contemporary art involves two distinct approaches: first, to analyse Guattari's reading of Duchamp, and to follow its trajectory through a generation of thinkers who utilised Guattari's approach to art, most notably Nicolas Bourriaud, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Maurizio Lazzarato and Eric Alliez; second, to confront Guattari's prophecy with the post-conceptual modes of art that now appear hegemonic, and that would seem to deny its efficacy. This we might say, is to approach our problem twice-once philosophically, and again from the point of view of contemporary art. As we shall see, these approaches lead in quite different directions.

Research paper thumbnail of UNCONDITIONAL BUT CONTINGENT LOVE: YVES METTLER’S EUROPE SQUARE PROJECT

AtlasEuroSquare - Yves Mettler, 2020

Following the Treaty of Rome in 1958, the council of Europe called upon all its municipalities to... more Following the Treaty of Rome in 1958, the council of Europe called upon all its municipalities to dedicate a space to Europe. This sparked a boom in Europe Squares, and when Yves Mettler last counted there were over a thousand of them, mostly in Europe. Mettler is fascinated by how Europe Squares both express and construct an idea of Europe, or what he calls the 'abstract site or entity that is "Europe"'.1 How, in other words, these squares architecturally embody a wider mode of organisation, materialising global forces and relations on a local level in a way that also expresses abstract European ideals. As public space (based on the Italian piazza) the squares not only

Research paper thumbnail of Una pedagogía de la sensación, Deleuze y el concepto kantiano de lo sublime

Deleuze: una pedagogía desde la inmanencia: Apuntes para otros modos de enseñar y aprender

Research paper thumbnail of "hang on tight and spit on me" - Lyotard and contemporary art

"hang on tight and spit on me"-Lyotard and contemporary art Stephen Zepke if [the proletariat] do... more "hang on tight and spit on me"-Lyotard and contemporary art Stephen Zepke if [the proletariat] does not perceive that there is something absolutely analogous between what must be done today to social reality and what is done on a canvas or within sonorous space, not only will it not encounter the problem of art, it will never come upon revolution. i Jean-François Lyotard not only enjoyed art, he was politically committed to it, making its "problem" nothing less than "revolution." Art's revolutionary power comes from its embodiment of an underlying "ontological rift" between primary libidinal forces and the rational dispositifs that represent and control them, a rift that for Lyotard defines both political economy and artistic production. ii Art materializes this incommensurability in radical onto-political "gestures" that confront our supposed a prioris of time, space, and the organic body with forces that are "strangers to consciousness," iii their unbound energy of aisthesis creating "testimonies that represent nothing," iv pure intensities of "orgasmic death." v Although these unconscious forces are "ontologically located outside the system," they find expression in art works that "deconstruct" normal thoughts and feelings by revealing how "this 'order' conceals something else, that it represses." vi While Lyotard's later work shifts from celebrating the deconstructive power of the aesthetic to mourning its loss and disappearance, his affirmation of art's constitutive incommensurability remains constant. This essay will focus on Lyotard's early libidinal work and its commitment to the political power of aesthetic experience, and compare it to recent theories of postconceptual contemporary artistic practices. Lyotard's aesthetics of incommensurability is based upon Freud's economic perspective distinguishing between the primary and secondary processes of the psyche. Freud argues that the psyche reacts to excitation by releasing tension and causing pleasure, this pleasure principle maintaining the equilibrium and integrity of the organic body and the ego riding in it. The reality principle augments this process by making it consistent with the drive for self-preservation. Prior to these secondary drives however, is a primary process that manifests in the death drive, a force that, Freud claims, is constantly seeking "to revert to the quiescence of the inorganic world." vii The death drive, he writes, is "a function of the psyche which, without contradicting the pleasure principle, is nonetheless independent of it, and appears to be more primal." viii As all the drives seek equilibrium, and the death drive is primary, Freud argues that "for intrinsic reasons … the goal of all life is death." ix This ontological priority of the death drive is crucial for Lyotard, who follows Freud in giving greater importance to its "economic dysfunctions". x For Lyotard the aesthetic intensities of art embody the death drive, and their violent and creative enjoyment (jouissance) cannot be sublimated by secondary mediations such as pleasure or consciousness. This aesthetic experience is an "unadulterated displacement" putting us "in direct contact with the unbound nature of the energy at work in the primary process." xi Nevertheless, and it is an important point, "Jouissance is not death, but like death, at the same time that it discharges tension, it brings obscurity: the

Research paper thumbnail of "This world of wild production and explosive desire" – The Unconscious and the Future in Felix Guattari

Research paper thumbnail of 'A work of art does not contain the least bit of information': Deleuze and Guattari and Contemporary Art.

Any attempt to understand Deleuze and Guattari's relation to contemporary artistic practices is i... more Any attempt to understand Deleuze and Guattari's relation to contemporary artistic practices is immediately confronted with the highly variegated and dispersed field of contemporary art. Nevertheless, there are three aspects of contemporary art that Deleuze and Guattari (in their work both together and alone) directly respond to: 1) the central position of photography, both conceptually and practically; 2) the unavoidable ubiquity of digital technology; 3) Duchamp's readymade and the 'conceptual turn,' or what is also known as postconceptual practice. By following, and sometimes anticipating Deleuze and Guattari's response to these axioms we will be able to extrapolate some of their views on art today. Additionally, this will allow us to construct some alternative art histories accounting for these aspects of contemporary artistic practices, genealogies that while often beginning in familiar places (photography, Duchamp, Benjamin) develop these in unexpected directions that often sit uncomfortably with our usual understandings of contemporary art. We set off, in other words, towards a minor contemporary art. In Logic of Sensation Deleuze claims that too many people mistake a photograph for a work of art because a photograph cannot—by definition—be art. To think that a photograph is a work of art is not, in other words, a question of taste, it is an ontological mistake. As Deleuze explains, " the photograph tends to reduce sensation to a single level, and is unable to include within the sensation the difference between constitutive levels " (Deleuze 2003, 91). The single level is that of representation, which imposes on sensation its conditions of possible experience, the a prioris of space and time, subject and object, and human consciousness. It is in this sense that the

Research paper thumbnail of Post-conceptual analogue; Mladen Bizumic’s Kodak Photographs

Research paper thumbnail of Peace and Love (and Fuck) as the Foundation of the World; Spinoza's Ethics in Samuel Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Research paper thumbnail of Value-added Remix: Daniel Malone Plays Colin McCahon

Research paper thumbnail of Schizo-revolutionary Art; Deleuze, Guattari and Communization

Research paper thumbnail of Foucault and Art; From Modernism to Biopolitics

In a 1983 interview Foucault rather disingenuously asks, 'What are we calling postmodernity? I'm ... more In a 1983 interview Foucault rather disingenuously asks, 'What are we calling postmodernity? I'm not up to date.' (1998 447) Explaining his dislike of postmodernity, he argues that the 'grand narratives' of rationality or reason are not yet over, because through reason 'other forms of rationality are created endlessly.' (1998 449) Reason, Foucault continues, always exceeds the limits of the current forms of rationality, but in doing so acts as their vital impetus. In this sense 'reason' is a critical practice that seeks to create 'virtual fractures' within its present conditions of possibility or 'historical a prioris', and so produce spaces of 'concrete freedom, that is, of possible transformation' (1998 450). His point, and it is one made against postmodernism, is that we should not pronounce the present as an end or a new beginning, but live precisely at that point of the present where reason exceeds its rational conditions and reveals -Foucault's phrase is fantastically deadpan -'how that which is might no longer be that which is ' (1998 450). Foucault's formulation here already alerts us to what remains his subtext, he rejects postmodernity because modernity is not yet over, and indeed how can it be when modernity is defined by reason's ability to go beyond its rational limits. In modernity then, reason operates as a 'fold' (as Deleuze put it) between the outside and the inside, between 'life' understood in its Nietzschean sense as the aleatory battle of forces and the power they produce, and the forms of rationality that instantiate this power within a political context. This is the relation underpinning the modern forms of biopolitical power, the continually changing relations between reason and rationality, power and knowledge, life (bios) and politics. Within this dialectic of reason and rationality defining modernity, modern art seems to have a privileged position for Foucault, or at least a 'complicated' one that he exempts from the current 'domination' of rational forms (1998 448). Art, as we shall see, is an instrument of reason that expresses and constructs forces that exceed the limits of rational domination, causing existing forms of rationality to open up to what they will become, to what they are not yet. Like many philosopher's of his generation (and not only his) Foucault saw art as a privileged realm of ontogenesis: 'The idea of the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is,' he once claimed, 'something that fascinates me.' (1997 260) But more than just a question of formal aesthetics, art as life had a profoundly political meaning for Foucault that on the one hand produced a very specific, and provocative understanding of contemporary art, and on the other turned modernist artistic practices into a paradigm for political life. It is precisely this trajectory that I want to explore here; from Modernism to biopolitics.

Research paper thumbnail of Beyond Cognitive Estrangement; The Future of Science-Fiction Cinema.

Research paper thumbnail of Interface Aesthetics; Science-Fiction Film in the Age of Biopolitics.

Research paper thumbnail of Towards a Bio Politics of the Future: Nietzsche Against the Present

More and more, I tend to think that because the philosopher is necessarily a man of tomorrow and ... more More and more, I tend to think that because the philosopher is necessarily a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, he has always been and has had to be in conflict with his Today: in every instance, Today"s ideal was his enemy." (BGE 212) Do we have ears to hear Nietzsche today? 1 Can his Übermensch (over-human) from Übermorgen (the day after tomorrow) still be heard in the cacophony of our present? Does Nietzsche"s strident "critique of modernity" still have any relevance? If Nietzsche is to be heard today these questions must be posed in relation to our contemporary biopolitical mechanisms of control, mechanisms that have succeeded in grasping the vital processes of biological life. Today, I would like to argue; Nietzsche"s concept of an untimely future can still show us how to "philosophise with a hammer", but if it does then its blows must fall on the great idols of today; our digital prostheses. For Nietzsche the future can only emerge from a critique of the present, a critique that manages to escape its contemporary conditions to reaffirm the inhuman and unchanging horizon of the becoming of life. In order for this to happen Nietzsche"s transcendental ontology of becoming -or will to power as he called it -must once more be affirmed, but not abstractly, as an academic exercise of scholarship, or worse, in a quasi-mystical expression of faith. The fate of the future, the fate that is of becoming itself, rests in its embodiment. Our challenge then, is not so much to think the future, as to produce it, to produce the untimely sensations that escape our times, but in doing so rupture their continuity and explode their self-evidence. How, as Nietzsche so dramatically described himself, might we stop being human, and become dynamite (EH, Why I Am a Destiny, 1, see also TI, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 44)? This dynamite future is an internal outside that confronts our times with their alterity, with their otherness, in order to produce a break through which might flow "the unexhausted procreative will of life" (Z, "on Self-Overcoming"). Nietzsche"s "critique of modernity" still provides us with many insights into contemporary life, and much useful advice for overcoming the challenges facing us today. These will certainly be helpful to us. But his insistence on the distance and loneliness of the "noble spirit" of the future, his insistence that is on the future"s otherness, seems irrelevant within the hyper-connected digital networks now determining our present. It is this ambivalent status of his thought -both prescient and redundant -that we must understand today, or Nietzsche risks being reduced to a ridiculous crank, or worse, a dreaming mystic.

Research paper thumbnail of Contemporary art - beautiful or sublime? Kant in Rancière, Lyotard and Deleuze.

Recent French aesthetic theory remains fixated on the realm of sensation that was laid out for ar... more Recent French aesthetic theory remains fixated on the realm of sensation that was laid out for art by Kant. We might find this surprising given that art since the end of the 60s -and with Duchamp earlier -took a path that rejected sensation (or at least challenged its privilege) in favor of conceptual and political practices that mixed art with philosophy, the mass-media, information technology and the rest of the world. Today, there are no expectations that art should be medium specific, quite the opposite, and if it is to be considered 'contemporary' it must include a minimum of conceptual and political techniques and objectives. It is therefore somewhat ironic, given their importance to art theory today, that the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze remain largely concerned with the legacy of Kant. Both Lyotard and Deleuze place Kant's experience of the sublime at the base of their aesthetics and indeed their ontology, while Rancière condemns them for this, and favors Kant's category of the beautiful. Tracing these differences provides a Kantian topology of contemporary aesthetics, and reveals some of the deeper implications these different philosophies of difference have for contemporary art and aesthetics.

Research paper thumbnail of The Schematism of Conceptual Art; from the Analytic Proposition to the Culture Industry

Presented at The Multiple Arts of Schematism in the Depths of the Soul, 26-7 May 2023, Erasmus Sc... more Presented at The Multiple Arts of Schematism in the Depths of the Soul, 26-7 May 2023, Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, in collaboration with V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media.

Research paper thumbnail of Towards a New New Brutalism, the case of Robin Hood Gardens

Paper given at the Nacional Universidad, Bogota, Colombia. 8 March 2018

Research paper thumbnail of From Physiological Aesthetics to Anthropological Poetics: Activating the Pictograms of Cerro Azul

Paper given at the conference 'III Seminario Internacional Arte & Alteridad', Cauca University, C... more Paper given at the conference 'III Seminario Internacional Arte & Alteridad', Cauca University, Colombia. 18 November 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Capitalism and Schizophrenia in Dystopian Science Fiction, talk version

A public lecture given on 20 April, Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria.

Research paper thumbnail of Speculative Anti-Aesthetics, or, Art Against Itself, Again

Research paper thumbnail of The Politics of Cinema; From Expressionism to the 'will to art’

Paper given at 'Deleuze and the Contemporary Moving Image', KAVA (National Audiovisual Archive), Helsinki, Finland. 2 March 2013

Research paper thumbnail of 'My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding', Deleuze and the Sublime

Paper given at the conference 'The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze', Purdue University, West Lafyette. 13-14 November 2015

Research paper thumbnail of From Conceptual art to contemporary practice: theory as art

Symposium; The Materiality of Theory, ICA, London. May 24 2009

Research paper thumbnail of Modernism Forever; Towards a New 'New Brutalism'

SYMPOSIUM: The Open Hand: A Call for Civic Debate ST. PAUL ST. Gallery AUT, New Zealand, 16 - 17... more SYMPOSIUM: The Open Hand: A Call for Civic Debate

ST. PAUL ST. Gallery AUT, New Zealand, 16 - 17 May 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Accelerating Capitalism; the internal tensions of Accelerationism

Paper given at V2, Rotterdam, Holland. 19 April 2015.