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Conference Presentations by Andrew Lapworth

Papers by Andrew Lapworth

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necess... more The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2021

The recent 'nonhuman turn' in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the ... more The recent 'nonhuman turn' in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical 'responsibility' of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this paper, I

Body & Society, 2020

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the field of 'art-science' collaborations for ... more Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the field of 'art-science' collaborations for their perceived capacity to develop new cultural understandings of technology and science. In this article, and through an engagement with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, I argue that if art-science represents an important site for the formation of an alternate technical culture today, then it is because of the new technical mentalities that such practices might cultivate. Here, creating a new technical mentality is more than just a representational concern with enhancing 'public awareness' of technology, instead referring to more material transformations in our embodied capacities for perceiving and affectively engaging with technologies. I flesh this potential out through an encounter with work of Art Orienté objet, whose art-science collaborations challenge the anthropocentric and utilitarian mentalities of contemporary bioscience through explorations of the transindividual conditions of human embodiment and its material immersion within nonhuman ecologies.

Why Guattari: A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics, 2019

A central focus of Guattari’s engagement with politics in both his writing and activism was the p... more A central focus of Guattari’s engagement with politics in both his writing and activism was the problem of the liberation of desire from dominant regimes of signification. This chapter explores the role that cinema can play in the struggle for what Guattari calls a micropolitics of desire that creatively experiments with preindividual forces that exceed the conventional images we have of ourselves and of our relations to others. The chapter thus highlights the stakes of Guattari’s philosophy for traditional understandings of a cinematic politics by tracing two key theoretical shifts: from a thought of the cinematic encounter as a structural repetition of the same (psychoanalysis) to the encounter as a machinic event of difference; and from an interpretative politics of signification (linguistics) to an experimental micropolitics of asignifying forces. At stake in Guattari’s thought, I claim, is a more transformative sense of cinema as a desiring-machine, generating asignifying intensities that disrupt existing forms of representational coding and open thinking to new collective arrangements of desire. I explore this potential through an engagement with Satoshi Kon’s 2006 anime, Paprika, a film which forcefully highlights cinema’s capacity to think desire as a machinic process of individuation and becoming.

Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2016

In his two-volume study of the cinema, Deleuze presents a unique understanding of film as a space... more In his two-volume study of the cinema, Deleuze presents a unique understanding of film as a space of thinking productive of its own cinematic thoughts and ideas, which it thinks through the compositions of images and signs it produces. This question of what new kinds of thinking the cinema might develop underwrites Deleuze's theory of the postwar transition from the sensori-motor thought of the 'movement-image' towards an intensive 'thought without image' generated by the crystalline 'time-image'. Great directors, for Deleuze, are those who invent new intense connections of preindividual singularities and ideas in thought that disrupt the habits and clichés of ordinary perception and action, forcing us to think and feel differently. It is precisely in terms of the production of a new style of cinematic thinking, I argue, that we can frame encounters with the films of Japanese director Ozu Yasujirō, and specifically his contribution to the emergence of what we might term, following Deleuze, a cinema of contemplation rather than action. Whilst a number of scholars have recognised a certain 'contemplative' aesthetic in Ozu's films (Bordwell, 1988; Schrader, 1988), this article turns to Deleuze's discussion in Difference and Repetition to understand contemplation not as a subjective form of transcendence, but rather as an immanent event of individuation. I focus in particular on Ozu's cinematic thinking of contemplation generates new and transformative ways of thinking and perceiving the city, uncoupling urban spaces and bodies from the requirements of sensori-motor action such that they become expressive sites of indeterminate signs and unexpected intensities of affect. By dramatizing these immanent transitions and thresholds of affective and spatial becomings, I argue that Ozu's films direct us toward new possible openings of thought to a politics of the virtual.

Cultural Geographies, 2015

This paper develops a vitalist conception of habit as a means to theorize the material capacity o... more This paper develops a vitalist conception of habit as a means to theorize the material capacity of art-encounters to reconfigure and reinvent the subject. Drawing principally on the innovative conceptualization of habit articulated in the philosophies of Félix Ravaisson and Gilles Deleuze, where it is theorized as a much more volatile and creative force of repetition that makes change possible, I first explore how habit pushes our contemporary understandings of the subject through an attentiveness to its ontogenetic emergence from material and affective processes and ecologies, as well as its plastic susceptibility to immanent disruption. Second, and through an engagement with the bioaesthetic and micropolitical thought of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that it is precisely on the ontogenetic terrain of plastic habits that art-encounters might be understood to intervene. I unpack this empirically through an engagement with the bioartistic practices of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), whose ‘semi-living’ installation art, I argue, stages a disruption of pernicious contemporary habits in favour of new and creative capacities for thinking perceiving, and relating to the nonhuman.

Theory, Culture & Society, 2016

In recent years " bioart " has been lauded in the social sciences for its creative engagements wi... more In recent years " bioart " has been lauded in the social sciences for its creative engagements with the ontological stakes of new forms of biotechnical life in-the-making. In this paper I push further to explore the ontogenetic potentials of bioart-encounters to generate new capacities for thinking and perceiving the nonhuman agencies imbricated in the becoming of subjects. To explore this potential I stage an encounter with Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation, highlighting three implications for theorisations of the constitution and transformation of subjects. First, Simondon forces us to rethink the subject in terms of its transductive emergence from preindividual processes, and its metastable susceptibility to ongoing transformations. Second, he substitutes voluntarist conceptions of thought with an involuntarist primacy of material encounters as the conditions for novel individuations. Finally, I argue that Simondon enables a thinking of the politics of the (bio)art-encounter in terms of its ontogenetic capacity to materially produce, rather than merely represent, new subjects and worlds.

Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture, 2015

The past few decades have seen the proliferation of discourses, practices, and spaces of what has... more The past few decades have seen the proliferation of discourses, practices, and spaces of what has come to be termed ‘art-science’. Employed in the social sciences as a loose umbrella term for a heterogeneous array of practices, art-science is typically seen to be united by a common attempt to explore and open up the liminal space between the methods, knowledges, and objects of these increasingly bifurcated disciplines. Pushing beyond the representational logic of interdisciplinary ‘communication’ that continues to frame social science engagements, this paper instead explores the implications of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead for how we might rethink art-science as a space of ontological encounter that opens a creative interval in disciplinary habits of thought that transforms how the world appears. What Whitehead offers is an understanding of art and science as modes of thought which can enhance capacities to be affected by material relations and nonhuman forces in ways that orient thinking and perception towards other possible individuations. In particular, I foreground the concept of ‘abstraction’ as an important conceptual frame through which to rethink art-science encounters as ethical interventions in worlds of process that produce empirically-felt variations in the way experience comes to matter (Stengers, 2008). I flesh this out through an engagement with the Bristol-based nanoart collective danceroom Spectroscopy whose installations, I argue, creatively engage artistic (new media and technologies of visualisation; contemporary dance), scientific (the speculative concepts of the nanoscale and molecular fields), and corporeal (the intensities and forces of dancing bodies) techniques of abstraction in ways that modify our capacities for thinking and feeling the immanent forces and nonhuman agencies of emergent (nano-) worlds.