=) A Grin without a Cat Annual
National Deleuze
Conference 2017
AKI Academy of Ar t and Design
Enschede
17–18 May 2017
=)
Table of Contents
03
I Introduction
04 - 05
II Timetable
06 - 07
III Programme
09 – 13
IV Keynotes (KN1–2)
15 – 23
V Art Encounters (A1–A3, B1–B2)
25 – 65
VI Panels (1A–1D, 2A–2D, 3A–3D, 4A–4D)
66 - 67
VII Colophon
=)
I Introduction
02 / 70
The Sixth Annual Lowlands Deleuze Scholarship Conference will take place on 17–18 May 2017 at the AKI Academy of Art and Design in Enschede, part of ArtEZ University of the Arts, the Netherlands. The Conference’s scientific committee includes Rosi Braidotti, Rick Dolphijn and Sjoerd van Tuinen. The conveners of the event are Marc Boumeester (AKI) and Andrej Radman (TU Delft). Previous editions revolved around the following central themes: 2012 University of Utrecht; 2013 Delft University of Technology: Affect; 2014 Erasmus University Rotterdam: Passions; 2015 Radboud University Nijmegen: Aesthetics; 2016 University of Amsterdam: Ecologies. The 2017 edition titled A Grin without a Cat will be devoted to the concept of pedagogies. It starts from the premise that what we learn is inextricably linked to how we learn it. Dichotomies such as content and form, figure and ground, or inside and outside, serve no purpose. It is the task of educators to integrate de-stratification and immanent approaches into pedagogical practices that should include the design of education itself. Papers concerning these and related issues will be presented at the conference. Of special interest are papers exploring the intersection of education and semiotics. It is neither the materiality of the sensuous body, nor the incorporeality of signs, which render meaning, but a space of reciprocal determination. Deleuze calls this intensive space, or spatium, the ‘body without organs’. BwO is not the body, but the very process of de-re-territorialisation, i.e. embodiment. Here comes the formula, a prescribed pedagogy if you will: ‘To make the body a power which is not reducible to the organism, to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness.’ Keynotes: Edusemiotics: Pedagogy of Concepts / Pedagogy of Values Inna Semetsky, Institite for Edusemiotic Studies (IES), Melbourne Learning as a Repetition Form of Passive Syntheses Marc Rölli, Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts.
Admission: Free. For updates kindly visit deleuze.artez.nl
03 / 70
=)
II Timetable
DAY ONE 10:00-10:30
Registration
10:30-10:45
Welcome
Boumeester
10:45-11:30
Keynote 1
Rรถlli
11:30-12:00
Q&A
12:00-12:30
Art Encounter 1
12:30-13:30
Lunch
13:30-15:30
Panel 1
Kleinherenbrink
13:30-14:00
Reinertsen
14:00-14:30
Bang
14:30-15:00
Weiss
15:00-15:30
Wolf
15:30-16:00
Art Encounter 2
Transformances
16:00-18:00
Panel 2
Dolphijn
16:00-16:30
Ionescu
16:30-17:00
Gorny
17:00-17:30
Kousoulas
17:30-18:00
van Tuinen
Art Encounter 3
Robaard
18:00-18:30 18:30-19:30 19:30-22:00
Conference dinner
04 / 70
Ertelt
DAY TWO
10:30-10:45
Coffee
10:45-11:30
Keynote 2
11:30-12:00
Q&A
12:00-12:30
Art Encounter 4
12:30-13:30
Lunch
13:30-15:30
Panel 3
Radman
13:30-14:00
Parsa
14:00-14:30
Žukauskaitė
14:30-15:00
Wołodźko
15:00-15:30
Lynch
15:30-16:00
Art Encounter 5
Transformances
16:00-18:00
Panel 4
Wambacq
16:00-16:30
Motala
16:30-17:00
Lebedev
17:00-17:30
Brouwer
17:30-18:00
Potter
Farewell
Boumeester
18:00-18:15
05 / 70
Semetsky
van de Ven
=)
III Programme
DAY ONE =)Keynote 1 Learning as a Repetition Form of Passive Syntheses Marc Rölli, Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) =) Art Encounters A A1 The Catless Grin Marius Ertelt, artist and curator A2 Transformances (Exhibition during the break) A3 Eva Describes the Image as it Aligns the Symbols Contained in the Image Joke Robaard, Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam =) Panel 1: Antifascist Pedagogies (moderator: Arjen Kleinherenbrink, Radboud University Nijmegen) 1A Polycriticality and Polyfactual Diffractive Pedagogies: Polyapproaches to Education Anne B. Reinertsen, Queen Maud University College abr@dmmh.no 1B The Feminist Subject Revisited – Deleuze and Guattari’s Becoming-Imperceptible Lars Bang, Manchester Metropolitan University l.jensen@mmu.ac.uk 1C A Deleuzian Perspective on Refugee Integration Akiva Weiss, University of Bologna, Department of Economics akivaweiss1979@gmail.com 1D The Metamorphs: Facilitating Thinking in a Deleuzean Community of Philosophical Inquiry with Children Arthur Wolf, University of British Columbia arthurwolf@icloud.com =) Panel 2: Pedagogies of Making (moderator: Rick Dolphijn, Utrecht University) 2A Applications and Implications of artistry: On craftsmanship, Then and Now Vlad Ionescu, Hasselt University vlad.ionescu@uhasselt.be 2B Partition, Partimenti and Pedagogies of ConDividuation Robert A. Gorny, TU Delft r@relationalthought.com 2C A Ferryman who Stutters: From the Architectural Subject to an Architecture of Subjectivation Stavros Kousoulas, TU Delft stakousou@yahoo.gr 2D The Cosmic Artisan: From Mannerism to Metamodernism Sjoerd van Tuinen, Erasmus University Rotterdam vantuinen@gmail.com
06 / 70
DAY TWO =) Keynote 2 Edusemiotics: Pedagogy of Concepts / Pedagogy of Values Inna Semetsky, Institite for Edusemiotic Studies (IES), Melbourne =) Art Encounters B B1 A Short Study on the Immobility of Movement Frank van de Ven, dancer and director B2 Transformances (Exhibition during the break) =) Panel 3: Milieus of Pedagogy (moderator: Andrej Radman, TU Delft) 3A Learning as the Resonance between Series of Senses Mehdi Parsa, University of Bonn Mehdi.parsa.kh@gmail.com 3B On Corporeal Hauntology Audronė Žukauskaitė, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, zukauskaite.audrone@gmail.com 3C On Pedagogies of Affect and the Microbiopolitics of S/He/It Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko, Leiden University aawolodzko@gmail.com 3D An Affective Community – or ‘Munus’ as Body without Organs Heather Lynch, Glasgow Caledonian University heather. lynch@gcu.ac.uk =) Panel 4: Pedagogies of Zigzagging (moderator: Judith Wambacq, School of Arts KASK) 4A Between Art and Science: Storytelling in Geomatics Education Siddique Motala, Utrecht University siddique. motala@gmail.com 4B ‘Quod Erat Faciendum’: The Theorematic and the Problematic in Deleuze Oleg Lebedev, Université Catholique de Louvain oleg.lebedev@uclouvain.be 4C An Apprenticeship in Becoming: Deleuzian Pedagogy as a Social Remedy in the Era of Identity Politics Robin Brouwer, independent researcher info@robinbrouwercollective.nl 4D The Intervening Pedagogy of Liberal Arts Education Kevin Potter, independent researcher Potter. kevinmatthew@gmail.com
07 / 70
=) IV Keynotes
Learning as a Repetition Form of Passive Syntheses
M a r c Rö l l i
Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig
Bio Marc Rölli is Professor for Philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. Marc Rölli has been researcher and lecturer at universities in Marburg, Berlin, Bochum and Darmstadt, where he completed his doctoral qualification in 2008 . Between 2008 and 2011, Marc Rölli was Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Darmstadt, before being appointed Professor at the Department of Philosophy at Fatih University, Istanbul. During the fall term 2011/12, Marc Rölli was Senior Fellow at the ‘Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie’ (IKKM) in Weimar. From 2013, he was director of the research cluster ‘Theory and Methods’ at Zurich University of the Arts. Recent publications include, among others, Mikropolitik. Eine Einführung in die politische Philosophie von Deleuze und Guattari (2010), with Ralf Krause, Philosophie und Nicht-Philosophie (2011), co-edited with Friedrich Balke, Kritik der anthropologischen Vernunft (2012), Fines Hominis? Beiträge zur Geschichte der philosophischen Anthropologiekritik (ed. 2015), Eigenlogik des Designs/ Intrinsic Logic of Design (2016), co-edited with Gerhard M. Buurman and Gilles Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism. From Tradition to Difference (2016), translated by Peter Hertz-Ohmes.
10 / 70
=) K N1 Rölli 17/05/201710:45 –12:0 0
Abstract In the chapter on the ‘Image of Thought’ (Difference and Repetition, chapter 3), Gilles Deleuze defines the eighth dogmatic postulate through the status of knowledge. It is connected with a remarkable power which manifests itswelf in the epistemological regulations and in the special practices of knowledge mediation. Precisely the modeling of knowledge by the totality of true propositions covering the field of possible solutions to given problems degrades learning to an inevitable means to an end – but one completely absorbed in the result of its efforts. Deleuze radically modifies this asymmetrical relation between knowledge and learning. Against the methodological regulation of learning, which is backed up by a knowledge, he places the learning processes in the area of passive syntheses of repetition. Learning then means exploring and determining the problems and ideal configurations that give possible solutions their sense. In this way, time infiltrates thinking – and does not remain external to thinking as a mere factual condition of knowledge acquisition. ‘Education’ (Bildung) is no longer bound to disciplinary knowledge spheres – nor to a leftover area of aesthetic play. On the contrary, Deleuze redistributes the empirical and the transcendental, which explains knowledge as a whole (including the pedagogy of ‘lifelong learning’) into a transitory effect of learning.
11 / 70
Edusemiotics: Pedagogy of
Concepts/Pedagogy of Values
Inna Semetsky
Institite for Edusemiotic Studies (IES), Melbourne
Bio Inna Semetsky has a PhD in educational philosophy (Columbia University, New York) preceded by an MA in counseling psychology and Grad.Dip.Ed. She published 10 books including Deleuze, Education and Becoming (2006), Re-Symbolization of the Self (2011), The Edusemiotics of Images (2013), Deleuze and Education (2013) and has a contract with Routledge for a new book, Learning with the Unconscious. In 2000 she received the Kevelson Award from the Semiotic Society of America for her paper ‘The Adventures of a Postmodern Fool’. Her book Edusemiotics (2015, co-authored) received the Book Award from the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia. In 2017 she edited Edusemiotics: A Handbook. She has numerous book chapters including in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Religion (2016). Her papers appeared in Educational Philosophy and Theory, Semiotica, SubStance and other journals. She serves as a chief consultant to the recently established Institute for Edusemiotic Studies (Melbourne).
12 / 70
=) K N2 Semet sk y 18/05/2017 10:45 –12:0 0
Abstract Edusemiotics is a new direction in educational theory that takes semiotics as its foundational philosophy and explores its philosophical specifics in educational contexts. The minimal descriptive unit in (edu)semiotics is a sign as a tri-relative entity engaged in the dynamics of transformations, translations, and growth. Edusemiotics considers relation to be ontologically basic, while also affirming the feminine emphasis on relations and relatedness. Sign-process crosses over the human mind, culture, and nature alike. Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is an ongoing inspiration for the creation or invention of edusemiotics as a novel concept. Contrary to Saussure’s semiology, which addresses largely linguistic signs, edusemiotics investigates multiple regimes of signs, verbal and non-verbal, natural and invented, and considers human beings to also be signs situated in the larger, non-human yet semiotic, world. The dynamics of signs is a process of becoming, with signs always already becoming-other. At the outset the paper will address the logic of signs in terms of what Deleuze called intensive multiplicities that function on the basis of the conjunction ‘and’. The dynamic structure of signs forms a rhizomatic network grounded in Deleuze’s new image of thought. Still, the theory of signs remains meaningless without the corresponding practice as an apprenticeship in signs or continual learning. Learning becomes a creative process oriented not just to factual knowledge but to new modes of existence and involves our becoming aware of unconscious ideas because signs often just portend as subtle sensations and need to be interpreted or evaluated amidst the problematic instances that abound in affective encounters, in life – which thus becomes our informal, experiential and experimental, ‘school’. Secondly the paper presents the pedagogy of concepts, stressing that the current emphasis of formal schooling on ready-made answers rather than on the production of ‘Sens’ is counterproductive to edusemiotics and to students’ growth. Significantly, edusemiotics presupposes teachers’ growth too: subjectivities of both are to be produced! As the transformation of signs involves an ethical aspect, the pedagogy of values becomes imperative – however such pedagogy strongly contradicts the persistent, even if implicit, model of moral education that focuses on the direct inculcation of values. The paper examines some challenges faced by edusemiotics, one of which is the task of the transformation of habits not just as a theoretical slogan but as a real-life necessity, one demanding that Deleuze’s ‘people to come’ actually ‘become’. As a conclusion, the paper discusses some aspects of the new materialism that parallels edusemiotics in many respects, even as these two directions appear to spring to life independently and without any prior awareness of each other. Importantly, both areas of research revisit the latest developments in science and posit the significance of subjectivity as posthuman. Edusemiotics is incomplete without a posthuman intelligence, which in turn is a function of learning and developing semiotic competence as its own integral part. For Deleuze, philosophers, writers and artists are semioticians and symptomatologists who can read and interpret signs that function as the symptoms of life. To this list we should now add educators as edusemioticians. 13 / 70
=) V Art Encounters
The Catless Grin
16 / 70
=) A1 Er tel t 17/05/2017 12:0 0 –12:30
Marius Ertelt
Artist and curator
Bio Marius Ertelt studied at the University for Fine Arts Hamburg, the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Marseille and at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He worked in the Depot, Raum für Kunst und Diskussion in Vienna. As an artist and curator he is concerned with the conditions and functions of art and cultural production in various fields of conflict of social transformation.
17 / 70
Transformances
18 / 70
=) A 2 - B2 Trans formances 17-18/05/2017 15:30 –16:0 0
In addition to the conference’s Art Encounters in the form of presentations, there will also be screenings and exhibitions. For details of these Transformances we refer you to the web site.
19 / 70
Eva Describes the Image as it Aligns the Symbols
Contained in the Image
Joke Robaard
Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam
Bio Joke Robaard (1953) is an artist/researcher and a lecturer at the TXT (textile/text) department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her video, Small Things That Can Be Lined Up was recently presented by If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam (2016.) Since 2014 she collaborates with Camiel van Winkel opening her extensive Archive Intersections collection, an inquiry into the representation of the clothed body in print media since the 1970s. Their book Assemblage: Bodies, Habits, Practices will be released in 2018 by Valiz publishers.
20 / 70
=) A3 Robaard 17/05/2017 18:0 0 –18:30
Abstract It orders the symbols as if they were pebbles, and orders them in series just like a necklace. (Vilém Flusser, Our Images) Together with eight students from the Cygnus Gymnasium in Amsterdam, parts of my archive have been performed for the camera by means of text recitals and discussions. In the video Small Things That Can Be Lined Up , various assemblages of images are intersected in new ways, accompanied by the overlay of text passages by philosophers Plato and Vilém Flusser that address the magic of images, text, and textiles.
21 / 70
A Short Study on the Immobility of Movement
Frank van de Ven
Dancer and director
22 / 70
=) B1 van der Ven 18/05/2017 12:0 0 –12:30
Bio Frank van de Ven is a dancer and director who spent his formative years in Japan working with Min Tanaka and the Maijuku Performance Company (1983–92). In 1993 he founded, with Katerina Bakatsaki, Body Weather Amsterdam as a platform for training and performance. He has an ongoing commitment to his Body/Landscape series of workshops conducted worldwide and since 1995 he has led the annual, interdisciplinary Bohemiae Rosa Project with Milos Sejn (Academy of Art and Design, Prague, Czech Republic), connecting body and landscape with art, geology and architecture. With Australian theatre artist Peter Snow he presented the Thought/ Action performances in Australia, USA, New Zealand, Asia and Europe. For more info on Body Weather Amsterdam, see bodyweatheramsterdam.blogspot.com.
23 / 70
=) VI Panels
=)
Panel 1
Moderator: Arjen Kleinherenbrink Radboud University Nijmegen
26 / 70
Antifascist Pedagogies
27 / 70
Polycriticality and Polyfactual Diffractive Pedagogies:
Polyapproaches to Education
Anne B. Reinertsen
Queen Maud University College, Trondheim, Norway
Keywords
polycriticality, quantum competences, action of signs,
emergent diffractive pedagogies and gentle
generalizations, transpersonal methods
of body and insecurity
Bio Anne Reinertsen is Professor in Education preoccupied with Speculative Philosophy, Semiotics, Subjective Professionalism and New Material Qualitative Research Methodologies.
28 / 70
=) 1A Reiner t sen 17/05/2017 13:30 –14:0 0
Abstract We often say that we live in a postfactual society in which we are critical towards all types of knowledge claiming to be true. Rather than post- I claim that we live in a polyfactual society in which factual knowledge originates from many and different places, is decentred and deauthorized ultimately turning resistance and critique into key elements and subject matter in pedagogy. Critique being neither about legitimate nor justified criticism per se, but as a form of life or a confirmative immanent critique praxis through a state of virtuality in which one asks questions about quality, procedural truthfulness, learning and justice; resisting normative ways of thinking and understanding always. Far from being negative or dangerous, this is a chance of creating invitational edusemiotic and transcurricular pedagogies in different process ontologies and through this with force to form and stimulate exploration and innovation: positive difference exceeding all categories. I speculate with/in the positivity of schizophrenic language and gentle generalizations as a semiotic competence and logics of the included middle: pedagogical and scientific generalization in a responsible and gentle manner. We are in what I call the transpersonal quantum competence and polycritical landscape of Deleuze and Guattari´s philosophy of difference and immanence, Body without Organs and the human as a ‘thinking territory’, normalizing critique, judgement and decisionmaking. Pedagogy and the tasks for the pedagogues in every case being to discover the libidinous or sublime speech of the body and its investments at the social area, possible internal conflicts between, relations with and to pre- or unconscious investments at the same area and then again possible conflicts between these, or rather the whole inter-intra-play between machinic desire and the suppression of desire. Pedagogy seen as an in-phenomenological accelerating and diffractive discursive materiality in an expanding universe: a real non-teleological revolution, body as profession in lifegiving insecurity and resistance. In the field of the speaking subject and the blindspots of autonomy perhaps we can speak of creating a polyconsensus society and critical bildung pedagogies in which we recreate ourselves and our pedagogies, sciences, institutions and systems again and again; not to lose force; to create on the basis of knowledge.
29 / 70
The Feminist Subject Revisited –
Deleuze and Guattari’s BecomingImperceptible
Lars Bang
Manchester Metropolitan University
Keywords
Kierkegaard, Spinoza, nomadic subject
Bio Lars Bang is a Research Fellow in STEM Education. His research focuses on sociological and philosophical investigations of science education, in order to develop new methodological and theoretical insights that can help practitioners and researchers understand and develop their practice. Bang’s doctoral work was a large four-year quantitative and qualitative study of the choice of STEM careers in rural areas in Denmark. His current work is concerned with repositioning concepts from science education research to a framework drawing upon Deleuze and Spinoza.
30 / 70
=) 1B Bang 17/05/2017 14:0 0 –14:30
Abstract The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell To Arms, 1929) This paper is an affirmative response to the feminist subject, or the nomadic subject, as envisioned and argued by Rosi Braidotti and others. The revisited feminist subject is of potential critical importance in formulating a new horizon for an immanent pedagogy, a pedagogy of anti-fascism. The paper will address how such a pedagogy potentially could be fertilized by such a revision. The feminist subject forwarded as being in thread with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming is here carefully re-examined. Especially in the way Deleuze and Guattari draw upon the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard to envision the ‘man of becoming’ / the Knight of Faith. They write: To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. As Kierkegaard says, nothing distinguishes the knight of the faith from a bourgeois German going home or to the post office: he sends off no special telegraphic sign; he constantly produces or reproduces finite segments, yet he is already moving on a line no one even suspects.
Deleuze and Guattari’s strange notion of being-imperceptible is, not as previously put forward by contemporary Deleuze scholars, a part of a trinity of becoming-woman/becoming-animal/becomingimperceptible, but points to something far more radical, namely the veritable utopian resistance on the horizon. Similarly when Rosi Braidotti writes ‘Death, on the contrary, is the death of becomingimperceptible of the nomadic subject and as such it is part of the cycles of becomings, yet another form of interconnected-ness, a vital relationship that links one with other, multiple forces’, it is slightly misconceiving the particularity of becoming-imperceptible, which is definitely not a ‘death’. Becoming-imperceptible is the end of molecular-becomings, where the whole world now is becoming. You become like everybody else, like the lead character Eliot in the contemporary television show Mr. Robot, a grey imperceptible multifaceted ‘thing’, in tune with, and immersed in the immanence of the world. This is not death, but the most vitalist and joyful experience, a veritable becoming where one achieves Spinoza’s third degree of knowledge, reaching and understanding the essence of things and the ‘God-machine of nature’. The importance of becoming-imperceptible is misaligned in contemporary Deleuze studies due to the failure to recognize Kierkegaard’s importance for Deleuze and Guattari. The Knight of Faith, becoming-imperceptible, is the priest of immanence, the supreme pedagogue of immanence, and the ‘end of becomings’. This pedagogy is exactly a teaching of becomings, envisioning a non-fascist mode of living. The final matter addressed here is the continuum between, what could be crudely called ‘the state-subject’ and the nomadic subject. It is crucial to bear in mind Deleuze and Guattari’s highlighting of the constant struggle between major and minor, between striated and smooth, between the electron and the nucleus and so forth. This means here that the nomadic subject must always be seen in a flux between a ‘state-subject’, or for lack of a better word ‘the classically rendered psychological subject’, and the nomadic subject. This is again where becoming-imperceptible becomes crucial, because here the ‘statesubject’ is affirmed, ‘one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody’. 31 / 70
A Deleuzian Perspective on Refugee Integration
Akiva Weiss
University of Bologna, Department of Economics
Keywords
education, migration, Deleuze, spatium, semiology
Bio Akiva Weiss is a Phd Candidate at the University of Bologna and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He holds a Masters in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University and a Masters in Special Education from Western Governor’s University. Akiva has worked as a legal aide for the City Government of the City of New York. He has written papers on migration and process philosophy and is currently researching the intersection of semiotics and education.
32 / 70
=) 1C Weis s 17/05/2017 14:30 –15:0 0
Abstract Successful integration of refugees into the educational system is critical for the long-term economic and social stability of EU member states. Yet whose role is it to ensure integration is effective? EU primary law clearly bestows competency upon individual member states. Yet spillovers from ineffective integration may adversely impact neighbouring states and the Union as a whole. This paper proposes an EU-wide mentoring program to address determinants shown in the educational literature to have an impact upon the integration of third-party nationals. Departing from a Deleuzian perspective, this paper argues that while de-stratifying institutional inequalities may not be feasible, mentoring may alter the design of the educational system for refugees by transforming the dimensions of learning to a non-reducible reciprocity. This is akin to the reciprocal determination Deleuze suggests in his discussion of intensive space. Mentoring may mitigate the institutionalization of education and lead to a more successful pathway towards integration. Through case studies and empirical analysis, a well-designed mentoring programme reveals the potential for a positive impact on inequalities shown in the educational literature to stifle effective integration. Increased flow of information, higher levels of social cohesion and generalized trust, as well as facilitating a sense of belonging for refugees may allay the uncertainty for communities absorbing humanitarian migrants. It may also weld a sense of permanence for refugees, thereby increasing incentives to invest in the human capital of their designated host country. Centralized coordination will help ensure consistent funding, measurable outcomes, and independent oversight. Moreover, an integration mechanism governed at the supranational level has the ability to tie integration into more equitable Union-wide burden sharing. Centralization, however, does not preclude local ownership: interactions between State and refugees must be embedded within local institutions and involve community-level stakeholders.
33 / 70
The Metamorphs: Facilitating
Thinking in a Deleuzean Community of Philosophical Inquiry with Children
Arthur Wolf
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Keywords
philosophy for children, concepts, pedagogy,
intensity, problem-space
Bio Arthur Wolf is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. The questions ‘When and, consequently, why are we thinking?’ in the work of Deleuze are of central concern to his thesis. In particular the relationship between the concept of intensity and thought, and its pedagogical implications. Wearing Deleuzean goggles, which are removable, he enjoys setting up all kinds of pedagogical relationships like, for example, with children at the Think Fun philosophy summer camps (thinkfuncamps.ca) or museums in the greater Vancouver area. Previously he has worked for UNESCO on the promotion of philosophy and education in Asia and the Pacific, the philosophy for children institute in South Korea and organized philocafés/bistros in Japan. More recently and increasingly encumbered by the lumbering weight of finishing his thesis he is focused on making delicious free range chocolate truffles.
34 / 70
=) 1D Wolf 17/05/2017 15:0 0 –15:30
Abstract ‘When knowledge becomes a legislator, the most important thing to be subjected is thought... Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life... In other words, life goes beyond the limits that knowledge fixes for it, but thought goes beyond the limits that life fixes for it... The thinker thus expresses the noble affinity of thought and life: life making thought active, thought making life affirmative.’(Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy). In the above quote Deleuze highlights the important distinction between thinking and knowledge. It implies that knowledge as legislator is fixed, rigid or fossilized thought. This unadventurous and unexploratory mode of thought reflects the kind of educational practice where students are not allowed to think critically and creatively but simply absorb and follow the teacher’s instructions. The quote also offers us a way forward. It suggests that to discover and invent new possibilities of life we have to stimulate thought to be inquisitive, to explore and to be adventurous. This is the context within which this presentation takes place: to investigate how a pedagogical practice can improve thinking. Here I will draw on ‘Philosophy for Children’ (P4C) and its key concept of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI), which has become a popular pedagogical approach. In doing so I will focus on Deleuze’s notion of intensity and suggest how it might strengthen and theoretically reinforce CPI as pedagogy. Finally I will show how this has practical implications and give examples from ‘The Metamorphs’, a curriculum at Think Fun philosophy camps and address the following question: How does this new pedagogical theory, i.e. seeing CPI through an intensive lens, relate to practice?
35 / 70
=)
Panel 2
Moderator: Rick Dolphijn, Utrecht University
36 / 70
Pedagogies of Making
37 / 70
Applications and Implications of
Artistry: On Craftsmanship, Then and Now
Vlad Ionescu
Faculty of Architecture and Arts, Hasselt University
Keywords
craftsmanship, technology, arts
Bio Vlad Ionescu is post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts (Hasselt University). Besides co-translating the art criticism of Jean-François Lyotard, he has published on the art historiography of Aloïs Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Worringer in the Journal of Art Historiography and ARS, the aesthetics of Gilles Deleuze in Deleuze Studies and architectural theory in Architectural Histories and A+. Currently he works around the artistic and cultural potential of the adaptive re-use of the built environment. He is the author of the essay Applied Arts, Implied Art. Craftsmanship and Technology in the Age of Art Industry (A&S/ books, 2016) and of the forthcoming Pneumatology. An Inquiry into the Representation of the Wind, Air and Breath (ASP Editions, 2017).
38 / 70
=) 2 A Ionescu 17/05/2017 16:0 0 –16:30
Abstract When the difference between designing and making implements a distinction between what is man-made and what is machine-made, an inevitable question arises: what is the meaning of craftsmanship in the age of digital production? Traditionally craftsmanship has been associated with applied arts, the hand-made production of objects. However, technologies like 3D printing and digitally assisted design blur the distinction between what is man-made and machine-made. Is the complex machine opposed to craftsmanship and does the interaction with machines affect our interaction with objects? Confronting the theories of Aloïs Riegl and Frank Lloyd Wright with each other, this intervention debates the role of technology in craftsmanship. Relating the aesthetics of Paul Valéry to the design theory of Jacques Vienot allows us to propose a new interpretation of applied arts as implied art, a type of making that concentrates less on the beauty of machines and more on human life, its experiences and the occasional poverty thereof.
39 / 70
Partition, Partimenti and
Pedagogies of Con-Dividuation
Robert Alexander Gorny
Chair of Methods and Analysis & Chair of
Architecture Theory, TU Delft
Keywords
Serlio, partimenti, diagrams, different/citation, rhetoric
Bio Robert A. Gorny is founder of relationalthought, a nomadic architectural practice. After receiving his Master’s degree from the Berlage Center for Advanced Studies, he is currently guest teaching at TU Delft, where he conducts his doctoral studies. He is moreover a member of the editorial board of the architecture theory journal Footprint.
40 / 70
=) 2B Gorny 17/05/2017 16:30 –17:0 0
Abstract Sebastiano Serlio, the same professore di architettura who made the classic orders of architecture speciate, introduced in 1540 the notion of ‘appartamenti’ into ordering discourse. An anatomy without a body, the term debuts not as the cellular units we know today; but as a diagram for the different/ciation of architectural multiplicities. Pedagogies of partitioning have long maintained the image of thought to instruct architectural composition at the intersection of compositional practices, rhetorical mnemotechniques, and modern ordering conceptions. This paper will expose the singularly nonunitary and anti-representational agenda of Serlio’s conception by means of a genealogy of this crystallizing conception through a series of conceptual personæ and their treatises.
Starting by rethinking partitioning processes through
a dividual lens, the paper will first critically discuss a rhetorical conception of ‘partitio’ as a metaphysical operator of hierarchical segmentation in Alberti, and the process in which subsequently ‘compartition’ becomes a design process through Filarete, and ‘partimenti’ a measuring unit through Francesco Di Giorgio. In differentiating how these aesthetic regimes operated only on a plane of organization, the paper will foreground how Serlio, as the supposedly first theorist to show an actual interest in the workings of composition, brought graphic modes of thinking onto the pure plane of consistency. A schizoanalytic perspective on emergent phenomena can greatly illustrate how this mode of thinking allows him to restrategize the diagrammatic agency of graphic arrangement, through which architecture is literally drawn into reality, through a recursive practice of progressive differentiation. In discussing the catalytic role to visual models, the presentation centrally discusses the musical genre of ‘partimenti’. Its training through difference and repetition engages with a creative pedagogy to learn to differentiate compositions on the go. In a similarly differential didactic, Serlio’s thinking rests on an ethico-aesthetic agenda that persistently proceeds from multiple configurations and part-to-part-relations. As I want to show, this allows him to resingularize the immanent multiplicity of appartamenti so as to measure architecture against itself, not an external referent! Thus replacing the old system of comparison of measurement with a measurement of order, Serlio not only forcefully liberated architectural composition from its representational predicament. In his attempt to structure an entire discourse, Serlio’s topological conception also contributed tremendously to the serial pedagogies in the discourse on the art of distribution and thus modern ordering practices. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning =)
41 / 70
A Ferryman who Stutters: From the Architectural Subject to an Architecture of Subjectivation
Stavros Kousoulas
Theory Section, Architecture Department,
Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft
Keywords
architecture, perception, stuttering,
subjectivation, metastability
Bio Stavros Kousoulas studied Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and at TU Delft. Since 2012, as a researcher and lecturer, he has been involved in several academic activities at the Theory Section of the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at IUAV Venice participating in the Villard d’ Honnecourt International Research Doctorate. He has published and lectured in Europe and abroad. He has been a member of the editorial board of Footprint since 2014.
42 / 70
=) 2C Kousoulas 17/05/2017 17:0 0 –17:30
Abstract What would architecture be if it did not constantly confront the open and the intransitive, chaos itself? This confrontation, the friction between architectural reason and imagination, leads to architecture’s special mode of enunciation: the atypical expression of spatial stuttering as the precursor of disrupting metastability. To reunite concepts and intuition, reason and imagination, the Sublime and the Beautiful, or, in other words, the transitive with the intransitive, cannot be accomplished in principle but solely in fact: through constant singular processes of individuation. It is for this reason, that spatial stuttering may be seen as the precursor of any attempt to disrupt metastability. The focus should not be on the misspelled sounds of one who stutters, but, conversely, on the event itself: to stop and start again, to begin anew, a repetition full of minimal differences, tensions and cracks. Stuttering operates as a singular moment of indeterminacy, able to open a multiplicity of bifurcations, a multiplicity of worlds yet to come. Such moments of spatial stutter, genuine events, involve a dual process: at once a negation and an affirmation, a rupture and a creation. In addition, an architectural subject who stutters – a subject composed of extended minds yet open to the decomposing effects of a violent encounter – brings forward a theory of perception that destabilizes representational logics. It is a theory of perception that Meillasoux has qualified as a subtractive one: there is less in perception than in matter, less in representation than in presentation. The atypical expressionism of spatial stuttering has an infinite duration, with every specific stutter, every disruption being the actualization of its absolute power to re-singularize both matter and the subject that emerges out of its perceptual subtractions. When an architect stutters, she moves through a flow of breaks, alongside the flows that make these breaks possible; she moves through the transitive disruptions of spatial metastability while also moving through the intransitive flows that make them possible. I will claim that the architectural subject already presupposes its own decomposition. What is necessary is to practice this dissolution by means of expressing the interceptions that constitute it, not only in order to resist entropy, but also to intervene with the environment that the architectural subject creates. By practising the ways that architecture could plunge to the infinity of experience, the same infinity that it wishes to manipulate when attempting to intervene, its minor and major minds could reunite, even temporarily, even to perform a survey of the field in an instance. If opening oneself to chaos means opening to the infinity of a world’s flows, to the intransitive powers that mobilize not just representation but all that can be represented, then what is important is to learn how to die without dying: to confront chaos and come back ready for another round. This is where the ferryman awaits. One has to negotiate with him, if one wants to negotiate how to confront chaos. Not only how fast his rowing should be, but more importantly, to ask him a return trip. In the roar of Acheron, one should know how to stutter.
43 / 70
The Cosmic Artisan: from
Mannerism to Metamodernism
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Erasmus University, Rotterdam
Keywords
mannerist genealogy, metamodern crafts, craftsmanship
Bio Sjoerd van Tuinen is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam and holds a PhD (on Deleuze and Leibniz) from Ghent University. He is editor of several books, including Deleuze Compendium (Boom, 2009), Deleuze and The Fold. A Critical Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), De nieuwe Franse filosofie (Boom, 2011), Speculative Art Histories (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2017), The Polemics of Ressentiment (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2017), and has authored Sloterdijk. Binnenstebuiten denken (Kampen: Klement, 2004). He also coordinates the Centre for Art and Philosophy (CAP) and is a co-founder of the Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge (EIPK), where he is responsible for a project on European politics of debt and austerity.
44 / 70
=) 2D van Tuinen 17/05/2017 17:30 –18:0 0
Abstract In metamodern culture, handicraft is everywhere. As I argue, the ‘artisanal turn’ is not just a symptom of postmodern nostalgia, i.e. past ‘options’ or ‘instances’ allowed to make a second appearance. Rather, it is our very experience of time that has changed. What seemed old can appear authentically new again. Today’s interest in crafts and craftsmanship thus has less to do with the idolisation of pre-industrial handicrafts by John Ruskin or the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts movement founded by William Morris than with Bauhaus. Ever since, craft has been emancipating itself from the intimacy of the studio and the corresponding closed guild mind that values only the specifics of its metier and its skills. This transformation marks less the disappearance of craftsmanship after the end of art than its development into a general media-literacy. Given a certain material, what is it capable of? It was perhaps in this metamodern sense that Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, proposed the concept of the modern artist as ‘cosmic artisan’. In my paper, I offer a mannerist genealogy for metamodern crafts and craftsmanship. Starting from tensions brought about in matter-form relationships by contemporary digital design practices, I retrospectively problematize the division of labour between design and craft at the very moment it first appeared. In this way, I expose an informal or cosmic dimension in both mannerist and metamodern craftsmanship, characterized by an infinite and continuous variation of manners rather than forms. I will then develop some of the ontological, epistemological and political implications of this dimension in the light of recent developments in Theory such as New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and the care for the plastic relationality of the Self, which themselves are interpreted as expressions of a metamodern sensibility.
45 / 70
=)
Panel 3
Moderator: Andrej Radman, Delft University of Technology
46 / 70
Milieus of Pedagogy
47 / 70
Learning as the Resonance between Series of Senses
Mehdi Parsa
University of Bonn
Keywords
resonance, sense, communication, series, learning
Bio Mehdi Parsa holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran inquiring into Derrida’s reading of Plato and Hegel. Currently he is again a PhD Candidate of Philosophy at the University of Bonn with a thesis entitled ‘The Problem of Ontology and Epistemology in Contemporary European Philosophy’. He has translated philosophical works from English and French into Persian. Among his publications are the volumes Derrida and Philosophy (2014) and Derrida and Media (2012), both in Persian.
48 / 70
=) 3A Par sa 18/05/2017 13:30 -14:0 0
Abstract In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze introduces an ontology based on the concept of sense as the effect of corporeal causality. The connection between incorporeal senses is not causality, but is expressed by the anomalous concept of quasi-causality which is borrowed by Deleuze from ancient Stoics and is similar to the relation between windowless singular monads in a specific reading of Leibniz. Quasi-causality is the logical relation between Stoic Lekta (sayables) which are incorporeal senses, or between rational singular monads. Deleuze explains the communication between these singular entities as the communication between series around them. These series are always heterogeneous or divergent, and the communication between divergent series is called resonance. The univocity of being necessitates an internal resonance which induces a forced movement, and goes beyond the series themselves. A singularity is a potential difference which produces naturally the differences via pulsation. This is the source of the essential diversity of being. Being is not monotone, but univocal, and this is why it is intelligible or it needs to make sense. It makes sense by the pulsation in its singular points which form its essences, and the outcome of this pulsation is a series. Now, for example, when I read a text, I’m not an empty container to be filled with the content of the text. The reading comes out when my series resonate with the series of the text. Or as Deleuze explains in Difference and Repetition what we call learning, ‘we learn nothing from those who say: “do as I do”. Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me”, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce’. A relationship is understood usually based on identity and similarity. When two people communicate there should be something common which makes them similar. But what is the similarity between the movement of my body and the movements of the wave, when I swim? This communication is based on the differences of forces, what we call resonance. This is how things make sense and we make sense of them and of ourselves, and how we learn or teach ‘something’. The teacher is one who makes the student vibrate with him, to make a resonance and to produce a new series. Learning in its nature is not human, but an expression of the univocity of Being.
49 / 70
On Corporeal Hauntology
Audronė Žukauskaitė
Lithuanian Culture Research Institute
Keywords
the body without organs, immunity, contagion,
microchimerism, corporeal hauntology.
Bio Audronė Žukauskaitė is Chief Researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and the President of Lithuanian Philosophical Association. Her recent publications include the monographs From Biopolitics to Biophilosophy (2016, in Lithuanian) and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Philosophy: The Logic of Multiplicity (2011, in Lithuanian), and an edited volume titled Intensities and Flows: Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy in the Context of Contemporary Art and Politics (2011, in Lithuanian). She also co-edited (with S. E. Wilmer) Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; Deleuze and Beckett, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; and Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies, New York, London: Routledge, 2016.
50 / 70
=) 3B Žukauskai tė 18/05/2017 14:0 0 –14:30
Abstract The paper will discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the body without organs and Esposito’s notion of immunity as a project of affirmative biopolitics. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas, Esposito (2011) comes to the conclusion that the immune system is not something definitive and identical to itself but is permanently changing and adapting itself to the environment. In this sense the immune system can be thought of not as a defensive mechanism but as a network of relationships, or, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, as an assemblage, that creates temporal and non-hierarchical connections between heterogeneous elements. The discovery that immunity is not something always already given but can be artificially induced helps to imagine the relationship between the self and the other as an assemblage where every part is connected to the other by relationships of exteriority. From this point of view immunity is not an always pre-given and self-identical system but a fusional multiplicity composed of heterogeneous and non-necessary elements. The paper will discuss two specific examples of such fusional multiplicity. First, it will examine the biomedical case of microchimerism: in biomedicine, the theory of microchimerism is associated with cases of organ transplantation and pregnancy, and refers to a small but significant presence of so-called non-self cells coexisting with a dominant population of cells in the same body (Shildrick 2016). Second, it will examine the experimental performance “May the Horse Live in Me”, which took place in Ljubljana in 2010. The performance was conducted by a French artistic duo Art Orienté Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin) and involved the transfusion of horse blood into Marion’s body. In other words, the performance can be seen as an example of chimeric multiplicity in which different molecular populations interact and interfere. Both examples are interpreted in term of corporeal hauntology, which indicates that our bodies, far from being unique and self-identical, are always haunted by the spectre of foreign molecular multiplicities. These examples can provide a strong stimulus for challenging our political imagination and to think about the “corporeal pedagogy” of dealing with the other. The immunitary paradigm is still retaining its arguments and strengths in today’s Europe, where almost every country is erecting barricades and walls. The political attempts to resolve the migration crisis resemble the logic of vaccination: the foreign “pathological” element is induced into the body (or nation as body) but only on the condition that this element will be homogenized and its natural development will be blocked. Contrary to this logic of vaccination, Deleuze and Guattari’s proposed “logic of contagion” can be seen as a pedagogical tool to embrace the other, to experience the body’s capacity to affect and to be affected.
51 / 70
On Pedagogies of Affect and the Microbiopolitics of S/He/It
Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko
Leiden University; AKI, Artez
Keywords
multiplicity, microbiome, bioart, affect, speculation
Bio Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn (Poland) and an MA in the Philosophy of Art History from Leiden University (the Netherlands). She is a PhD candidate in cultural disciplines at Leiden University investigating ways in which art, by using living bodies as its medium, reveals overall cultural, social and political significance of affect in the contemporary understanding of biotechnologically manipulated bodies.
52 / 70
=) 3C Wo łodźko 18/05/2017 14:30 –15:0 0
Abstract In the following paper, by asking about the methods of practicing affect, I am focusing on what can be called the pedagogies of affect. I am transversally following Gilles Deleuze’s notion of pedagogy of concept that he defined with Félix Guattari as ‘the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments’ (What Is Philosophy?). To learn about the pedagogy of affect would be thus to learn the condition of how affect is produced, how it functions and what its implications are. Importantly, as that which is considered as singular moment, beyond categorization, it demands a different logic of thinking. To learn how to learn is a question of creation, of production of the new in a way that would capture the intensity of the moment. It is a paradoxical process indeed: how to capture that what cannot be captured? How to learn what cannot be learned but only experienced in a moment? Using the example of bioart I will discuss how it forces the new material microbiopolitics of our multibodies that practice moments of transformative encounters. The paper draws arguments from the recent launching of the first Dutch Fecal Bank that is to allow for a more persistent treatment of fecal microbiome transplantation. However, rather than calling for a more symbiotic and nonanthropocentric thinking, our relationship with microbiome is usually described in terms of ‘super-organization’ that perpetuates the power of fixed categories and hierarchies between bodies. Using the example of the bioart work Microbiome Security Agency (2015), I will discuss how bioartists practice the relational understanding of microbiome that focuses on transversal conditions to create and generate the new. The question of conditions focuses on how to resist the logic of signification by creating new concepts rather than perpetuating old hierarchies. Art working with living materialities and agencies gives a new understanding that what matters is continuous experimentation with the body but not in order to achieve more control, but rather to allow for speculation and attentiveness to bodies’ difference. In the following paper, I will discuss how within their speculative approach bioartists exercise such questions as: how can we know what the body is when the material reconfigurations change; and how do our practices transform our presuppositions and knowledge?
53 / 70
An Affective Community – or
‘Munus’ as Body without Organs
Heather Lynch
Glasgow Caledonian University
Keywords
‘munus’, Body without Organs, biopolitics
Bio Heather Lynch’s research interests focus on the ecology of social order as this relates to the contemporary challenges and opportunities of emergent more than human worlds. Her research is informed by the Spinozism of Deleuze and Guattari, Simondon, Haraway and Esposito where she is concerned with modes of sense making which eschew dominant anthropocentricism. Her practical experience as artist, producer and social worker has informed her interdisciplinary approaches to research which involve practices of field philosophy that intersect with anthropology, cultural geography, fine art and social work. Her public communication includes articles, books and art works.
54 / 70
=) 3D Lynch 18/05/2017 15:0 0 –15:30
Abstract A growing incidence of human conflict indicates that, in some contexts, the ability to learn to live together is not keeping pace with the movement of people and places. The pedagogical project found in public policy to foster cohesive social relations through local, social and environmental interventions can be understood in Foucauldian terms as a move to govern life. Notable education scholars indicate that to live is to learn, where the most profound learning is an enfolding. Learning as the production of forms of subjectivity is instantiated in everyday practices of governance which seek to generate behaviours and motivations. Such biopolitical work has, over the past decade, operated explicitly within the register of community. Agamben and Esposito have explored the problems of the immunitary logic of the prevalent understanding of community based in national identity and race. In response Esposito proposes a non-propriety understanding of community which is not derived from sameness. This is a community of affect constituted through and of difference, or what might be described as the Body without Organs (BwO). Esposito describes this as a ‘common non-belonging’, a ‘limit that cannot be interiorized because it constitutes precisely their outside’. Esposito offers a means of making sense of Deleuze’s BwO which offers political and operational purchase. This paper situates this thinking through anthropological study of Allison Street, in Govanhill, Glasgow, an area mooted to be Scotland’s most ethnically diverse. Constituted through its migrant history and social deprivation, Allison Street has been subject to many interventions which seek to produce cohesive subjects. Drawing on this theorization of Esposito’s ‘munus’ as a Body without Organs, I will outline the problems with local interventions or policy pedagogy which seeks to produce cohesion. I will argue that these attempts to generate a community of sameness act back on themselves. They sidestep the complex knots of virtual and actual, signs and corporate bodies which collude in the production of the street. As such they re-inscribe the issues they seek to address, while the forms of life that thrive are constituted through difference. My speculation with abstract theory in a dynamic material, more than human situation does not provide solutions but an alternative approach to formulating problems. Such understanding has the potential to promote radically different forms of policy pedagogy.
55 / 70
=)
Panel 4
Moderator: Judith Wambacq, School of Arts KASK
56 / 70
Pedagogies of Zigzagging
57 / 70
Between art and science:
storytelling in geomatics education
Siddique Motala
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Keywords
geographic information systems (GIS), geomatics,
storytelling, critical posthumanism,
diffraction, cartography
Bio Siddique Motala (BSc Land Surveying, MSc Engineering, HDipl Higher Education & Training) is a lecturer in the Department of Civil Engineering & Surveying at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa. He has worked as a land surveyor and GIS practitioner before joining academia. He lectures surveying and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and is currently studying towards a PhD in education through the University of the Western Cape. His research interest include historical mapping, participatory GIS, digital storytelling, socially just pedagogies, and posthumanism. He is a Fellow of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University.
58 / 70
=) 4A Motala 18/05/2017 16:0 0 –16:30
Abstract This paper reports on ruminations on geomatics education in South Africa. Situated in engineering education in the global South, a storytelling intervention was introduced, to investigate how points of compatibility between the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences can be identified and demonstrated, as called for by numerous theorists. The pedagogical intervention was theorized and navigated with critical posthumanism and new materialism, mainly drawing on the works of Braidotti and Barad. In South Africa, geomatics qualifications at universities, like other engineering qualifications, are focused on maintaining minimum standards and covering specific technical knowledge areas. It is not just technicist, but also politically loaded in a way that entrenches certain discourses. The recent upheavals in higher education in South Africa have brought the issue of decolonization to the fore. This research contributes to the development of transformative pedagogical techniques that are aimed at decolonization and conscientization in South African engineering education. In a diffractive move, it puts new materialism in conversation with geomatics theory, teaching and learning theory, non-representational theory, post-colonial theory, and storytelling. Through posthumanism, inspiration is drawn from Deleuze’s take on rhizomes, mapping, intensities and other concepts. The problems that arise with the choice of cartography as a figuration within the philosophy of posthumanism are examined. This meta-discursive analysis of geomatics (of which cartography is a part) is thus a posthuman cartography of cartography, contextualized in the Global South. It will show how geomatics education in South Africa is intensely humanist, even though there have been attempts to reform the curriculum. In a micro-political instance of activism, storytelling was introduced into the geomatics curriculum to enhance the Spinozist joyful passions in students, and to open up spaces in which students could experiment with cartography. The paper will report on a storytelling intervention in a course entitled ‘Spatial Analysis’, which is a course that focuses on spatial analytical techniques using geographic information systems (GIS). Lessons have been learnt from running this pedagogical intervention over the last few years, and a diffractive analysis will illuminate learnings for both geomatics and posthumanism.
59 / 70
‘Quod Erat Faciendum’: The Theorematic and the Problematic in Deleuze
Oleg Lebedev
Université catholique de Louvain
Keywords
Proclus, Deleuze, geometry, schematism, problem
Bio Oleg Lebedev is a teaching assistant in philosophy at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research interests focused so far on cinematic realism (especially among French theoreticians and film critics influenced by Bazin, such as Daney or Comolli), and on the conceptualization of the link between politics and aesthetics proposed by Jacques Rancière. His current research pertains to the theory of subjectivity and individuation in philosophy.
60 / 70
=) 4B Lebedev 18/05/2017 16:30 –17:0 0
Abstract In his First book of Euclid’s Elements the neo-platonic thinker Proclus acknowledges that geometry proceeds in a theoretical and immaterial manner, but also pays a particular attention to its relation to matter, so that sciences like geodesy, optics, catoptrics, mechanics, and even what he calls ‘scenography’ emanate out of it, doing some good to ‘mortal humanity’. While maintaining the primacy of theorems over problems, Proclus defines the conditions of the problem in terms of an order of events and affections, so that the main working method of a geometrician is differentiated into procedures of organizing movement (removal, addition, substitution, expansion and delimitation). This distinction between (1) a theorematic demonstration developing what was already inscribed in an axiom and (2) the construction/drawing of figures implied by the very nature of a geometrical problem is summed up in Difference and Repetition, but runs throughout Deleuze’s thought (for instance in his reevaluation of kantian schematism or in the distinction found in A Thousand Plateaus between royal science and minor science). Instead of analytic geometry going back to the initial, simpler figure at rest, Deleuze always promoted the real movement of non-metric multiplicities, where the synthesis is forced to compose consecutive principles. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how this defense of descriptive and projective geometry, which science would like to turn into a mere practical dependency of analytic geometry, unveils an important issue in pedagogy and learning. Ultimately, it is argued that the axiomatic element should always be made dependent upon a problematic, ‘intuitionist’, or ‘constructivist’ current emphasizing a calculus of problems very different from axiomatics. Only on this condition will thought cease presupposing the answer as the simplicity of an essence, and will it reconnect the abstract movement of representative understanding with the real movement which traverses the conditions of the problem. Be it in science or philosophy, it is working on the limits that allows us to distinguish the singular from the ordinary, making us happy in our search for something new. These considerations on the role of experimentation in a science as abstract as geometry thus serve as the basis for unveiling the sensible, rhythmic origin of any learning. In that regard affects, concepts, and percepts are indeed the three inseparable forces in every scholarship.
61 / 70
An Apprenticeship in Becoming: Deleuzian Pedagogy as a Social Remedy in the Era of Identity Politics
Robin Brouwer
Independent researcher
Keywords
assemblage, multiplicity, rhizome, schizoanalysis
Bio Robin Brouwer lives in Amsterdam and studied and teaches Philosophy and Semiotics at the University of Amsterdam (until 2001). He has taught at various academic institutions and from 2004 to 2008 was editor in chief of the arts magazine HTV De IJsberg. In 2005 he founded, with colleague Tiers Bakker, the Liberticide Working Group for Social Analysis and Ideology Critique. This critical enquiry into the foundations of neoliberal society lead to a volume of research: Liberticide. Kritische reflecties op het neoliberalisme (2008, with Tiers Bakker). In 2012 he published a second volume entitled: Vrijheid. Maar voor wie? with a contribution by Slavoj Žižek.
62 / 70
=) 4C Brouwer 18/05/2017 17:0 0 –17:30
Abstract The introduction of neoliberalism marks a new era in western history. In What money can’t buy. The moral limits of markets, Michael Sandel gives a detailed account of the transition from state-ruled capitalism to a market-driven society. He recognizes social disintegration, de-emancipation and (economic) segregation as the main consequences of this change. The Belgian psychologist Paul Verhaeghe goes into the social and psychological consequences of the market society. He describes that due to the so called ‘educational meritocracy’ youngsters are being classified based on quantifiable criteria such as profiles and detailed assessments. In a social reality that is merely driven by competition, the young generation is taught to understand themselves and each other accordingly. As Verhaeghe points out, education is not only about the acquirement of professional skills. The school system is an ideological factory; its main goal is the production of obedient subjects within a political doctrine. Slavoj Žižek analyses the ideological framework of contemporary image culture. Being a model citizen means being successful, well educated, sexy, young and driving a Porsche. The propagation of these cultural ideals through the media corresponds with the ideology that dominates the world of education and employment. The popular rhetoric of the free individual – the ideal consumer – leads to subjectivation, social inertia and nihilism. The recent upcoming of the ‘new politics’ in Europe and the US indicate a further segregation and political polarization. Binary differences in race, gender, culture and religion lead to xenophobia and racism. When we look at our education system today it is striking to see that it is still conservative – serving the existing bourgeois ideology. One of the reasons for this is the dominance of Platonic logic. This logic of identification not only constructed an epistemological grid to classify the objective world; it also constructs our social reality. Common understanding of identity (citizenship, professionalism, lifestyle) is the result of the application of resemblances and binary differences (x = x = not y). In Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari unfold a different ‘ontology’, a different logic. With concepts like the ‘assemblage’, ‘multiplicity’, ‘rhizome’ and ‘schizoanalysis’ they construct a strategy or engagement of becomings. A practice not motivated by analogy, not founded by a binary understanding of social interaction, but a creative activity directed at symbiosis. In a (micro) political sense becoming can be seen as a transgression of the sphere of identity. At the Willem de Kooning Academy I have organized two courses based on a Deleuzian (micro) political approach. The first consisted of an ‘institutional critique’ that investigated the academic (educational) structure and culture and resulted in many projects by the students. The second consisted of an ‘ideology critique’ of social identities. By making use of schizoanalysis we tried to investigate our personal dependence on identity formats produced by (social) media. Both courses lead to creative engagements and becomings. With my presentation I want to elaborate on the relevance of Deleuzian pedagogy, in particular in the field of identity and becoming. My recent experiences with art education will serve as an illustration. 63 / 70
The Intervening Pedagogy of Liberal Arts Education
Kevin Potter
Independent researcher
Keywords
liberal arts, education
Bio Kevin Potter graduated in 2015 from the Research Master’s program in Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. For his thesis, he was primarily focused on migrant literature and ethics, working within the theoretical parameters of linguistic post-structuralism. He is now working as a full-time editor and copywriter for StudyPortals. com in Eindhoven.
64 / 70
=) 4D Pot ter 18/05/2017 17:30 -18:0 0
Abstract
This project explores the recent attention given to liberal arts education, bringing to bear Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on conceptcreation, and the creative ethics integral to his philosophy. For Deleuze, the role of the philosopher is to create concepts; and as Inna Semetsky notes, ‘the concept is always full of political and critical power that brings forth values and meanings’. Furthermore, concepts have their own pedagogical quality, according to Deleuze, whereby they are ‘created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed’. The ‘pedagogy of the concept’ unseats the Universal, and actualizes the immanent potential of the subject. As a practice, philosophy is, then, a creative process of becoming; and the pedagogical component similarly enables the subject to leave the realm of the familiar, the territorial, and navigate its own line of flight. In the university setting, the liberal arts is a broad category that includes subjects in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, physical sciences, and economics; as social critic William Deresiewicz calls them, they are ‘those fields in which knowledge is pursued as an end in itself, the sciences and social sciences included’. The important thing to emphasize here is that these fields are pursued without adherence to transcendent principles or for the benefit of any organ of power; and the pedagogical method for teaching in the liberal arts will be a major focus of this discussion. For, the typical instruction methods in a liberal arts classroom include discussion, writing, and presentation – distinct from rote learning and teach-to-the-test strategies. What should be stressed, indeed, is that these courses demand students to enact the affirmative ethics and creative potential that Deleuze champions in his philosophy. They empower the student to deterritorialize the boundaries of disciplinary confinement and institutional control. Students can liberate themselves from the ‘umbrella’ of Urdoxa and ‘plunge into chaos’. As I shall conclude, I argue that the liberal arts and its uncertain status in the neoliberal university is precisely the affirmative tool of resistance that Deleuze celebrates.
65 / 70
=)
VII Colophon
AKI Academy of Ar t and Design Enschede 17–18 May 2017
A Grin without a Cat Annual National Deleuze Conference 2017
Editors
Marc Boumeester
Andrej Radman
Copy-editor
Heleen Schröder
Design
Mirjam Leppers
Scientific committee
Rosi Braidotti
Rick Dolphijn
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Organization committee
Sjoerd van Oevelen
Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko
Stavros Kousoulas
This conference (booklet) is made possible by the innovation fund of the University of the Arts ArtEZ. © AKI Academy of Art and Design, University of the Arts ArtEZ, Enschede 2017