A Deleuze Society?

Deleuze, Ethics and Politics

2009-11-17T19:55:00.012Z

Deleuze: Ethics and Politics

The 4th Biennial Philosophy and Literature Conference at Purdue University, April 9-10, 2010

Keynote speakers: Daniel W. Smith (Purdue University), Eugene Holland (Ohio State University), and Arkady Plotnitsky (Purdue University)

The philosopher Michel Serres once described Gilles Deleuze as “an excellent example of the dynamic movement of free and inventive thinking.” Without a doubt, Deleuze was one of the most singular and prolific philosophers of the 20th century. It is no surprise then, that the impact of Deleuze’s thought continues to reverberate throughout a host of diverse disciplines. With recognition of Deleuze’s influence in these various fields, and in the spirit of Serres’ assessment, this conference seeks to motivate an exploration of Deleuze’s inventive thinking in the particular areas of politics and ethics by bringing together faculty and graduate students interested in engaging, developing, or critically examining these areas of Deleuze's work.

This two-day conference will consist of four panels, each with three to four accepted graduate students presenting, three keynote addresses, and a wine and cheese reception.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

immanent vs. transcendent criteria in ethics.
political theory, law and jurisprudence.
the role of the State in relation to capitalism.
the possibility of social forms of organization radically exterior to the State forms.
the positive or productive function of desire as a creative force directly invested in the social field.
the problem of micro-fascism with respect to individual and collective processes of subjectivation.
forms of resistance enabled by minor literature and other processes of becoming-minor.
conceptions of cartography as a critical and transformative social analytic of power relations.

EMAIL SUBMISSIONS TO: philconf@purdue.edu

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS JANUARY 15, 2010.

Papers and abstracts should be sent as Word documents. Personal information is to be sent in the body of the email and should not appear on the paper itself.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Dr. Daniel W. Smith is known for national and international projects including translations of Deleuze and Klossowski and several works on Deleuze leading up to the forthcoming publication of his book on Deleuze’s philosophical system. Dr. Eugene Holland specializes in social theory and modern French literature, history, and culture. He has published widely including a 1999 volume on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and a forthcoming book on Nomad Citizenship. Dr. Arkady Plotnitsky has contributed numerous publications on Deleuze and on the topics of science, literature, and philosophy. He is currently working on a book entitled Space-Time-Matter-Thought: Non-Euclideanism from Riemann and Deleuze, and Beyond.

"Deleuze: Ethics and Politics" is being made possible through the generous financial support of the Dean's Office of the College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University.

Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture

2009-11-17T19:38:00.002Z

Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture

Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory

Venue: Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Dates: June 1st - June 2nd 2010

What is schizoanalysis and how might it be applied to the analysis of contemporary visual culture?

This question is both daunting in its complexity and exciting in terms of the possibility for a whole new way of thinking about visual culture it offers. Answering it seems to require that we experiment with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas and concepts to produce our own new syntheses adequate to the demands of the present creative, historical and theoretical conjuncture we find ourselves in today. That is the challenge this symposium will take up by bringing together some of the most creative and exacting scholars working in the twin fields of Deleuze studies and film studies today.

Abstracts should be sent to the conference convenor Ian Buchanan buchanani@cardiff.ac.uk by January 31, 2010.

Registration and program details will be added to this site in due course.

Keynote Speakers

Dr Felicity Colman (Manchester Metropolitan)

Dr Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University)

Dr Richard Rushton (University of Lancaster)

Professor Tom Conley (Harvard University)

Professor David Rodowick (Harvard University)

Professor Mirjam Schaub (The Free University of Berlin)

Professor Paola Marrati (Johns Hopkins University)

Professor Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam)

Deleuze Studies Special Issue

2009-10-01T05:31:00.017Z

Deleuze and The Symptom

This is a call for papers for a special issue of the journal

Deleuze Studies

entitled 'Deleuze and the Symptom'.
Guest edited by Aidan Tynan.

Some of the most influential theoretical contributions of the last several decades have sought to formulate the relationship between the body and its symbolic environments through the concept of the symptom. Perhaps the most influential of these was Lacan's conception of speech
and desire, in which the symptom, as signifier, discloses a set of meanings which disturb conscious discourse, while Althusser’s symptomatic reading of Marx offered a means to bypass vulgar economist and historicist versions of Marxist theory.

More recently, the symptom has figured prominently in Žižek’s unique
brand of ideology critique, while Althusserian symptomatic reading has been employed in Jameson’s literary criticism to overcome the antinomies of structure and history. This issue of Deleuze Studies is concerned with Deleuze’s position in relation to these debates. Much of Deleuze’s work, particularly the essays collected in his final book Critique et Clinique, was influenced by Nietzsche’s conviction that philosophy should proceed as a diagnosis of culture. This is complicated by Deleuze and Guattari’s apparent repudiation of psychoanalysis and exaltation of the schizophrenic as the supreme cultural icon of our time.

Some of the questions which this issue seeks to address are: what is the relation of Deleuze’s highly formalist conception of critique as symptomatology to the practice of schizoanalysis, and how does this position Deleuze’s work with respect to the debates mentioned above? Is there a specifically Deleuzian conception of the symptom? What roles do the pathological and pathos play in Deleuze’s thought and politics? What is the significance of Deleuze’s insistence on the criterion of “great health”, and the fact that schizoanalysis is presented as therapeutic?

Please submit papers of between 5,000 – 10,000 words to
atynan@gmail.com by no later than December 20th, 2009.

The 3rd International Deleuze Studies Conference

2009-09-06T06:08:00.014Z

Connect, Continue, Create

Deleuze and Nomadic Methodologies

Amsterdam 12-14 July 2010

ASCA / CFH

Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis with the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University

“Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience”, Deleuze and Guattari argue in What is Philosophy? The third annual International Deleuze Studies Conference will address the relevance of nomadic thought for contemporary scientific, critical and artistic practices. More specifically, it will explore the fast-growing new inter-connections among the three domains of art, science and philosophy, by mapping out and exploring the complex ways in which transdisciplinary encounters can be engendered. Combining critique with creation, the conference will focus on issues of methodology by positioning Deleuze’s philosophical work as the missing link among different domains of scientific enquiry, philosophical and artistic practice today. Central questions are: what are the different ways of interference among these different areas? What kind of methodological implications do their dynamic encounters entail? What are the limits of transdisciplinary connections, relations and fields? What kind of research is art practice? In a world that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how can scientific disciplines connect in distinctive and productive ways both among themselves and with practices located in the world of art and thought? The conference rests on the assumption that rhizomatic growth and inter-relations are unpredictable but this does not mean that they proceed randomly. Connections may be broken but will always continue to grow in other directions and create new encounters, new thoughts and new affects. The notion of creation itself is thus an important one that needs to be reconsidered and reevaluated.

Central questions addressed at the conference are: in what ways do disciplines meet and interfere with one another? What kind of methodological and political implications do their dynamic encounters entail? What are the limits of transdisciplinary connections, relations and fields?

Possible topics for papers may include:

* Methodological interfaces between science and the Humanities
* Art as Philosophical Practice
* Urban planning and architecture
* Nomadic politics and Social Sustainability
* Neuroscience and Culture
* Aesthetics of Life Sciences
* The Policy-making implications of eco-philosophy and Triple Ecologies

Length of presentations: max. 20 minutes. We welcome panel proposals.

Please send your abstract (max. 200 words) and a short bio to callforpapers@deleuze-amsterdam.nl before the 1st of March, 2010.

Confirmation of acceptance will be emailed before April 15th, 2010. Selections will take place on the basis of the number of panel presentations.

For conference registration and further information, please refer to our website: www.deleuze-amsterdam.nl

For more information please contact Maryn Wilkinson at
conference@deleuze-amsterdam.nl.

Please see also the conference website at www.deleuze-amsterdam.nl

Parallel to the conference several art events and film screenings will take place in Amsterdam and Utrecht. Conference Organizers: Prof. Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam; Prof. Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht.

Mille Gilles: Deleuze Camp 4

Preceding the conference students can participate in the Deleuze camp Mille Gilles which will take place from 5-9 July 2010 in Amsterdam. In intensive sessions participants will read texts by Deleuze and Deleuze scholars with the help of experienced scholars from different disciplinary fields. The Deleuze camp also includes a student forum in which participants can launch their own ideas and questions. Places are limited.

Participating scholars include:

Ian Buchanan
Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Gregory Flaxman
Eleanor Kaufman
Gregg Lambert
Elena del Rio
James Williams

Registration will open at the beginning of October 2009. Please address your application to Amir Vodka at summerschool@deleuze-amsterdam.nl

The Second International Deleuze Studies Conference

2009-03-25T08:37:00.009Z

The Second International Deleuze Studies Conference

CONNECTdeleuze: TRANSDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

The Department for American Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany

Aug 10-12 2009

The conference aims at building transdisciplinary assemblages that

involve Deleuze in a wider range of thought, i.e. at constructing, from different 'modules of thought,' innovative conceptual arrangements that integrate Deleuzian philosophy into the larger field of contemporary knowledge production and practices of living.

Speakers include:

Brent Adkins, Jeffrey Bell, Réda Bensmaia, Hanjo Berressem, Charlie Blake, Arno Böhler, Ronald Bogue, Mark Bonta, Rosi Braidotti, Ian Buchanan, Didier Debaise, Norbert Finzsch, Colin Gardner, Erika Gaudlitz, Johnny Golding, Paul Harris, Peter Hertz, Jean Hillier, David Holdsworth, Eugene Holland, Gillian Howie, Jan Jagodzinski, Shoshone Johnson, Christian Kerslake, Gregg Lambert, Patricia MacCormack, Erin Manning, David Martin-Jones, Brian Massumi, Philippe Mengue, Luciana Parisi, Patricia Pisters, Arkady Plotnitsky, Bryan Reynolds, Martin E. Rosenberg, Horst Ruthrof, Jac Saorsa, Mirjam Schaub, Henning Schmidgen, Inna Semetsky, Daniel W. Smith, Andreas Speer, Charles Stivale, Kenneth Surin, Laurent de Sutter, Janell Watson, Edward Willatt, Doro Wiese, James Williams

If you are interested in presenting at this conference, submit panel proposals and/or individual abstracts [250 words] to

CONNECTdeleuze@web.de

DEADLINE: Apr 30, 2009 (please include your affiliation and short bio)

Further details can be found at

http://www.pressoffice.uni-koeln.de/

Deleuze and Sex

2009-03-21T09:46:00.012Z

"Making love is not just becoming as one,

or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand."

(Anti-Oedipus)

Deleuze and Sex

A new proposed volume in the Deleuze Connection series for Edinburgh University Press (Series Editor Ian Buchanan). Edited by Frida Beckman.

For Gilles Deleuze, sexuality has a central role in the production of thought, bodies, and becomings. True thought, he argues in Logic of Sense, is possible only when it is liberated from the notion of castration as transcendent law. Castration needs to be thought of, instead, as a crack, a fracture that does not produce a lack but a surface of thought, “projecting the entire corporeal surface of sexuality over the metaphysical surface of thought.” Sexuality, then, is linked closely to the possibility of immanence and thinking; the event of thought. If the transcendent law of castration results in a blockage of thought, it also results in the mastering and moulding of the sexual body into the molar notion of two sexes rather than the (pregenital) Harlequins cloak to which Deleuze compares it. The sexual surfaces of the libido are restricted, blocked, and reduced and thereby their flows are repressed “in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type ‘couple,’ ‘family,’ ‘person,’ ‘objects.’” However, the sexual body is seen to retain a revolutionary potential and sexuality is seen as a source of becoming; there is immense power in the thousand sexes of desiring-machines, in sexuality beyond the “all too human” idea of castration as absence, and in the multiplicity of surfaces that are opened up in its place.

This collection seeks to address the notion of sexuality, not so much as instinct but as creation, not so much as a transcendent mode of organization but as a revolutionary machine. It wants to know the potential of sexuality when liberated from genitality as well as antrophomorphic presuppositions. It is therefore interested in exploring areas such as for example sexuality and the machinic, sexuality and surfaces, and sexuality and animality. It asks about the ontology of sex and how we can begin to know of it when it is no longer captive to molar representations. Investigating the strengths and potentials but also the weaknesses and dangers that sexuality open for thinking, bodies, and becomings, it pursues the ethic, aesthetic, political, and philosophical dimensions of Deleuze’s work on sexuality.

Importantly, contributors should note that this edited collection follows on edited books in the same series focusing on Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Deleuze and Queer Theory, and Deleuze and the Body (forthcoming). While aspects of gender, queer, and the body will be likely, as well as welcome in this new collection, it is crucial that articles focus specifically on the possibilities of sexual practice in the revisiting of such issues.

Abstracts should be submitted electronically to the editor no later than May 1st 2009.

frida.beckman@engelska.uu.se

The proposed publication date is set for autumn of 2010.

CFP: Deleuze and Activism

2009-03-21T09:41:00.008Z

Deleuze and Activism

Cardiff University, Wales, UK

12-13 November, 2009

When Deleuze and Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus they hoped it would be a resource to arms for dissidents and political activists. Rather than set out a program of change, they tried to isolate the political, cultural and economic factors that inhibit change. In so doing they created a work that was instantly recognised as a philosophical watershed. It changed the landscape of political theory in a single sweep. Subsequent works developed this analysis further, creating a formidable armoury of critical tools with which to face a world increasingly indifferent to philosophy. This conference seeks to examine the Deleuzian legacy from the point of view of radical politics. It seeks to analyse both what he and Guattari wrote on the subject and more particularly to see what their writings enable us to say now.

Keynote speakers

Paul Patton
Jeremy Gilbert
Nathan Widder
Ian Buchanan

Convened by Dr Marcelo Svirsky, Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University

For more information, please contact:

svirskym@cardiff.ac.uk

2008-06-25T12:07:00.009Z

Lines of Flight: The Deleuzian Text

‘a fibre strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization’

A One-Day Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference
Friday 5th September 2008

English Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University

Keynote Speaker:

Ian Buchanan, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory in the School of English, Communication, and Philosophy, Cardiff University.

‘It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and the end are points. What is interesting is the middle’ Dialogues II, p.39

For Gilles Deleuze, the real potential of a text lies in process, in its lines of flight. The artist’s ability to take up the ‘interrupted line’ in the middle mobilises a becoming through art, a creation of something new and of endless transformative potential. This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference invites students from the fields of English, Film Studies, Philosophy, Art, Performing Arts, and Cultural Studies to explore how Deleuze’s concept of the ‘line of flight’ opens up new, non-representational readings of the text, offering innovative spaces in which to actualise different art forms and ultimately different lines of thought. The following issues will be investigated:

In what ways do particular art forms operate lines of flight?
How can Deleuze be applied to contemporary texts?
How is his work relevant for literature/film/art today?
How does Deleuze’s work relate to other theoretical paradigms?
How can Deleuze be used to open up new readings of literature?
In an age in which identity politics has become so important, where can Deleuzian theory fit?

Conference fee: £20 (inc. lunch)

CFP Deadline July 15th 2008

For more information, please contact Lucy Prodgers (l.prodgers@student.mmu.ac.uk) or Deleuze Studies (deleuzestudies@mmu.ac.uk)

Please find us on Facebook Groups

2008-05-01T13:23:00.010Z

The First International
Deleuze Studies Conference

“One or Several Deleuzes?”

Cardiff University, Wales
August 11-13, 2008

CFP deadline extended to May 31

Participants include:

Hanjo Berressem
Ronald Bogue
Claire Colebrook
Gary Genosko
Eleanor Kaufman
Janell Watson

Eugene Holland
Dorothea Olkowski
John Protevi
James Williams
Kenneth Surin
Richard Pinhas

Convened by Ian Buchanan,Tom Harman, Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan

The incredible body of research on Deleuze’s work that has emerged in the past two decades - well over 130 books and literally thousands of articles - has created a situation in which it is no longer possible for a lone scholar to keep pace with new developments in the field. As scholars in disciplines as far flung from each other as musicology, organisational studies, philosophy and cultural studies embrace Deleuze this problem grows ever more intractable. Compounding matters further, Deleuze scholarship spans most languages. In the process there has appeared a highly contested variety of Deleuzes - there is the political Deleuze, the apolitical Deleuze, the philosophical Deleuze (who is a Kantian, a Nietzschean, a Spinozist, a Stoic, etc.), the phenomenological Deleuze, the activist Deleuze, and so on. Sponsored by the journal Deleuze Studies, the aim of this conference is to bring all these Deleuzes into communication.

Send panel proposals and abstracts to deleuze@cardiff.ac.uk the deadline for abstracts is 31st May 2008

Registration, accommodation options and program updates will be added to this page.

Graduate Students may also be interested in attending Deleuze Camp 2 - ‘When far too much Deleuze is barely enough!’.

Suely Rolnik on Felix Guattari's Molecular Revolution in Brazil @ Goldsmiths, London, UK

2007-12-03T14:06:00.000Z

The Micropolitics Group (PoCA) will be hosting Suely Rolnik, cultural critic, curator, psychoanalyst and professor at the Universidade Católica de São Paulo, this December and organizing a number of events and meetings around her visit:

Monday, 26 November, 6-8 PM
RHB (Goldsmiths Main Building) Room 141

Suely Rolnik is a cultural critic, curator, psychoanalyst and professor at the Universidade Católica de São Paulo, where she conducts a transdisciplinary doctoral program on contemporary subjectivity. She is co-author with Félix Guattari of Molecular Revolution in Brazil, to be released in English translation by Semiotext next year and Micropolitics: Cartographies of Desire (1986). Most recently Rolnik curated “Lygia Clark. From work to event. We are the mould, it’s up to you to breathe substance into it’, a touring exhibition and catalogue on Clark’s later work. Refusing to simply re-display art works, the exhibition was composed of 63 video interviews with Clark’s friends, acquaintances, students and colleagues about the implications of her experimental, collective projects like the ‘Nostalgia of the Body’ workshops of the early 1970s and the individual therapeutic ‘Structuration of the Self’ sessions she undertook on her return to Rio in 1976.

MICROPOLITICS READING GROUP
Topic: Pimping and Counter–Pimping
In preparation for Suely Rolnik’s visit to Goldsmiths, a session addressing the politics of subjectivation in cultural work. Reading:
Suely Rolnik, ‘The Geopolitics of Pimping’:

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en

Felix Guattari and Suely Rolnik Molecular Revolution in Brazil (forthcoming MIT Semiotexte):
‘Subjectivity and History’ pp.35-178 and ‘Love, territories of desire and a new smoothness’, pp.413-463

http://micropolitics.wordpress.com/text-links/

Wednesday, December 5th 5-7pm
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths
SUELY ROLNIK: PUBLIC LECTURE
Lygia Calling

Thursday December 6th 5-7pm
RHB (Goldsmiths Main Building) 256
SEMINAR with SUELY ROLNIK

Seminar will be based on texts for Reading Group (above), her lecture and thoughts on the forthcoming publication in English of ‘Molecular Revolution in Brazil’, MIT Semiotexte 2007/8

http://micropolitics.wordpress.com/

CFP 'One or Several Deleuzes?' or The First International Deleuze Studies Conference

2007-10-01T16:31:00.000Z

The first international Deleuze Studies conference

'One or Several Deleuzes?'

Cardiff University, Wales, UK

August 11-13, 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS

The incredible body of research on Deleuze's work that has emerged in the past two decades - well over 130 books and literally thousands of articles - has created a situation in which it is no longer possible for a lone scholar to keep pace with new developments in the field. As scholars in disciplines as far flung from each other as musicology, organisational studies, philosophy and cultural studies embrace Deleuze this problem grows ever more intractable.

Compounding matters further, Deleuze scholarship spans most languages. In the process there has appeared a highly contested variety of Deleuzes - there is the political Deleuze, the apolitical Deleuze, the philosophical Deleuze (who is a Kantian, a Nietzschean, a Spinozist, a Stoic, etc.), the phenomenological Deleuze, the activist Deleuze, and so on. Sponsored by the journal Deleuze Studies, the aim of this conference is to bring all these Deleuzes into communication.

Participants include:
Hanjo Berressem
Ronald Bogue
Claire Colebrook
Gary Genosko
Eugene Holland
Dorothea Olkowski
John Protevi
James Williams

Convened by Ian Buchanan
Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan

Send panel proposals and abstracts to buchanani@cardiff.ac.uk

Registration, accommodation options and program updates can be found at:

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/deleuze/index.html

Graduate Students may also be interested in attending next summer's

Deleuze Camp 2: 'When far too much Deleuze is barely enough!'

'The Strange Encounter of Kant and Deleuze.' Saturday July 7th, Greenwich University, London.

2007-05-15T13:00:00.000Z

Greenwich University, Maritime Campus, Old Royal Naval College, London: 10am - 5pm

'My book on Kant is different, I like it very much, I wrote it as a book on an enemy, in it I was trying to show how he works, what his mechanisms are...'
Gilles Deleuze, Letter to Michele Cressole

'Our age is properly the age of critique, and to critique everything must submit.'
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Call For Papers

This conference aims to explore and dramatise the conceptual relations that exist between Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Kant. Deleuze offers us a 'transcendental empiricism' in direct contrast to Kants' 'transcendental idealism' and the combination of their common ground and their stark oppositions makes this a particularly fertile realm of thought. There has been a growing recognition of the importance of the connections between Deleuze and Kant and this conference aims for the first time to place these relations centre stage. We are strongly encouraging both Deleuzian and Kantian scholars to come together in a constructive encounter that has critical importance for the wider philosophical community.

Keynote Session

Dr Paul Davies (Sussex University) and Dr Daniel W. Smith (Purdue University)

Possible topics for papers:

Deleuze's claim to complete the Kantian project through immanent critique.
Kantian Ideas and Deleuze's concept of Problems.
Transcendental idealism and transcendental empiricism.
Deleuze's subversion of Kant's thought - 'fractures', 'breakdowns' and 'discords'.
The development of Kant's thought through his critical period, culminating in his Opus Postumum, and the implications for his relations with Deleuze.
Parallels between Kant's moral theory and Deleuze and Guattari's desiring-production.
Deleuze’s attempt to unify the two senses of the Aesthetic in Kant
The philosophy of Solomon Maïmon in the encounter between Kant and Deleuze.

Submissions of full papers, of no more that 5,000 words, for a delivery time of 40 minutes, are invited on these and other issues involved in Kant and Deleuze's relations. The deadline for submissions is May 31st.

Please e-mail contributions in MS word, Open Office or Abiword format, along with any queries about the conference, to volcaniclines@hotmail.com Please include a 500 word abstract with your submission. We intend to publish an edited collection of papers presented at the conference.
_____________________________________________________
Conference organisers: Matt Lee and Edward Willatt.
Volcanic Lines - Deleuzian research group, an initiative of the Greenwich University Philosophy group.

Cardiff Deleuze Camp 2007 (Fully Booked)

2007-03-17T19:30:00.000Z

The first Deleuze Camp at Cardiff is now fully booked. However, Wendy Lewis, the Camp coordinator, has assured me that it is planned as a yearly event, possibly with a greater intake in subsequent years. For anyone who wants to take a look at the syllabus for this year (to see what you're missing) it's available on the Cardiff University website. In brief, Profs. Claire Colebrook, Ian Buchanan, Dan Smith, Gregg Lambert and Paul Patton will be giving a week of lectures, on Deleuze and the image of thought, colonization, democracy, desire, L'anti-oedipe, sexual difference and more.

Call for papers: The Deleuzian Event at MMU

2007-02-15T18:07:00.000Z

THE DELEUZIAN EVENT: CALL FOR PAPERS
'everything changes, and we change in the event'
(What is Philosophy?)

A/V: Journal of Deleuzian Studies and The English Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University are hosting a two-day weekend conference in Manchester September 8/9 2007.

Inviting the 'creative interference' of insights from art, philosophy, science, psychology and politics, this conference asks how the radical immanence of the event might be both thought and expressed. Input from a wide range of creative perspectives and applications, including Deleuzian-inspired creative practice as well as academic papers, is welcome.

Keynote Speakers include Professor Ian Buchanan (University of Cardiff) and Professor Claire Colebrook (University of Edinburgh).

Abstracts of 300 words and one-page CVs are invited by March 23, 2007.
Conference convenor: Dr Anna Powell
A.Powell@mmu.ac.uk
A/V: Journal of Deleuzian Studies http://www.eri.mmu.ac.uk/deleuze/

Deleuze in Leadership Studies - Martin Wood

2007-02-15T17:35:00.000Z

In January 2007, Dr Martin Wood, of the York Management School, University of York gave a paper in the Philosophy Department of the University of Dundee. The extended abstract for his paper is given below for those who might be interested to look an example of how Deleuzian concepts might operate in an interdisciplinary context. Wood is working on this material individually but also in collaboration with Donna Ladkin who is based in Leadership Studies here at Exeter.

Adventures of Difference in Leadership

Overview
Leadership has secured a dominant place within the contemporary popular imagination. It has also captured the attention of business managers and policy makers in their efforts to ‘engage people’ and to ‘rouse commitment’ to organisational goals (Goffee and Jones, 2000). For academics, the strong modernist desire for identifying ‘leadership’ and ‘leaders’ with all too evident unitary subjects – self-responsible free-agents, possessing a variety of unique powers, attributes and competencies – presents an opportunity to inspect and interrogate the primacy accorded to individual identity and the scant attention paid to the ‘post-individual’ (Lyotard, 1988) and anti-identical possibilities of difference, in leadership theorising.

In this paper I advance a new way genuinely of theorising leadership as ontological difference – an internal qualitative relation in contrast to nothing external (Deleuze, 1994). Speculative theory development has not, historically, been an important aspect of leadership research over the past 30 years and inquiries can often run into difficulties when trying to deal with an uncommon concept such as ‘difference’. One way around this difficulty is to borrow ideas from other fields. I draw substantially – though not exclusively – on the distinctive process thought of Alfred North Whitehead (1978) and Henri Bergson (1983), the radical cultural theory of Gilles Deleuze (1994) and the contemporary political theory of William Connelly (1990; 1991; 1996), to insist on the conceptual advantage difference can have for our understanding of leadership in a fluid, postmodern world.

In order to do this I analyse critically, contemporary theoretical developments in the field, from the finalism of individual leadership identity – preoccupied with the psychology of the individual self – to the interpersonal relations between identity and non-identity – a set of mechanistic differences, which are often fixed, regulated, or excluded, perniciously, as Other – the Other being all identities which are not leadership, or, rather, which are not the leader’s identity. Second, in order to explore and tolerate alternative conceptions, the proposal contends not so much that leadership identity establishes itself in discrete relation to a set of negative differences, but that difference in itself (Deleuze, 1994) can be seen, from the very outset, as a basic property of leadership, as its necessary vitalism (Bergson, 1983).

Leaders are distinguished often from most people by their talents, their accomplishments, and their personality characteristics. Some of these characteristics, qualities, and abilities are listed as if to fill followers with longing, desire and envy that in turn require regulation, control, denial, or exclusion. This leads inexorably to the perpetual subordination of difference to identity in ways that reinforce rather than challenge traditional representations of leadership. Certainly, attempts to secure an idealised concept of the attitudes and behaviours required of leaders have been widely adopted as a basis for contemporary management selection, education and development. Personal qualities, attitudes and behaviours, such as self-belief, -awareness, -management, -improvement, and personal integrity are held up consistently as exemplars, archetypes or ‘standards’ of behaviour (Bolden and Gosling, 2006; Bolden, Wood and Gosling, 2006). Nonetheless, this preoccupation with the monitoring, regulation and normalisation of individual functioning is criticised for being reductionist, fragmenting the management role rather than representing it as an integrated whole (Bolden and Gosling, 2006).

In response, we often hear that leadership is about being followed, or that leadership is not just a quality in the leader but, more importantly, it is a quality that resonates among the led. The idea of a socially ‘negotiated’ leadership role proceeds from a system of discrete identity-seeking and identity-fixing leader-member exchanges (Graen and Scandura, 1987), which is preoccupied, amongst other things, with the relation between self and other; leader and follower. Nonetheless, when these discrete exchanges reach completion they re-establish an image of leadership as independent from any relations with others.

Seeing the leadership role as obtaining in a perfectly definite sense from a set of abstract exchanges between individual social actors is to commit, unwittingly, the error of mistaking abstract constructions for substantial processes – the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead, 1925). Put differently, the danger is that of lapsing into representations of leadership’s superordinate identity (for example, certain admired or endorsed characteristics) as different from a subordinate identity external to it. As a consequence, leadership identity is re-established in mutually exclusive terms, which are seen usually from one side only – self not other, leader not follower. In other words, difference remains subordinate to identity’s superordinance. Yet it is precisely the tension between these analytical divisions and categorical imperatives that forces us to acknowledge their inseparability – that is to say, not only self and leader but also other and follower. Such recognition does not essentialise identities, or relations between binary terms, which are outside of each other. Instead it calls to mind the double existence (immanence) of leadership in one term and the other.

In a world of grey zones, transgressions, and unstable ground, the task is to theorise leadership in ways that enable us to think a concept of difference without it being subordinated to identity. The instability or lack of certainty often associated with postmodern theories challenges the concept of the leader as a purposive, consistent and masterful figure and its inadequacy for the functioning of ‘leadership’. The potential dissonance between accepted meanings and characteristics associated with an individual leader’s self-identity and our brute experience of leadership requires new insight and different options. New insight and a different option are far removed from identity’s established common ground. Instead, leadership is affirmed as the positive difference between agent-fixing propositions, as an inseparable variation within the terms, actors, identities, themselves (Wood, 2005).

To say that leadership is afirmed in difference is to invoke interdependence more at the level of an a priori characteristic and to accept difference as ontologically preceding identity. Each leader’s self-identity actually has two dimensions and is grasped only in terms of both, as the relation between terms, where the terms not only refer but also defer to one another consistently. We can say that leadership is this difference. It is not a function, characteristic, or property of a taken-for-granted self-identity, nor something to be entered into as an external relation between individual social actors, whose individuality can exist without the relation, but rather as an effect of difference-in-itself.

Exeter Deleuzians / Deleuze Summer Camp

2007-02-15T01:22:00.000Z

The University of Exeter's bid to inaugurate 'A Deleuze Society' continues to require your support. In order to register with the student's guild we require an inaugural 25. Whilst we have received a fantastic amount of interest since suggesting the society last autumn, we nonetheless remain two or three individuals short of our 'becoming-official'. Please contact Tim Matts in the Department of English or Laura Cull in Drama for details (timmatts494@hotmail.com, or lkc202@exeter.ac.uk).

Exeter students and staff who have thus far expressed interest are:

Joanie Willett (PhD Political Theory)
Taihei Hanada (PhD English)
Laura Cull (PhD Drama)
Luke Kennard (PhD English)
Michelle Lisa Parslow (PhD English)
Steve Harris (PhD English)
Robin Dunford (BA Philosophy and Politics)
James King (MA English)
Simon Townsend (MA Political Theory)
Nauelle Lecheualier-Bekadar (MA English)
Tim Matts (PhD English)
Matt Hayler (MA Creative Writing)
Anne-Flore Laloe (PhD Geography)
Katie-Jane Hext (PhD English)
Andrew Patch (PhD Film)
Caroline A. Greene (PhD English)
Gregg Redner (PhD Film)
Natasha ? (PhD English)
Mike ? (PhD English)
Komkrit Chooruang (PhD Engineering)
Chun Mai-Tsai (MA Finance and Accounting)

Dr. Robin Durie (Politics)
Anthony Fothergill (English)
Dr. Mark Whalan (English)

Again, please contact either Tim Matts or Laura Cull if your details are in any way incorrect or incomplete, and please encourage any friends or colleagues who may harbour curiosity about Deleuze's work to pass on their details.

In the meantime, any of you who might be available this coming summer for an extended introduction to Deleuze should approach The School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, where Prof Ian Buchanan will be convening a Deleuze summer camp in August of this year. Ian is one of the world's leading Deleuzians and has published extensively on the implications of Deleuze for literature and popular culture. Please see below for details.

Deleuze Summer Camp 2007
(@ Cardiff University)

A Summer School for postgraduate students interested in the work of Gilles Deleuze.

Who? Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, Gregg Lambert, Paul Patton and Daniel W. Smith.

What? A hectic combination of lectures, seminars, and workshops on the work of Gilles Deleuze led by some of the most important Deleuze scholars writing today. The full schedule will be uploaded soon.

Where? The Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University (Cardiff, Wales UK).

When? August 20 to August 24 2007. (Cut-off date for enrolment is June 29, 2007)

How much? £100 all inclusive for all lectures, seminars and workshops. Does not include meals or accommodation.

Contact? Professor Ian Buchanan buchanani@cardiff.ac.uk or +44 (0)29 2087 5619

Book Discount for Campers

2007-02-14T14:52:00.000Z













Dear Campers,

I thought you might like to know, I've done a deal
with Continuum Books to make Deleuze and Guattari's
Anti-Oedipus available to you at a knock down price.

Cheers,

Ian Buchanan