Edimburgh University Press
Series editor Ian Buchanan

What might emerge from an encounter between Deleuze and design? From a Deleuzian mapping of the relays between and blockages of the flows of theory and practice? Where the practices of design and philosophy can creatively affect each other?
Deleuze and Design is the first book to interrogate the theory and practice of design through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Beginning with an investigation of how the field of design is currently mutating, this book suggests an open-ended definition of design reflecting design’s own entanglement with the practice of ‘making worlds’ and ‘creating futures’. Taken as a force, a disruption and a process, design will be examined insofar as it is the material expression of possible worlds.
Whether products or scenarios, packaging or experiences, objects or digital platforms, services or territories, organizations and strategies, design is here taken in its broadest sense as a profoundly disruptive force, constituted in the multiform entanglement of practices, discourses, industry agendas, lifestyles and behaviours, thus optimally positioned to offer a stringent critique of how the emergence of complex relationships between human and non human agencies elicit affects, tells stories and ultimately make us think by doing.
To design means always to engage with what is not-yet but could be. To design means to engage with the new, the possible, the potential. Design is not however a mere matter of futureforecasting or problem-solving. Rather, it is about turning imagination into reality. Thus, the present emerges as the embodiment of a thought. Design possesses an extraordinary quality: it is project that keeps on designing, it keeps on giving visible, tangible shape to the material world we inhabit.
Every designed object contains in itself the seeds of future practices and future behaviours.
Furthermore, design as a targeted expressive and creative act is constantly crossing the boundary between chaos and equilibrium in its drive to partiality and critique.
Can we investigate and reconceptualise design’s own prehension into the future with Deleuze’s theoretical corpus? What are the tensions between a creative philosophy intended as the practice of creating new concepts and the practice, discourse and theory of design as the field not simply of innovation but of the creation of the future? What can the principles and practices of design offer a material philosophy of partial critique?
Deleuze’s formidable thought can be taken on board by design, not as a fulminous theoretical fad to be shortly outmoded, but as a slow releasing arsenal of tools to think with, and to inform, the process of thing-making. Ideas on the relations between the actual and the virtual, the becoming else of matter, the material realities of expressing a creative, critical position, the mapping of horizontal networks of strategic opportunities and the affects elicited by the utterly relational kinship of bodies and objects, all can benefit by a reconceptualization based on Deleuze’s philosophy.
In particular, Deleuze’s idea that philosophy is creative and revolutionary precisely because it is always creating new concepts deeply resonates with the demands and the agenda of design, always engaged with thinking about the not-yet. Even more pertinent to design is Deleuze’s affirmation that new concepts should be both necessary and unfamiliar, as well as being a response to real problems.
If to design means always to engage with the making of the new, design then is a powerful perspective on the future, a lens through which we can catch a glimpse of what is not-yet but might, could be. Indeed, for some design theorists we have a future only by design (Fry 2009). But design is not only a reality-building, world-making project. It is also a vector intersecting a multiplicity of other forces–political, economical, social, cultural, experiential, institutional–and as a force it participates to the construction of the future. It is not the future in itself but participates in its creation; it is not an event in itself but participates in its generation.
A (by no means exhaustive) list of possible topics:
• Designing systems
• Designing experiences
• Design as social innovation/social enterprise
• A Deleuzian take on critical/speculative design
• Relationship with objects/status of object? assemblage
• Ethology/affect/encounters/affordance…
• Deleuze and design research
• Design and the future
• Design and becoming/the becoming of design
• A Deleuzian account of prototypying
• The ethic role of designers
• Design as social practice
• Design and sustainability
• Design and…and…and.. a new paradigm to think at design with
• Design of embodiment
• Design of subjectivity
• Conceptual design. Design thinking
• Design as a political agenda
• Design and posthumanism, a new paradigm to think things with
• Design and circulation, monitoring and capture of affect
• Design and control
• Design pedagogy
• Design and inter/trans/infradisciplinarity
• Design, disruption & partial critique
• Creative networks
Paper proposals may be submitted to
Betti Marenko b.ma...@csm.arts.ac.uk by 23rd March 2012.
Proposals should include CV, contact information, and a preliminary abstract of 300 words or less.
Full papers by 23rd August 2012
Editors
Dr Betti Marenko
Senior Lecturer
Contextual Studies Leader, BA (Hons.)
Product Design
Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design
University of the Arts, London
b.ma...@csm.arts.ac.uk
+44(0)20 7514 7102
Dr Jamie Brassett FHEA FRSA
MA Course Director & Subject Leader
Innovation Management
The Innovation Centre
Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design
University of the Arts London
j.br...@csm.arts.ac.uk
+44(0)20 7514 7907

March 20th, 2012 - 10:54am

CALL FOR ENTRIES

We are now inviting entries for short artists’ films, moving image works and feature films. This year’s festival will be ‘traversing the wild’ exploring our relationship with the natural world, how we move through the landscape, how landscape might move within us. Our open submissions strand has a focus on experimental short film and moving image work, though narrative films that show strong relevance to our theme are also most welcome.

Submit online at

http://www.alchemyfilmfestival.org.uk/2012_submissions/

Submissions are free and we welcome all film and digital video formats.

Submission deadline: 10 June 2012

Please help us by spreading the word among your networks.

http://www.facebook.com/alchemyfilmfestival

http://www.alchemyfilmfestival.org.uk

March 6th, 2012 - 16:22pm

We require chapters (8,000 words), written by specialist
… researchers, on the following topics: 

> analytic philosophers on film as philosophy
> continental philosophers on film-philosophy
> philosophers of aesthetics on the philosophy of film
> film theorists to write on film philosophy

If you have a position on any of these (including variations of), then please send a short chapter abstract to us, together with a brief bio note or link. Chapters won’t be required for some time. Send abstracts and enquires to both editors: Felicity Colman <feli...@gmail.com> and Colin Gardner <coli...@cox.net>

February 21st, 2012 - 11:44am

Geophilosophies of Masculinity: Re-mapping gendered configurations of politics, aesthetics and knowledge

Themed edition of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Edited by Anna Hickey-Moody & Timothy Laurie, The University of Sydney

“The concept is not object but territory. It does not have an Object but a territory. For that very reason it has a past form, a present form and, perhaps, a form to come” (Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy? 1996: 101)

Knowledges are generated by located cultural formations embedded in particular historical trajectories. Our special edition of Angelaki builds on the suggestion ‘the concept is not object but territory’
through positing material-cultural geographies of masculinity as the sites in which thought is created. Such forms of thought are, we argue, necessarily gendered and the products of gendered cultures. We are specifically interested in ways in which lived cultures of masculinity might be read as offering means for understanding men and masculinities articulated across political formations, aesthetic practices and institutionalized systems of thought. Three specific disciplinary axes of analysis are suggested through which to explore these trajectories: performance studies, continental philosophy (especially Deleuze and Guattari’s work), and critical race theory.
As editors, we are interested in contributions that consider cultural formations ranging from local performance spaces and working environments to global demarcations of masculinised territories, such as the nation-State or the “Western” hemisphere. We are interested in the ways in which different social boundaries and cultural economies are made and remade through articulations of masculinity and the extent to which such re-mappings can (or can not) be read as constitutive of thought.

An imperative driving this project is an interest in how cultural geography and masculinity studies might offer conceptual resources for scholars working in continental philosophy. Specifically, we are interested in how the examination of political and aesthetic terrains involved in the formation of masculinities, hegemonic or otherwise, might be mapped onto the field of continental philosophy. As such, the editors encourage a focus on the political implications and/or methodological consequences of poststructuralist approaches to masculinities, especially perspectives on the possible limitations of continental philosophical thinkers within more applied disciplines or fields of inquiry. To this end, articles utilizing models of thought generated within masculinity studies to reconsider or critique Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and/or the work of other continental philosophers, are welcomed. We also invite contributions that draw on continental philosophy to interrogate literature from the field of masculinity studies.

Contributors are invited to explore specific geographies of masculinities as thought-machines. As suggested above, there are three areas in which we would like to locate contributions:

• Cultures of performance, music, dance and visual arts,
including (ethico)aesthetic approaches to masculinities within artworks or performances, but also extending to the gendered dynamics of artistic production, consumption and/or reception.

• Cultures of scholarship, including the institutional
politics of masculinity studies, the impact of masculinities on research practices and publishing, and the take-up of psychoanalysis and post-structuralism within gender studies. We welcome contributions that explore the gender dynamics of knowledge production within specific university environments and/or in the context of global knowledge production. This work might also develop Alice Jardine’s response to Deleuze and Guattari in the context of gendered research environments.

• Masculinity and geographies of race, including the formation
of masculine identities, stereotypes and spaces along racial and ethnic lines, or within racially “marked” diasporic communities. This could also include considerations of masculinities within anthropology, migration studies and critical race studies.

Contributors are also invited to consider the constitutive relationship to femininity performed through the masculinities under consideration.

About the editors:

Dr. Anna Hickey-Moody is a lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at Sydney University. Anna has a background in performance studies, youth studies and education. She is co-author of Masculinity beyond the Metropolis (Palgrave, 2006), co-editor of Deleuzian Encounters (Palgrave, 2007) and author of Unimaginable Bodies (Sense, 2009).

Timothy Laurie is a PhD Candidate in Gender and Cultural Studies at Sydney University. His thesis examines theories of cultural economy, focusing on issues of race, ethnicity and gender in the US and UK music industries 1958-1990. He has published on Gilles Deleuze and music criticism, and has a forthcoming book-chapter on Deleuze and Afrofuturism. He is currently researching Anglo-Saxonism and the gender politics of heritage in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.

Submission Details:
Abstracts of 500-750 words should be submitted in electronic format to the editors by March 31st 2012. This special issue of Angelaki is scheduled for publication in spring 2013. This means that completed papers should be with the issue editors no later than September 25th 2012. Papers will then be circulated to external referees and depending on their feedback, papers will be amended or accepted by the deadline of November 20th 2012.

Length: 5,000 -10,000 words.

Queries on this special issue may be addressed to both the issue
editors:
Anna Hickey-Moody anna...@sydney.edu.au Timothy Laurie tlau...@gmail.com

Work accepted for development in this special issue must conform to the Modern Language Association Handbook for Writers of Research Papers ( http://www.facebook.com/l/6AQGE7S6WAQFOYKv_CxmCIhx-_N-vdAKoA4zjMcqp6ToSyA/www.mla.org).
Manuscripts should be original in content and not published, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Manuscripts are not returned.

February 9th, 2012 - 17:08pm

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and Moving Image<http://goog_2091948534/> <http://cjpmi.ifl.pt/> invites submissions for its 3rd issue.

Submission deadline: 15 February, 2012 (abstracts)

The third issue of Cinema<http://cjpmi.ifl.pt/> takes up the theme of embodiment and the body, its relationship to cinema’s history (theory and practice), and its reawaken in a recent body of research attentive, not only to film, but also to video and to new media. In the last few years, creative and theoretical work have focused in the body, either as phenomenological encounter immersed in everyday practices, or as a material process made of fluids, energies and forces, arguing, in both cases, that cinema is a ‘cinema of lived experience’ and/or of ‘sensation’ where the intellectual, mental and cognitive processes must be understood as embodied and carnal. At a time when the rhetoric of disembodiment and the virtual is becoming deeply questioned by flourishing issues on the moving image’s sensuous and haptics qualities, cinema as sensation, cinema of the body, etc., all these theorizations are, on the other hand, faced with  particularly challenging issues that spring  from new media practices, avatars and their prospective future: our changing concept of human body and of its relationship to mind and consciousness which is questioning the traditional mind/body divide.

This issue of Cinema<http://cjpmi.ifl.pt/> calls for examinations of these issues in all its forms, in contexts including and beyond film. The editor welcomes innovative approaches that might address (but should not be limited to) the following themes:

*   Cinema and the senses

*   Cinema and the body

*   Cinema as sensation

*   Cinema as a materially-embodied structure

*   Cinema as a physical shock

*   Haptic/optic visuality

*   Critics to ocularcentrism

*   Moving Images and the ‘logics of sensation’

*   New media and new cinematic experiences

*   The embodied/disembodied debate and the moving images

*   New media and the Posthuman body

*   Embodied cognition

*   Technology, art and body

*   The virtual/actual

*   Cyborgs, avatars.

The submission deadline is 15 February 2012 (for 500-word abstracts). Prospective authors should submit a short CV along with the abstract. A selection of authors will be invited to submit full papers according to the journal guidelines. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee publication, since all papers will be subject to double blindpeer-review. Submissions are accepted in Portuguese and English (and in French and Spanish, but only from native speakers of these languages).

Cinema also invites submissions to its special sections: interviews, conference reports, and book reviews. For further details, please consult the journal’s web site<http://cjpmi.ifl.pt/>

Feel free to contact the editor for this issue, Patrícia Castello Branco<mailto:pscbranco@fcsh.unl.pt> on specific queries, or  Sérgio Dias Branco, and Susana Viegas, with general queries at cjpmi@fcsh.unl.pt<mailto:cjpmi@fcsh.unl.pt>.

January 16th, 2012 - 13:24pm

Institut Francais & Cine Lumiere, London, UK May 25th-26th 2012 (dates to be confirmed)

“There is a power inherent in the false: the positive power of ruse, the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking one’s life force.”

(Brian Massumi, REALER THAN REAL, The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari)

This two-day symposium addresses the complex ethics of the manipulation of real people and events in documentary, fact-fiction hybrid cinema and artists’ moving image.  Through close readings and screenings of contemporary and historical films that deliberately falsify actuality, the Powers of the False symposium will ask, can there be an ethic of falsification in the encounter between filmmaker and subject? How can we document something whose truth has many sides or may be inscrutable? Is the act of documenting always inevitably performative?  The symposium will also examine instances where the subjects of films have deliberately deceived filmmakers. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s theories of minor cinema and his term ‘powers of the false’, the symposium will turn to other philosophers too, to approach its central conceptual and ethical questions, including Levinas’ philosophy of alterity.

Academic research methods regard most filmmaking practices as unethical, particularly documentary filmmaking because of its direct encounter with actuality. The principles of consent for sociological research are anathema to factual film production, because total editorial control can never be given to the subjects. Instead, prior-consent is necessary. Moving image artists tend to disregard contributor consent forms and often freely intervene in the lives of their subjects. The activity of filmmaking is clearly predisposed to manipulation, and film productions inexorably produce alteration and change. Powers of the False looks at filmmaking as a site for performing difference and as a manipulative and coercive agency. When and for what reason is forgery, manipulation and deception conceptually motivated, even ethically necessary? How are we as human subjects changed by filming and by being filmed?

Topics may include:

* Inventing the past and fictionalising the present in the factual film; ethno-fiction.

* Staged events and re-enactments.

* Instances where filmmakers have deliberately delayed, intervened in, or given testimony in legal proceedings, or have broken the law.

* Films that have to come to light as true/false over time; film hoaxes.

* Films where authorship has been shared with, or passed over to, a subject.

* Films where the subject has manipulated the filmmaker.

* Films that have significantly altered personal or historical events, whether positively or negatively.

* Directionless films guided by an encounter with a subject.

* The docudrama, the drama-documentary, the mock-documentary and the cinematic essay.

* Iterations of subjectivity within the factual frame, recollection images, use of free indirect discourse.

Suggested artists and filmmakers for consideration as topics of discussion include Jean Rouch, Chantal Ackerman, Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Chris Marker, Abbas Kiarostami, Errol Morris, Nick Broomfield, Ulrich Seidl, Andrew Kötting, Ben Hopkins, Clio Barnard. This list is by no means exhaustive.

The papers and short film/video works presented over the weekend will be edited into a published collection of essays (accompanied by a DVD).

Please email abstracts for papers or films no more than 20 minutes in length by Dec 1st 2011, attn of:

Steven Eastwood  (University of East London): eastwood@uel.ac.uk<mailto:eastwood@uel.ac.uk>

Catherine Wheatley (Kings College London): catherine.wheatley@kcl.ac.uk<http://kcl.ac.uk>

Powers of the False symposium supported by The University of East London and Kings College London

September 29th, 2011 - 12:02pm

May 18, 2012–May 21, 2012
Henan University,
Kaifeng, Henan, China

Keynote Speakers:

Anne Sauvagnargues (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, France)

Ronald Bogue (University of Georgia, USA)

Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht University, Netherlands)

Brian Massumi (Université de Montréal)

Invited Speakers:

Paul Patton (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Daniel W. Smith (Purdue University, USA)
Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Ian Buchanan (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Manola Antonioli (École Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Valenciennes, France)
Kim Sang-Hwan (Seoul National University, South Korea)
Chan-Woong Lee (Ewha Womans University, South Korea)
Timothy O’Leary (Hong Kong University)
Gao Jihai (Henan University, China)
Du Xiaozhen (Peking University, China)
Wang Minan (Beijing Foreign Languages University, China)
Jiang Yuhui (East China Normal University, China)

2012 Kaifeng International Deleuze Conference, hosted by College of Foreign Languages, Henan University, will be held in Kaifeng City, a famous ancient capital city of seven dynasties. We invite participation by Chinese and international scholars. This conference will provide an opportunity for Chinese and international scholars to exchange ideas around the work of Gilles Deleuze. Topics include:
1. Interpretation of important Deleuzian concepts;
2. Deleuze and cinema, art, philosophy, painting, literature, politics, music, religion, architecture, etc.;
3. Deleuze and other poststructuralist philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, etc.;
4. Deleuze and psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, Guattari;
5. Developing and transcending Deleuze: the application of Deleuzian ideas in Arts and Humanities disciplines in China and throughout the world.
We welcome individual abstracts as well as panel proposals from scholars both at home and abroad. An English version of the abstract is required for domestic scholars and scholars from other non-English speaking countries: it should be between 300 to 500 words. Keynote speeches (40-55 minutes) will be in English and Chinese with simultaneous translation. Those interested in participating in the conference should send a title, keywords and abstract to 2012...@gmail.com before October, 31, 2011. Those interested in proposing panel topics should send panel proposals to 2012...@gmail.com before October 31, 2011. Attendance at the conference will be limited so a selection will be made on the basis of abstracts submitted. Papers selected will be notified by December 1st 2011. The deadline for full conference papers (20-25 minutes) is March 15, 2012.
Conference fee: 150€, with half discount for MA and PhD candidates. Early birds will enjoy a 20% discount if paid before December 31, 2011. The conference fee will include meals, but not accommodation and other individual expenses. Excursions to Shaolin Temple will cost another 30€, and visits to Kaifeng City another 10€.
Conference Schedule:
Registration: May 18, 2012 (8 a.m.-8 p.m.);
Conference Sessions: May 19 until May 20 or 21 (depending on the number of participants), 2012;
Tours around Kaifeng City and excursions to Shaolin Temple will be available during the last two days.
Information on Shaolin Temple is available at:
http://www.travelchinaguide.co​m/attraction/henan/luoyang/son​gshan_shaolin.htm.
Accommodation: We have arranged for discounted offers at Zhongzhou International Jinming Hotel, which is within Jinming Campus of Henan University:
Standard room (two persons) costs 20€ each per night (including breakfast)
Small suite costs 50€ per night (including breakfast)
Luxurious suite costs 80€ per night (including breakfast)
The rooms will be arranged by Henan University.
The Board of Organizing Committee:
Chairman: Prof. Paul Patton (University of New South Wales, Australia);
Vice Chairmen: Prof. Chen Yongguo (Tsinghua Univerisity, China) and Prof. Gao Jihai (Henan University) ;
Executive Assistants: Dr. Yin Jing, Dr. Zhang Jinghui, (Henan University).
For further inquiries, please contact
Dr. Yin Jing,
College of Foreign Languages
Henan University
85 Minglun Street,
Kaifeng, Henan, 475001, P. R. China.
Email: 2012...@gmail.com (preferred)
For further information, please contact Yin Jing at: 2012...@gmail.com, or visit the conference website which will be available shortly.

College of Foreign Languages, Henan University
People’s Republic of China
July 18, 2011

July 22nd, 2011 - 12:42pm

The prestige of Alphonso Lingis as a translator and his very personal philosophical voice may explain why the philosophical community has not yet recognized the radical reorientation of phenomenology that has been taking shape under Lingis’ pen for the last twenty years.   Our hope is that by dedicating our first issue of Singularum to his invention of another phenomenology, this oversight can be corrected, and a new appreciation or education of the senses can get underway.

What distinguishes Lingis’ phenomenology is his resistance both to the theoretical bias of phenomenology’s Husserlian roots and to the pragmatic bias of phenomenology’s Heideggerian developments. His ambition, as he puts it, is to “elaborate a phenomenology of the levels upon which things take form, the kinds of space, the sensuous elements, and the night.” (The Imperative 1998, p. 5)  This is another phenomenology.  A phenomenology that resists the pragmatic reading of our experience that we owe to Heidegger and to many of his American interpreters trained by Hubert Dreyfus.  The sensuous elements of the earth beckon us to sensual arousal.  They draw us from the comfortable worlds organized by our practical posture to the dangers and delights of the sensual earth revealed to a dissolute posture.

Lingis moves toward the sensual earth along two not quiet differentiable dimensions, which might once have been called the phenomenologies of the body and of language.  Along both dimensions Lingis’ other phenomenology explores the earth in advance of its organization by the practical purposes of our linguistic and perceptual lives.  The sensual elements of the earth should not be confused with Heidegger’s dark romantic earth, twinned as it is with the world, nor should it be confused with potting soil.  Lingis’ earth is alive with the activity of sensual elements.  What Levinas called the elemental.

This other phenomenology is a phenomenology of levels, and what the more familiar phenomenology recognizes as the lived body is here presented simply as how our worlds organize when our sensory-motor activities follow the directives of the beckoning level.  Lingis is interested in something else: “we set out to recover a substantive conception of our bodies given to excitement and lust.” (Sensation, 1996, p. x)  As Lingis tells the story, we can enjoy our bodies in this other way when we move levels, the passage between the levels.  It is at this point that Lingis’ work resonates with what Deleuze, in his appreciation of Francis Bacon, called the logic of sensation.

What are levels? Levels are understood in terms of relations of forces and qualities that emanate from things, as imperatives or directives. This helps to initiate an aesthetics, “beauty is imperative”, and an ethics, “emotions are also forces”, forces of the earth or the sensuous. (Trust 2004: 111; Dangerous Emotions 2000: 16) Furthermore, it points in the direction of a philosophy of nature congruent with the insight, which we owe to Deleuze and Guattari, that the true nature is unnatural.  The unnatural here figuring itself as the trans-substantiating passage between levels.

Lingis’ well-known itinerancy, his wandering wonders, are not, therefore, ancillary to, but a condition of, his philosophy. “The nomad is summoned not by distant things fixed on one equator, but by multiple spaces, multiple ordinances.” (The Imperative, 1998: 116) Lingis writes, as a philosopher, from the earth he explores. His descriptions, the simple cadence of his prose, attest to his corporeal encounters, encounters that traverse philosophy itself. In the conclusion to Gilles Deleuze’s short presentation at Cerisy-la-Salle, Nomadic Thought, Deleuze inspires “who are today’s nomads, who are today’s Nietzscheans?” (Desert Islands and Other Texts, 2004: 260) Our response is direct: Alphonso Lingis.

We imagine an issue of Singularum provoking, at last, an attempt to understand Lingis’ difference in phenomenology, and the difference this phenomenology of levels makes to Lingis’ appreciation of aesthetics, education, ethics, ontology, and perception.

Please send your submissions, due August 1st, to: hello@singularum.com

April 26th, 2011 - 08:30am



March 30th, 2011 - 13:21pm

March 30th, 2011 - 13:20pm