Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ is going to be important in my PhD for thinking about ‘appropriation’.
A friend in Sydney is assembling a symposium on assemblage. There will be speakers on such topics as ‘minor literature’, cultural industries and (post-)subcultures.
The details, including date, are yet to be fixed, and it will be something of an underground event i.e. outside of academia and with little publicity. If you’re interested in participating (as a speaker or punter) please let me know.
March 26th, 2006 at 8:42 pm - Edit
Am I allowed to go along and whinge about how annoying Deleuze & Guattari are?
March 26th, 2006 at 9:38 pm - Edit
Sure, as long as your criticisms are well-informed (I’d expect nothing less from you).
It took me a long time to become interested in D&G (I mainly knew of D through ‘Nietzsche & Philosophy’ and the ‘Cinema’ books) but I’m finding them increasingly useful for thinking about culture & politics. ‘Assemblage’ (from my limited understanding of it) resonates with some of the ways I think about how ‘appropriation’ works. It’s something that I want to explore further.
Nevertheless I (like you, I suspect) remain sceptical of cultural theory that isn’t empirically based. But so much of culture and politics is based on illusion and irrationality (or escapes calculation) - that suggests that the cultural theorists may be on to something! ;) In any case, I’m with Eagleton in thinking that much of this (esp French) theory is art in another form - and that’s OK, there are still lots of insights to be found.
March 27th, 2006 at 2:16 am - Edit
Annoying?!?! Do you mean deleuzians or D&G themselves? ;)
Are they annoying because they are useful/useless?
March 27th, 2006 at 10:33 am - Edit
After avoiding them for quite a while, I eventually spent quite a bit of time with D&G and the concept of the ‘refrain’, or ‘ritornell’, while working on my honours thesis last year. I was quite suspicious of their work because of its popularity at the moment and the number of armchair theorists I have come across in the digital arts world who mumble incomprehensibly about D&G with clearly no substantial thought beyond the adoption of nice little catchphrase like ‘ritornell’ or assemblage. However, the ‘ritornell’ pops up again and again in the digital arts theory world, and particularly in debates around post-digital aesthetics, so I thought I should at least investigate and upon doing so did find D&G incredibly useful and thought provoking and useful. All of that said, I have always believed that such post-structuralist thought exists as a project of philosophy as creative endevour. D&G provide a flexible catalyst for further thought that can be mapped to almost anything and should not be considered in anyway overarching or ‘truthful’.
March 27th, 2006 at 12:44 pm - Edit
“I was quite suspicious of their work because of its popularity at the moment and the number of armchair theorists I have come across in the digital arts world who mumble incomprehensibly about D&G with clearly no substantial thought beyond the adoption of nice little catchphrase like ‘ritornell’ or assemblage.”
ha!
from my work-in-progress PhD (the wark reference may not be right cause I have a word doc version of the book, plus ‘digital capitalism’ is a footnoted reference to Zizek’s description of Deleuze as “an apologist for digital capitalism”):
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Their last co-authored text together sought to wrest the practice of creating concepts from “computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication� (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 10). Cultural Studies has always walked a fine line between being complicit in “digital capitalism� and taking a critical stance towards it. Worse is the prospect of authoring a text that is thoroughly ‘Deleuzian’ for the sake of a scholarly cultural industry, as McKenzie Wark writes:
Among other things, philosophy is a tool to be used to escape from the commodification of information as communication, but only when it escapes the commodification of knowledge as education as well. […] [Deleuze and Guattari’s] version of escape from history can easily take on an aristocratic form, a celebration of singular works of high modernist art and artifice. These in turn are all too easily captured by the academic and cultural marketplace, as the designer goods of the over-educated. D+G all too easily become the intellectual’s Dolce and Gabbana. (Wark, 2004: 283, fn. xix)
In a book co-authored with Deleuze, Claire Parnet railed against such “relationships of force� that combined writing practices with the cultural industry, or as she put it “writers or intellectuals have passed into the service of journalists, or become the servants of journalists, journalists of themselves� (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 26-27). It is ironic that Deleuzian enthusiasts are serviced by an academic or scholarly cultural industry in such a fashion that is not dissimilar to the way enthusiasts of modified-car culture have their constant supply of publications, scandals, and festive events. Perhaps, critically speaking, some aspects of Cultural Studies come from the other side of the coin, that is, as Theodor Adorno might have said, from the “intellectualization of amusement� (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1996: 143)?
March 30th, 2006 at 1:07 am - Edit
(a lot of the key solo texts from Deleuze especially were published in English after or around the same time as Levy’s book). Did Levy actually read the introduction to What is Philosophy?!?!?! Here is my extract and extended comments (orig. postedhere). : — Their last co-authored text together sought to wrest the practice of creating concepts from “computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communicationâ€? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 10). Cultural Studies