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The machinic city investigates the role of performance art to help us reflect on contemporary urban living, as human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban fabric. This is illustrated by several case studies on performance art interventions from artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life and to speculate on its future. As cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, the performative potential of the aesthetic machine is analysed, as it assembles with media, Capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is analysed through its different – design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city, which consists of assemblages of efficient and not-so-efficient machines. The machinic city pays particular attention to participation, describing how digitally mediated performance art interventions in urban space foreground different modes of subjectivity emerging from human and machine hybrids. This highlights the importance of dissensus as a constitutive factor of urban life and as a means of countering machinist determinism in present and future conceptualisations of city life.
hedonist impulses, A/traverso experimented with proto-punk graphics that reflected an innovative idea of language which was imbued with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The title of the magazine can be translated as ‘through’, ‘going through’ or ‘crossing over’. It refers to the concept of transversalité, which was developed by Guattari in order to seek alternative ways of understanding the notion of subjectivity, as well as to move beyond the duality between the verticality of hierarchical groups and horizontal forms of self-organisation that end in
sense of advocating egalitarian transformations in social organisation without being affiliated to the Communist Party or other long-standing socialist political structures. Several of the leading names of French anti- or radical psychiatry, especially Jean Oury, Félix Guattari and Maud Mannoni, had a personal connection with Lacan. The Lacan connection helps explain how Dolto, too, came into contact with thinkers whose political orientation was very different from the Catholic, holistic, anti-communist direction of Psyché
fact that whilst Nagel believed that we are unable to imagine what it is like for a bat to be a bat, he did concede we might instead behave as a bat behaves. 8 In each of the aforementioned works, Coates imitates various non-human animal behaviours with the aim of experiencing the world as a fox, a stoat or a bird, employing a makeshift and comic aesthetic that serves to highlight the absurdity – and even the impossibility – of the task the artist has set himself. Whereas the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix
rather as agents of micropolitical disorientation in societies where different forms of macropolitical segmentalisation constantly intersect. As will become apparent in dialogue with Sara Ahmed, it is often too easy to romanticise queer diasporic subjects as inhabiting alternative semiotic spaces, when in fact their routine lines of flight from normativity, which I formulate via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, reveal their mundane micropolitical disorientation of normative social categories. As such, I present queer diasporic Muslims neither as exceptional figures
Press). —— ([1977] 1993), The Sadeian Woman (London: Virago Press). —— (1995), Burning Your Boats (London: Chatto & Windus). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux ([1980]), trans. Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus (1988, London: Continuum). Donovan, Josephine (1989), After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth 78 The arts of Angela Carter in Wharton, Cather and Glasgow (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University). Duncker, Patricia (1988), ‘Re-imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History, 10, 3–14. Goldsworthy
analysing Lessing’s late-twentieth-century ‘fabular’ fictions in relation to ideas about genre and ‘race’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion of ‘minor’ literature proves instructive. Deleuze and Guattari define minor literature as exhibiting three main characteristics: ‘the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’. 2 Thus, minor literature has a partial relation to nationality both linguistically and, I will argue, generically. The ‘social milieu’ 3 is not
to the question of subjectivity within poststructuralist theory. These can be roughly divided into two contrasting strategies. The first is the dispersal of the subject into relations of power and desire, typified by thinkers such as Foucault and, to a much greater extent, Deleuze, who, in his early collaborations with Felix Guattari, sought to liberate desire from the centricity of the subject – particularly the subject described by psychoanalysis – thus dispersing the subject amongst a multitude of ‘assemblages’ and ‘desiring machines’. The second approach is one
Russian political theorist Peter Kropotkin is a giant in the early formation of anarchist thought. This chapter pays particular attention to the cultural/visual implications and possible models both he and Murray Bookchin offer for art history, the humanities and cultural practice. Kropotkin’s main work, Mutual Aid (1902) influenced later subjects in our discussion, particularly Bookchin and Herbert Read. Murray Bookchin is central to 1960s–1990s libertarian socialist political theory, interested in nonhierarchical human formations as well as symbiotic organisation in the botanic and animal worlds. He is discussed here in the realm of art and art history, exploring his understanding of earlier utopian traditions and his interest in artisanship, medieval society and technology. There are also links to another key text in the tradition of critical theory, Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, in relation to external and internal ecologies.
Russian and Brazilian nineteenth-century literature and early twentieth-century cultural theory anticipate and complicate Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's ideas of modernist fascicular and postmodern rhizomatic development. In self-conscious fictions as early as Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky's and Machado de Assis's, eccentric literature anticipates the contemporary theories and elucidates the 'transcultural' dynamics of an increasingly decentred, multicentred and cosmopolitan literature. This chapter traces many of the modern theories concerning alienated consciousness and culture to disruptions within the concentric city as well as to the challenges posed by post-colonialism. Nikolai Gogol and Machado de Assis play variants of this hand, as part of their gamble on eccentric authorship and authority. Sentencing eccentric culture, underground narrative turns out not to be a death sentence, but a modernist sentence that opens onto over a century of ethical reflection and rewriting.