By Dr. Chantelle Grey van Heerden
In recent years there has been
a widespread surge of interest in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari. Although Deleuze and Guattari studies is still in its infancy in
South Africa, many of the themes that emerge from their individual and
collaborative works – a politics of deterritorialisation, an ethics of
becoming, a materialist ontology and so forth – hold great promise for thinking
through and engaging with the complexities of contemporary South Africa and
Africa more broadly, with pressing concerns around identity, geopolitics,
culture, art, time, memory, autonomy, oppression and justice desperately
calling for a bold, radical new praxis.
With the emphasis on Africa (but also
keeping in mind what Deleuze says about the untimely),
the first Deleuze and Guattari
conference was held at UCT in Cape Town earlier this year from 15-16 July.
Keynote speakers included Rosi Braidotti, Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook and
Paul Patton. Expecting a small conference, we were pleasantly surprised to see
how many people responded to the Call for Papers and, in the end, we had about
120 delegates and about 35 speakers, including a number of international ones.
Topics covered included
decolonisation practices, the anthropocene, ethics, minor literatures, art,
rhizomatic pedagogies, feminism, transgressive sexualities, politics, ecology,
and so on. Together with the help from the NRF Posthumanism Project, the
conference was organised by Chantelle Gray van Heerden and Aragorn Eloff.
Speakers from the NRF Posthumanism Project included (listed alphabetically):
Delphi Carstens – Deleuzo-Guattarian sorcery
Deleuze and Guattari use the
supernatural to reveal the numinous possibilities inherent in the quotidian,
thereby recognising the inherent strangeness of the world and naming aesthetic
relations as the ground of being. Their transcendental or gothic materialism,
which combines vitalism, intensive abstraction and an interest in ‘unnameable
things,’ has produced many sorcerous ofshoots like ‘thanatropics’ and
hyperstition, which have themselves morphed into explorations of radical
hertzian and sonic spaces. I will also explore how these and other sorcerous
interventions, based on a Deleuzo-Guattarian praxis, present ways of bridging
the so called ‘fatal’ incongruence between materialism and the mythic.
Chantelle Gray van Heerden - Reshaping Social Practices through Masochist
‘Smut’ Literature: From Heteronormative Mimicry to a Radical Becoming-woman
I argue that Patrick Califia’s
collection of lesbian S/M short stories, Macho Sluts, deterritorialises from
heteronormative pornographic literatures, such as 50 Shades of Grey, in that it
avoids capture by what I term the onceuponatime abstract machine. Like Deleuze,
Califia distinguishes between masochism and sadism and offers a real
alternative: a radical becoming-woman. Such a kind of becoming, I contend, may
be likened to cannibalism in that both relations could be described as
alimentary anthropophagy with a double-sided foundation: an irrepressible will
to pleasure on the one hand and a death drive on the other. This death drive,
however, is not to be understood as desire for an end, nor as premised on lack
or regulated by laws. As such, the emphasis shifts from morality (the
transcendent) to power (the immanent).
Veronica Mitchell - A nomadic becoming through blogging
This presentation explains how my
iPad ruptures me in unexpected nodes, facilitating lines of flight that
deterritorialize the assumed role of technological support. The tablet forms an
integral, embedded and embodied part of my becoming and my research
subjectivity in Obstetrics teaching. Rhizomatically creating images in blogging
opens new meanings.
Karin Murris - Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively through one another as
a way forward for South African schools
Against the ontoepistemic injustice routinely done
to child, and with a view of child as unbounded ‘mangle’ - inhuman
materialdiscursive becoming of unique being with fluid boundaries which
manifest in materialdiscursive relationship with others, I explore the application
of intra-active pedagogies that do justice to the ontology of child and child’s
reconfiguration as rich, resilient and resourceful, appealing to Deleuze and
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to argue for a ‘learning’ focused on difference
and becoming.
For more
information, see http://deleuzeguattari.co.za.
The organisers are currently talking about next year’s conference which will
respond to feminism, gender and queer studies in Africa.
