Deleuze AND Guattari AND Africa: Southern Responses Conference Feedback

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.

SAHJE review session at UCT with Vivienne and Michalinos

A few months ago we circulated a call for papers for South African Journal of Higher Education (SAHJE) for papers to be included in a special edition dedicated to critical post-humanism, new materialisms, and the affective turn for social pedagogies in higher education. Several project members submitted papers and had opportunity to have these reviewed by Professor Vivienne Bozalek, University of the Western Cape and Professor Michalinos Zembylas from the Open University of Cyprus. This happened at a session at the University of  Cape Town at the Graduate School of Education. Currently, the review progress for the journal is ongoing, however authors will be informed shortly whether submissions have been accepted. This issued has been planned to be published during 2016. The original call can be downloaded here. Below a few photos from the review session at UCT

Michalinos, Karin and Veronica

Rouxnette, Tammy and Daniella

Michalinos, Karin and Veronica

Daniella

Tammy and Michalinos

Seminar: In conversation with Elspeth Probyn - UWC 12 October 2015

Women’s and Gender Studies

Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape

Invite you to the following seminar 

In conversation with Elspeth Probyn

Elspeth Probyn (Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia) is Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, as well as adjunct Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Western Australia, and adjunct Research Professor at the University of South Australia. She has taught media, cultural studies and sociology at universities in Canada and the USA, and has held several prestigious visiting appointments around the world. Her work has helped to establish several new areas of scholarship – from embodied research methods to cultural studies of food. Professor Probyn is the author of several groundbreaking monographs and over a hundred articles and chapters across the fields of gender, media, and cultural studies, philosophy, cultural geography, anthropology and critical psychology. Her research (funded by an ARC Discovery Project) analyses the role of place and community within the transglobal food system. She is particularly interested in the sustainability of the production and consumption of fish, or what she calls ‘more-than-human” sustainable fish communities, the results of which is published in a new book, Oceanic Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2014). In this seminar, she speaks to her scholarship on affect and shame as elaborated in her book Blush: Faces of Shame (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

DATE: 12 October 2015

TIME: 12h00 – 14h00 (light lunch will be served)

VENUE: TBC

For RSVP and more details please download the poster here.

This seminar forms part of an NRF funded project on Critical Posthumanism, the Affective Turn and Socially Just Pedagogies and is convened by Viv Bozalek, Directorate of Teaching and Learning & Tamara Shefer, Women’s and Gender Studies at UWC, and Ronelle Carolissen at Stellenbosch University.

Deleuze AND Guattari AND Africa: SOUTHERN RESPONSES

15-16 July 2015, University of Cape Town

A two day conference on philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their relevance for Africa. Keynote speakers include Ian Buchanan, Achille Mbembe and Rosi Braidotti.

Deadline for submission of papers 1 May 2015. For more information please refer to the conference web site 

Special Edition of SAJHE 2016 call for papers on critical posthumanism

Yusef Waghid kindly offered to devote a special issue  of the journal he edits - the South African Journal of Higher Education (SAJHE) - to critical posthumanism, new materialisms and the affective turn for socially just higher education pedagogies.  The issue will be published in 2016 and Michalinos Zembylas and Vivienne Bozalek will be the special editors.  There will also be a colloquium on 24 July 2015 in Cape Town for people who are keen to submit papers to the special issue.
We hope that some of you will be interested in submitting something, and if not, you would be willing to make yourself available to review one of the papers. The call for papers is available for download here and contains all the information about the special issue.
If you have any questions about it, don't hesitate to contact Vivienne or Michalinos.