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What is the power of the monstrous? Where does it get this power? Jacques Derrida, who in his early work associated the future as such with a certain monstrosity (cf Derrida’s preface to Of Grammatology), said in an interview: A monster may be obviously a composite figure of heterogenous organisms that are grafted onto each [...]

For an ontogenesis of the refrain

What happens when the monster becomes simply a sign-post, but a remarkable one of immanent processes of becoming? Recall what Michael Hardt says of the remarkable in Spinoza, Here we are confronted with the Spinozian principle of the singularity of being. As a first approximation, we could say that singularity is the union of monism [...]

Monstrosity and Ontology

Monstrosity problematizes becoming. Monsters have been within me and my ecologies for so long, as an immigrant child learning English in Flushing, New York, in my filmi dreams co-evolving with the pirated Hindi and Bengali VHS library spawned by my mother’s VCR, in the desiring conjunctions of friends and lovers, in the improvised fairytales between [...]

The Affect of Precarity

We insist on one thing. Duration. And the diagram. And affect. Ok that’s already quite a crowd, well but isn’t there an entire method in these three vector-concepts: duration, diagram, affect? What is the duration of a habit, say the habit of smoking or the habit of playing a guitar? Remember what Toscano teaches us [...]

Are you with the Occupation?

What is the nature of a connection? I have been influenced by Franco Berardi (Bifo) recently. He points out that definitions have to be approached through multiple strategies because what is important is shocking thought by the reconstitution of a virtual field of sense and sensation. In other words, part of what is at stake [...]

What’s your Virus?

Could a kind of resonance potentially form between post-Prigogine/Bohm-inspired physics and critical management studies? Both share a commitment to materialism and realism. But this assumes the continual transformation of both physics and CMS, given the temporal aspect of both matter and reality. In one sense I would like to argue that at their best, at [...]

Ingression

How does one engage an event? The event has gone through torsions in this blog. But we shouldn’t confuse an event with a blog. What is happening as I write in Libya is an event that changes the contours of everything, but not for everyone in the same way, or for the same duration, or [...]

The Politics of Affect: Berlant on Affect and Austerity

What are the politics of affect? And is this a well-posed question in the first place? Why affect now? In what sense is a given politics affective? As discourses of shame sweep across dominant media in the UK, what are the implications of naming this discursive coding an affective politics? Is such an affect being [...]

Digital Marketing as Generalized Snooping: On Virilio’s Information Bomb

Let’s begin with some examples that will update aspects of Virilio’s argument in The Information Bomb. 1. “The Reality Mining Dataset: The Reality Mining project represents the largest mobile phone experiment ever attempted in academia. We are collecting an unprecedented amount of data on human behavior and group interactions that we plan on anonymizing and [...]

Deleuze on Affect, Guattari on Virtual Ecologies

Throughout these blog entries I have continued to specify, define, differentiate, complexify, and diagram Gilles Deleuze’s conception of affect. Here is a further attempt, this one taken from Deleuze’s fine book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Robert Hurley, trans. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988) 48-51. Deleuze makes some crucial distinctions in the definition of “Affections, Affects” [...]