Ethics: immanent, historical, and emergent rather than transcendent, essential and static
"Deleuze and Guattari's notion of ethics does not suggest relativism. Ethics are 'relative,' or related to the condition of their use, however they have criteria. The criteria for ethics according to Deleuze is 'immanent, historical, and emergent rather than transcendent, essential and static' (Hayden 121). Thus Deleuze and Guattari assert that thinking belongs to the earth and is not the manifestation of a knowing subject apart from its environment. Thinking exists as the fluid effect of the interactions that take place between the force of the body and the environment in which it occurs (121). The reciprocal relationality of bodies and milieux implies that each have effects on the other. Evaluation of modes of existence, then, must proceed from the recognition of this reciprocity or symbiosis (121). Such an ethics requires careful study not only of the natural conditions of phenomena, but also of the effects of various modes of existence. Therefore, though ethics implies a continuous process within diverse milieux, this is not to say that it is impossible to distinguish particular modes of existence as more desirable than others (122). However such distinctions are always site-specific, so to speak, and cannot be measured against a transcendent standard."
(Sheri Benning, Rhizomes 15)
Hayden, Patrick. Multiplicity and Becoming: The Pluralist Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.
Benning, S. (2007). "Claybank, Saskatchewan." Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge winter(15).
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Donna Haraway: Situated Knowledges
"Situated knowledges have to do with communities (or affinities), not isolated individuals."Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor or agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource...." Haraway points specifically to social science projects where the agency of subjects transforms the project of producing social theory and science. However, in the biological sciences, the objects of knowledge are also contingent, not static. In other words, we never have recourse to realism."
(Donna Haraway)
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
