Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding
"...The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding - or allowing the decoding of - the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations. They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate between two poles: the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour or flow out through the otaxher. They are continually behind or ahead of themselves."
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 260)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The rhizomatic nature of the internet allows certain anti-capitalist groups to ward off the capitalist machinery
"The rhizomatic model presents a problem for the dominant systems of capitalism in place in the global economy and the behavior of capitalism in general. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the function of a capitalist system is a schizophrenic behavior which encompasses the 'decoding' and 'deterritorializing flows' of breaking down existing systems of society such as church or family in order to extract the maximum amount of capital and then instigate 'their violent and artificial reterritorialization' through 'ancillary apparatuses' of capitalism such as the government or corporate bureaucracy which reterritorialize grouped elements to extract an even larger share of capital.2 Like any other system within its reach, the capitalist machinery attempts to behave in this schizophrenic manner with regards to the internet. The rhizomatic nature of the internet, however, allows certain anti-capitalist groups to ward off the capitalist machinery on the net due to the particularly advantageous characteristics of the rhizome for these minority factions."
(Amanda Wasielewski)
2). Amanda Wasielewski (2005). 'The Antidote to Capitalist Power: Rhizomatic Networking on the Internet as a Framework for the Success of Anti-Capitalist Minority Groups Against the Schizophrenic Capitalist Machinery'.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Practicing Theory (or : Did Practice Kill Theory ?)
"Designerly ways of knowing, reflection in action/reflection on action, tacit knowledge, the language of things etc. The theoretical dimension of design research is usually described in numerous and various ways that tend to subsume in elegant formulas the complex relationships between designers and thinkers. Many design research bibliographies show a tendency to overquote a set of common references that could be perceived as the doxa of design research - either in the French theory (Deleuze, Baudrillard), or in the fashionable sociology of systems (Latour, Tarde) or the pragmatic approach (Schön, Simon, Dewey).
The Swiss Design Network one-day Symposium of 2011 Practicing Theory aims at understanding what are the real theoretical contexts of designers practicing design research, how these theoretical backgrounds are formed, explored and broaden, and what use is made of them in the everyday practice of a research project in design. Not only will we seek to understand where from designers think, but also in what directions their research could possibly push the activity of thinking. The aim is not to re-design the ideal library of design thinking, but on the contrary to interrogate the dialog that design research establishes with the historical discourse disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, semiotics or cognitive theories."
(Genève, University of Art and Design Geneva, 2011)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
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).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
An assemblage of connecting parts that defies traditional climactic and dissipative character
"The complexities already evident in L'anti-oedipe are compounded by Deleuze and Guattari's deliberate refusal to propose a central narrative or theme for the book [A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia]. They refer to the sections in Mille plateaux as 'plateaus', a term they derived from the anthropological work of Gregory Bateson. Bateson had used the term to describe the libidinal economy he found in Bali, which differed from that in the West, with its emphasis on climax. Deleuze and Guattari intended that the sections of their book should not reproduce the climactic and dissipative character of Western discourse, as manifested in the traditional book format with its culminations and terminations. They hoped rather that each plateau would operate as part of an assemblage of connecting parts to be approached by the reader in whichever order they chose. As this might suggest Mille plateaux is a complex and difficult book, though, at the same time, extraordinarily compelling."
(Charlie Gere)
Gere, Charlie. 2002 'Digital Culture' Reaktion Books. ISBN 1861891431 1861891431 (pbk.)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
