The Deleuze and Guattari Studies Camp is a week long summer school that will take place from July 3 to July 7, 2023 in Belgrade, Serbia. The summer school is dedicated to the rigorous study of Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. Lecturers will explore some of the central concepts of their philosophy such as assemblage and affect, crisis and resistance, the application of their thought to the field of architecture and to problems of environmental destruction in socialist and post-socialist countries, as well as others.

Camp instructors and topics:

• Ian Buchanan – assemblage, affect, differential method
• Anthony Faramelli – Institutional Psychotherapy’s Spaces of Resistance
• Andrija Filipović – anthropocene, plasticene, postsocialist necroecologies
• Jovan Čekić – Diagram of Control, Capturing Forces, Art and rendering the invisible forces
• Janae Sholtz – Three Forms of Resistance: Creative, Affective, and Noological
• Chris L. Smith – the fold, geophilosophy, architecture and subjectivity, cinema

IAN BUCHANAN

Ian Buchanan is a Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. He is the founding editor of Deleuze and Guattari Studies and the author of Assemblage Theory and Method.

Lecture 1 – Assemblage

What is an assemblage? This is a surprisingly difficult and contested question to answer. This lecture will attempt to answer the question drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari. It will also show where competing versions of the assemblage in the work of Bennett, DeLanda, and Latour, differ from Deleuze and Guattari’s own account of the concept.

Lecture 2 – Affect

What is affect? This lecture will attempt to specify what Deleuze and Guattari mean by affect and show how it is derived from several philosophical sources, including but not limited to the work of Spinoza. It will also show where Deleuze and Guattari’s account of affect differs from the version of affect to be found in the broad field of affect theory.

Workshop – Differential Method

This workshop will explore practical ways of making use of the concepts of assemblage and affect in order to undertake critical work in the humanities and social sciences. The workshop will use case studies drawn from the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a starting point and the explore possibilities drawn from the work of workshop participants.

ANTHONY FARAMELLI

 Dr Anthony Faramelli is a psychosocial researcher and practitioner at Goldsmiths, University of London where he co-Head of the Centre for Institutional Analysis. Anthony lecturers in Visual Cultures and co-leads the BA in Fine Art and History of Art. Anthony also works as a mental health recovery programme consultant and reflective practice facilitator. He is a member of the Executive Board of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and is a founding member of the Network for Institutional Analysis.

Anthony is the author of Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics (Bloomsbury 2018) and an editor, with David Hancock and Rob White, of Spaces of Crisis and Critique: Heterotopias Beyond Foucault (Bloomsbury 2018). He is currently completing a monograph provisionally titled The Mass Psychology of Fascism in the Age of Machines.

 Lecture 1 – Introduction to Institutional Psychotherapy

 This lecture will map out the histories, theories and practices of Institutional Psychotherapy and the two related practices of Institutional Pedagogy and Institutional Analysis. Highlighting the way these practices were first developed in refugee camos and in the hospital Saint Alban during the war and then migrated to other sites in France and to North Africa and Latin America. This lecture will demonstrate how Institutional Psychotherapy is distinctly different from anti-psychiatry and institutional critique in both its politics and in its way of working.

This lecture will demonstrate how Institutional Psychotherapy forms the basis of schizoanalysis. By doing this, the lecture will demonstrate how Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative thought must be understood as being grounded in concrete political and psychotherapeutic practice.

Lecture 2 – Crisis and Resistance

 This lecture will dig into two of the most significant, if often overlooked, concepts within Institutional Psychotherapy, crisis and resistance. The lecture will proceed by way of situated our current psychosocial landscape as being locked into a permanent state of crisis with no resolution. Drawing on the work of Guattari, as well as on Fanon and Lacan, this lecture will explore the role crisis plays in mental health practice and for global authoritarian politics, i.e. the proliferation of microfascism(s) and the way they metastasise into overt macro fascist politics.

The lecture will then turn to the concept and practice of resistance. Taking care to understand it in both its psychoanalytic and political meaning, this lecture will demonstrate the foundational role resistance played in constituting Institutional Psychotherap. To do this, this lecture will look at four of the movement’s most prolific and politically engaged members: François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari and Anne Querrien in order to show how the psychoanalytic concept of resistance also informed their political activism.

Workshop – Institutional Cartographies

Schizoanalytic cartographies take as their inspiration the maps created by the pedagogue Fernand Deligny in his work with autistic children. Indeed, these aesthetic practices that mapped the clinical space of La Borde are a key avenue into Institutional Psychotherapy’s therapeutic practice. This interactive workshop will draw from the ethical-aesthetic practices of Institutional Psychotherapy to map the role institutions play in subjectification. The workshop will begin with an outline of the histories and applications of these cartographic practices. It will then present work from mental health services and current projects with refugee communities in London as a way to ground the theories. We will then collectively develop a map of the institutional arrangements we work in and through.

The workshop will demonstrate how different cartographies can be constructed throughout clinical and urban environments and what the therapeutic and political value of these divergent cartographic practices are. It will pay particular attention to the role phenomenology plays in these forms of map making and what are the affective dimensions to different spaces. Finally, this workshop will seek to illustrate how the subject is formed with and through institutional assemblages.

ANDRIJA FILIPOVIĆ

Andrija Filipović is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Art & Media theory at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade. They are the author of Ars ahumana: Anthropocene Ontographies in the 21st Century Art and Culture (2022), Conditio ahumana: Immanence and Ahuman in the Anthropocene (2019), and monographs on Brian Massumi (2016) and Gilles Deleuze (2015). Their articles appeared in Sexualities, The Comparatist, Contemporary Social Science, NORMA and a number of edited volumes. Their research interests include environmental humanities, queer theory and contemporary philosophy. They are executive editor of AM: Journal of Art and Media Studies.

Lecture 1 – MechanoAnthropocene: Periodizations

The aim of the first lecture is to introduce and to compare two periodizations – one given in A Thousand Plateaus where each “plateau” is given a particular date or at least a year, and the other dealing with dating the beginning of the Anthropocene. How can these two periodizations possibly relate and respond to each other? What effects can the periodization in A Thousand Plateaus have on understanding of the beginning of the Anthropocene, especially since the term itself is contested (Capitalocene, Plantationcene, Plasticene, Chthulhucene, etc.). And vice versa – how can dating the Anthropocene shed a new light on various plateaus in A Thousand Plateaus?

Lecture 2 – MechanoAnthropocene: The Great Acceleration

The second lecture takes as a case study the Plasticene, that is, the fossil fuels, plastics and the so-called Great Acceleration that occurred in the middle of the 20the century, as well as the beginning of the production and use of plastics in socialist Yugoslavia in all its various forms (consumer products, design, art, etc.). The use of plastics in Yugoslavia and the Plasticene as a planetary phenomenon are then compared to the periodization given in A Thousand Plateaus as explicated in the first lecture in order to see what can happen with understanding the plastics as a particular form of matter, with understanding the Plasticene as a geological epoch, and, in return, with understanding A Thousand Plateaus and its plateaus if the Plasticene is the focal point.

Lecture 3 – MechanoAnthropocene: Postsocialist necroecologies

The third lecture focuses on the ways in which historically sedimented effects of governing in socialist and postsocialist periods have been producing environmental conditions that are inimical to some human and non-human actors and lead to their immediate or slow death and, finally, to extinction. One aspect is the production of plastic waste, but other forms of environmental destruction that constitute necroecologies will be taken in account as well (exploitation of mountain habitats through small hydropower plants, chronic air pollution due to the use of coal-fired power-plants, etc.). The aim is to compare A Thousand Plateaus and postsocialist necroecologies and see what kinds of new knowledges might arise from the encounter. That is, to see how and whether postsocialist necroecologies can fit in as a plateau in A Thousand Plateaus and to develop a critical reading of A Thousand Plateaus based on the postsocialist necroecologies.

JOVAN ČEKIĆ

Jovan Čekić is a full professor from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. He received his doctorate in 2009 from the Faculty of Media and Communications. He was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade (2003), the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje (2003-2007), and the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade (2008). He has published numerous papers in philosophy, art theory, and media theory.

He has been exhibiting since 1975. He is one of the founders of the conceptual Group 143. He is the editor of the Art Edition at the Geopoetika publishing house. He was the theory editor of the magazine “Moment” and the editor-in-chief of the magazine for visual culture “New Moment” (1993-1997). He was the artistic director of the Youth Biennale in Vršac (2002) and BELEF (2003, 2004). He was a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi (1993-1997) and Communis (2006). He is a recipient of the Nadežda Petrović Memorial
Award (1996) and the October Salon Award (2000).

Lecture 1 – Diagram of Control

Deleuze Societies of Control can be seen as a historical mutation of the diagram of forces, leading to a shift in focus from disciplinary modes of enclosure and different molds to control or modulation. These mutations of the diagram become apparent with arising of AI (AGI and then ASI) and the potentially dangerous dominance of non-human intelligence. With 21st-century technologies, a new control diagram emerges where new forces lead to a radical change in their relationship, whose effect is that disciplinary apparatus (dispositif) are replaced by apparatus which is “taking shape in attitudes of open and constant control.”
One of the essential functions of a dispositif is the effort to control some event or chain of events, as can be seen in Foucault’s analyses of security, sexuality, and other dispositifs. A dispositif, which makes up a network of heterogeneous entities, develops and perfects networked algorithms to ensure the desired effect on the nature and course of an event. In disciplinary dispositif, the dominant role is played by analog, organic, or bio-algorithms that try to ensure the most reliable, existing relations of power, their survival, and the transfer of their genetic material to the next generation.
In the case of Societies of Control, with the third generation of machines, computers, non-organic, and now especially with AGI, techno-algorithms gain a dominant role due to the increasing complexity of the interconnected world. The world as a network of events required a new logic, a thought in terms of techno-algorithms, which are able to process and analyze large amounts of data and adapt to the constantly changing network topology. But with AGI, we have a radically new topology of the forces, including continuous entanglement of the actual and virtual with continuous modulation of control assemblages.
On the other hand, with the Societies of Control, modulation begins to develop new modes of virtual, algorithmic spaces, not so much of the enclosure but of controlling attention, where “computers will carry out universal modulation.” These new types of virtual control of attention, which directs, redirects, distracts, and disorients attention, are actualized as free, fluid, and elusive modes of control, from home care, permanent education, house arrest, work from home to corporate businesses, stock transactions, and hybrid war. At the same time, the overlap and interaction of the actual and virtual leads to the emergence of different modes of toxic virtual environments of enclosure, such as post-truth phenomena, echo chambers, filter bubbles, fake news, deep fakes, conspiracy theories, cancel and woke culture, etc. Therefore, the complex interconnected world requires a new ecology of attention or the art of paying attention that escapes the toxic environments of the enclosure.
With the Society of Control, hybrid structures will emerge, as some intelligent environments include new connections between organic and non-organic entities. Thus, the post-human future envisions new structures of control where non-organic algorithms and various organic algorithms will try to establish even more comprehensive control over nodes within the network of events. This can lead to the emergence of new modes of virtual control environments in almost all registers and suggests the possibility of techno-feudalism and the domination of repressive and reactive forces.

Lecture 2 – Capturing forces

As an introduction to the workshop, the second lecture focuses on how it is possible to detect the emergence of new forces or changes in their relationships in art, as well as the new mutation of  diagrams. According to Deleuze, the common problem of all arts (art, music, etc.) is not the  reproduction or discovery of forms but the capture of forces. Deleuze starts from Paul Klee’s famous formula: “Not to render the visible, but to render visible.” From this endeavor to capture forces, the artist’s task emerges: to make visible the forces that are not inherently visible. Deleuze analyzes how invisible forces shape and influence artists’ work (from Van Gogh and Cézanne to Bacon). It’s not a question of the relationship between form and matter but rather the relationship between material and forces that make these forces visible through their effects on different entities. From the new relationship of forces, a diagram of control emerges, determining what is visible and expressible, thus creating machines of visibility and regimes of expressivity.
When this approach is applied to contemporary artistic production, not only in painting, it becomes clear that the problem of capturing forces requires artists to employ various nomadic and creative strategies. What was the Figure in Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon’s painting becomes, with new approaches, a kind of quasi-object (M. Serres), which renders different visible connections within a network that renders different lines of forces. As Deleuze mentions that diagrams communicate with each other in some way, above, below, or between respective layers, it is necessary to see how contemporary artists detect this communication between diagrams.
Artists often demonstrate how diagrams communicate in some way: from Velásquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X to Bacon’s Screaming Pope and Damien Hirst’s “empty boxes,” from Goya’s horrors of war (Caprichos) to the Chapman brothers’ interventions in the original Goya prints. The Chapman brothers further develop this line of forces towards eugenics, from reconstructions of horror in concentration camps to future genetic modifications. Lastly, in the contemporary moment, artists gathered around Forensic Architecture to analyze Digital Violence, where new forces emerge and virtual violence is actualized.

Workshop – Art and rendering the invisible forces

In order to prepare for the workshop, students need to conduct research by choosing a work of art by one artist from the list. Based on previous lectures and discussions during the workshop, we will explore how contemporary art captures the forces emerging with the new diagram of control based  on lectures and students’ research. For literature list and links to the works of art, please  download this WORD FILE.

JANAE SHOLTZ

Dr. Janae Sholtz is one of Alvernia’s Neag Scholars and the author of The Invention of a People, Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political, and the editor of Deleuze and the
Schizoanalysis of Feminism: Alliances and Allies for Bloomsbury and a special journal edition entitled Infinite Eros: Deleuze, Guattari, and Feminist Couplings. Dr. Sholtz has published research in the areas of continental philosophy, feminist theory, philosophy of art, and social and political philosophy. She has written articles for Evental Aesthetics, Deleuze and Guattair Studies, Journal of Continental and Comparative Philosophy, phioSOPHIA and is currently co-editing a book on Contemporary French Philosophy and Stoicism. She researches primarily in Twentieth Century and Contemporary Continental Philosophy and is interested in aesthetic practices and how the affects created through these practices contribute to a new ethos that can be shared and transmitted on social and political levels.

Three Forms of Resistance: Creative, Affective, and Noological

These lectures will explore three different registers of resistance found in Deleuze’s philosophy. The idea of resistance is an active one – not just to resist in the sense of enduring suffering and present conditions but the practice of creative destruction as a “pragmatics of the future”. The first lecture will address creative resistance as an aesthetico-political necessity, mining Deleuze’s philosophy for conceptual tools that artists may use for creating new spaces of resistance. We will explore what transformations the artist must undergo to become the cosmic artisan,“the itinerant, the ambulant,” who addresses space and movement differently and how this could translate into political efficacy. The second lecture will address affective resistance more broadly, to consider how affective attunement is necessary for changing the space that we occupy. This lecture will explore the possibilities of becoming-revolutionary, revolutionary-love, and affect as a war machine, linking the discussion to the decolonial feminist tradition that has long-employed political conceptions of love. The third lecture will build upon these discussions to develop the language of noological resistance and will focus on Deleuze’s critique of images of thought and Deleuze’s vision of what thought needs to think – namely the condition of immanence itself and the iconoclasticism of the cosmic. This lecture will critically engage with the image of thought of new materialism supposedly inspired by Deleuze to return us to a more robust conceptualization of sense and meaning making.

CHRIS L. SMITH

Dr Chris L. Smith is the Professor of Architectural Theory in the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Chris’ research focuses on the nexus of architecture and the body. He has published on architectural theory and its dynamic relation with poststructural philosophy, technologies of the body, and the intersections of architecture, the biosciences, and medical humanities. Chris is the co-editor of Architecture in the Space of Flows (Routledge, 2012) and Laboratory Lifestyles: The Construction of Scientific Fictions (MIT Press, 2018); and is the co-author of LabOratory: Speaking of the Science and its Architecture (MIT Press, 2019), and the author of Bare Architecture: a schizoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Architecture After Deleuze and Guattari (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Lecture 1 – Concrescence

The relation between philosophy and architecture is complex. The migrations of ideas from one discipline to another is rarely a simple matter of uni-directional appropriation, and it is equally rare that a concept that emerges in one discipline is adopted seamlessly by another. Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold is an example of the complexities of conceptual migration. The concept was derived from a late 16th century architectural invention that accorded with a contemporaneous philosophical intervention and found itself (re)deployed in late 20th century architecture under the aegis of a reclamation. The story of the fold is a story of interwoven conceptual and concrete sympathies over centuries. The moment I am particularly interested in is the 1990s where the conceptual and expressive capacities of the fold reached a particular zenith. Soon after the initial French publication of Deleuze’s Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (1988) came a series of architectural explications. In 1993 Greg Lynn edited a special issue of the journal AD (Architectural Design) titled Folding in Architecture. By 1996, when ANY Magazine published Lynn’s essay ‘Blobs, or Why Tectonics is Square and Topology is Groovy’, the fold had started to serve a different purpose, and by 1997 Lynn had embarked on his Embryologic Houses^© project. The fold was liberated from Baroque architecture, enfolded into philosophy and then at once perplicated and parametricised into the architecture of the emerging digital era.

Lecture 2 – Colonisations

The incitement of Anti-Oedipus is to leave habitual codifications and simplistic narratives that might be used to organise the complexities of life; and instead to enter the intense and intimate outside world. This is framed by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘the schizo’s own way of rediscovering the earth’. In Anti-Oedipus the earth, territory, and landscape become intimately bound with systems of logic and thought itself. To put it simply, the idea is that where we are cannot be dissociated from who we are. Someone on an analyst’s couch is an analysand bound to any number of diagnostic labels… they are a narcissist, a fetishist, a masochist, an Oedipus, an Electra. That same someone wandering the street is a pedestrian, and; when they wander across landscapes, a wayfarer. A subject can be many things in many places. Such an idea comes as no shock to architects. It is a much-repeated refrain in architecture that architects construct not only alternate worlds but in doing so, also the people that occupy them. The nexus of geo-historic realism—the concrete of our buildings, cities, and landscapes—alongside the construction of subjectivities, has always been a fundamental concern of architectural theory. This concern made an early adoption of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative project a simpler matter. The interweaving of interior senses of self and an exterior that is no less intimate underpins their geophilosophy and pre-empts much of what we now speak of as the colonisations of thought.

Lecture 3 – Tokyo Paris

In the Palais de Tokyo on a Tuesday evening in March 1987, Gilles Deleuze cautioned students: ‘If you are trapped in the dream of others, you are fucked.’ The students who comprised the bulk of the audience that evening were studying cinema at the newly created film school ‘La fémis’ and Deleuze’s lecture focussed on what it is ‘to have an idea’, to create, in cinema and philosophy. La fémis occupied draughty spaces in the West wing of the Palais de Tokyo. The students of La fémis plied their trade that evening, filming Deleuze’s lecture. The film took the title ‘What is the Creative Act?’ [Qu’est-ce que l’acte de creation?]. Deleuze would parry the questions: ‘what exactly do you, who do cinema, do?’ and ‘What exactly do I do, when I do, or hope to do, philosophy?’. He had recently published his second book on cinema but claimed no mastery of the art and instead was focussed on the philosophy that the cinematic encounter might prompt. This positioning was important for one main reason that Deleuze would summarise that evening as ‘Ideas must be treated as potentials as already engaged in this or that mode of expression and inseparable from it’. What Deleuze was conveying was a sense of the déjá là—the already there— harboured in any idea and inextricable from the material upon which our disciplines focus, such that ‘ideas in cinema can only be cinematographic’. This lecture will focus on what it is to operate as a cinematographer, an architect, an artist, as part of a discipline; and yet to ever-escape ‘the dream of others.’