Editors: Ananya Roy Pratihar(IMIS,Bhubaneswar), Saswat Samay Das (IIT, Kharagpur) & Shashibhushan Nayak(GP Nayagarh)
The biopolitical schemas for restructuring machinic networks of
Media, Digital, and cinema do not stand as productive mimicries of
mediations prerequisite for effecting an anthropological clearing (with Cracks, throws and blows,
as Sloterdjik puts it) or grafting some kind of symbolic unity on
chaotic materiality. Rather, such schemas act as ambivalent
double-pincered mechanisms, turning loose incessant networked flows on
the one hand, only to reduce them to domesticable or governable
totalities on the other. If Deleuze & Guattari show how such
networks lead to the creation of a control or surveillance society
committed to colonizing what Husserl calls Lebenswelt (the life
world), reducing its pulsations to algorithmic dividuals, Donna Haraway
and Manuel Castells show how an interplay between desiring networks of
media, digitality and cinema leads to the production of what they call informatics of domination
when it is coupled with biopolitical agendas. Thinkers such as Nancy
Fraser indicate how progressive networks in neoliberal societies bear a
Janus face, hiding underneath their progressive orientation a regressive
economy of ideas, opening up an uncompromising field of dialectical
contradictions that turns networked flows, passages, archipelagos and
routes to dispositif or worse dead ends.
However, while tracing the historical genesis of networks to
colonialism or stressing their subsequent bio-politicization,
materialist thinkers such as Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway, Braidotti,
or Katherine Hayles do not posit de-essentialized expressions of
networks as a kind of insidious metaphysical grammar. Rather, they view
networks as actual expressions of machinic materiality and posit faith
in the inter-related dynamism of networks to lead humanity out of the
morass that humanist reductive mediation of such dynamism leads us to.
Deleuze and Guattari turn towards stressing the deterritorializing
capacity of networks. The stress they put on the need for finding new
weapons of resistance against the biopolitical manipulation of networks
only supplements this capacity, for with their conviction that even
primary assemblages such as signs or senses arise out of the workings of
an abstract machine immanent to these assemblages, they seem least
inclined towards indicating that such weapons needs to be dialectically
opposed to networks and may be used to arrive at a utopian
anthropological clearing beyond them. As Guattari says, "There are
material machines and immaterial machines, technical machines and
imaginary machines, desiring machines and abstract machines, machine
inside the machine, nested like fractals…Guattari advocates viewing
machines in their complex totality in all their (networked) avatars and
resists attempts to essentialize them or the assemblages they compose.
Thinkers such as Latour stress the necessity of having broader,
bigger and more effective networks comprised of human and non-human
actants to release us from the humanist organization of society that
leads us to deadlocks. Haraway rethinks the clarion call by Deleuze to
find new weapons of resistance only to put forward the machinic and
networked figure of Cyborg as the new war machine, a machinic assemblage
that she calls the cat’s cradle, which synthesizes the organic and the non-organic, the machine & the body and the physical and the non-physical.
Similarly, thinkers such as Patricia Pisters foreground the machinic
orientation of minor films. They view such orientation as nurturing the
potential to both abolish clichés, dullness, and normative
subjectivation and transform subjects puppeteered by representationalist
populist cinema into what they call super-jects who might bear the
potential to create a new world order.
Is then becoming a pure network, nodes of machinic connections or
Haraway’s string figures, the only rejoinder against the biopolitical
restructuration of Networks? One needs to remember that networked
movements such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement and most
recently, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey have failed to bring about
the required shift, let alone create fresh ethical bindings between the
chaotic multitudes and that many social commentaries claim that such
networked protests have large bark, but no bite.
However, then, is there any alternative to combating networks with
networks, pitting open-ended ecosophical networks against crampy and
claustrophobic networks of neoliberalism, with the redundancy of
classical Marxist struggle against the biopolitical machinery? How does
critical disclosure of schizoanalytic desire to blur the libidinal and
political economy divide help us, with Berardi and Fisher putting
forward such ampliative networks as effective tools, meant both for
mapping and effecting a revolutionary breakthrough, a Kairos,
in relation to the current scenario? With experimentations in media,
digitality and cinema constituting the liminal zone of nomad science,
will creating a Spherological unity among such sciences effect a
deterritorializing rupture with the current predicament. With creative
thinking making way for the untimely, can we have an alternative
mechanism of resistance to grassroot the flows, as Manuel Castells puts it?
21%
3%
1%
5%
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12%We invite papers that could both extend and critique the experimental
media, digitality and cinema of our times. Simultaneously, we also need
papers that reflect the potential for reinventing the schizoanalytic or
experimental mode of media, digitality and cinema in order to do
justice to Deleuze’s clarion call for finding new weapons of resistance.
Submissions
Abstracts of about 200 words, including six keywords, a 50-word
bio-note, institutional affiliation, and contact details, should be
emailed by 01 March 2024 to shashienglish@gmail.com as a single MS Word document attachment.
Chapter requirements: A chapter should be 4000-5000 words, including footnotes and bibliography adhering to the MLA 9th edition.
Important Dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: 01 March 2024
Abstract selection notification: 30 March 2024
Complete Paper Submission: 01 October 2024
Contact Information
Dr. Shashibhusan Nayak
MLA Bibliography Fellow
Contact Email
shashienglish@gmail.com
