Group items tagged

How do Deleuze and Guattari help us rethink our ecological crises beyond the impasses of State-sanctioned resource exploitation and reactive environmentalism? Do these authors not abstract concepts from earth- and life-sciences and assemble a geophilosophy with which to construe a new earth? Does A Thousand Plateaus not expressly evolve what Gregory Bateson calls an "ecology of mind"? Let us, then, examine those plateaus-the "rhizome" plateau, "the geology of morals" plateau, "the becoming-intense, becoming-animal" plateau, and "the refrain" plateau"-that draw most explicitly upon ecology, biology, zoology, ethology, geography, geology, meteorology, and chaos and complexity theory, and that compose an ontology and politics for enhancing creative terrestrial life. Let us unearth the ecological wisdom of their plan/e of composition by putting it to the test in pressing case studies. Do Deleuze and Guattari not give us multiple outlines for ecological experimentation in their collaborative "rhizome-books," as well as independent proposals for eco-critical and clinical transvaluation such as Guattari's green manifesto, Three Ecologies, and Deleuze's philosophical assemblage of a "radical naturalism"?

" ABSTRACT: In academic philosophy the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are still treated as curiosities and their importance for philosophical discussions is not recognized. In order to remedy this, I demonstrate how the very concept of philosophy expounded by the two contributes to philosophical thinking at the end of the twentieth century while also providing a possible line of thought for the next millenium. To do this, I first emphasize the influence of Deleuze's thinking, while also indicating the impact Guattari had on him. This account will therefore show Deleuze's attempts before Guattari to concieve of a non-dialectic philosophy of becoming. I will turn to rethink this approach given the influence of Guattari and his anti-psychoanalytic analysis of territorial processes. The result is a conception of philosophical activity as an act of 'becoming minor'.(1) "

This thesis explores the process of learning theoretically through a rhizomatic process applied to collaborative learning. A rhizome constantly changes, is flexible and spontaneous. The destination of the path is the process of networking. The Rhizomatic Theory provides a model to develop a learning space that constructs a collaborative knowledge-based community. Therefore the qualities of the Rhizomatic spaces become the root force supporting the collaborative prototypical learning spaces that offer direction towards creating a networked globalized student ecology.

This wonderful, highly readable book breaks new ground in revealing commonalities between Gilles Deleuze's nomadic method of inquiry and the pragmatic method of John Dewey. It should be of great interest to both philosophers and educators. Nel Noddings, Stanford University, author of Happiness And Education. . . few have placed the thinking of Dewey into effective dialogue with other forms of philosophy. This is particularly the case regarding contemporary European philosophy. Inna Semetsky's exciting new book bridges this gap for the first time by putting the brilliant poststructuralist work of Gilles Deleuze into critical and creative dialogue with that of Dewey. . The publication of this work announces the appearance of a remarkable line of thinking that scholars around the world will soon come to appreciate.

"In an interview published shortly after his death, Deleuze commented that A Thousand Plateaus was the best book he had written, alone or with Guattari. It remains a book whose time has not yet come, its conceptual riches largely unexploited." "A Thousand Plateaus provides an example of such an open system. It does not advocate an intellectual anarchism in which the only rule would be the avoidance of any rule. It deploys variable, local rules in order to construct a bewildering array of concepts such as assemblage, deterritorialization, order-word, faciality, ritornello, nomadism, and different kinds of becoming."

The paper highlights the importance of ontological assumptions to the management of knowledge and the development of knowledge management systems. It juxtaposes the ontology of "being" based on the work of Heidegger , and the ontology of "becoming" based on Deleuze and Guattari' s discussion of rhizomatic activity. The relevance of these ideas to knowledge management, information systems, and organisational activities in general is illustrated and a tentative framework based on rhizomatics is developed and discussed.

"The global trend toward democratization of the last two decades has been accompanied by the resurgence of various politics of "identity/difference." From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet Union, to the politics of cultural separatism in Canada, and to social movement politics in liberal western-democracies, the negotiation of identity/difference has become a challenge to democracies everywhere. This volume brings together a group of distinguished thinkers who rearticulate and reconsider the foundations of democratic theory and practice in the light of the politics of identity/difference. In Part One Jürgen Habermas, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jane Mansbridge, Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Iris Marion Young write on democratic theory. Part Two--on equality, difference, and public representation--contains essays by Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, Carol C. Gould, Jean L. Cohen, and Nancy Fraser; and Part Three--on culture, identity, and democracy--by Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Fred Dallmayr, Joan B. Landes, and Carlos A. Forment. In the last section Richard Rorty, Robert A. Dahl, Amy Gutmann, and Benjamin R. Barber write on whether democracy needs philosophical foundations. This is an excellent yext for someone interested in models of the public sphere. While all the authors are proponents of the deliberative model of democracy (as opposed to, for instance, the liberal, interest-based, technocratic, communitarian, or civic-republican) many of them place their arguments in the context of other models. So, the book reads like a symposium of like-minded people, rather than like a rally of true believers. Almost all of the essays are accessible to a generalist, but several really stand out (especially those by Benhabib, Fraser, and Young)."