Schizoanalysis And Visual Cultures

Film criticism has always been about more than aesthetics, and by staging an encounter between Deleuze's cinema project and his schizoanalysis work with Félix Guattari this volume attempts to open Deleuze's aesthetic and philosophical analysis of film into spaces that can address his cinema books as a project that is also political, historical, industrial, economic, or cartographic in nature. Cinema no longer exists solely inside the cinematic apparatus - cinema must become television, digital imagery, web broadcast, advertisement; it must become open to a field of moving images and visual culture at large, and this volume opens Deleuze's thought accordingly, inviting a range of leading scholars to question what can be done with Deleuze's cinematic analyses if we are made to think of them as a further study in schizoanalysis.Key Features*Tom Conley explores an intersection between Deleuze and Blanchot in order develop a cartographic theorisation of film and visual culture *Patricia Pisters asks what a cinematic conception of Deleuze's third synthesis of time might look like and begins to explore what she will call the Neuroimage*Richard Rushton charts the appearance of a Deleuzian imaginary in the films of Jean Renoir*Hanjo Berressem studies actual/virtual montage in Psycho and The Birds and uncovers a schizoanalytic Hitchcock of pure optical and sound images.

The concept of schizoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari's fusion of psychoanalytic-inspired theories of the self, the libido and desire with Marx-inspired theories of the economy, history and society. Schizoanalysis holds that art's function is both political and aesthetic – it changes perception. If one cannot change perception, then, one cannot change anything politically. This is why Deleuze and Guattari always insist that artists operate at the level of the real (not the imaginary or the symbolic). Ultimately, they argue, there is no necessary distinction to be made between aesthetics and politics. They are simply two sides of the same coin, both concerned with the formation and transformation of social and cultural norms. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art explores how every artist, good or bad, contributes to the structure and nature of society because their work either reinforces social norms, or challenges them. From this point of view we are all artists, we all have the potential to exercise what might be called a 'aesthetico-political function' and change the world around us; or, conversely, we can not only let the status quo endure, but fight to preserve it as though it were freedom itself. Edited by one of the world's leading scholars in Deleuze Studies and an accomplished artist, curator and critic, this impressive collection of writings by both academics and practicing artists is an exciting imaginative tool for a upper level students and academics researching and studying visual arts, critical theory, continental philosophy, and media.

The concept of schizoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari's fusion of psychoanalytic-inspired theories of the self, the libido and desire with Marx-inspired theories of the economy, history and society. Schizoanalysis holds that art's function is both political and aesthetic – it changes perception. If one cannot change perception, then, one cannot change anything politically. This is why Deleuze and Guattari always insist that artists operate at the level of the real (not the imaginary or the symbolic). Ultimately, they argue, there is no necessary distinction to be made between aesthetics and politics. They are simply two sides of the same coin, both concerned with the formation and transformation of social and cultural norms. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art explores how every artist, good or bad, contributes to the structure and nature of society because their work either reinforces social norms, or challenges them. From this point of view we are all artists, we all have the potential to exercise what might be called a 'aesthetico-political function' and change the world around us; or, conversely, we can not only let the status quo endure, but fight to preserve it as though it were freedom itself. Edited by one of the world's leading scholars in Deleuze Studies and an accomplished artist, curator and critic, this impressive collection of writings by both academics and practicing artists is an exciting imaginative tool for a upper level students and academics researching and studying visual arts, critical theory, continental philosophy, and media.

This book provides a thorough application of theoretical ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to a series of examples drawn from contemporary film and new media arts. Chapters demonstrate examples of how to do schizoanalysis in philosophically informed cinema studies, new media, and arts based education. Schizoanalysis, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in distinction to Lacanian psychoanalysis, provides an imaginary basis to address the precarity of the contemporary world order: from the growing populism with its authoritarian fascist tendencies to the growing concerns regarding climate change within the Anthropocene. Part I of this book initiates this understanding through cinematic examples. Part II calls for a schizoanalytic pedagogical imagination, which is needed to provide insight into the structures of desire as they circulate in media, especially videogames, and the tensions between analogue and digital technological manifestations. Such pedagogy enables an understanding of the ‘new materialism’ where nonhuman and inhuman (AI) agencies are taken into account. To this end schizoanalytic pedagogy calls for a ‘new earth’ of transformed values and relationships.

We live in a world of the image. In many ways images have replaced words as the defining aspect of cultural identity, while at the same time they have become part of our global culture. The rapidly developing discipline of visual cultural studies has become the key area for examining the issues of the image. Visual Cultures and Critical Theory provides students with a clear guide for understanding ideas of critical theory through the visual. Taking up a range of themes such as spectatorship, pleasure, power, doubles, hallucination, and the frame, the book explains them within the context of the theoretical developments in psychoanalysis, cultural theory, postmodernism, Queer theory, gender studies, and narrative theory.

In 1971, Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative work, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia caused an international sensation by fusing Marx with a radically rewritten Freud to produce a new approach to critical thinking, which they provocatively called "schizoanalysis." Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema explores the possibilities of using this concept to investigate cinematic works in both the Hollywood and non-Hollywood tradition. It attempts to define what a schizoanalysis of cinema might be and introduces a variety of ways in which a schizoanalysis might be applied. This collection opens up a fresh field of inquiry for Deleuze scholars and poses an exciting challenge to cinema studies in general. Featuring some of the most important cinema studies scholars working on Deleuze and Guattari today, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema is a cutting edge collection that will set the agenda for future work in this area. Contributors include: Gregory Flaxman, Amy Herzog, Joe Hughes, Gregg Lambert, Patricia MacCormack, Bill Marshall, David Martin-Jones, Elena Oxman, Patricia Pisters, Anna Powell and Mark Riley.

In an exciting range of original responses to Nancy's work, these 12 essays reanimate the dialogue between interdisciplinary scholars and practicing artists that originally gave birth to visual culture as a field of study. A new translation of Nancy's essay, 'The Image: Mimesis and Methexis', reveals how Nancy's work informs, challenges and inspires our encounters with visual culture.

The schizoanalytic method and the lines of flight that it has inspired align with contemporary feminist concerns and practices in productive and revealing ways in this ground-breaking collection. To address the relevance of schizoanalysis for contemporary developments in new materialism, affect theory, transnational feminism, political ontology, feminist critiques of globalization and capitalism, feminist pedagogy, and ethics, the overarching questions explored are: What can schizoanalysis do for feminist theory? What would a feminist schizoanalysis look like? Is it possible to perform a schizoanalysis of feminism? How do schizoanalytic-feminist alliances create new ways of understanding the future, sexuality and bodily transformation, political resistance, new subjectivities, and ethical relationships? Highlighting the strength, richness, and diversity of feminist perspectives this collection shows how issues of re-conceiving desire, theorizing embodiment and materiality, interrogating the status of sexuality and difference, decentring feminist practice to be inclusive of transnational and de-colonial concerns, critiques of binary logic and gender, transversal politics, and the need for new political visions in light of advanced capitalism are all enhanced by this alliance.