Dark Deleuze by Andrew Culp
Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of joyous affirmation and rhizomatic assemblages. Andrew Cul... more Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of joyous affirmation and rhizomatic assemblages. Andrew Culp argues that this once-radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Culp unearths an underground network of references to conspiracy, cruelty, the terror of the outside, and the shame of being human to rekindle Deleuze’s opposition to what is intolerable about this world.
Full text available online through University of Minnesota Press's Manifold platform: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/dark-deleuze
Invited talked at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Jun 25.
boundary 2, 2016
An interview with Alexander R. Galloway about my recent book Dark Deleuze has been published at b... more An interview with Alexander R. Galloway about my recent book Dark Deleuze has been published at boundary 2 online. In it, we discuss Deleuze and Guattari, technology, queer feminism, blackness, intolerance, and many other topics.
This is the longer version of a blog post I initially wrote for the University of Minnesota Press... more This is the longer version of a blog post I initially wrote for the University of Minnesota Press. You can find the shorter version that was originally on their blog.
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is usually characterized as a thinker of positivity. Consider two of his major contributions: the rhizome as an image for the tangled connections of networks, and the molecular revolution as transform spurred by unexpected quantum drift. These concepts catapulted the popularity of his thought as the digital age seemed to reflect social forms matching each form, namely the world wide web of the internet and the anti-globalization ‘movement of movements’ that lacked central coordination. Commentators marshaled his work to make sense of these developments, ultimately leading many to preach the joy of finding new connections to the material world (New Materialism), evolving the human at the bio-technical level (Post-Humanism), and searching out intensive affective encounters (Affect Studies).
In my new book Dark Deleuze, it is not my contention that such “affirmations” are incorrect. Rather, my argument is that Deleuze was ambivalent about their development, and later in life, became more a critic than proponent. In updating Deleuze for the digital age, I did more than restore a critical stance – I worked out how his lost negativity could be set loose on this world by destroying it.
Here I expanding on the Dark Deleuzian notion of “Death of This World,” a term I introduce as an image of negativity, by rendering it here as “the alien.” Instead of using well-worn digital examples, I instead explore the greatest looming question for the humanities: the Anthropocene.
Hong Kong Review of Books, 2017
Interview with Alfie Bown:
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Andrew Culp is one of the most exciting young theorists publish... more Interview with Alfie Bown:
Home
Andrew Culp is one of the most exciting young theorists publishing at the moment. His first book Dark Deleuze was released last year with University of Minnesota Press and has been translated into many languages already, including Japanese (no Chinese edition just yet). In the latest in the HKRB Interviews series with authors in critical theory, our co-editor had the chance to put some questions to him about his powerful and subversive little theory text.
Society & Space, 2018
Andrew Culp teaches Media Theory in the faculty of Aesthetics and Politics at the California In... more Andrew Culp teaches Media Theory in the faculty of Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and a range of articles in Parallax, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. His work deals with questions of digital power, radical theory and media resistance. He is currently pursuing these themes in his second book, Persona Obscura: Invisibility in the Age of Disclosure (University of Minnesota Press; under contract), which pays particular attention to the power of invisibility. He is also a general editor of the journal Hostis.
What might it mean, Andrew Culp asks in Dark Deleuze, to “give up on all the reasons given for saving this world” (Culp, 2016b: 66)? In response, this interview explores the pathways offered by a “dark” Deleuze, a politics of cruelty, Afro-Pessimism, partisan knowledges, destituent power, and tactics of escape.
*"#1 Most Read Piece from 2018": http://societyandspace.org/2019/01/02/most-read-pieces-from-2018/
Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational, 2018
Reprinted in translation in French in Dictionnaire Deleuze, Bouquins 2019, trans. Frédéric Neyrat.
Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2018
Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) appears as an anomaly in English Deleuze schol... more Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) appears as an anomaly in English Deleuze scholarship. Andrew Culp contrasts Deleuze as a thinker of positivity who constantly demands we find “reasons to believe in this world” with a Deleuze of dark negativity. In doing so, Culp offers an alternative Deleuze in a time where powerful forces from Buzzfeed to the IDF seek to appropriate Deleuze’s thought. The Dark Deleuze speaks of destructive negativity, hatred for this world, and the shame of being human. All of these ideas are pit against “the canon of joy” that would have us relentlessly celebrate the new, affirm the present, and give in to compulsory positivity. Culp makes a powerful case that, contrary to what one might expect, it is precisely the positivity that lies at the heart of both liberal and accelerationist readings of Deleuze.
Fractal Ontology: Refracting Theory: Politics, Cybernetics, Philosophy, 2018
Interview by Joseph Weissman, transcript by Taylor Adkins.
Hello, and welcome to Theory Talk, a ... more Interview by Joseph Weissman, transcript by Taylor Adkins.
Hello, and welcome to Theory Talk, a philosophy podcast and critical thinking jam session. I am Joseph Weissman. Taylor Adkins will be back next episode, but this week I am pleased to present to you an interview that I conducted with Andrew Culp, a media theorist and author of a new book called Dark Deleuze. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, go to our Patreon right now and throw us a few pennies. Support independent media in trying times. With that said, please enjoy this interview with Andrew Culp.
Нож, 2019
Interview by Arnold Khachaturov
Parallax Views, 2019
Podcast interview w/ JG Michael. On this edition of Parallax Views, the French continental philos... more Podcast interview w/ JG Michael. On this edition of Parallax Views, the French continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze has had an impact that's moved from the halls of academia into places like Buzzfeed and even the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Deleuze is perhaps most well-known for either his metaphysical treatise Difference & Repitition or his seminal two-volume collaboration with Felix Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia that began with Anti-Oedipus and concluded with A Thousand Plateaus. One key aspect, perhaps even what could be called the motivating force, of Deleuze's work is the cultivation of joy. In other words, a positive philosophy. However, our guest for this conversation, media scholar Andrew Culp, has sought to, through an engagement with this popularly imagined Deleuze, birth a new Deleuze. In other words, a monstrous child of the "Joyous Deleuze" that Andrew calls "Dark Deleuze". Andrew argues that in this current moment, when neoliberalism demands constant happiness from its subject, we must harness a "hatred for this world" that reacts to the global injustices of our time with a righteous contempt and rage (although not a crude misanthropy). All that and more on this edition of Parallax Views.
Papers by Andrew Culp
Spectator, 2019
“Networks are not just for the counter-culture anymore, they are how the military plans war, comp... more “Networks are not just for the counter-culture anymore, they are how the military plans war, companies do business, and governments cast their influence.”
Новое литературное обозрение (New Literary Review), 2019
In Russian only.
In this essay, Andrew Culp asks “What if The Anthropocene is actually a failed ... more In Russian only.
In this essay, Andrew Culp asks “What if The Anthropocene is actually a failed pitch for a film?” This leads him to consider the vertical perspective of The Anthropocene associated with recent environmental thinking. This line of thought takes him back to early discourses of the human, the current visuality of the cosmic zoom seen in space photography of the earth, and their recent deployment to spur environmental change. He finds the much-touted newness of the discourse is already ubiquitous in contemporary film and military technology. Then the essay proposes three alternate endings of The Anthropocene, each drawing on a different mythological figure: Gaia, Prometheus, and Medea.
Stasis, 2019
In this article, Andrew Culp looks to how Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari flip Marxism on its h... more In this article, Andrew Culp looks to how Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari flip Marxism on its head. He makes the case by drawing on Marx’s own distinction between the dialectical mode of presentation and research-based mode of inquiry that went into writing Capital, which leads him to consult the prefaces and afterwords to Capital in addition to Marxist feminists who discuss the book’s sensational style. Culp then argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s most significant contribution to Marxism is a methodological one, as found in their critical and clinical anthropology, which outlines the universal history of capitalism (diagrammed by Culp in an included chart). The result, he maintains, frees images of radical change from dialectics, liberal democracy, markets, or production as engines of revolution. In their place, he locates a new critique of political economics based on the destruction of economics itself by way of a revolution of the outside.
Artleaks, 2019
What does it mean for a protest to be sculptural? For forces to swirl around an object, for and a... more What does it mean for a protest to be sculptural? For forces to swirl around an object, for and against: a raging bull, a Confederate soldier, a half-forgotten eugenicist, or liberty itself? Looking at what people say about them, our monuments’ significance is clear. Monuments publicly enshrine perspective, feeling, reverence, and devotion. Yet, in our estimation, they stand for a type of power that we will always oppose in the final instance – larger than life, institutional, regal, enduring. If the subjects of the statues still had their voices, their chorus would contain a common refrain of triumphalism; whole verses would be dedicated to achievements underwritten by misogyny, racism, colonial violence. Monuments are not even kind to those figures whose side we fight on in the struggles of history. Their legacy is still bleached and mounted when put up on display. It is for these reasons that this essay celebrates anti-monument forces that swelled in 2015 and continue to this day. We are inspired by the toppling of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, the sledgehammering of Christopher Columbus in New York, the Monument Removal Brigade, as well as a whole history of actions, such as the many times statues have been covered in blood, chipped away by hammers, or had limbs sawed off in the middle of the night. The message of these actions is clear: time is up on the thousands of memorials of ‘great men’ that have been erected to the causes of settler conquest, senseless wars, racist nationalism, exploitive industry, and more.
Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational, 2019
For Maurice Blanchot. Reprinted by Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene.
La Deleuziana, 2019
In a series of theses, Andrew Culp considers the varieties of accelerationism as dialectical resp... more In a series of theses, Andrew Culp considers the varieties of accelerationism as dialectical responses to capitalism. He identifies three main approaches: the boomerang pattern of the rebound, the fascist addiction to speed, and the techno-scientific dream of a technological fix. The second section is dedicated to critical oversights of the cybernetic approach of recent accelerationists, especially their purported project of Promethean mastery. The piece concludes with a renewed call for Deleuze and Guattari's war machine and an elaboration on how the partisanship of communism is better suited than a political project of global hegemony to defeat capitalism.
Flugschriften, 2019
“The arrow arrives at its destination with a clamor, its blackness marking the arrival of thought... more “The arrow arrives at its destination with a clamor, its blackness marking the arrival of thought from the outside: thought as problem, thought as sabotage.”
Contrapuntal Media, 2018
A conference talk, later rewritten and published in a print-only journal of CalArts Aesthetics & ... more A conference talk, later rewritten and published in a print-only journal of CalArts Aesthetics & Politics faculty.
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Dark Deleuze by Andrew Culp
Full text available online through University of Minnesota Press's Manifold platform: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/dark-deleuze
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is usually characterized as a thinker of positivity. Consider two of his major contributions: the rhizome as an image for the tangled connections of networks, and the molecular revolution as transform spurred by unexpected quantum drift. These concepts catapulted the popularity of his thought as the digital age seemed to reflect social forms matching each form, namely the world wide web of the internet and the anti-globalization ‘movement of movements’ that lacked central coordination. Commentators marshaled his work to make sense of these developments, ultimately leading many to preach the joy of finding new connections to the material world (New Materialism), evolving the human at the bio-technical level (Post-Humanism), and searching out intensive affective encounters (Affect Studies).
In my new book Dark Deleuze, it is not my contention that such “affirmations” are incorrect. Rather, my argument is that Deleuze was ambivalent about their development, and later in life, became more a critic than proponent. In updating Deleuze for the digital age, I did more than restore a critical stance – I worked out how his lost negativity could be set loose on this world by destroying it.
Here I expanding on the Dark Deleuzian notion of “Death of This World,” a term I introduce as an image of negativity, by rendering it here as “the alien.” Instead of using well-worn digital examples, I instead explore the greatest looming question for the humanities: the Anthropocene.
Home
Andrew Culp is one of the most exciting young theorists publishing at the moment. His first book Dark Deleuze was released last year with University of Minnesota Press and has been translated into many languages already, including Japanese (no Chinese edition just yet). In the latest in the HKRB Interviews series with authors in critical theory, our co-editor had the chance to put some questions to him about his powerful and subversive little theory text.
What might it mean, Andrew Culp asks in Dark Deleuze, to “give up on all the reasons given for saving this world” (Culp, 2016b: 66)? In response, this interview explores the pathways offered by a “dark” Deleuze, a politics of cruelty, Afro-Pessimism, partisan knowledges, destituent power, and tactics of escape.
*"#1 Most Read Piece from 2018": http://societyandspace.org/2019/01/02/most-read-pieces-from-2018/
Hello, and welcome to Theory Talk, a philosophy podcast and critical thinking jam session. I am Joseph Weissman. Taylor Adkins will be back next episode, but this week I am pleased to present to you an interview that I conducted with Andrew Culp, a media theorist and author of a new book called Dark Deleuze. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, go to our Patreon right now and throw us a few pennies. Support independent media in trying times. With that said, please enjoy this interview with Andrew Culp.
Dr. Andrew Culp is a Media Theorist In Aesthetics and PoliticsTeaching at CalArts. He was kind enough to join me to discuss his book, Dark Deleuze.
Links:
www.andrewculp.org/
https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/dark-deleuze
Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/podcastcocoopercherry
Twitter: @Podcastcocooper
Instagram: @podcast_co_cooper_cherry
Papers by Andrew Culp
In this essay, Andrew Culp asks “What if The Anthropocene is actually a failed pitch for a film?” This leads him to consider the vertical perspective of The Anthropocene associated with recent environmental thinking. This line of thought takes him back to early discourses of the human, the current visuality of the cosmic zoom seen in space photography of the earth, and their recent deployment to spur environmental change. He finds the much-touted newness of the discourse is already ubiquitous in contemporary film and military technology. Then the essay proposes three alternate endings of The Anthropocene, each drawing on a different mythological figure: Gaia, Prometheus, and Medea.
Full text available online through University of Minnesota Press's Manifold platform: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/dark-deleuze
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is usually characterized as a thinker of positivity. Consider two of his major contributions: the rhizome as an image for the tangled connections of networks, and the molecular revolution as transform spurred by unexpected quantum drift. These concepts catapulted the popularity of his thought as the digital age seemed to reflect social forms matching each form, namely the world wide web of the internet and the anti-globalization ‘movement of movements’ that lacked central coordination. Commentators marshaled his work to make sense of these developments, ultimately leading many to preach the joy of finding new connections to the material world (New Materialism), evolving the human at the bio-technical level (Post-Humanism), and searching out intensive affective encounters (Affect Studies).
In my new book Dark Deleuze, it is not my contention that such “affirmations” are incorrect. Rather, my argument is that Deleuze was ambivalent about their development, and later in life, became more a critic than proponent. In updating Deleuze for the digital age, I did more than restore a critical stance – I worked out how his lost negativity could be set loose on this world by destroying it.
Here I expanding on the Dark Deleuzian notion of “Death of This World,” a term I introduce as an image of negativity, by rendering it here as “the alien.” Instead of using well-worn digital examples, I instead explore the greatest looming question for the humanities: the Anthropocene.
Home
Andrew Culp is one of the most exciting young theorists publishing at the moment. His first book Dark Deleuze was released last year with University of Minnesota Press and has been translated into many languages already, including Japanese (no Chinese edition just yet). In the latest in the HKRB Interviews series with authors in critical theory, our co-editor had the chance to put some questions to him about his powerful and subversive little theory text.
What might it mean, Andrew Culp asks in Dark Deleuze, to “give up on all the reasons given for saving this world” (Culp, 2016b: 66)? In response, this interview explores the pathways offered by a “dark” Deleuze, a politics of cruelty, Afro-Pessimism, partisan knowledges, destituent power, and tactics of escape.
*"#1 Most Read Piece from 2018": http://societyandspace.org/2019/01/02/most-read-pieces-from-2018/
Hello, and welcome to Theory Talk, a philosophy podcast and critical thinking jam session. I am Joseph Weissman. Taylor Adkins will be back next episode, but this week I am pleased to present to you an interview that I conducted with Andrew Culp, a media theorist and author of a new book called Dark Deleuze. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, go to our Patreon right now and throw us a few pennies. Support independent media in trying times. With that said, please enjoy this interview with Andrew Culp.
Dr. Andrew Culp is a Media Theorist In Aesthetics and PoliticsTeaching at CalArts. He was kind enough to join me to discuss his book, Dark Deleuze.
Links:
www.andrewculp.org/
https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/dark-deleuze
Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/podcastcocoopercherry
Twitter: @Podcastcocooper
Instagram: @podcast_co_cooper_cherry
In this essay, Andrew Culp asks “What if The Anthropocene is actually a failed pitch for a film?” This leads him to consider the vertical perspective of The Anthropocene associated with recent environmental thinking. This line of thought takes him back to early discourses of the human, the current visuality of the cosmic zoom seen in space photography of the earth, and their recent deployment to spur environmental change. He finds the much-touted newness of the discourse is already ubiquitous in contemporary film and military technology. Then the essay proposes three alternate endings of The Anthropocene, each drawing on a different mythological figure: Gaia, Prometheus, and Medea.
conversations over chat. The style of their remarks demonstrates how scholars are now fusing traditional forms of thought with the tools of
digital culture, as their high-minded observations are punctuated by quotes from online anthologies, page numbers quickly culled through machine searching, and references provided by hyperlink as encouragement for readers to complete their own deep dive into the material. As such, perhaps the reader should imagine it less as an academic panel discussion and more like a post with threads, replies, likes, and links.
This interview was initiated during Claire Fontaine’s visit to Columbus, Ohio, in autumn 2009 for the group exhibition Descent to Revolution, curated by James Voorhies for the Bureau for Open Culture, to which Claire made two contributions: a solar-powered neon sign installed in down- town Columbus that cycled between the words WARM and WAR; and a multimedia lecture-performance on libidinal economy and human strike that focused on the bodies of women as site of political, social and aesthetic contestation in Berlusconi’s Italy.
To build my case for the state as concept, I contrast the Foucault-inspired Governmentality School’s object-based social science with a Deleuzian conception of the state as a virtual idea. On the one hand, the Governmentality School ‘descends’ from abstract variables to a concrete state of affairs by performing a scientific assessment of practices, behaviors, and subjectivities to establish an objective ontology of the present. While on the other hand, Deleuzian state theory ‘ascends’ from a state of affairs to a philosophical concept by abstracting a virtual idea that ‘does not refer to the lived’.
I make the political stakes clear by distinguishing between ontologies of objects and the philosophical powers of the false. Such a distinction begins with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of Empire, which I radicalize through Deleuze and Guattari’s prescriptive declaration in A Thousand Plateaus, to ‘overthrow ontology’. The consequence is a new definition of the state – not as an object that exists but as a concept that persists – that renews the revolutionary aspirations of utopia.
It's argument: we should tell ghost stories.
The argument brings together culture, crisis, and conflict to outline the political potential of escape. It begins by reintroducing culture to theories of state power by highlighting complementary mixtures of authoritarian and liberal rule. The result is a typology of states that embody various aspects of conquest and contract: the Archaic State, the Priestly State, the Modern State, and the Social State. The argument then looks to the present, a time when the state exists in a permanent crisis provoked by global capitalist forces. Politics today is controlled by the incorporeal power of Empire and its lived reality, the Metropolis, which emerged as embodiments of this crisis and continue to further deepen exploitation and alienation through the dual power of Biopower and the Spectacle. Completing the argument, two examples are presented as crucial sites of political conflict. Negative affects and the urban guerrilla dramatize the conflicts over life and strategy that characterize daily existence in the Metropolis.
Following a transdisciplinary concern for intensity, the work draws from a variety of historical, literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples that emphasize the cultural dimension of politics. The wide breadth of sources, which range from historical documents on the origins of the police, feminist literature on the politics of emotion, experimental punk film, and Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, thus emulates the importance of force over appearance found in contemporary radical politics. Departing from many of the accounts of political change given by political theory or sociology, “Escape” shows how the recent politics of autonomy is essential to understanding the struggle against Empire.