[D66] Declaration on the Notion of “The Future”

Sat Feb 6 14:07:43 CET 2016

  Traffic Jams

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Traffic Jams: Analysing Everyday Life through the Immanent Materialism
of Deleuze & Guattari*

by David R. Cole <http://punctumbooks.com/category/titles/david-r-cole/>

Dead Letter Office
<http://punctumbooks.com/imprints/dead-letter-office/> (for BABEL
Working Group <http://www.babelworkinggroup.org>)

Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2013. 60 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0615767000.
OPEN-ACCESS e-book + $7.00 [€6.00] in print.

<https://www.createspace.com/4162093>

Published: 2013-02-13

Download book <http://punctumbooks.com/titles/traffic-jams/#dialog>
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This dead letter presents an exploration of the immanent materialism of
Deleuze & Guattari as theorised in /A Thousand Plateaus/ as a means to
analysing everyday life. The evidence consists of art, film and objects
from life that relate to and suggest the complex ways in which we are
affected by traffic jams. Reciprocating substrata of everyday life build
upon the unconscious, and show how the abstract turbulence of everyday
life forms eddies and flows that may be followed and understood. The
immanent materialism of Deleuze & Guattari is a philosophical
construction that leads to the formation of ‘plateaus’ as they were
executed in /A Thousand Plateaus/. The plateau of this dead letter is
*[21 October 2011: the Petro-Citizen] *and is populated with traffic
jams, car crashes, global environmental concerns and the psychological
and sociological contingencies that accompany the petro-citizen.
Connections between the strata that make up the plateau of the
petro-citizen will deliberately be left as open-ended and speculative to
show how the petro-citizen functions as a flagrant construct in everyday
life, which includes the desire for petrol and explains the resulting
panpsychic petro-political landscape. The double-articulation of the
plateau depends upon the ways in which the petro-citizen and
petro-politics create reciprocating realms of motivation and drive that
tend towards contemporary double-articulation, paradox and contradiction
with respect to the usages of oil. This double-articulation results in a
multiple chequered flag or illusionary global end-game that designates
the current human relationships with oil.

*David R. Cole*
<http://uws.clients.squiz.net/education/soe/key_people/academic_staff/associate_professor_david_cole>
is an Associate Professor in Literacies, English and ESL at the
University of Western Sydney (Australia). David has edited four books:
/Surviving Economic Crises though Education/ (Peter Lang), /Multiple
Literacies Theory: A Deleuzian Perspective/ (Sense) with Diana Masny,
/Multiliteracies and Technology Enhanced Education: Social Practice and
the Global Classroom/ (IGI) with Darren Pullen, and /Multiliteracies in
Motion: Current Theory and Practice/ (Routledge) with Darren Pullen. He
has published a novel, /A Mushroom of Glass /(Sid Harta, 2007), and his
latest monograph is /Educational Life-forms: Deleuzian Teaching and
Learning Practice /(Sense). David uses his knowledge of Deleuze, and
multiple and affective literacies, to investigate areas of educative
interest.

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<http://punctumbooks.com/titles/traffic-jams/#> 11
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culture studies <http://punctumbooks.com/tag/culture-studies/>, Deleuze
& Guattari <http://punctumbooks.com/tag/deleuze-guattari/>,
environmentalism <http://punctumbooks.com/tag/environmentalism/>,
everyday life <http://punctumbooks.com/tag/everyday-life/>, immanence
<http://punctumbooks.com/tag/immanence/>, materialism
<http://punctumbooks.com/tag/materialism/>, oil
<http://punctumbooks.com/tag/oil/>, petro-citizenship
<http://punctumbooks.com/tag/petro-citizenship/>, traffic
<http://punctumbooks.com/tag/traffic/>

On 02/06/2016 02:05 PM, J.N. wrote:
> http://www.believermag.com/issues/201011/?read=article_necronautical
>
> 1. The Future, culturally speaking, begins with a car crash. Or
> rather, an account of one: a disaster always already mediated,
> archived, and replayed. “We had stayed up all night, my friends and
> I,” shouts Marinetti from the front page of /Le Figaro/ in February
> 1909. In a few paragraphs he’ll launch into a lyrical eulogy of
> arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons, of
> factories, trains, steamers, and aeroplane propellers cheering like
> enthusiastic crowds as they carry us forward; he’ll incite us to
> destroy the museums, libraries, and academies, and inform us that time
> and space died yesterday. But first, the car crash has to be narrated.
> After their frenzied nocturnal pacing and arguing and their manic and
> purposeful “scribbling,” the Futurists (as yet unnamed or unannounced:
> the future-Futurists) hear famished automobiles beckon from outside
> their windows, and throw themselves into the driving seats. Curling
> watchdogs under the burning tires of his, facing down death at every
> turn, Marinetti hurtles toward two cyclists wobbling in the road “like
> two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments”—that
> is, embodying the old cultural order and its foibles (reason, logic).
> Pulling up short, he veers, upturned, into a ditch, whose industrial
> sludge he laps up lovingly, since “it reminded me of the breast of my
> Sudanese nurse.”
>
> 6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS rejects
> the /idea/ of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of
> dominant socioeconomic narratives of progress. As our Chief
> Philosopher Simon Critchley has recently argued, the neoliberal
> versions of capitalism and democracy present themselves as an
> inevitability, a destiny to whom the future belongs. We resist this
> ideology of the future, in the name of the sheer radical potentiality
> of the past, and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses
> and imaginative landscape of the present. The future of thinking is
> its past, a thinking which turns its back on the future.
>
> 7. As Walter Benjamin correctly notes in “Theses on the Philosophy of
> History,” contemplating Paul Klee’s /Angelus Novus/—a floating figure
> who stares intently at something he’s moving away from—the angel of
> history faces backward. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” writes
> Benjamin, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
> upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” What we call
> progress, Benjamin calls “the storm.”
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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