The War Machine Has Been Televised

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s (D & G) politicized and collective style of making philosophy as “schizo-analysis” took impulses and sounds of the artistic avant-garde of the time and transformed those influences into an extraordinary political theory. The virtual potentials of these concepts are not yet exhausted and far from obsolete – that’s the thesis. The project “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” (“Anti-Oedipus” and “A Thousand Plateaus”) reacted to historical dead ends of left-wing politics and since then went through several waves of reception, with Pop-Philosophy functioning as a buzzword provider, especially for left-wing cultural milieus and the arts. This kind of appropriation often remained on the surface – in a certain way, D & G always moved asynchronously to the zeitgeist and against the grain of their work’s social resonance (bad timing?). It was the impact of 9/11 and the chaotic events unfolding worldwide as a result, which brought to light how the interplay between concepts like the “nomadic war machine, Urstaat” and the “capitalistic axiomatics” started to sparkle perilously, thus making a pragmatic and conceptual vision manifest. Events like the rise and fade of the Arab Spring, the establishment and collapse of the “so called” Islamic State, the election of Donald Trump as well as the resurgence of fascism on the world stage, are symptoms of this chaos. From the perspective of the arts, the relation to D&G’s philosophy would flip: from a rampant reservoir of seductive concepts to a tricky challenge of the very production conditions of the arts, intertwined with the “capitalistic axiomatics” on a whole new level. The event will try to approach and unfold this perspective.