Call For Book Chapters: Beyond Networks of Domination: Rethinking Machinic Media, Digitality & Cinema of our Times

Editors: Ananya Roy Pratihar(IMIS,Bhubaneswar), Saswat Samay Das (IIT, Kharagpur) & Shashibhushan Nayak(GP Nayagarh)

The biopolitical schemas for restructuring machinic networks of Media, Digital, and cinema do not stand as productive mimicries of mediations prerequisite for effecting an anthropological clearing (with Cracks, throws and blows, as Sloterdjik puts it) or grafting some kind of symbolic unity on chaotic materiality. Rather, such schemas act as ambivalent double-pincered mechanisms, turning loose incessant networked flows on the one hand, only to reduce them to domesticable or governable totalities on the other. If Deleuze & Guattari show how such networks lead to the creation of a control or surveillance society committed to colonizing what Husserl calls Lebenswelt (the life world), reducing its pulsations to algorithmic dividuals, Donna Haraway and Manuel Castells show how an interplay between desiring networks of media, digitality and cinema leads to the production of what they call informatics of domination when it is coupled with biopolitical agendas. Thinkers such as Nancy Fraser indicate how progressive networks in neoliberal societies bear a Janus face, hiding underneath their progressive orientation a regressive economy of ideas, opening up an uncompromising field of dialectical contradictions that turns networked flows, passages, archipelagos and routes to dispositif or worse dead ends.

However, while tracing the historical genesis of networks to colonialism or stressing their subsequent bio-politicization, materialist thinkers such as Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway, Braidotti, or Katherine Hayles do not posit de-essentialized expressions of networks as a kind of insidious metaphysical grammar. Rather, they view networks as actual expressions of machinic materiality and posit faith in the inter-related dynamism of networks to lead humanity out of the morass that humanist reductive mediation of such dynamism leads us to. Deleuze and Guattari turn towards stressing the deterritorializing capacity of networks. The stress they put on the need for finding new weapons of resistance against the biopolitical manipulation of networks only supplements this capacity, for with their conviction that even primary assemblages such as signs or senses arise out of the workings of an abstract machine immanent to these assemblages, they seem least inclined towards indicating that such weapons needs to be dialectically opposed to networks and may be used to arrive at a utopian anthropological clearing beyond them. As Guattari says, "There are material machines and immaterial machines, technical machines and imaginary machines, desiring machines and abstract machines, machine inside the machine, nested like fractals…Guattari advocates viewing machines in their complex totality in all their (networked) avatars and resists attempts to essentialize them or the assemblages they compose. 

Thinkers such as Latour stress the necessity of having broader, bigger and more effective networks comprised of human and non-human actants to release us from the humanist organization of society that leads us to deadlocks. Haraway rethinks the clarion call by Deleuze to find new weapons of resistance only to put forward the machinic and networked figure of Cyborg as the new war machine, a machinic assemblage that she calls the cat’s cradle, which synthesizes the organic and the non-organic, the machine & the body and the physical and the non-physical.

Similarly, thinkers such as Patricia Pisters foreground the machinic orientation of minor films. They view such orientation as nurturing the potential to both abolish clichés, dullness, and normative subjectivation and transform subjects puppeteered by representationalist populist cinema into what they call super-jects who might bear the potential to create a new world order.
Is then becoming a pure network, nodes of machinic connections or Haraway’s string figures, the only rejoinder against the biopolitical restructuration of Networks? One needs to remember that networked movements such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement and most recently, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey have failed to bring about the required shift, let alone create fresh ethical bindings between the chaotic multitudes and that many social commentaries claim that such networked protests have large bark, but no bite.

However, then, is there any alternative to combating networks with networks, pitting open-ended ecosophical networks against crampy and claustrophobic networks of neoliberalism, with the redundancy of classical Marxist struggle against the biopolitical machinery? How does critical disclosure of schizoanalytic desire to blur the libidinal and political economy divide help us, with Berardi and Fisher putting forward such ampliative networks as effective tools, meant both for mapping and effecting a revolutionary breakthrough, a Kairos, in relation to the current scenario? With experimentations in media, digitality and cinema constituting the liminal zone of nomad science, will creating a Spherological unity among such sciences effect a deterritorializing rupture with the current predicament. With creative thinking making way for the untimely, can we have an alternative mechanism of resistance to grassroot the flows, as Manuel Castells puts it?

We invite papers that could both extend and critique the experimental media, digitality and cinema of our times. Simultaneously, we also need papers that reflect the potential for reinventing the schizoanalytic or experimental mode of media, digitality and cinema in order to do justice to Deleuze’s clarion call for finding new weapons of resistance.

Submissions:
Abstracts of about 200 words, including six keywords, a 50-word bio-note, institutional affiliation, and contact details, should be emailed by 01 March 2024 to [log in to unmask] as a single MS Word document attachment.

Chapter requirements: A chapter should be 4000-5000 words, including footnotes and bibliography adhering to the MLA 9th edition.

Important Dates:

Deadline for abstract submission: 01 March 2024
Abstract selection notification: 30 March 2024
Complete Paper Submission: 01 October 2024

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