Susan Ruddick

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exi-gencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political pro jects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity (or not) of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political pro jects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s wri...

Contemporary neuroscientific evidence indicates that unrestricted movement and gestures are necessary for optimal cognitive and communicative development. In-depth understanding of disabled and non-disabled children’s interactions with physical features of their school environments is limited. Describing the ways school environments enhance or inhibit movement may optimize all children’s health, social abilities and cognitive development. This paper documents an interdisciplinary, ethnographic study designed to capture children’s interactions with the physical features of an integrated kindergarten classroom. The innovative theoretical and methodological approaches used are detailed. Children’s bodies were conceptualized according to “what they could do, ” and classrooms were conceptualized as being inherently “discoverable. ” Preliminary findings indicate that certain environmental features trigger children to move in dynamic, non-habitual ways.

and concrete dimensions of analysis and of the ways in which planetary urbanization is being applied “in many different ways, and from various angles and approaches.” Like Brenner, Schmid concludes that these applications are evidence of affinities among the plurality of voices in urban studies. In the particular light of postcolonial and feminist engagements with planetary urbanization, Schmid holds fast to the heterodox potentiality of the theory and calls for an “open-minded, respectful, and joyful” engagement with

In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre’s ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban.

The anthropological machine is the discursive framework, the dispositif that grounds “Western man” in a sense of civility, secured through a violent division within and between the human and nonhuman: not the after-effect of the civilizing act but its very foundation. This paper explores Agamben’s machine at multiple sites: in its expression in everyday lives of urban citizens, and its legitimation of capitalist urbanization on broader spatial and temporal scales, its “worlding” through planetary urbanization and normalization of climate change. Complicit in capitalist urbanization and climate change, the anthropological machine has acted as a “switch point” since the 1600s. It now frames an emergent response: triage as the inevitable sacrifice of some peoples and parts of the planet to preserve others. If the urban is to become the site of mondialization, confronting the apparent inevitability of triage we must think beyond the either-or of a people or a planet. Thought in relation to the urban, the anthropological machine offers a meeting ground between urban political economy and assemblage urbanism. It enables us to situate the Anthropocene and differentiate the urban. But it also exposes a deep divide between scholars reframing the human beyond “Western man”: between those for whom the more-than-human expresses the dreams of a biophilic city and those for whom the less-than-human is increasingly its living nightmare.

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity (or not) of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writin...

ABSTRACT In this paper, I take up the theme of Spinoza's ars vivendi in relation to its temporality; duration as the very rhythm of life. In the face of an intensifying climate crisis, our experience of the rhythm of life in the everyday and its implications for the deep time of climate futures seem increasingly out of joint. Building on Morfino's argument of the necessary relationship between ontology and history, I explore the connections between the rhythm of life and our (Western) comprehension of the climate crisis. This framing provides insights into a fatal confusion. This confusion is fueled by the chrono-topography of the modern capitalist city, its intensification of a perceived separation of daily life from bioenergetic processes; and it is amplified in object-oriented ontology, which, in its treatment of climate as a hyperobject, both accepts and reifies a split between ontology and history. I argue, in contrast, that to think of the world as multi-relational and multi-temporal provides us with tools to assess the politics of the multitude in relation to the climate crisis, to better comprehend the complexity of the conjuncture and the schematization of divergent climate futures, and to fashion a responsive and response-able ars vivendi.

The ecological crisis is also an ontological crisis. It raises questions about our ethical response-ability to this world, calling for a rethinking of the human–nature divide. Vitalist approaches and scholarship on the affective turn have shifted our understanding of our relations to nonhuman others, but they remain constrained: limited to proximate attachments; ambivalent or agnostic in the face of conflict; unable to move beyond the celebration of a lively earth. At issue I feel is a methodological individualism that haunts these offerings when confronted with questions of the ethical composition of a larger whole. Building upon Sharp’s invitation to explore ‘our continuity with nonhuman agencies’, I investigate the ethical basis for a reimagined subject in a series of becomings: the becoming nature of God, becoming animal of man, and becoming sign of earth. Drawing on the writings of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Peirce, I rework this familiar terrain on two counts. First, I...

In their responses to my framing of the ecological crisis as an ontological crisis, my interlocutors raise questions about the relationship between ontology and ethics; whether and how attention to affect and a reimagined ontology can cope with the demands that we face when thinking of ethics on a planetary scale; the implications of contemporary actions in deep time; and whether thinking through affect leads us to a perspective divorced from History. In response to Gandy and Jasper, I address misplaced charges of anthropocentrism, claims I abandon the subject, and claims I privilege affect in a way that ignores reason. In response to Sharp, Stark, and Clark, I elaborate (a) the ways in which we can proceed from a reimagined ontology to ethics through a more critical engagement with contemporary scholars (e.g. Buchanan and Wehelyie, who leaven the concept of assemblage), (b) the selective engagement of western philosophers as a kind of pars destruens to a western concept of the subject, and (c) the richness of an approach based on semiosis, which uncovers the communicative relations between a vast array of actors and actants and offers both a different vision of plenitude and the potential for wider range of alliances. I propose this as a prolegomenon to a reimagined future and expanded sense of human subjectivity—one which would acknowledge, celebrate, and promote a maximal biodiversity, in recognition of the ultimate dependence of humans on the workings of nonhuman others.

To the degree that the world is now made up of divergent series . . . crapshooting replaces the game of Plenitude.-Gilles Deleuze1IntroductionWhen Spinoza wrote The Ethics in the 1600s the world was largely a wild place. Intense human settlement occupied only a quarter of the globe.2 We now live in a very different world. In the 1600s the world was largely comprised of biomes: "contiguous area[s] with similar climatic conditions, and communities of plants, animals, and soil organisms."3 By the year 2000, only 20 percent of the world might be considered "semi-natural" and 25 percent "wild." But no place is leftuntouched by anthropogenic transformations; we live in a world of anthromes.4 Spinoza was largely concerned with questions of association between humans as they relate to a causal understanding of the human body.5 Today, forms of governance, indeed the choice between socialism or barbarism, is an ever more pressing question, but it is complicated by concerns about species extinction, loss of biodiversity and anthropogenic threats to global stability, unevenly felt in the global north and global south. With these concerns in mind, many scholars are calling for a reframing of the question of association to include our relations to non-human others.6In this paper I explore the question of the ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza's theory of the composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause (whether good or evil). The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition-which Nature do we ally with, what components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported (and threatened) by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of the monstrous infinite.To outline the contours of the problem I turn to a brief description of the Baroque to mark its coordinates, specifically the ways in which monstrous infinitude surfaces as an "ontological horizon" first in the seventeenth and again in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a Deleuzian distinction between the Baroque strategy of closure and the neo-Baroque strategy of capture as different responses to this monstrous infinitude, I explore a growing contemporary movement around "the rights of nature" which, though laudable, illustrates the dimensions of the problem by virtue of its current limitations. My premise is that a restrictive vision of a "rights of nature" is in a sense inadequate, an inadequate idea-a "baroque" response to a "neo-baroque" world: it is predicated on a strategy of closure, the idea that a harmony of nature might be restored, re-established against the infinite incursions of human indiscretion. My argument simply put is this: that those who attempt to "protect" nature and those who would simply exploit "natural systems" while envisioning, even generating incompossible worlds, partake of the same presumption of a human-nature divide (in Deleuzian terms an aleatory point in a disjunctive synthesis).In order to investigate what capture might look like I explore the premises of this movement through a Spinozist lens, turning to the writings of Baruch Spinoza-not as a Baroque thinker but rather a "thinker of the Baroque."7 We might ask-why turn to Spinoza? Genevieve Lloyd for instance declares, "Anyone who looks to the Ethics for a viable, coherent metaphysical system to ground a belief in the rights of the non-human will look in vain."8 And Spinoza himself was somewhat disparaging in his attitude towards non-human others.9Spinoza's usefulness here lies not in his writings on humans or non-human nature per se, but his thinking about the composite individual. The few short passages on the composite individual are a heavily contested terrain, a battleground between neo-liberal scholars who enlist Spinoza in their promotion of a vision of methodological individualism and thinkers of more complex collaborations in the relation between individuation as a process and individuals as the effect of that process. …

To accept the constitutive power of assemblages as a composition of forces rather than a form, is to accept that the scale, composition and temporality of ‘the thing' in question are not pre-given, but are determined by ‘the thing' by going to the limits of its power. Divergent approaches in assemblage thinking differ in terms of how they understand power

Building on Deleuze’s theories of the becoming of bodies, and notions of the geographic maturity of the disabled body we formulate an emplaced model of disability wherein bodies, social expectations and built form intersect in embodied experiences in specific environments to increase or decrease the capacity of disabled children to act in those environments. We join a growing effort to generate a more comprehensive model of disability, which moves beyond a binary between the individual and the social. Drawing on in-depth case studies conducted with 13 physically disabled children, we consider the intersections between their primary environments (homes, schools and neighbourhoods) and the multiple subjectivities they embody. Ultimately we make a case about the importance of responsive, situated models of subjectivity for the development of adaptations, and that physical and social adaptations must respond to these children’s complex and varied needs and desires.

Recent cognitive neuroscientific evidence indicates that movement and gesture are necessary for optimal cognitive and communicative development. Unrestricted movement may enhance learning because it allows children to freely engage with external properties of their environments. In-depth understanding of how children interact with/in classrooms and other everyday environments is lacking. This knowledge gap is particularly problematic for children with physical disabilities because gross and/or fine motor impairments restrict their movement, and exclusionary attitudes, safety concerns and environmental barriers further curtail their ability to explore their surroundings. Hence, all children's physical health, social abilities and cognitive development may be jeopardised when built environments and educational strategies inhibit rather than enhance their movement capabilities. In this paper, key studies from neuroscience, pediatric rehabilitation, ecological psychology, architectu...

... In the words of the judge ruling for the mother: Mr. and Mrs. Wynn [aka Tommie Granville] … are trying to put together a family that includes eight children … trying to get all those children together at the same time and put together some soft of functional unit wherein the children ...

What forms of knowledge and nonknowledge continue to haunt contemporary debates, and in what ways were they ‘known too well’ in the aftermath of 1968 to precipitate the falling out of favor of Marx and Marxism and the recasting of Macherey along with the rest of Althusser's circle as ‘structuralist dinosaurs’? And what might we learn from the staging of this encounter between Hegel and Spinoza, both in terms of the specific points of application and the method of enquiry? Macherey offers an answer to these questions not only in Hegel or Spinoza but also in a series of papers addressing Hegel's prior uptake in France—an engagement that had solidified tendencies in Hegel that were also, not coincidentally, the points of Hegel's misreading of Spinoza. Read together, they offer us a fuller picture of the long shadow—cast initially in Hegel's misinterpretation of Spinoza and amplified subsequently in the uptake of Hegel in France. To return explicitly to Hegel in 1979—eve...

The persistent divide within French philosophy between so-called structuralists and poststructuralists has been recently revived in the writings of Badiou and others. This narration of the history of French philosophy is trapped inevitably in the very way it poses the problem: as a dialectic of the negative. The abstracting of these traditions from all their messiness into a dialectical opposition is itself part of the problem, a misrepresentation, ignoring any points of convergence. Drawing centrally on the work of Pierre Macherey, I suggest this divide can be traced back to Hegel's profound misreading of Spinoza, which became the basis for Hegel's dialectic and Marx's subsequent inversion. I explore crucial points of convergence between Marx and Spinoza, and a resonance between Deleuze and Macherey (who are often stereotyped as emblems of oppositional tendencies within French philosophy). Their work converges on a rejection of negation as the defining quality of essenc...

In this paper, I take up the theme of Spinoza’s ars vivendi in relation
to its temporality; duration as the very rhythm of life. In the face of
an intensifying climate crisis, our experience of the rhythm of life in
the everyday and its implications for the deep time of climate
futures seem increasingly out of joint. Building on Morfino’s
argument of the necessary relationship between ontology and
history, I explore the connections between the rhythm of life and
our (Western) comprehension of the climate crisis. This framing
provides insights into a fatal confusion. This confusion is fueled by
the chrono-topography of the modern capitalist city, its
intensification of a perceived separation of daily life from
bioenergetic processes; and it is amplified in object-oriented
ontology, which, in its treatment of climate as a hyperobject, both
accepts and reifies a split between ontology and history. I argue,
in contrast, that to think of the world as multi-relational and
multi-temporal provides us with tools to assess the politics of the
multitude in relation to the climate crisis, to better comprehend
the complexity of the conjuncture and the schematization of
divergent climate futures, and to fashion a responsive and
response-able ars vivendi.

The anthropological machine is the discursive framework, the dispositif that grounds “western man’” in a sense of civility, secured through a violent division within and between the human and non-human: not the after-effect of the civilizing act but its very foundation. This paper explores Agamben’s  machine at multiple sites: in its expression in everyday lives of urban citizens, and its legitimation of capitalist urbanization on broader spatial and temporal scales, its “worlding” through planetary urbanization and normalization of climate change. Complicit in capitalist urbanization and climate change the anthropological machine has acted as a “switch point” since the 1600s. It now frames an emergent response: triage as the inevitable sacrifice of some peoples and parts of the planet to preserve others.  If the urban is to become the site of mondialization, confronting the apparent inevitability of triage we must think beyond the either-or of a people or a planet. Thought in relation to the urban, the anthropological machine offers a meeting ground between urban political economy and assemblage urbanism. It enables us to situate the anthropocene and differentiate the urban. But it also exposes a deep divide between scholars reframing the human beyond “western man:” between those for whom the more-than-human expresses the dreams of biophilic city and those for whom the less-than-human is increasingly its living nightmare

This paper is the second of two that examine the paradoxical relationship of the child to the liberal notion of the subject. Together they explore the range of contexts in which children’s relationship to parents and other caregivers raise questions about the nature of the subject qua individual, and highlight the potential for a ventriloquist discourse around the child in which political projects are mobilized by neo-liberal and neoconservative
groups that purport to speak for the child. The first paper examined the
emergence of two contradictory images: the ‘knowing’ fetal subject and the confused child; the second paper explores particular forms of presencing and absencing of the child in relation to parental rights and questions of social entitlements. Both papers speak to the contorted somatography and topography of the child-as-subject that is emerging at an historical juncture when children’s rights are being mobilized to undermine the gains made
by a range of heterodox subjects. They point to the limits of liberal constructions of the subject in struggles for emancipation.

The inability of the child to represent his or her own interests as a legal
subject (by definition), and the continued interest of the state in the child as a futurity or resource locks the child in an eternal pas de deux: the child continually approaches the possibility of ‘personhood’ but never achieves it. In the past 40 years, in western nations the child’s legal personhood has been simultaneously invoked and constrained: through a growing array of persons and organizations that, as an exteriority, purport to ‘best
represent the child’; and through an ever more finely gradated mapping of the child’s interiority—which filters the child’s voice through a range of interpretive theories, and mechanisms. In this myopic and hyperopic reading of the child, the child’s voice disappears. This paper is the first of two examining the relationship of the child to the liberal notion of the subject. In the case law explored around fetal rights and custody issues
in the United States and elsewhere we find a paradoxical situation where the ‘fetus’ is granted a more authoritative voice in terms of what it ‘wants’ than is the child, whose wishes are perpetually called into question. Together these papers raise questions about the nature of the subject qua individual. They highlight the potential for a ventriloquist discourse around the child whereby neo-liberal and neo-conservative groups that purport
to speak for the child mobilize their own political interests

Who speaks for the jaguar? Who speaks for the fetus? Both questions rely on a political semiotics of representation. Permanently speechless, forever requiring the services of a ventriloquist, never forcing a recall vote, in each case the object or ground of representation is the realization of the representative's fondest dream. Haraway p. 311 The Promise of Monsters Why is it just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then, the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? Harstock, 1990, 163

When Spinoza wrote The Ethics in the 1600s the world was largely a wild place. Intense human settlement occupied only a quarter of the globe.2 We now live in a very different world. In the 1600s the world was largely comprise of biomes: “contiguous area[s] with similar climatic conditions, and communities of plants, animals, and soil organisms.”3 By the year 2000, only 20% of the world might be considered “semi‐natural” and 25% “wild.” But no place is left untouched by anthropogenic transformations, we live in a world of anthromes. Spinoza was largely concerned with questions of association between humans as they relate to a causal understanding of the human body. Today, forms of governance, indeed the choice between socialism or barbarism, is an every more pressing question but it is
complicated by concerns about species extinction, loss of biodiversity and
anthropogenic threats to global stability, unevenly felt in the global north and global south. With these concerns in mind, many scholars are calling for a reframing of the question of association to include our relations to non‐human others.