book release + video - contemporary capitalism & mental health: rhythms of everyday life

My new book Contemporary Capitalism and Mental Health: Rhythms of Everyday Life, with Edinburgh University Press, is out now!

In the book I essentially do two things. The first part is devoted to making methodological and philosophical contributions to rhythmanalysis, an approach which tries to analyse phenomena in terms of their rhythms and processes, and the ways in which phenomena both stabilise and transform. I attempt to offer a new approach, drawing on the work of Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler, Henri Lefebvre, and Gilbert Simondon (among others). I call this particular approach to rhythmanalysis scaping.

The second part of the book takes scaping and applies it to the question of “mental health” in contemporary capitalism. I take a non-individualising approach to mental health, which is to say that I prefer to think of a mental environment or mental ecology. Applying scaping to the mental environment is what I call mindscaping.

In mindscaping the rhythms of everyday life in contemporary capitalism, I take three particular areas of inquiry into account. Namely, how we experience attention and distraction in relationship with contemporary digital technology, how we relate to and experience happiness and depression today, as well as political and affective economies of debt.

The book has a wonderful preface from Gary Genosko. It also has a concluding short dialogue between me and Iain MacKenzie.

In May 2024, at the University of Kent, Canterbury, Peter Marshall organised the 2nd Annual Workshops in Political Theory. At the end of this day there was a double-book launch, in which I tried to contextualise this new book alongside my first, Rhythm: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2023), as part of an ongoing set of contributions to the field of rhythmanalysis. Watch below!

For more information on the books, see the “Rhythm” tab above.

book announcement - rhythm: new trajectories in law

My first monograph Rhythm: New Trajectories in Law is due to be published by Routledge on October 3rd 2022 as part of the “New Trajectories in Law” book series. It is intended to be an entry-point for the budding rhythmanalyst, highlighting its transdisciplinarity, & an attempt to think law rhythmanalytically.

Here is a short description of the book:

This book analyses the conceptual and concrete relationships between rhythm and law.

Rhythm is the unfolding of ordered and regulated movement. Law operates through the ordering and regulation of movement. Adopting a ‘rhythmanalytical’ perspective – which treats natural and social phenomena in terms of their rhythms, repetitions, motions, and movements – this book offers an account of how legal institutions and practices can be theorised and explained in terms of rhythm. It demonstrates how the category of rhythm has jurisprudential significance, from how Plato envisaged the functioning of the city-state, to the operation of the common law, as well as in our relationship to contemporary digital technology. In music, rhythm ‘orders’ the movement of sound, binding together the motions and vibrations of sound in such a way that is neither pure noise nor pure mechanics. In this way, rhythm can be deployed as a concept in the analysis of one of the central purposes of legal institutions and practices: to order the movements of bodies, whether the bodies of citizens in everyday life or of prisoners in rituals of punishment. This book engages with the mutual intersections and points of illumination between rhythm and law, such as ritual, measure, order, and change.

This book is an experimental rhythmanalysis of law, offering conceptual and methodological starting points, as well as proposing directions that could be deployed in future research. It is aimed primarily at legal scholars intrigued by rhythmanalysis and rhythmanalysts more generally. This book will also be of interest to those in the fields of philosophy, political and legal theory, sociology, and other social sciences.

You can now pre-order the book, and if you do so direct via the publisher (link below), using the code ASM08, you can get 20% off.

Find out more details on the book, or to pre-order it, see here.

daylight saving and the politics of time

I recently wrote a short blog post for the Strathclyde Law Blog entitled “Changing Time/Timing Changes: Daylight Saving & the Politics of Time”, intended as a brief introduction to the question of daylight saving from a legal and political perspective. Read it here.

two short pieces on time

Over the past couple of months, I have written two shorter pieces. Both of which are, in some sense, about what we do with our time and what others want us to do with our time.

One was for the public philosophy website Armchair Opinions, whose goal it is to organise short, accessible responses by “philosophers” to questions sent in by, well, anyone. Check them out and send them a question! I wrote a response to the question “Is philosophy a waste of time?”. Read it here.

The second piece was in support of a new journal in political theory set and run by undergraduate students at King’s College London (KCL): Logos. If you’re a student at KCL, or at one of the University of London institutions, or an academic wishing to write something in shorter form, you should check them out. My essay is entitled “The Category of the Chronopolitical”. Read it here.

publications (article & chapter) - tragic rhythms (nietzsche, agamben) / chapter without organisation

I have just had an article published in La Deleuziana as part of a Special Issue entitled Rhythm, Chaos, and the Nonpulsed Man, coedited by Obsolete Capitalism and Stefano Oliva. The article is entitled “Tragic Rhythms: Nietzsche and Agamben on Rhythm and Art”.

Here is the abstract:

This paper explores the question of the relationship between art, rhythm, and life through a mobilisation of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion, first, of Nietzsche and the active nihilist’s relation- ship to art, and second, on his diagnosis of rhythm as pertaining to the “original structure” of the work of art in The Man Without Content. Agamben’s notion of the “rhythmic” and “poietic” encoun- ter is one which situates the experience of rhythm as the experience of the originary dimension of temporality and of the human’s relationship to the world. Turning to Nietzsche, this paper seeks to complicate Agamben’s picture by discussing Nietzsche’s under-discussed explorations of rhythm and its connection to art (focusing primarily on his early works). Three distinct rhythms will be identified: Apollonian, Dionysian, and the tragic or joyful rhythms of the Apollo-Dionysus relation (discussed through Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus and of Deleuze’s reading of Nie- tzsche’s Heraclitus). Reading Agamben through Nietzsche, it will be discussed how Agamben’s no- tion of rhythm (1) blends Apollonian and Dionysian elements; (2) does not through this blending however offer a tragic or joyful notion of rhythm, which, for Nietzsche, follows from their double affirmative rhythmisation. Instead of a rhythmic-poietic encounter opening an originary and au- thentic experience of temporality and dwelling, Nietzsche offers an account of tragic and joyful rhythms which continually create new worlds.

The full reference for the paper is as-follows:

Heaney, Conor, ‘Tragic Rhythms: Nietzsche and Agamben on Rhythm and Art’, La Deleuziana, 10, 2020, 61-78

You can download the paper here, or directly from the journal itself (where you can also check out other ones in the Special Issue) here. (Note - to download the papers from the journal, click the page numbers beside the article titles.)

In addition, a collaborative chapter for which I was a co-author on with Iain MacKenzie, Hollie Mackenzie, and Phil Gaydon, entitled “How Do You Make Yourself a Chapter Without Organisation?” has just been published as part of the edited collection Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by shine choi, Anna Selmeczi, and Erzsébet Strausz. More information about the book can be found here.

The full reference for this chapter is as-follows:

Gaydon, Phil, Heaney, Conor, Mackenzie, Hollie, and MacKenzie, Iain, 'How Do You Make Yourself a Chapter Without Organisation?', in Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by Shine Choi, Anna Selmeczi, and Erzsébet Strausz (Oxon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 239-256

special issue publication: culture & technics - the politics of simondon's du mode

On December 17th, a Special Issue of Culture, Theory and Critique was published entitled Culture & Technics: The Politics of Simondon’s Du Mode. This Special Issue followed the conference in September 2018 at the University of Kent which bore the same name.

The Special Issue follows the long-awaited translation of Simondon’s supplementary thesis, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, and seeks to mobilise around questions concerning the relationship between culture, technics, and politics, in a time of increasingly pervasive digitalisation. There are a number of really wonderful contributions here from authors working on a spectrum of problems and questions emerging through their engagement with Simondon’s work.

The full Issue can be found on the journal website by clicking here.

My introduction to the Special Issue is open access, and can be read or downloaded here, here, or here. If anyone has any issue with accessing articles, please get in touch.

publication (article): rhythmic nootechnics

I have just had an article published (Online First) in Educational Philosophy and Theory, which will form part of a soon to be published Special Issue on ‘Bernard Stiegler as Philosopher of Education’. The paper is entitled ‘Rhythmic Nootechnics: Stiegler, Whitehead, and Noetic Life’.

Abstract:
In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Bernard Stiegler develops an account of the pedagogical responsibilities which follow from rhythmic intergenerational flows, involving the creation of milieus which care for and pay attention to the future, toward the creation of nootechnical milieus. Such milieus are defined by their objects of attention: political life, spiritual life, and political life; taken together: noetic life. Such is the claim Alfred North Whitehead makes when arguing that the sole object of education is life and the creation of an art of life which is itself a rhythmic adventure.

The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, to clarify the importance of Stiegler’s reading of Aristotle’s notion of the noetic soul in our thinking about the role, purpose, and function of educational institutions in relation to intellective, spiritual, and political life. In this paper, I will fuse this discussion with a Whiteheadian approach to rhythm, developing what I call a ‘rhythmic nootechnics’ in the service of ‘nootechnical evolution’ as, I argue, Whitehead’s approach to rhythm allows to clarify and enrich Stiegler’s reading of Aristotle. Second, and as indicated, to explore the relationship between Whitehead and Stiegler, insofar as the former has become an increasing reference point for the latter, but this relationship remains unexplored in the literature. Third, to apply this concept of ‘rhythmic nootechnics’ to think about what transformations at the level of pedagogy and politics are necessary to reinvent the university from this Stieglerian and Whiteheadian perspective.

The full reference is as-follows (updated following the release of the full Special Issue):

Heaney, Conor, 'Rhythmic Nootechnics: Stiegler, Whitehead, and Noetic Life’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52, 4 (2020), 397-408

You can download the paper from the journal's website (as well as access the other articles in this issue) here. Or by clicking here, where the first 50 downloads are free. If anyone wishes to see the paper and has issues with these links, please get in touch.

culture and technics: the politics of simondon's du mode

On 13th-15th September 2018 (and the months preceding), I had the privilege of co-organising a conference with Dr Iain MacKenzie and Arshita Nandan entitled Culture and Technics: The Politics of Simondon’s Du Mode, under the auspices of the Centre for Critical Thought and the Department of Politics & International Relations, for which we received funding from the University of Kent Faculty Research Fund and received invaluable support from professional services staff in the organisational process.

The conference emerged following the recent (and long awaited) translation of Gilbert Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques [1958] (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects) which, among other things (and to put it lightly) made foundational and innovative contributions to the philosophy of technology, to the questions on the relationship between culture and technology, to process philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and ontology. This text would become crucial, for example, in the work of Gilles Deleuze and his approach to “individuation” (a Simondonian term), and is of course foundational in the work of Bernard Stiegler, whose “organological” approach is grounded (at least in part) by Simondon’s philosophy of technics.

We were delighted to welcome, among others, Cecile Malaspina, Yuk Hui, and Simon Mills (as keynotes), Bernard Stiegler (virtually - as an e-keynote), Anne Sauvagnargues, Daniela Voss, Ashley Woodward, and many others across all stages of research for a truly exciting and enriching set of discussions.

Incase any one might be interested, we have begun to upload the roundtables, keynotes, and panel sessions to the Centre for Critical Thought’s YouTube channel, all of which are being progressively organised into this playlist. Subscribe to the channel to stay tuned. I here embed the second roundtable session, a discussion between Anne Sauvagnargues and Yuk Hui, chaired by myself.

publication (article): pursuing joy with deleuze

I have just had an article published in the new edition of Deleuze and Guattari Studies, entitled 'Pursuing Joy with Deleuze: Transcendental Empiricism and Affirmative Naturalism as Worldly Practice'.

Abstract:
In this paper, I seek to extract what I call an empiricist mode of existence through a combined reading of two under-researched vectors of Gilles Deleuze’s thought: his ‘transcendental empiricism’ and his ‘affirmative naturalism’. This empiricist mode of existence co-positions Deleuze’s empiricism and naturalism as pertaining to a stylistics of life which is ontologically experimentalist, epistemologically open, and immanently engaged in the world. That is, a processual praxis of demystification and organising encounters towards joy.

The full reference is as-follows:

Heaney, Conor 'Pursuing Joy with Deleuze: Transcendental Empiricism and Affirmative Naturalism as Wordly Practice', Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 12, 3 (2018), 374-401

You can download the paper from the journal's website (as well as access the other articles in this issue) here. Or by clicking here.

publication (book review): lazzarato's "experimental politics"

I have just had a book review of Maurizio Lazzarato's recently translated Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age published in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books. The text itself is a blend of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari (among others) derived concepts used to think through contemporary political conflicts and struggles over the future of capitalism, as will be familiar to readers of Lazzarato's other works already translated.

The full reference is as-follows: Heaney, Conor, 'Experimental Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato'. Reviewed in: Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, June 2018. 

The review is Open Access, and can be read by clicking here. 

blog contribution: coping in the hyperindustrial university: politics & pedagogy

I have just had a blog post published as the second part of a ten part series organised by the BISA Postgraduate Network devoted to thinking about what it means to teach as a PhD student in the contemporary university, the challenges involved, as well as the transition to post-PhD life wherein teaching experience is so often a crucial factor in securing employment (casual or non-casual). You can check out the first post, which focuses on the BISA PGN Teaching Prize, here. My contribution, which focuses on the political aspect of pedagogy in the contemporary university, can be accessed here. Future contributions will be added in the weeks to come. Thanks go to Tom Watts and Camille Merden for organising, commissioning, and editing this interesting series of contributions which, I think, are necessary and timely insights into the different ways different PhD students deal with the demands of the hyperindustrial university. 

publication (article): stupidity and study in the contemporary university

I have just had an article published in the new edition of La Deleuziana, entitled 'Stupidity and Study in the Contemporary University.'

In the paper, I consider the concepts of "stupidity" (with Deleuze and Stiegler) and "study" (with Harney and Moten) in relation to the contemporary university. I argue that the university functions within, and perpetuates, systemic stupidity through corporatised management structures and regimes of governance of research and teaching. Further, I consider some projects of study which might be developed in the university-to-come in order to escape such systemic stupidity. 

The full reference is as-follows:

Heaney, Conor 'Stupidity and Study in the Contemporary University', La Deleuziana, 5, 2017, 5-31

You can download the paper from the journal's website (by clicking the page numbers beside the article title), as well as access the other articles this issue here. Or by clicking here. 

PLANK zine contribution: learning, exchange, and play

In September 2015, Hollie Mackenzie, Dr Iain MacKenzie and I hosted the first iteration of Learning, Exchange, and Play at an event hosted and organised by PLANK (Politically Led Art & Networked Knowledges) at King's College London. I blogged about this previously following the subsequent release of the first LEP film, LEP I, here. 

Following this event, the team at PLANK sought contributions for a zine based around the day's events, which was launched/released in June 2017. In it contains a short piece by myself, Hollie, and Iain discussing and reflecting on some of the ideas and practices in this first version of LEP. You can download our short contribution here.

The full reference is:

MacKenzie, Iain, Mackenzie, Hollie, and Heaney, Conor, 'Learning, Exchange, and Play: Practicing a Deleuzian Pedagogy', PLANK Zine, Issue 1: Techniques of Art and Protest, 2017,  41-45

If you want to find out more about PLANK, and the other activities and events they're involved with, you can check out their blog here: http://plank-network.blogspot.co.uk 

publication (book review): raunig's "dividuum"

I have just had a book review of Gerald Raunig's recently translated Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution Vol. 1 published in New Formations. The book is an (Deleuze and Guattari inspired) attempt to both historically trace and develop anew the concept of dividuality and its place in both the politics of the present and in trajectories of potentially revolutionary politics-to-come. 

The full reference is as-follows: Heaney, Conor, 'Inventing New Lines', New Formations, 89/90 (2017), 268-271

Click here to download the review. 

publication (article): the teaching excellence framework: perpetual pedagogical control in postwelfare capitalism

Myself and Hollie Mackenzie have just had a paper published in Compass: A Journal of Learning and Teaching in a special issue on the Teaching Excellence Framework (which I have blogged about previously), which the Conservative government are seeking to introduce into the tertiary education sector, and which would see the creation of new university league tables centred around teaching-based metrics. 

The abstract for the paper is as-follows:

In this paper, we argue that Success as a Knowledge Economy, and the Teaching Excellence Framework, will constitute a set of mechanisms of perpetual pedagogical control in which the market will become a regulator of pedagogical possibilities. Rather than supporting pedagogical exploration, or creating conditions for the empowerment of students and teachers, such policies support the precarisation and casualisation of both. We develop these claims through a reading of these policies alongside Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control, and situating it in the context of what Gary Hall has termed postwelfare capitalism. We conclude by reaching out to others in the tertiary education sector and beyond to ask if this really is the direction we wish to take this sector in the UK.

The full reference is as-follows:

Heaney, Conor and Mackenzie, Hollie, 'The Teaching Excellence Framework: Perpetual Pedagogical Control in Postwelfare Capitalism', Compass: A Journal of Learning and Teaching, 10 (2), 2017

You can download the paper here. The journal itself is Open Access, and you can download all the other articles from this edition here.

selected excerpts from deleuze (1990) and the economist (2017)

The Economist published an article entitled 'Lifelong Learning is Becoming an Economic Imperative' this month. 

Gilles Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control was first published in 1990 in L'Autre journal (which, as far as I'm aware, no longer publishes). 

Here are excerpts from both placed alongside each other. 

“In many occupations it has become essential to acquire new skills as established ones become obsolete [...] To remain competitive, and to give low- and high-skilled workers alike the best chance of success, economies need to offer training and career-focused education throughout people’s working lives [...] Universities are embracing online and modular learning more vigorously. Places like Singapore are investing heavily in providing their citizens with learning credits that they can draw on throughout their working lives.”

— The Economist

“the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.”

— Deleuze, pp. 4-5

“Individuals, too, increasingly seem to accept the need for continuous rebooting […] Another survey, conducted by Manpower in 2016, found that 93% of millennials were willing to spend their own money on further training. Meanwhile, employers are putting increasing emphasis on learning as a skill in its own right.”

— The Economist

“Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”

— Deleuze, p. 7

(Continuous re-booting - software updates - is what The Economist recommends for us all.)

Well. 

publication (article): revising sangiovanni's reciprocity-based internationalism

I have just had an article published in Ethics & Global Politics entitled 'Revising Sangiovanni's Reciprocity-Based Internationalism: Towards International Egalitarian Obligations.' 

The paper considers aspects of international capital ownership and interstate trade and argues that these practices, under my modified version Andrea Sangiovanni's of 'reciprocity-based internationalism' (which attempts to account for when and how egalitarian obligations might be generated through social, political, and economic relations), themselves generate egalitarian obligations. I also work with Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century in this article. 

The full reference is as-follows:

Heaney, Conor, 'Revising Sangiovanni's reciprocity-based internationalism: towards international egalitarian obligations', Ethics & Global Politics, 9, 2016

You can download the paper here, where there is also a more detailed abstract, if you're interested.

publication (book review): pettman’s "infinite distraction"

I have just had a book review published in Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. I reviewed Dominic Pettman’s recently released interesting text, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media, published by Polity Press. The book is another attempt within contemporary social and cultural theory to consider what we might think and about what we might do in relation to our contemporary algorithmic entanglement with digital technologies.

The full reference is as-follows:

Heaney, Conor, ‘Pettman, Dominic, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2016’, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 63, 1 (2016),  75-77

Click here to download the book review. 

our collective insomnia

Arthur Winfree was a theoretical biologist whose work, among other things, focused on the connections between organisms and the "time-worlds" through which they navigate their "life-worlds." Considering, for example, mosquitoes, Winfree experimented with how certain “time shocks” were reacted to by the objects of the experiment. Manuel DeLanda, in his famous Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, writes the following in relation to Winfree’s research:

Winfree’s main result is, basically, that a singular, critical stimulus applied at a singular, sensitive moment has a destructive effect on the sleep-awake cycle of organisms, giving a population of mosquitoes, for example, permanent insomnia. (2013: 106-107)

In other words, Winfree’s results suggest that certain modifications in an organism’s life-world can rupture the internal relationship that organism has to itself (its rhythms, habits, and so on). This is not, in itself, surprising. Humans tend to obey circadian rhythms, it would seem, partially due to the fact that natural selection tends to “select” modifications that enable the continual development of organism-and-life-world (where the unit of evolutionary selection is not “the organism” but “the organism and its environment”). The human life-world is one experienced largely in terms of the temporal cycle of day-and-night. It makes sense, therefore, that the human-as-organism would come to regulate itself in relation to the life-world (of day-and-night) that it inhabits.

But this self-regulation of which humans (and all other effects of evolutionary processes) are capable of doesn’t always occur quickly. Sometimes there are historical developments or ruptures which off-set the balance and force new adaptations to the fore. Technological innovation and development has, in many – though by no means all – urban areas rendered the distinction between online and offline increasingly problematic or increasingly inapplicable. In sites where this permanent online-ness is operative, we see an expanse of strategies of surveillance, a more pervasive and individually targeted virtual landscape of advertisements to fend off, resist (and often submit to), and the permanent opportunity to be “working.” The erosion of the online/offline distinction bears the potential of eroding the labour/leisure distinction: one can always be consuming and one can always be producing. Indeed, the social injunction is that one ought to be doing precisely these two things, at all times.

When is there time to sleep? That contemporary labour relations wage a war on sleep – where sleep is only valued to the extent that it replenishes calorie-dependent, appetite-dependent, taste-dependent, and liquidity-dependent supplies of human capital, potential productivity and consumption – is no new thing. But let’s say that the “new digital landscape” wages war on sleep in a new way, and therefore commands new responses. The imbrication of neoliberal capitalism and advanced digital technologies tends towards a culture of permanent production, consumption, and, as such, permanent collective insomnia. Has the critical stimulus to produce this collective insomnia in us already been applied, like to the mosquitoes in Winfree’s experiments?

References

DeLanda, Manuel, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)