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.

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

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.

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.

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. 

publication: the academic, ethics and power

I have just had a paper published in a new two volume collection entitled Engaging Foucault, a collection which emerged due to the work of the organisers of the Engaging Foucault conference which took place at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade (December 2014).

The full reference for the paper follows, as well the abstract and a download link to the paper:

Heaney, Conor, ‘The Academic, Ethics and Power’, Engaging Foucault: Volume I, ed. by by Adriana Zaharijevic, Igor Cvejić and Mark Losoncz (Belgrade: Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, 2016), pp. 185-201

Abstract

What relationship does, or can, the academic have to herself, today? To what extent can one’s relationship to one self be stylised as a site of resistance in the contemporary university? In this paper, I seek to begin to respond to these questions. I do so, first, through a connective reading of Michel Foucault’s work on (neoliberal) governmentality and his later work on the care of the self. Whilst such a connection was drawn explicitly on a number of occasions by Foucault in lectures and interviews, it is understated in the Foucauldian literature, and at times distinguished by researchers working either on governmentality studies or on his ‘care of the self’. Whilst I do not reject the importance of singular focus in either of these fields, I nonetheless feel that work at their intersection can be fruitful.

More specifically, in this connective reading, I argue that the academic, today – and my focus for this paper’s purposes will be, admittedly, UK-centric - is incentivised to internalise the principles of, and self-govern according to, neoliberal governmentality. Through such self-government, the academic’s everyday practice of ‘knowledge production’, ‘skill transfer’, et cetera, is today in the service of neoliberal governmentality. I cite two examples on this: academic writing and practices of networking. Pivoting on these two examples, I will then suggest and defend two practices of resistance available to the academic today under neoliberal governmentality: writing (again) and friendship. I argue that writing and friendship open up the possibility of resistive and transformational practices of subjectivation.

Click here to download the paper.