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

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 (shashienglish /at/ gmail.com) 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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