Timothy Deane-Freeman

The question of agency is immediately both practical and political, given that it is ultimately a question of responsibility, and the exigence of establishing just who or what might be held accountable for a particular process or event. As such, far from an obscure problem of metaphysics, the question of agency is thus encountered quite directly in law, ethics and psychology, where it becomes synonymous with the need to distinguish voluntary action from all the other kinds of events. Given the combination of rational intentionality with a productive openness to the unpredictability of particular situations and materials, artistic and creative practices that strive to bring about the new resist explanation by standard accounts of action and agency. Drawing on contemporary French philosophy, this collection finds that the ethical and political significance of artistic agency lies in this combination of purposive behaviour and its openness to the unforeseen.

Work in the contemporary academy is increasingly regulated by “feedback” in the form of a series of evaluations, satisfaction surveys and progress reviews which ostensibly serve to render the institutions of knowledge production more responsive and accountable to their various stakeholders. In this way, university managements have followed a broader cultural trend, applying concepts derived from information theory and cybernetics to contemporary forms of sociality, thought and labour. But as is often the case with such transpositions, there has been relatively little critical attention to the specific technical problems and epistemic commitments which inform cybernetic conceptualisation. In this chapter, I turn to these commitments, and argue that a careful reading of cybernetic accounts of feedback equips us with critical tools we might use to question this concept’s role and applications, particularly in the context of projects to “marketise” social and subjective institutions. In disentangling positive and negative feedback—in the technical senses of these terms —and by mapping experiments with both in art, I propose a qualified concept of feedback, which might inform both contemporary accounts of agency and forms of resistant institutional praxis.

This volume seeks to explain the notion of control artists possess, and given they are changed by the action, the sense in which they can claim an artwork as theirs. Standard explanations of action and agency struggle to explain various artistic practices. Requiring recourse to a prior intention, these accounts are challenged by the spontaneity of dance and musical improvisation, a painter’s realization of an artwork, and how writers manifest meaning in a piece of writing. Furthermore, in such artistic practices, the artist is changed by the demands of the action. This interdisciplinary volume combines thirteen contributions from various artistic practices, in photography, music, dance and painting, with philosophical perspectives from post-war France to consider the changing role of the artist. This identifies what it is about an artistic practice that is creative, and how everyday occurrences can become artistic, describing the ethical and political implications of various artistic practices.

Timothy Deane-Freeman traces Deleuze's remarks about the digital to reveal both their origins and implications. In so doing, we encounter a position which is fundamentally ambiguous. On the one hand, digital techniques are intimately related to what Deleuze calls 'societies of control', which deploy them in order to close down potential spaces of creativity and resistance. On the other, digital images take up the mantle of cinema, displacing habitual forms of cognition and forcing us to think in new ways. Deane-Freeman traces these dual impulses through the images of cinema, television and social media, as well as explicating key Deleuzian concepts, including virtuality, immanence and the outside.

In this paper, I defend a conception of Deleuze’s two volumes dedicated to film – Cinema I: The Movement-Image, and Cinema II: The Time-Image – as protracted expressions of his political philosophy. In this context, I will elaborate the difficult and entwined political claims Deleuze makes on behalf of cinema: that it is capable of engendering a tentative ‘belief in the world’, such as is the necessary correlate of political action; that it captures the contemporary political fact that ‘the people are missing’, as a unified or coherent political agent; and finally that it might reveal those ‘impossible’ or ‘intolerable’ situations which would provoke such a people into being. In advancing this conceptual triumvirate, I will argue that the claims made here on behalf of cinema overspill the art form itself, linking up with Deleuze’s broader political ontology of thought and constituting a generalised political philosophy proper to so-called ‘late-capitalism’.