Ways of Meaning: Machinic animims and the revolutionary practice of geo-psychiatry

Melitopoulos, Angela. 2016. Ways of Meaning: Machinic animims and the revolutionary practice of geo-psychiatry. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

Based on audio-visual research and an archival survey, this thesis
addresses questions regarding the possible relations that could be
established between artistic practice, geo-psychiatry, politics,
resistance, pursuing an updated cosmic thinking in which “soul” and
“machine” exist everywhere simultaneously, in order to deal with
thenotion of multiplicity intensified by the proliferation of machinic
social relations. The underlying investigation follows Félix Guattari’s
interest in animist cosmologies and practises that can be seen as
models of subjectivity production that can be folded into our
contemporary existence. Guattari was convinced that animism, far
from being a return to irrationalism, is a way to overcome and to
neutralize the ontological dualisms of modernity that have become
the main sources of many of the contemporary political, ecological,
social, scientific, and aesthetic problems. This thesis connects the
anthropological approaches of Viveiros de Castro, Elisabeth von
Samsonow, and Barbara Glowczewski with the experimental
approaches of institutional psychiatry, from the ‘migrant work’ of the
Catalan anarcho-syndicalist psychiatrist and resistance fighter
François Tosquelles to the psychiatric clinic of La Borde where Félix
Guattari worked all his life, as well as the cinematic and cartographic
projects of the Research Group Fernand Deligny and their therapeutic
practices. The aim is to show that geo-psychiatry started as a
decolonisation of our psychic life from the ontological dualisms of
modern thought. The main concepts of the collective assemblage of
enunciation and form of machinic animism pursued by Guattari are
central to the emergence of these aesthetic paradigms in an
increasingly affirmative culture of connectivity between techno-allied
bodies. It reaches out to networks of resistances that build animist
subjectivities in anti-colonial minority politics in the Global South.
And finally it evaluates a technophile becoming of our subjectivity in
the fabrication of the techno-scientific modes of seeing the earth with
regard to environmental politics and the autonomy and right of
migration.

Item Type:

Thesis (Doctoral)

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00019684

Keywords:

animism, assemblages, machinic animism, rhizome, multiperspectivism, anti-colonial minority politics in the Global South, network media, institutional psychotherapy, cinema verité, Francois Tosquelles, Saint-Alban, Félix Guattari, the clinic of La Borde, Fernand Deligny, Viveiros de Castro, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Barbara Glowczewski

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Visual Cultures > Centre for Research Architecture

Date:

30 November 2016

Item ID:

19684

Date Deposited:

18 Jan 2017 16:53

Last Modified:

08 Sep 2022 11:45

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/19684

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