LGS Blog
Simon O’Sullivan: “Art Practice as Non-Schizoanalysis and Myth-Science (Case Study: Plastique Fantastique)” – 18th March at Kingston University
Upcoming public lecture hosted by the London Graduate School at Kingston University:
“Art Practice as Non-Schizoanalysis and Myth-Science (Case Study: Plastique Fantastique)”
Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths, University of London)
5-7PM on Tuesday, March 18 in the John Galsworthy Building Room 0002 at Kingston University.
Using Plastique Fantastique as case study this talk will develop the idea (following Felix Guattari (but also Francois Laruelle)) of art practice as a form of non-schizoanalysis (insofar as it might use the insights and approaches of schizoanalysis without fully signing up to the ethicoaesthetic paradigm laid out by Guattari (and to a lesser extent by Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in their collaborations)). Art practice, it will be argued, is not a therapeutics in this sense, but might be better characterized, at least in Plastique Fantastique’s case, as a holding pattern for points of rupture or collapse. As far as this goes art practice allows a kind of minimum consistency so as to present and pitch these points of collapse. With Plastique Fantastique this takes the form of a complex fictioning function (that involves, amongst other elements, performance), or what might be called, simply, Myth-Science. Accompanying and in resonance with my comments on the latter will be some experiments in matheme-patheme metamodelisation and the invention of some new terms that bring Guattari and the late Lacan into productive encounter.
Simon O’Sullivan is Reader in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London where he teaches on the MA Contemporary Art Theory. He has published two monographs, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (2010). He also makes art, with David Burrows, under the name Plastique Fantastique.
