The French philosopher Félix Guattari frequently visited Japan during the 1980s and organized exchanges between French and Japanese artists and intellectuals. His immersion into the “machinic eros” of Japanese culture put him into contact with media theorists such as Tetsuo Kogawa and activists within the mini-FM community (Radio Home Run), documentary filmmakers (Mitsuo Sato), photographers (Keiichi Tahara), novelists (Kobo Abe), internationally recognized architects (Shin Takamatsu), and dancers (Min Tanaka). From pachinko parlors to high-rise highways, alongside corporate suits and among alt-culture comrades, Guattari put himself into the thick of Japanese becomings during a period in which the bubble economy continued to mutate. This collection of essays, interviews, and longer meditations shows a radical thinker exploring the architectural environment of Japan’s “machinic eros.”

The concept of assemblage has emerged in recent decades as a central tool for describing, analysing, and transforming dynamic systems in a variety of disciplines. Coined by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to different fields of knowledge, human practices, and nonhuman arrangements, “assemblage” is variously applied today in the arts, philosophy, and human and social sciences, forming links not only between disciplines but also between critical thought and artistic practice. Machinic Assemblages focuses on the concept’s uses, transpositions, and appropriations in the arts, bringing together the voices of artists and philosophers that have been working on and with this topic for many years with those of emerging scholar-practitioners. The volume embraces exciting new and reconceived artistic practices that discuss and challenge existing assemblages, propose new practices within given assemblages, and seek to invent totally unprecedented assemblages.

This book examines Félix Guattari, the French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and radical activist, renowned for an energetic style of thought that cuts across conceptual, political, and institutional spheres. Increasingly recognised as a key figure in his own right, Guattari’s influence in contemporary social theory and the modern social sciences continues to grow. From the ecosophy of hurricanes to the micropolitics of cinema, the book draws together a series of Guattarian motifs which animate the complexity of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most enigmatic thinkers. The book examines techniques and modes of thought that contribute to a liberation of thinking and subjectivity. Divided thematically into three parts – ‘cartographies’, ‘ecologies’, and ‘micropolitics’ – each chapter showcases the singular and pragmatic grounds by which Guattari’s signature concepts can be found to be both disruptive to traditional modes of thinking, and generative toward novel forms of ethics, politics and sociality. This interdisciplinary compendium on Guattari’s exciting, experimental, and enigmatic thought will appeal to academics and postgraduates within Social Theory, Human Geography, and Continental Philosophy. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

On Critical Postmedia and Korea: Philosophy, Technology, Literature was curated for the simple reason that a shift has taken place in orientation towards the future. Not long ago, the West looked to Japan as charting a path to a new form of society, with a unique dynamic of media, economics, technology, culture, and politics. Yet, across the Sea of Japan, a phase change has occurred since the bursting of the economic bubble on the Japanese archipelago. Now, we look to South Korea for a new vision of the future and a fresh perspective on media and technology. A new era beckons—a Korean era! Therefore, it’s imperative to understand this gleaming model of hyper-accelerant advanced industrial capitalism and its soft and hard power effects. This collection thus embraces South Korea’s transformation, positioning it as a key architect of future societies.

Driven by the Foucauldian attitude of subsuming architectural history into a genealogy of techne, Architectures of Life and Death advances a transdisciplinary approach rethinking subjectivity and exploring the political ramifications of these processes for the discipline of architecture and beyond. In contrast to mainstream approaches, architecture will not be seen as representative of culture, but as the mechanism of culture, the ‘collective equipment’ that rests on the reciprocal determination of social habits and technological habitats. In this sense, the idea that we shape our environments, therefore they shape us, is not to be taken as a metaphor. The animate has always been utterly dependent on the inanimate. A livable habitat is one which the inhabitant actively co-evolves with and which does not constitute a ready-made condition to which the inhabitant would simply have to passively adapt.

Is the self or subject discontinuous across technological platforms? Do technological developments increase inequality and exploitation? Is the new media landscape creating a dangerous distraction from the climate crisis? Connecting the work of critical postmedia studies to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of schizoanalysis, this book marks a bifurcatory shift in the radical theory on technology. A range of critical perspectives are explored by international authors who engage with ecology, ecosophy, climate change, the postmedia condition, and the Anthropocene. Answering the above questions, editors Joff P.N. Bradley, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, and Manoj N.Y. frame the volume's chapters as urgent responses to unbridled technological advance and impending climate disaster. Using ecological philosophy as a core focus, the volume analyses new media, technologies of the self, the power of algorithms, and technologies of resistance, to outline a materialist paradigm capable of addressing crises across the cultural, biological, and informational spheres. Through contesting economies built on desire and destruction and questioning the infiltration of capitalism in all of its spheres of negative influence, the editors review recent technological developments in light of Deleuze and Guattari's earlier seminal theories to make bold new connections and critiques in the study of media, philosophy, and the environment.

This volume brings together scholars based predominantly in Asia to contribute provocative and experimental essays on the dynamic relationship between animation and philosophy. In an inventive and playful philosophical way, they address not only the mainstay of Japanese animation, but also Korean film, picture books and Mickey Mouse to understand what we might call film-philosophy in Asia. In thinking animation with concepts from the technicolour philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, Stiegler, Benjamin, Kristeva and Heidegger, the book sees animation not as a representation of a philosophical idea per se, but conceptualizes it as a philosophical thinking-device. In the images themselves, what is at work is not just the thinking of a particular director or manga artist, but, rather, thinking as such, through and by the images themselves. The scholars in this collection are committed to thinking images themselves as thought-experiments and thinking machines.