A last reconfiguration of our seminaries

After the sudden publication of the third book about the Focaultian course by Deleuze (Ed. Cactus, Buenos Aires), we have decided to reschedule our calendar for the end of this course. In this sense, the readings have been set in this way:

June, 1th: Gabriel Tarde, Social laws and beliefs, desires, societies. 

June, 15th: Gilles Deleuze, The Subjectivation.

For this reasons, we have delay the second Cinema seminary by Deleuze till the next course (most probably, in October). In this vein, we can complete the seminary about the Foucault's course with this little book about the subjectivation. If you want to come to our seminaries, write an e-mail to: portraitsbioscontemporary@gmail.com. Attendance is free and it is located at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, department of Social Psychology. 

In a few moments, you will see in our website the updated information (http://pobics.wix.com/pobics)

Photo Credit: By ourselves, front of "La Sujetivación", by Gilles Deleuze.

Summary of our Deleuze reading: Cinema I

Yesterday, we held a new seminary where we had the chance to read the first book by Deleuze about images. Here you can read a brief summary about our meeting:

Bergson thesis:

The film really does not represent the movement. It would not exactly reflect or capture the real movement, but creates the movement-image. It is a way of reinventing the movement itself (Chinese pictures are first but they are different).

(P. 90) ancient philosophy: the film exists only when it is equidistant from images (any kind of images). The modern cinema invented the frame: always the same images, one after another, without priority, preference or distinction between them.

The moment is a motionless cutting movement.

The movement is a mobile cutting of length.

At the duration there is a whole, and the duration is also a transformation. The movement, which we usually consider translation, is transforming everything, affects everything, and it has nothing to do with the space (the tiger when it moves and eats zebra, then there es one zebra less, and this changes the whole result of the forest).

What is a picture-motion?

Bergson called images to what in philosophy is called phenomenon: the image is what appears, is the phenomenon, the idea.

The subject wants to know the noumenon that can never be known. The phenomenon is the encounter between the subject and the noumenon. The film brings a new conception of the image: the picture-motion.

The motion-picture is the main brick with which it is mounted or built the rest, is the atom. These bricks are expanding, in constantly movement, making a gap. Each frame, each image, has movement, and this establishes relationships with previous and the later frames and frames. That is the essence and the novelty of cinema: we hold the movement in a image.

There are three levels of analysis or elements:

-Framing: Framing is to build an artificially closed system, a system of things artificially closed.

-Plane: The plane is made determining the relative movement between the objects that have been determined by the frame. The plane is inseparable from the movement of the camera, and then what we have is a permanent sequence of shots.

-Assembly: The assembly is the way in which the relative movement is composed (a plane), and gives meaning to everything else.

There are types of motion-picture, and besides, this is different from the memory-image:

-Perception-image: is the image that reaches the indeterminacy center (IC).

-Affection-image: it is what is installed in the indeterminacy center.

-Action-image: it is what comes out of the indeterminacy center.

The indeterminacy center (in principle) is the brain, this introduces a mismatch between an action and a reaction. If we had no brain, everything would be directly action-reaction-action-reaction, constantly.

The image is displayed. What appears is the phenomenon. What appears is moving.

The brain is an interval, makes a change. The image, when it abuts on an IC becomes a affection-image, and it subtracts something (perception-image - something). In the sense that I can perceive something, I can catch something, I stick with it, the arrest occurs, (the theft of something). If that something would not been subtracted, all will pierce me without leaving a trace in me. And it not only passes by me but it affects me and also produces feelings in me (affect me).

The same imbalance is what generates the affection, then this is what makes possible the action-image.

Perception-image:

Faciality, pure condition. We must eliminate communication, the exacerbated expression of emotion. (Whether or not a face, a close up of a watch is also faciality).

Affection-image:

The image-affection is the foreground image, the face. The face is the foreground. The foreground does not have to be a face. The affection causes only within the whole, but in isolation, in the foreground isolated (in a frame for example), it does not cause affection.

Affection is a common potential to two opposites (the scary-the grounding) or a common quality (the vampire and his victim)

Action-image:

What comes out is different. The curve is the angle that allows us to what comes out would different. What comes out has a difference with what came in (diffraction of light, the angle at which the light enters the water, it makes what comes out (the rainbow) is different from what came in (the white light of al lightning). This concept is similar to the "clinamen" concept by Michel Serres.

Almost all the current cinema is action-image.

The movement-image reaches a limit where it overflows into something new: the optical-noise image (together with music): suddenly, there are two planes, image and another plane that is the sound, and this throws the image to another dimension. The movement-image is the motion, and time is the image-volume. Both are consubstantial, and it occurs when we reach the pure affection.

There are other kind of images:

-Time-images.

-Memory-images.

-Remembrance-images.

Photo Credit: By ourselves, part of the POBICS staff.

Biocapitalism, state of exception, and scenarios.

After several weeks shaping a new paper about biocapitalism (you can read about our first ideas here), we are finalizing it with new concepts and theories where our recent seminaries have had a clear influence (particularly, the Agamben's reading). 

Finally, the paper is about a brief review about the biopolitical proposal given by Agamben, and then we offer our particular vision. The key idea is the political axis is not longer the "leading actor" in our contemprary time about the law or govermentality, but it is the techno-scientific knowledge about the bios and life. Despite some theories like Rose for instance, we propose that this shift till the techno-scientific rule is fostered by the scenario concept.

What is then, a scenario?, it is the techno-scientifical injuction where the classical and positive conception about the Scientific Method is substituted by the creation of fictional futures within the preparedness logic of government. Our novelty results by placing the scenario-creation before the prearedness. Scenarios, then, are the new state of exception within this new key role of bioscience and biotechnology. This state of exception creates deterritorialized life flows without a main figure (unlike for Agamben, which talks about the Homo Sacer figure).

How we explain the performance of this new logic? Through the equipment concept given by Foucault. In the paper, we offer some examples about how it works, and you can read it when the paper is available. We want to offer a new conception about the role of bioscience in our contemporary life, and some points about a new state of exception articulated by the same kind of knowledge. 

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Wes Peck.

2014/2015 Course: an activities report

In this post, we want to give an overview of the activities we have done during the course that is ending. Although we still have some task to finish, now we can offer a complete report about the key events, papers and research we have done. Here is it in detail:

1) We started writing one paper for "Universitas Psychologica" Journal, a Colombian ISI journal. This paper was called "From Biopower to Kinepower in the European Union Security Devices". In we talked about how biosecurity has implemented a new regime of control in the contemporary world, where biopolitics in the Foucaultian sense has been abandoned in favor of a new regime: the  movement's control and surveillance. 

2) During the first months we also work on the communications for the II Congress of Critical Social Psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. We presented two communications called "From institutionalized body to interspecie body" and "We always have been Cyborg. Re-thinking embodiment". The first one was about a new kind to understand body as a interrelational body, where mosquitoes and human (for instance) was only one body linked by the new knowledge produced by bioscience and the new way of understand the life from biosecurity. The second one was about post-humanism, and we talk about how technology was present in our daily life from the birth of humankind, and not only from the last decades with the emergence of computers or another kind of technologies as DNA manipulation. In this vein, we hava try to answer to two main questions: Do we are truly evolving? and, in this case, there is some historical and taken-for-granted conceptions we have to change about it?

Furthermore, some of our staff participated as volunteers in the congress, guiding and moderating the communications.

3) Along this months, we have explore the role of citizenship as Early Warning System, as well as the concept of biosurveillance: is this kind of surveillance different in his nature from other kind of surveillance? What can people do when they see an odd man bleeding from this mouth and coughing? We have instigate some documents from the WHO and some "apps" and software as HealthMap.

4) In the end of 2014, we launched this blog by one of our staff, Enrique Baleriola. Two months later, the blog was linked with our final version of our webpage. The binomial Blog (Anthropology of the Bios) and webpage (POBICS) has an average of 150 monthly visits.

5) Portraits of Bios in the Contemporary Societies (POBICS) was constituted as research group as a branch of the new research group STS-b (Science and Technology Studies-Barcelona). Our research group aims to study the bios and life within the contemporary practices of biosciences in the path of biosecurity and biosurveillance.

6) We have published two papers: one in a Brazilian journal called "Subjectivity and Subjectifiers in Union European Technologies of Biosecurity" and other one in a Chilean journal called "Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics in the European Union Regimes of Biosecurity". 

7) We are finishing and sending more articles. For instance, one titled "New forms of inhabit the city: towards a conceptualization of biovigilant citizenship", "Biocapitalism and suspension of the norm: from the politic-legal paradigm to the emergence of the techno-scientific paradigm", or another one called "Images Regimes in Social Psychology" (we will offer an abstract about the last one in the next post). 

8) We received a great new when we achieved fund from the Spanish Government with the project called "Citizen Participation in Social Aproppiation of Knowledge and Technological Design Processes". This project has a duration of three years and we are involving in it now with new research.

9) We are also writing to ISI journals a new paper about the scenario-planning concept and another one about acceleration dispositifs in the last ebola outbreak.

10) We have held several seminaries about key Authors as Deleuze or Agamben, as well as key concepts and theories as Biopolitics, surveillance and new ways to understand the life, with the whole STS-b group and anyone who wanted to come. In fact, these seminaries are still actives.

11) Our students have collaborated in some teaching assignments, as guiding to pre-graduate students in their final dissertation, doing a peer-to-peer review for an ISI journal, or teaching to post-graduate students some issues as Images Analysis or writing some manuals.

12) Finally, the book about Biosecurity and Biopolitics in the 21th Century where we are editors and authors is about to be published . We will post about it when it would be published (but meanwhile you can see our chapter here).

And that is all. We think it has been a very productive course. We have learned many things and we want to follow this line next course. All of our staff hope you keep reading our post during this course and in the future!

Photo Credit: By ourselves at the 2nd Congress of Critical Social Psychology.