Deleuze and Guattari Quarantine Collective and Acid Horizon

It’s been a busy few weeks for me. Aside from having to finish writing the first chapter of my PhD thesis, submit, take feedback, correct, resubmit, get more feedback, and begin to plan the next chapter, two other pretty amazing things have happened. One is the Deleuze & Guattari Quarantine Collective, which I’ve been privileged to do what I can to contribute to. It’s a discussion group organised on Discord dedicated to deinstitutionalising knowledge and to group, collaborative learning about the work of Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari. At the moment we’re reading slowly, patiently, and methodically through their masterpiece Anti-Oedipus. It’s a difficult text, but by drawing on the multiplicity of backgrounds, experience and insights of the members involved in the group, it’s proving to be an extremely fulfilling project. This evening we’re going to be focusing on Chapter 2 Section 4, The Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording, with a view to understanding what’s going on here and how it fits into the bigger picture of Deleuze and Guattari’s project. Fingers crossed, we should also have the excellent Taylor Adkins joining us to help build up that bigger picture as well as perhaps to say a bit about Gilbert Simondon’s influence on Deleuze. Taylor is currently finishing up one of the first (perhaps the first) major English translation of Simondon’s work, so it could be really fascinating. I’m going to include a public invite to the Discord server here, but if it expires then you can always hit me up on Twitter for a new invite. All of our discussions are recorded and placed on Soundcloud so that anyone can jump in or catch up. Here’s the last one:

The other project which has emerged is an off-shoot of the Deleuze & Guattari reading group: Acid Horizon Podcast. It’s a slightly different space for a few of us to discuss in a slightly more streamlined way a range of different texts of critical theory which may have more or less no bearing on Deleuze and Guattari, but always to keep things accessible and to relate theory back to praxis. The idea is to create a space for different kinds of discussions and content to emerge. For now we’re committing to five initial episodes, the first of which (an introduction) has been recorded and published; the following four will be explorations of four respective texts, picked by us. I’ve gone with the chapter “Postmodernization, or The Informatization of Production” from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s masterpiece Empire. You can listen to the first episode below, or support us over on Patreon if you want to hear more interesting discussions of important or lesser-known theory.

This is all pretty exciting. I only hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew!