Author(s):
Brett Zehner* - University of California San Diego Literature Department
Abstract:
Regulation, repression and capture of social and emotional difference to extract material profit is the modus operandi of semiocapitalism. Nuclear test sites, dead zones, extraction industries, excluded and disused urban neighborhoods ripe for gentrification, to name a few key sites in this libidinal economy, make up the necessary away and affective dumping ground for both material waste and emotional representations to clear a path for infinite growth in a finite world.
So now, as we move from a social control apparatus of the panoptic order to the oligoptic, these zones of sacrifice, as a circuit, contain within them the negative public affects ushered away from Deleuze's society of control. It is necessary to decipher and make visible these zones of sacrifice, to hijack the negative affect as a contagious revolutionary process and to theorize new tactics in the service of challenging power structures wherever they may be found.
I propose a creative/critical methodology for exploring zones of sacrifice. Following the lead of Experimental Geography as an artistic process involving post-Situationist tactics, including critical tourism and Non-Representational ethnography. I also draw heavily from Felix Guattari's later developments on Schizoanalysis as a process of metamodeling to unlock the revolutionary potential of excess subjectivity, and what Guattari called the ethico-aesthetic paradigm. I hope to create a Schizo(path)ology, or a hybrid conceptual toolkit to be used on the move, as a spatial hacker, in this constant state of crisis.
