The (schizo)analysis of value in the 'Age of Innovation'

Abstract

Guattari's schizoanalytic method offers a means of apprehending and evaluating forms of life in the making. Here, the notion of schizoanalysis is deployed towards an engagement with the emerging practices and institutions now familiarly known as Art-Science. In the face of the growing conviction that art and science are fecund bedfellows, the chapter argues that the analysis of such emerging forms needs to push away from a scientific paradigm towards an ethico-aesthetic one, if it is to play a role in actualising their most productive potentials. In pursuing this argument, the chapter turns to Guattari's analysis of the ethico-aesthetic experiments of Kingsley Hall. It is argued that, in 'the real schizo trip', it is not money that is the problem, so much as the paranoid tendencies of capitalism and science. While the task of innovative capitalism is to extract a surplus from the deterritorialised flows of capital and labour, there is always an immanent processual potential that remains strictly irreducible to dominant reterritorialisations. And this immanent and irreducible potential might, to the extent that it operates within an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, push beyond the dominant redundancies that normalise the production of subjective and objective worlds. Show more