Professor William Watkin (Brunel University) on Fake News

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this. Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference an...

What we learnt from Cambridge Analytica, Really!

Just over half a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, the ongoing investigations into the criminal and nondemocratic role that illegal data-harvesting and targeted political ads have had on the election of Trump, and of course Brexit rumble on. At the same time there is clear disagreement as to what degree companies like Cambridge Analytica in cahoots with the far right and the Russians really skewed recent elections. It is now clear that what they did was on the edges of legality, but does that mean to say it was wrong? And if CA did not elect Trump, then what is the real political significance of data-based campaigning? Prof. Watkin, as ever, thinks we may have fresh insights into the debate.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is the source for some concepts relating to mechnisation in the later, more famous "Anti-Oedipus". Here are my schematic notes pertaining to the development of my idea of poetry machines. Deleuze, Phillipe and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone Press, 1990. The Desiring Machines: 1: Desiring-Production It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into and energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machines that produces milk, and the mouth a m...

william watkin's blog (since 2003)

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