Abstract
This chapter argues that understanding the forces at work in the production of celebrity through the media are critical to comprehending the present moment (and doing anything about it) – and the result of this confluence is a state of ‘no media’. The primary contradiction of ‘no media’ is that we are facing planetary extinction and environmental crisis on an unparalleled scale due to climate change, and the scientific facts and combinational tendencies embodied through the name: ‘ the Anthropocene’ (Crutzen 2002). However, and at the same time, the entertainment business distributes generalized, hypnotizing, sleepless vapidity, through ever-increasing and penetrating media networks, precisely designed to take away the ability to think otherwise, and hence to act in a way that could help in the contemporary Anthropocenic moment (by turning us into ‘idiot media consumers’). This chapter suggests that Deleuze and Guattari (1984) get close to prophesizing this situation in Anti-Oedipus and, combined with Guattari’s solo work, these texts offer a potentially significant way through the impasse of environmental catastrophe and media brainwashing: here called ‘no media’. This writing offers a new synthesis based on these texts, and in so doing revives social ecology in the context of the Anthropocene, moves towards the dissolution of the ‘idiot/mesmerising/nullifying’ media … and subsequently takes us through revised approaches to economics and education. The economic analysis on offer here engages with Guattari’s notion of semiocapitalism (cf. Genosko 2012) and Raworth’s (2017) doughnut economics, the educational complex deploys Deleuze’s third synthesis (1994) to open up different time strata in teaching and learning.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia |
Editors | Joff P. Bradley, Alex T. Lee, Manoj N.Y. |
Place of Publication | U.K. |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Academic |
Pages | 149-163 |
Number of pages | 15 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781350180529 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781350180505 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2023 |