Prefactory Note from Brent Lin
Hi UBC STS! The working paper I’m sharing with you is being commissioned for publication in a zine, so I ask for your patience and good humour with its stylistic quirks! However, I am considering turning this into my grad school writing sample, so definitely hold my feet to the fire if you think it can be improved towards that end in any way. Thanks!
Abstract
This essay is one further rupture in the subterranean stream of thought flowing from, through, and under the works of Tiqqun, Alexander Galloway, Orit Halpern, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, and Rey Chow, concerned with the pre-histories and afterlives of poststructuralism. Philip Mirowski has written about the resonances between economics and cybernetics, while Orit Halpern examined the intellectual grounding of cybernetics itself in continental philosophy. What might a study of what I call the “avant-garde” of contemporary capitalism and French philosophy do for us? Combining intellectual history and cultural studies in both content and style, I tell stories of my time studying in business school in order to excavate and examine the resonances between certain trends in contemporary business practice and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, and what they might mean for politicized scholarship incorporating this philosophy.
Bio
Brent Lin is a reformed goon who has studied both philosophy and business. His current academic interests are in software/computing studies, new media studies, and postcolonial studies. He plans to investigate blockchain technology as an “archivist-less” archive and the influence of cybernetics on Deleuze and Guattari in his graduate studies. When not writing freelance cultural criticism, he works as a television reporter.
