Topic outline

  • Deleuze and Guattari

    Prev Next

     EDGE banner

    Definitions

    Metaphysics—the branch of philosophy which treats of first principles, including the sciences of being (ontology) and of the origin and structure of the universe (cosmology). It is always intimately connected with a theory of knowledge (epistemology) (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Transcendental—transcending ordinary or common experience, thought or belief; extraordinary, supernatural, abstract or metaphysical (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Topology—the study of those properties of geometric forms that remain invariant under certain transformations, as bending, stretching, etc (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Monad—an entity, conceived after the fashion of the self, and regarded as the ultimate unit of being or as a microcosm (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Nomad—wanderer, one of a race or tribe without fixed abode, but moving about from place to place according to the state of the pasturage or food supply (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991). 

    Conatus—an effort or striving, a force or tendency simulating a human effort (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Univocal—having only one possible meaning; unambiguous, unmistakable (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Vitalism—the doctrine that phenomena are only partly controlled by mechanical forces and that they are in some measure self-determining (opposed to mechanism); Biol. the doctrine that ascribes the functions of a living organism to a vital principle distinct from chemical and other forces (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Rhizome—a root like subterranean stem, which usually produces roots below and sends up shoots progressively from its nodes (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Aborescent—hierarchical, tree-like structure.

    Machine—an apparatus consisting of interrelated parts with separate functions, which is used in the performance of some kind of work; a mechanical apparatus or contrivance, a mechanism; a device which transmits and modifies force or motion (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Nominalism—the philosophical doctrine that universals are reducible to names without any objective existence corresponding to them. In the strict sense of the doctrine there are no universals either in the mind or in the external world but words operate as symbols (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).

    Scientific realism—the view that the subject matter of scientific research and scientific theory exists independently of our knowledge of it, and that the goal of scientific research is to describe and explain both observable and unobservable aspects of the world. Scientific realism holds that there are knowable, mind-independent facts, objects, or properties.

    Introduction

    This topic introduces the work of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), a French philosopher, and his collaboration with Felix Guattari (1930–1992), a radical psychoanalyst, from the late 1960s. Together they wrote Capitalism and Schizophrenia, including Anti-Oedipus (1972), and a A Thousand Plateaus (1980), as well as What is Philosophy? (1991). In the first part of this topic we will consider some of the key influences on Deleuze's work including Spinoza, Hume, Bergson, and Nietzsche, all of whom Deleuze studied and wrote a book about. The topic will then look at Deleuze's early work on identity and difference. Lastly, we will look at some key concepts and terms introduced in Deleuze and Guattari's work on capitalism and schizophrenia and their implications for contemporary social forms.

    Like the other post structuralist approaches we have looked at, Deleuze rejected the idea of an essential world that is copied or represented in language. He also rejected the idea that the subject is the central pole from which ideas about the world are produced. Like Derrida and Foucault, Deleuze rejected the modernist research project, or in other words, the aim to uncover essential truths, and especially general principles about the world and about experience upon which human actions and decisions could be based. Instead, like Derrida and Foucault, Deleuze agreed about the importance of releasing human beings from the constraints that apparently certain or essential knowledge entails. In Derrida we saw that this is achieved by highlighting the linguistic dependencies and inconsistencies upon which supposedly inevitable or natural knowledge depends. For Foucault it is achieved by showing the historical play of discursive and non-discursive actions and events that give rise to what we hold to be essential knowledge about human beings and society.  

    What is distinctive about Deleuze's work compared to other post structuralist thinkers is his interest in metaphysics and the 'actual' world of becoming. Unlike the post structuralist philosophies we have looked at in previous topics, Deleuze claimed to be a realist and to develop a realist philosophy.

    However, Deleuze's idea of the real is a post structuralist one, not a modernist one. For Deleuze, the real world that forms the conditions of what exists is not a template or pattern that explains or determines events or representations. The real for Deleuze is unlimited and unpredictable, and it endlessly throws up distinctive or unique productions. Deleuze rejects the idea that the world is underpinned by essences in the form of generalities, classes, types, trends, or progressions, and the idea that subjects or consciousnesses 'recognise' these classes, types or trends. The essence of the world can only be grasped in the field of becoming, in unique instances, and in a specific time and place for Deleuze.

    Deleuze rejects the notion that there is a discrete separation between a knowing, observing subject and a fixed and knowable objective reality captured in a neutral system of representation. In doing so, there is a rejection of the idea that human knowledge is gradually marching forward from one analysis to another toward absolute knowledge of the world and its internal structure. Instead Deleuze claims that change, mixture and interpenetration are fundamental properties of the actual world which must become the centre of analysis. He argued for an 'exterior', 'outside' or 'surface' analysis that reads the 'becoming' world without reducing subject, object and representation to separate domains.

    Deleuze, rejects the structuralist idea that it is impossible to express the real within the existing system of signification. For structuralism, everything, history, experience, knowledge, perception, depends upon the structure of differences within the sign system. For structuralism, it is not possible to arrive at the origin of things; the idea of the origin is itself just another difference that emerges within the field of signification. Deleuze rejected this claim. For Deleuze the origin of difference is difference itself. It is not grounded in consciousness or in the structure of language. It is groundless, anarchic, and endlessly creative. The problem for Deleuze, is that pre-existing concepts within the field of signification delimit, distort, or miss the multiplicity and flux of the real. It is not that there is no origin, no real, no essence, and not that what we know about it is necessarily arbitrary, as for structuralism. For Deleuze, the real demands a creative receptivity to an ever new, becoming world.

    In exploring Deleuze's thought, this topic assumes a basic knowledge of the philosophical assumptions underpinning empiricism, social constructionism, hermeneutics, structuralism and Foucault. These topics will be essential revision for this topic.

    Central tenets of Deleuze

    Some of the central tenets of the thought of Deleuze:

    1. we do not come to know and experience the world solely through structures of representation (as structuralism holds);
    2. raw experience exceeds concepts;
    3. the mind does not produce differentiated social codes (as structuralism holds);
    4. social codes contain or reduce the multiplicity of difference within raw experience into a narrow range;
    5. there are not static structures lying behind representations (as structuralism holds);
    6. There is not a separate subject that observes or knows about reality. Perception and reality are in constant interplay.
    7. the world is comprised of singularities, unique instances, which exist within specific planes of space and time;
    8. remaining within the human domain of concepts limits our experience of the actual world of becoming;
    9. in exceeding the categories of human thought, the becoming or actual world creates the need for new ideas;
    10. in this way the representational world is also in a constant state of creative becoming.

    Philosophical influences

    Extracts taken from Cambridge dictionary of philosophy: second edition, 1999, Sanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2008, electronic, and Wikipedia, 2008, electronic.

    Unlike most philosophers of his time who were interested in Husserl and Heidegger, Deleuze was interested in the work of less popular thinkers including Spinoza, Hume, Bergson, and Nietzsche. In order to understand Deleuze's work it is helpful to understand some of the philosophers he chose to read and who influenced the development of his philosophy. 

    Baruch Spinoza (1632–77)

    Key tenets of Spinoza's thought:

    1. God and nature are identical.
    2. God/Nature has no desire or purpose (we should not anthropomorphise God).
    3. There is no good or evil from the divine perspective.
    4. There is no personal immortality.
    5. There is only one substance not two, as Descartes thought (mind and matter, thinking soul and extended body).
    6. That one substance is God/Nature, an infinite being with infinite attributes expressed in infinite ways.
    7. God/Nature is the whole universe, all things are in God/Nature, nothing exists outside God/Nature.
    8. God/Nature is uncaused, everything that exists is brought forth by God/Nature.
    9. Everything is causally determined.
    10. Human beings are a finite mode of God/Nature.
    11. The 'mind/body' problem (the means by which an insubstantial mind can be seen to move the substantial body), does not exist because the two are independent.
    12. God/Nature is expressed in two different ways within human cognizance—thought (ideas) and extension (physical bodies).
    13. Thought and extension have nothing in common; they are causally closed systems (forms of extension follow the causal laws of physical bodies, ideas follow the infinite series of ideas determined by the nature and relations of thought).
    14. However thought and extension have a parallel existence—for every relatively stable collection of matter there is a corresponding mode of thought.
    15. In fact a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are the same thing expressed in two different ways.
    16. The constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient (panpsychism).
    17. All beings are naturally endowed with conatus (an effort or striving, embracing desire or volition).
    18. Human affects are divided into actions and passions—actions arise from inner, 'adequate' knowledge and cause events, passions are passive responses to uncontrollable events arising outside us.
    19. Freedom arises from adequate knowledge of our own natures, bondage arises from being swept to and fro by fleeting, changeable and uncontrollable outside events.
    20. The solution to our bondage to externalities lies in virtue.
    21. Virtue consists in being true to one's nature which is to seek one's own advantage and preserve one's being (ethical egoism).
    22. Our greatest advantage lies in knowledge of God/Nature.
    23. Recognition of the inevitability of events beyond our control leads to equanimity (stoicism). 
    24. Since the human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God/Nature, knowledge of the essence of things leads to identification with the eternal.
    25. Hence one becomes free, unconcerned with local forces in the immediate environment.
    26. The blessedness, peace of mind, and intellectual love this induces might be compared with the feeling tone of God/Nature.
    27. In this way a free human being participates in immortality while still alive.
    28. A political society allows intellectual and religious freedom.
    29. We also need a political state to prevent the uncontrolled pursuit of individual self interest, vengeance and judgements of 'good' and 'evil'.

    From Spinoza, Deleuze develops the ideas that:

    • there are not many different things in the world from which the multiplicity of creation emerges
    • there is one being which is infinite and capable of infinite expression (univocity).

      top

    David Hume (1711–76)

    1. Philosophy cannot go beyond experience.
    2. Perceptions are comprised of 'impressions' (sensation and reflection) and 'ideas' (including memory and belief).
    3. Ideas are causally dependent upon impressions.
    4. The immediate objects of the mind are always perceptions.
    5. We have no direct impression of space and time.
    6. We have no direct impression of the self.

    From Hume, Deleuze develops the ideas that:

    • the subject is not the central pole from which ideas about the world are produced
    • the subject is itself a product of passive synthesis.

      top

    Henri Louis Bergson (1859–1941)

    Key tenets of Bergson's thought:

    1. Spencer's evolutionary philosophy is inaccurate.
    2. For Spencer all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity and progress to increasingly complex, differentiated, heterogeneous forms which gradually become more and more integrated into separate parts (like the species of the earth which resemble the branches of a tree stemming out from the trunk across time).
    3. Spencer conceptualises time as a series of separate numeric units (seconds, minutes, hours) which cause one another.
    4. This concept does not square with experience.
    5. Duration in real experience is qualitative (concerned with quality), dynamic (active/forceful), heterogeneous (composed of parts of different kinds), and irreversible.
    6. Within experience, time cannot be broken into discrete, evenly distributed units without being deformed.
    7. Time is not extended, it does not stretch out, this is a spatial representation of time.
    8. Time is also the ground from which free acts emerge.
    9. Free acts are spontaneous and qualitative and cannot be predicted.
    10. Life is not the progressive development of an initially determined 'genetic program'.
    11. Life cannot be planned beforehand, but unravels unforeseen possibilities.
    12. Life is comprised of a creative vitalism which strives to overcome the entropic drift of matter (elan vital).
    13. Time is a mobility that cannot be grasped by immobile concepts.
    14. The brain is not a place of thought, but an organ that receives environmental stimuli and adapts behaviour to suit.
    15. Intuition and analysis are different in kind, the first being capable of grasping the absolute, the other incapable.
    16. Analysis breaks up the flow of real duration into fixed, stationary, fragmentary concepts.
    17. In doing so analysis fails to capture reality. 
    18. Intuition is a direct, concrete experience of duration.
    19. Intuition is the vehicle by which we may increase the possibilities of thought, and thereby understand the absolute, real life, pure duration.

    From Bergon, Deleuze develops the ideas that:

    • the real has no unitary genesis
    • the real is brimming with multiple creative possibilities.

    • the real cannot be predicted.

    Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    Key tenets of Nietzsche's thought:

    1. The fundamental problem of contemporary life is the 'death of God' and the advent of 'nihilism' in the wake of the decline of traditional religion and metaphysics.
    2. Science cannot fill this void, the health of civilisation is in danger.
    3. There is the need for some life affirming alternative.
    4. Need a radical reconsideration of life, the world, human existence, value, morality and our 'spiritual' nature.
    5. Absolute knowledge is impossible, all knowledge is perspectival and interpretive in character.
    6. Need to undertake genealogical inquiries into the conditions under which various values have arisen.
    7. A naturalistic epistemology or 'cheerful science' can nevertheless challenge nihilism.
    8. There are ways of thinking that may be more or less well warranted in relation to specific interests and practices.
    9. Although our comprehension is restricted, it is nevertheless necessary to take part in an active re-evaluation of life and society.
    10. There are no separated souls and things, this separation of entities is a conceptual, linguistic fiction.
    11. The God hypothesis is also unworthy of belief, wrapped in error, political motivation, and 'all-too-human' need.
    12. The world is an interplay of forces without inherent structure or end, ceaselessly organising and reorganising itself ('eternal return').
    13. This creative transformation of existence is the fundamental nature of the world, a 'will to power' that suffuses everything and every one.
    14. There is a need for a 'Dionysian value standard' to replace non-naturalistic values.
    15. Most human values are not life affirming, but reflect 'all-too-human' needs and fears of less favoured groups.
    16. Morality arises from the vengeance and assertion of the weak against the strong.
    17. 'Slave' morality or 'herd-animal morality' has become dominant in the modern world.
    18. Herd morality is suited to the requirements and vulnerabilities of the majority of mediocre people who are the human rule.
    19. Herd morality is stultifying and detrimental to the breaking of that rule.
    20. A 'higher humanity' or 'higher morality' is fundamentally creative rather than cognitive.
    21. Art, as the creation and transformation of the existing world, represents the highest in humanity.

    From Nietzsche, Deleuze develops the ideas that:

    1. There is no separation between a knowing subject and an independent reality, the world is comprised of an interplay of forces.
    2. individuals are not the bearers of natural rights and duties in a state of nature;
    3. individuals and morals are products of pre-individual desires and powers;
    4. we should not judge by non-empirical or transcendent standards;
    5. to live well is not to judge, but to create;
    6. to live well is to fully express ones potential, or power, it is to become all that one can become.

    Deleuze

    From Hardt, Michael 2008, 'Reading notes on Deleuze and Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia', electronic, http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/aol.htm , viewed 24/09/08. Colebrook, C 2002, Understanding Deleuze, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, Miller, E 1993, Questions that matter: An invitation to philosophy, McGraw-Hill, New York; Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy 2008; Wikipedia.

    Identity and difference

    Difference as identity
    In his early work, Deleuze's thought revolves around a disagreement with the philosophical view of difference as identity as it originates in Plato and Aristotle through to modern empiricist thinkers like Locke and Quine. According to these thinkers the order in the world that we witness around us emerges from a process of recognition of identity. That is, each type of thing is assumed to possess a separate essence or identity that makes it different from things of other types. In this view, the world is sorted into general categories in which each instance of a type shares a similar set of recognisable and essential characteristics that are unlike the characteristics pertaining to other classes of object. For example, dogs and humans are recognised as mammals which are distinct from reptiles because their young are fed by milk from the mother's breast. Dogs and humans are recognised as different from one another because dogs have four legs and humans have two legs. In this view, the mind recognises a natural order of differences, or prior identity, within the world. In this way, so the argument goes, we can be sure that human discourse is rational or pertains to real things in the world rather than dissolving into a relative incoherent flux.

    Nominalism
    In opposition to this view is the philosophical view of nominalism. Nominalism holds that objects like 'animal', 'tables', 'planets', 'human beings' and so on have no independent existence prior to perception and language, but are simply names by which human beings group together objects which share similar features in their perception. Deleuze's thought follows a kind of nominalist perspective. For Deleuze, a concept like the self is a name only and does not pertain to a real substance in the world. Concepts are constantly produced in language until they become beliefs through force of habit.

    Singularity
    Deleuze replaces the conception of identifiable differences in the world by positing a real world of duration, flow and ever unfolding uniqueness. The world is populated by individual 'singularities' operating in different spatial and temporal zones. Although certain properties within a genus are shared, each being or object has its own historical specificity that makes it distinctive from every other. And each genus has its own history of becoming, and is constantly changing. To confront the world it is necessary to grasp things as they actually are in the flow of becoming. Instead of asking 'what is it' or 'is it true', we should ask 'which one', 'where', 'when', 'how does it work', 'how many', 'what does it do', 'what does it produce', 'in which case', 'from which viewpoint'. The world must be encountered in its specificity.

    Epistemology
    For Deleuze, knowledge does not come from 'recognising' types of object or classes of experience, rather, we perceive the world directly and attempt to fit our perceptions into the categories of thought available to us. Deleuze broadly accepts the structuralist idea that all concepts and all thought depends on linguistic difference, that is, upon a contrast with something else within the sign system. However, for Deleuze, difference cannot be mapped or contained in structure. Instead, raw experience exceeds our concepts and creates novelty or exception, which creates the need for new ideas. 

    Within structuralism there is a general concept of human mind that produces differentiated social codes. Deleuze inverts this order arguing for an infinite proliferation of difference that is then selected by social codes. This process of reducing difference is referred to as 'synthesis'. It is not that social codes differentiate otherwise meaningless human bodies, as structuralism would have it, but that a multiplicity of differences—linguistic, genetic, geographical, microsopic, or imperceptible differences, are reduced by social codes into a narrow range. The contrast between aborescence (root system) and the rhizome is used to illustrate this point. Aborescence assumes a root essence that provides the relationship or rationale for understanding which shuts down potential and possibility. The rhizome (like grass) goes out in all directions without any fixed centre or structure.

    Epistemology and monads
    The world is comprised of different planes of perception of monads or individual perceiving beings. No monad can experience the world as it really is. There is no God's eye view. Every plant, animal, inorganic, organic monad has its own view shaped by its perceptual field. A plant perceives heat, light and moisture. Animals experience different realities based on the peculiarities of their perceptual fields. Each has its own experience of light, and cannot grasp the power of light itself. Deleuze was interested in the forces or nature behind the perceptual field which is what life is made of.

    Fold
    Deleuze uses the term topology to describe the world of becoming in which breaks in continuity lead to extinction or finality. There is no essence of a thing that ensures its ongoing existence. Life continues by a process of 'folding' in which new forms are mutated and birthed. This depends upon connectivity of one state to another. For example, the vertebrae of animals mutate over the centuries to take the diverse forms of animals. The development of the human foetus is another example of the topological folding of the actual world of becoming. The 'line of flight' is a break, dispute, or mutation in the flow of becoming. For example, a genetic mutation, a challenge to the view that human beings are rational animals, a new sense of one's abilities or future. Once an entity passes out of existence it is gone forever. There is no general category or essence that exists in some abstract space that can keep the memory of that entity alive, or which can encapsulate the ever unfolding and irreducible domain of becoming.

    The virtual
    In the place of a world organised by general categories, Deleuze offers the concept of a space of possibilities, or a 'virtual' reality. Virtual reality is not a chimera as in computer speak, or an experience of a form or essence as for Plato (not a transcendent realm comprised of models or ideals). The virtual world comprises the real conditions upon which actual experience depends. For example, genetic material is the virtual reality from which actual species and extended bodies emerge. Virtual reality contains many potentialities, paths, or firings that are never realised in actuality.

    For Deleuze, a philosophy of the actual over the potential, of difference understood as points or substances fails to attend to the potentialities contained within the condition of the real. Deleuze talks about the actual world as a 'plane of immanence', a 'plane of spirituality', a 'space of possibilities', in which new forms of life, new ways of life, are constantly coming into being. The power to create is not outside the world in God, but is immanent to the world, within the world. What is important for Deleuze is to affirm life, to affirm the irreducible differences constantly coming into existence, and, following the logic of his conception of virtual difference, to affirm also all that we might, have not yet, become.

    Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and schizophrenia

    From Deleuze and Guattari, Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Hardt, Michael 2008, 'Reading notes on Deleuze and Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia', electronic, http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/aol.htm , viewed 24/09/08, and Manuel DeLanda, Lectures on Gilles Deleuze, electronic,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1ujGqlvNew&NR=1 , viewed 19/09/08, and Wikipedia, 'anti-Oedipus', electronic, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-%C5%92dipus, viewed 24/09/2008.

    Capitalism and Schizophrenia offers an analysis of human psychology, economics, society and history that re-reads Marx and Freud and rejects a view of social forms as either the result of sublimated family patterns or by-products of unjust social structures. This reading is expressed via a series of metaphors including desiring-machines, bodies without organs, miraculating-machines, and a materialist psychiatry referred to as schizoanalysis.

    Psychoanalysis explains human subjectivity according to negative root causes of Oedipal theory and 'lack'. Deleuze and Guattari posit an alternative theory—schizoanalysis—in which the hidden parts of human consciousness retell pre-coded stories as well as seek out new, plural and contradictory possibilities of interconnection, expansion and production. These productions do not come from within, but are taken up, dropped, and mutated by a promiscuous play of external cultural meanings that constantly generate new possibilities. Deleuze and Guattari recommend that we cut ourselves off from the self-policing, fake, turning inward to embrace the outer world and its ever renewing field of connections and possibilities.

    Deleuze and Guattari welcome the fall of traditional society associated with the rise of industrial capitalism, but criticise the way capital reduces all values to the market. The problem with capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari is not that it alienates us from our own humanity or individuality as for Marx, but that it reduces the endlessly proliferating potential of difference to a form of humanity and individuality expressed within the system of labour and exchange. They are also critical of the way capital limits the self to desires that can ultimately be explained and fulfilled through a single, quantifiable and exchangeable value. For Deleuze and Guattari, capital leads to a congealing and regimentation of desire, and to neurotic and repressed individuals trained to experience desire as a form of lack fulfilled in consumption. The state is conceptualised as a society of continuous control. Capitalism is a kind of anarchy in which desire is channelled into infantile forms of commodity fetishism.

    Desiring machines

    1. All is machines. This is an ontological claim. It describes the nature of reality.
    2. The usual meaning of machines is that they are products that are neither human nor natural. Machines are seen to be operated by humans, and to transform the object, nature.
    3. This imposes a false set of distinctions, of being and of nature as distinctive from machines.
    4. But being is all one; nature and being are one; there are no separate or distinctive parts in nature; humans, nature and machines are all animated by the same stuff.
    5. Nature, being, machines are not fixed, but are all characterised by movement, striving, flows, will to power, they are all processes of production.
    6. All life is machinic in the sense that it is productive, all being is becoming.
    7. Machines connect to other machines that interrupt or partially draw off their flow to form new machines. Machines are capable of potentially infinite connections.
    8. Machines do not act upon objects, machines are interconnected within processes.
    9. There is no distinction or line of separation between producers and products. Producers are products and products are producers. Producers and products are indistinguishably linked in the process of becoming.
    10. Being is not a fixed state but a continually modulating process.
    11. All life is machinic because there are no meaningful distinctions between a state of nature and some other state of being, such as human nature or the machinic.
    12. Human subjects and nature are products of machinic being.
    13. Being is asubjective, there is no subject or intelligence that stands behind actions directing operations.
    14. There is no such thing as desire, only desiring-machines, because there is no subject before the desire, the subject is a residue or after effect of production.
    15. Machines are not animated by subjects, and they are not created by subjects, they act of their own accord. Machines are asubjective and anonymous.
    16. Machines/life are created by other machines back in an endless chain.
    17. There is only action or the field of forces.
    18. Desire does not arise from lack, but is a productive force.

    For example
    Deleuze challenges an understanding of the relationship between human beings and computers as, humans produce computers, computers are not like humans, they have no productive or creative capacity, computers are mere objects of production. A conception of life as comprised of desiring machines, understands that machines, both human and material, continually interact with one another in an endless pattern in which it is impossible to ever arrive at a moment of origin. Human beings create computers in a context in which computers change the shape of the world, what humans desire from the world, as well as human perception and biological states. What is interesting in a Deleuzian frame is not simply what computers reflect about human beings (for example their gendered nature or how they have become tools of domination and oppression), but the direction of desiring machines. What is the horizon of the process of production? What new capacities, worlds, perceptions, understandings are arising?

    Body without organs

    The term bodies without organs is used in different ways across the course of Deleuze's work. The term is used as a metaphor for the virtual world which, according to Deleuze, is without functioning parts, knowledge of which can be used to predict the world coming into existence. 'Bodies have no organs' in the sense that the virtual world lacks a fixed, essential depth or differentiation that interconnected functions or organs provide. The lack of a finite and fixed set of essential relationships within the virtual world upon which absolute knowledge of the emerging world can be built, demands a reading of the surface of the body, or of events, without reading through or building upon pre-existing theory, concepts or other form of signification.

    Capitalism as a body without organs

    1. A body without organs with reference to capitalism describes a state of anti-production. Capitalism is an empty body without organs because it produces nothing and depends upon desiring machines.
    2. Capitalism is a surface that records or codes production, and thereby, apparently, possesses productive capacities, but does not actually produce.
    3. In this sense, capitalism is a miraculating machine. The false appearance of desire production is captured in the term miraculating machine.
    4. Capital produces nothing, but seems to produce everything.
    5. Capital is really produced by labor, but it seems to produce itself.
    6. In fact, labour produces and records production on the body of capital.

    Production versus expression

    1. Expression is the primary enemy of production.
    2. Expression is related to representation and signification, a process that stands outside of production which blocks production.
    3. The ontological nature of the unconscious is production.
    4. Expression is an alienation or falsification of that nature. Expression disallows production from being what it is.
    5. Reading life as a production allows us to see what is rising in the field of becoming. But expressive readings confine us to repetitions of existing meanings.

    Liberation/revolution

    1. Desiring machines lead to revolution, or are in fact revolutions in themselves.
    2. Repression is the domination of the social form over desiring production.
    3. The liberation of desiring production from repression destroys the social form and constitutes a revolution.

    Territorialization/deterritorialisation

    1. Deterritorialization refers to the dispersal of control from an established territory. For example, the deterritorialisation of English peasants from common land when it was enclosed for private landlords by the Enclosure Acts in 1709–1869.
    2. Deterritorialization is usually followed by reterritorialisation in which control is reasserted over a territory.

    The State and the war machine

    1. The army is typically understood to be a branch of the State.
    2. But the war machine is actually exterior to the State, an anarchic presence beyond the State's field of order.
    3. The war machine emerges from undisciplined nomadic movements which come from outside the State and threaten the authority of the State.
    4. The State attempts to appropriate the war machine and make it a part of its apparatus in the form of a stable military institution.
    5. War kills and mutilates, but never so effectively as after it has been appropriated by the state.
    6. The State needs crippled, zombie-like people, 'predisabled people, preexisting amputees, the still-born, the congenitally infirm' (ATP 425–26).

    Conclusion

    Instead of looking at the way systems of meaning are imposed on the world, as for structuralism and for Foucault, Deleuze radically suggests we look toward the next production of intensities from which meaning will be extracted. If we follow the lines of flight contained in the virtual world of  becoming we can escape the limitations of the expressive world and engage more creatively and fully in life. The question is not 'what does this mean?', or even, 'what are the effects of this imposed sense of meaning?', but 'how does this work, how does this machine connect to other machines'?

    References used in the development of this resource

    Cambridge dictionary of philosophy: second edition, 1999, R Audi (general editor), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Colebrook, C 2002, Understanding Deleuze, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

    Hardt, Michael 2008, 'Reading notes on Deleuze and Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia', electronic, http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/aol.htm, viewed 24/09/08.

    Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, Chapter 10.

    Manuel DeLanda, lectures on Gilles Deleuze, electronic, 

    , viewed 19/09/08.

    Miller, E 1993, Questions that matter: An invitation to philosophy, McGraw-Hill, New York.

    Sanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2008, 'Gilles Deleuze', electronic, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/, viewed 23/09/2008. 

    Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2008, 'Gilles Deleuze', electronic, http://en.wikipedia.org/wike/Gilles_Deleuze, viewed 5/02/2008.

    This web resource was developed by Wendy Bastalich.


    Prev Next