Kick-ass Deleuze & Guattari introduction!!!

(english below)

Hittade den här introduktionen till Deleuze och Guattari i boken Theory for education av Greg Dimitriadis och George Kamberelis. Boken sammanfattar mängder av tänkare och analyserar deras betydelse för pedagogikens utveckling och kan rekommenderas (har iofs inte läst hela än men…). Just delen om d&g innehåller extremt lite om undervisning, men är den mest lättbegripliga sammanfattningen av deras teorier som jag hittat.

D&G:s teorier är ju inte helt lätta att skaffa sig en sammanhängande bild av, framför allt inte genom att läsa deras Capitalism and shizophrenia. Det är förmodligen inte meningen heller. De har själva sagt att deras bok A thousand plateaus ska läsas ”som man lyssnar på en skiva”. Och tanken att känslor och musik inte ska förklaras eller analyseras sönder är ju utbredd, så frågan är - bör d&g:s ”poesi” förklaras på ett begripligt sätt? Jag tycker nog att den klarar det. Sen är det upp till dem som kan dem desto bättre att bedöma om förklaringen nedan är någorlunda korrekt eller inte.

En sista grej: hittar ni några OCR-fel nedan så säg gärna till!

Deleuze & Guattari

Key Concepts

• rhizome
• deterritorialization
• pack multiplicities
• schizoanalysis
• desiring-machines
• body without organs

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), a philosopher, was born in France. He studied at the Sorbonne under Georges Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite. He later taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, the University of Lyon, and, at the invitation of Michel Foucault, at the experimental University of Paris VIII. He retired in 1987. Deleuze was a prolific writer on both philosophy and literature, including studies of Hume, Bergson, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Proust, Artaud, and Lewis Carroll, critiques of Kantian and Platonic thought, and considerations of such issues as representation, linguistic meaning, subjectivity, and difference.

Félix Guattari (1930-1992), a noted psychoanalyst and political activist, was also born in France. He embraced both radical psychotherapy (which he called ”anti-psychiatry”) and Marxist politics, though he became disillusioned with the French Communist Party after the May 1968 Paris strikes. He was a psychoanalyst at the Clinique de la Borde from 1953 until his death and was known for his use of alternative psychoanalytic therapies. Guattari was closely associated with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. He received training from Jacques Lacan and was in analysis with him from 1962 to 1969. He later came to critique at least some aspects of Lacanian analysis. Guattari individually published essays and two books on psychoanalytic theory. In addition to his work with Deleuze, he collaborated with other Marxist thinkers and psychoanalysts.

Deleuze and Guattari met in 1969 and started working together soon after. Their collaborations include four books that are especially noteworthy for their dual critiques of Marxist and Freudian thought. The writings we will deal with here are Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (first published in French in 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (first published in French in 1980). In these twin volumes, Deleuze and Guattari attempted to destabilize essentialism and grand theories, especially those of Marx, Freud, and structuralism. Deleuze and Guattari left us a rich conceptual palette replete with neologisms, only a small part of which we can discuss here. Despite the tendency among many to associate Deleuze and Guattari with ”postmodernism,” they did not themselves see their intellectual project in this light. Guattari, for instance, repudiated postmodernism as ”nothing but the last gasp of modernism; nothing, that is, but a reaction to and, in a certain way, a mirror of the formalist abuses and reductions of modernism from which, in the end, it is no different” (1996, p. 109). The postmodern label notwithstanding, Deleuze and Guattari crafted a view of the world critical of grand narratives, foundational thought, and essences. Resisting those tendencies of modern thought, their texts describe ways of seeing and understanding multiplicities both of individual subjects and of larger institutional entities. It was to the end of destabilizing what they refer to as ”fascist ways of acting in the world” that they armed themselves with a battery of neologisms that force us to think and conceptualize outside established, hegemonic, and naturalized modes of modern common sense.

Because Deleuze and Guattari sought multiplicity in their writing style, it is difficult to derive a clear and linear outline of their ideas. Any attempt to do so runs counter to their own resistance to such modernist ways of thinking. Many of the neologisms they employed are more suggestive than definitive. But we can point out some of the recurring themes and concepts with which Deleuze and Guattari were concerned. In general, they engaged in insistent critiques of modern ideas concerning the primacy of hierarchy, truth, meaning, subjectivity, and representation. For instance, they attacked the notion that there exist individual subjects who can gain knowledge of the truth and then transmit (represent) that truth transparently to others.

One notion that underscores their attempt to derail modernist, linear thinking is their construct of the rhizome, an idea taken up at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus. For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome is an oppositional alternative to what they call ”arborescent” or ”arboreal” ways of thinking, acting, and being, which have defined Western epistemologies at least since the Enlightenment and probably much earlier. As the name suggests, arborescent forms and structures may be imagined metaphorically as trees—linear, hierarchical, sedentary, striated, vertical, stiff, and with deep and permanent roots. They are structures with branches that continue to subdivide into smaller and lesser structures. In their various social and cultural instantiations, arborescent models of thinking, acting, and being amount to restrictive economies of dominance and oppression.

Deleuze and Guattari were clear that they opposed the arborescent model because of its inherent totalizing logic: ”We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics” (1987, p. 15). In the place of the tree, they offer the rhizome as an alternative theoretical model. In contrast to arborescent forms of thinking, acting, and being, rhizomatic forms are nonlinear, anarchic, and nomadic. The ”rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by the circulation of states” (1987, p. 21). Rhizomes are networks. Rhizomes cut across borders. Rhizomes build links between preexisting gaps and between nodes that are separated by categories and orders of segmented thinking, acting, and being.

According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), rhizomes develop and function according to six fundamental principles. The first two principles are connection and heterogeneity. ”[A]ny point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or the root, which plots a point, fixes an order” (p. 7). rhizomes are thus ever-growing horizontal networks of connections among heterogeneous nodes of discursive and material force. (Hall [1986] defines articulation as a non-necessary relation.)

The third principle of the rhizome is multiplicity. A rhizomatic system is comprised of a multiplicity of lines and connections. ”There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 8), and these lines are organized as ephemeral horizontal relations that are always proliferating Multiplicity  celebrates plurality and proliferative modes of thinking, acting, and being rather that unitary, binary, and totalizing modes. Rhizomatics ”extirpate roots and foundations, to thwart unities and break dichotomies, and to spread out roots and branches, thereby pluralizing and disseminating, producing differences and multiplicities, making new connections. Rhizomatics affirms the principles excluded from classical Western thought and reinterprets reality as dynamic, heterogeneous, and non-dichotomous” (Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 99).

The fourth principle of the rhizome is the principle of asignifying rupture. This principle states: ”A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 9). Movements and flows are always rerouted around disruptions in a rhizomatic formation. Additionally, severed sections regenerate themselves and continue to grow, forming new lines, flows, and pathways.

The fifth and sixth principles of rhizomatics are cartography and decalcomania, which ensure that ”a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure” (1987, p. 12). Because Deleuze and Guattari viewed genetic axes and deep structures as reproductive rather than productive, they distinguished these from rhizomes by appealing to the metaphors of maps and tracings, and especially the differences between them. A tracing (or decalcomania) is a copy and operates according to ”genetic” principles, evolving and reproducing from earlier forms. It is a reproduction of the world based on an a priori deep structure and a faith in the discovery and representation of that structure. A tracing is arborescent: ”All tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction” (1987, p. 12). The tracing replicates existing striated structures. Deleuze and Guattari used Freudian psychoanalysis as an example of a historically powerful regime of truth within which tracings are always at work. No matter what an analysand utters, it is read against Oedipus, the phallus, lack, desire for the mother, rage against the father, and so on.

In contrast to tracings, maps (cartography) are open systems – contingent, unpredictable, and productive. Deleuze and Guattari invoked the sense of original cartographic work here and insisted that we think of maps as producing effective spatial articulations rather than simply (re)presenting space. From this perspective, a map produces an organization of reality rather than reproducing some prior representation of reality. Like the rhizome itself, the map is contingent and tentative. ”The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted, to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (1987, p. 12). The map is oriented to experimentation and adoption. Maps have multiple entryways. Unlike tracings, maps are based on rhizomatic or essentially unpredictable articulations of material reality. In drawing maps, the theorist (like an original cartographer) works at the surface, creating possible realities by producing new articulations of disparate phenomena and connecting the exteriority of objects to whatever forces or directions seem potentially related to them.

Although Deleuze and Guattari saw rhizomatics as necessary to any radical political work, they rejected utopianism and insisted, following Antonio Gramsci, that rhizomatic formations are always constructed in the struggle between stabilizing and destabilizing forces. To further explain the nature and functions of rhizomatic formations, Deleuze and Guattari suggested using the linear algebraic metaphors of lines or vectors to think about rhizomes. They posited two basic kinds of lines or vectors: lines of articulation (or consistency) and lines of flight, both of which project their effects across the rhizomatic field. Lines of articulation connect and unify different practices and effects. They establish hierarchies. They define center-periphery relations. They create rules of organization. They encourage stasis. In contrast, lines of flight disarticulate non-necessary relations between and among practices and effects. They open up contexts to their outsides and the possibilities that dwell there. They disassemble unity and coherence. They decenter centers and disrupt hierarchies.

Finally, every line or vector (of either kind) has its own quality, quantity, and directionality. Thus the effects of any line or vector will vary as a function of these characteristics, as well as of the particular densities built up at the intersection of various lines or vectors. From this perspective, rhizomes—as fields or contexts—are produced in the constant struggle between lines of articulation and lines of flight. The coherence and organization of a rhizome are effects of lines of articulation, and the instability and dissolution of a rhizome are effects of lines of flight. Lines of articulation make received models of reality eminently visible. Lines of flight expose these models as historically produced and power-laden (rather than natural and power-neutral). Lines of flight also open up new possibilities for seeing, living, and organizing political resistance. Effects are lines or vectors of force. Reality itself is constituted as configurations of these two kinds of lines or vectors. So, deploying or taking up lines of articulation or lines of flight has serious consequences for the production of reality. Taking up lines of articulation (”good student” or ”heterosexual parent”) helps to keep stable the current organization of a territorialized space and its relations to other territorialized spaces. Taking up lines of flight (”resistant but creative student” or ”gay parent”) helps open up new configurations of space (that is, reality) so that new possibilities for thinking, acting, and being may be opened up.

The goal of rhizomatics, then, is not the obliteration of existing strata (or organized, territorialized space) but the discovery of the available lines of flight within that space. Since the strata are inevitable and unavoidable, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) recommended ”diving into the strata,” becoming intensely familiar with them, and thus discovering the available lines of flight within them. Following this advice, working within the strata at the level of the lines of flight that continuously deterritorialize the strata, can, in some cases, lead to the complete abolition of the strata. At the very least, it can transform the strata into something new with new potentialities. Their project thus involves a radical opening up (more than an obliteration) of closed and repressive structures.

Deleuze and Guattari insisted that we not trace assumed reality, the taken-for-granted. Instead, we should map the real—not intentionally and structurally, but strategically and politically. Doing rhizomatics involves reconfiguring an understanding of reality according to strategic political interests. These reconfigurations, if not predictable, are readily understandable ex post facto.

Rhizomatics thus constitutes a critique of totalizing logics, of systems that attempt to explain all things within one interpretive framework or hierarchical master code. To this critical end, they mounted a blistering critique of the Freudian and Marxist master narratives that ultimately limit the complexity of reality with their transcendent interpretations of human subjectivity and history. They opposed to these dominant, transcendent modes of interpretation an immanent mode of interpretation that acknowledges and prizes complexities.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argued that ”packs” (or ”pack multiplicities”) are particularly powerful deterritorializing/reterritorializing machines. The construct of the pack holds considerable promise for producing new and effective conceptions of collective affiliation/action and political motivation. In this regard, Canetti (cited in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 33) distinguished between two kinds of multiplicities: mass multiplicities and pack multiplicities. Even though this is an analytic distinction, even though most multiplicities are probably mass-pack hybrids, and even though mass and pack multiplicities require each other for their existence, comparing Canetti’s descriptions of these two kinds of formations is instructive here. Mass multiplicities (for example, government agencies, labor unions, professional organizations) are arborescent formations. They are composed of relatively large numbers of members. There is both divisibility and equality among the members. Mass multiplicities are focused around the concentration of form. The aggregate as a whole acts as a unit. There is a one-way hierarchy. Mass multiplicities are predisposed to territorialize, and they work to establish recognizable signs of power and stability.

In contrast, pack multiplicities are rhizomatic formations. They are small or have restricted numbers. They are not centralized but dispersed. They have no fixed territory and are motivated by an impetus to deterritorialize. Pack multiplicities experience qualitative metamorphoses in formation over time and space. They are thus neither totalizing nor finalizable. There are inequalities of membership in pack multiplicities, but these inequalities are impossible to hierarchize because they are often temporary and they shift continuously. Individual and collective action are blurred in the pack. Each member ”takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band” (1987, p. 33). Packs exhibit ”a Brownian [random or apparently random] variability in directions” (p. 33) because they are constituted largely by articulated lines of flight or deterritorializations. Unlike mass multiplicities, pack multiplicities matter more in terms of their political motivations and effectivity than in terms of their forms of affiliation.

With pack multiplicities, there is no stable coherent whole to speak of, only assemblages of multiplicity. There is no politics of sublimation in the pack, no notion of transcendent similarity, only a constant becoming of multiply driven ethical and pragmatic singularities.

Although packs are not top-down structures or organized systems, they have specific sets of tactics. They are dynamic and complex webs of localized mobilizations. There are few, if any, hierarchical chains of command. No network has a single, specific leader, though at any given time someone may assume a leadership role. ”In the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge; at the edge and then back in the center. He may be in the center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge again” (Canetti, cited in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 33). Pack leadership, then, is a continuous mobilization of positions, This mobility through constant repositioning in space means that each pack member is always both responsible for ”guarding” a sector and also dependent on the whole pack for its survival.

A key question relevant to understanding and explaining mass  multiplicities is what brings the mass together. This question is usually answered by some appeal to biological or social essentialism (for example, the identity politics of the civil rights movement or streams of second-wave feminism). Secondary questions thus include the following: Where is the center? Who is the leader? What does the multiplicity represent or stand for? What are its politics? What are its strategies? These questions, however, are all but irrelevant when one considers the forms and functions of pack multiplicities. Moreover, answering these questions for themselves would probably lead to co-optation and a weakening (or negation) of the pack’s counter-hegemonic potential. Instead, the key questions to ask about pack multiplicities include the following: How do packs develop and flourish? How are packs and pack members mobilized? What do they deterritorialize and reterritorialize? What forces do they exert in the world, and what real effects does their work accomplish? How do new members learn about and join the pack?

Schizoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari’s name for doing anti-theory and anti-method, for resisting totalizing logics. The ”schizo” does not care how others have organized the world. The schizo is immune to extant systems of meaning and structure. The schizo creates his or her own meanings and structures ad infinitum. The schizo is thus anti-theoretical and untheorizable.

Rather than defining schizoanalysis per se, Deleuze and Guattari used it as a tool. In the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus, they took up the political nature of desire. Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of psychoanalysis is made under the banner of schizoanalysis, a rhizomatic alternative to the arborescent thinking of psychoanalysis. In their schizoanalytic critique of Freud, they refuted Freud’s negative notion of desire as lack, which is explained through the Oedipus Complex. For Freud, the Oedipus Complex transcends time and place and is a natural human disposition that is inescapable. For Deleuze and Guattari, this perspective is repressive because it subjects everyone to the same transcendent structure (mother-father-child). Rather than viewing the unconscious as characterized by desire and its lack, Deleuze and Guattari saw the unconscious as productive of desire and hence in need of repressive control by the capitalist state. During psychoanalysis, the immanent interpretation of individuals is recast into the transcendent interpretation of Freudian desire, the family triangle. The individual is thereby subjected to the repression and restraint of the psychoanalytic interpretative framework, and the patient is subjected to the interpretation of the powerful and authoritative analyst. Libidinal impulses are instead to be understood as desire-producing and therefore potentially disruptive to the capitalist state, which wants to control desire by casting it in negative terms. Similarly, culture, language, and other symbolic systems are repressive because they subject people to their rules and codes. Deleuze and Guattari contrasted the symbolic with the imaginary. They referred to schizophrenia as enacting imaginative modes of thinking. The Oedipal is symbolic; the presymbolic is pre-Oedipal and therefore prior to the hierarchy and repression of families (an idea also pursued by Lacan).

Psychoanalysis is an arborescent system. Schizoanalysis is a critique of psychoanalysis, especially its conceptions of unconscious desire and the Oedipus Complex. In traditional psychoanalysis, negative Oedipal desire precedes any particular patient’s narrative. That is, the interpretation of the reported narrative is known in advance by the analyst. The outcome of analysis is likewise predetermined and thus overdetermining. The only thing the analyst will find is Oedipal conflict. Desire is directed toward Oedipal prohibitions through this transcendent interpretation and as a means of internalized control: ”The law tells us: You will not marry your mother and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that’s what I wanted!” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 114).

Deleuze and Guattari conceived of human beings (or human potential) with the term ”desiring-machines” because desire stems from a moment prior to structure and representation. Bodies are desiring-machines in which such things as ideas, feelings, and desires flow in and out. Desire is like a machine. Both are productive. An engine produces torque, which produces speed and movement. A desiring-machine produces libidinal energy. The idea of machine subverts traditional views of subjectivity. Subjectivity is now an effect of production. A desiring-machine is connected to a body without organs (often abbreviated BwO). Deleuze and Guattari borrowed this term from the avant-garde playwright Antonin Artaud, who they claimed made himself a body without organs when he committed suicide. In Anti-Oedipus, the body without organs is posited to be a nonproductive entity that interrupts energy flows, arrests desire, and promotes Stasis. In A Thousand Plateaus, though,  the body without organs is recast as a productive force, a desiring-machine. By alluding to Artaud’s suicide in describing the body without organs, Deleuze and Guattari were claiming that the person is not to be found inside the body, composed of autonomous, self-sustaining, and organized internal forms. Instead, the person/body is interconnected, exterior, open, multiple, fragmented, provisional, and interpenetrated by other entities. In their words:

There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977, p. 2)

Additionally, Deleuze and Guattari seem to use the term figuratively not so much to oppose organs as to oppose organization and the organism, much as they used the rhizome to combat arborescent thought. It is a body of affective energies, not an organization of parts:

A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body upon that which serves as organs … is distributed according to crowd phenomena … in the form of molecular multiplicities…. Thus the body without organs is opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of the organs insofar as it composes an organism. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 30)

The body without organs is also unlimited human potential on the move, perpetual creation: ”It is not at all a notion of a concept, but an experimental practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (1987, pp. 149-150). It is a space of deterritorialization, a space where desire is liberated from the constraints of all overdetermined and overdetermining system: psychoanalysis, Marxism, capitalism, and so on. This contrasts with the territorialization and reterritorialization dynamic—the attempts to totalize, to structure hierarchically, to contain, through institutions such as religion, family, and school. To (re)territorialize is to try to recontain and to replace boundaries around desire, to repress it. Deterritorialized space is fragmented, multiple, uncontained. It is space where boundaries are fluid, selves transform, desire flows in multiple directions. Deterritorialized space is space where everything flows and everything is made up of flows. What allows us to distinguish these flows from each other is a threshold or a plane that separates one from another. Every flow is made by cutting off or restricting another flow. But flows do not want to be cut of or restricted. The desire that drives a flow to flow unconstrained is the body without organs. It is real because the desire is real. In fact, the body without organs might just as well be called desire. But it is abstract desire, because it always gets limited by other flows of desire. Flows are never totally free, but always interrupted. Without the interruption and the desire, the flow and its break, there would be no world at all. Freedom, then, is paradoxical with respect to the body without organs. On the one hand, freedom is the freedom to flow without constraint, the freedom of autonomy. On the other hand, freedom is death. How else might a limited freedom be conceived?

The very complex spatial theories of Deleuze and Guattari have been appropriated and deployed in mostly sporadic, selective, and often tentative ways within education. Most of the attention to their trenchant social theories has been a matter simply of trying to figure out what they mean. There seem to be several key reasons for this. Although some of their work is relatively accessible, much of it is extraordinarily difficult to decipher because it is so dense and abstract. Additionally, because educational researchers have been so selective in taking up the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, a more comprehensive understanding of the powerful ways in which this theoretical framework might be deployed for educational research and practice has been obstructed to a large extent. Unprincipled selectivity has also led to distortion of the few constructs that have been used (especially the rhizome). These tendencies are unfortunate. However, the same kinds of problems affected the application of Foucault’s theories to educational issues for many years, but more recent Foucauldian work has been considerably better. It is to be hoped that the same pattern will obtain with respect to the ongoing uptake of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Indeed, more numerous, more principled, and more interesting uses of their theories could galvanize a rather patchy and dull history of theoretically informed empirical research in the field. It would also be good to see Deleuze and Guattari’s work mobilized to reimagine how we ”do” learning, teaching, and assessment, and to deterritorialize/reterritorialize the institutional space called school.