Accueil
https://fr.book4you.org/book/768003/c72a92
"If our ideas are tied to life and action, then can we always ask of any idea: what type of life does it serve ?" (p.XI)
"Our concepts and beliefs do not just represent our world; they produce relations and forces of power, including class relations, sexual relations and racial relations." (p.XIII)
"Deleuze set himself the task of thinking desire positively: not a desire that someone has for something she wants or lacks ; but a desire that is just a productive and creative energy, a desire of flux, force and difference, a revolutionary desire that we need to think in ways that will disrupt common sense and everyday life." (p.XV)
"Oedipal desire, as defined by Freud, is negative and repressive ; we feel we have to renounce our primitive, chaotic and essential desires in order to enter society. We have to abandon our childhood bonding with our mothers and identify with our fathers. Oedipal desire, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is part of a long tradition of repressive and transcendent thinking. We enslave life to some overriding (or transcendent) value—such as the value of the good social individual who has abandoned their desires to be just like the ‘common man’. Anti-oedipal desire, by contrast, is positive and immanent. Desire is not something we repress to become civilised. Societies, cultures, images of the individual, and ‘man’ are all effects and productions of desire. Ideas do not come from outside to order and repress life ; they are part of (or immanent to) life. Life is desire. When a plant takes in light and moisture it becomes a plant through its relation to these other forces; this is one flow of desire. When a human body connects with another body it becomes a child in relation to a parent, or it becomes a mother in relation to a child ; this is another flow of desire. When bodies connect and become tribes, societies or nations, they also produce new relations and flows of desire. Identities and images are not, therefore, abstract notions added on to life and desire ; they are events within the flow of desire." (p.XVI)
"Spinoza’s philosophy formed a set of interweaving axioms and propositions, a style of philosophy that supposedly mirrored a world that is not an object outside us to be judged, but a dynamic plane of forces within which we are located (Deleuze 1992). Philosophy, for both Deleuze and Spinoza, cannot have a distinct foundation or beginning, for the life it studies has always already begun and the philosopher, scientist or artist who writes about life is also part of the flux of life. A philosophy or form of writing that aims to affirm the mobility of life must itself be mobile, creating all sorts of connections and following new pathways. [...]
Deleuze and Guattari also argued for ‘rhizomatic’ styles of thinking in which there would be not a fixed centre or order so much as a multiplicity of expanding and overlapping connections. [...] You need a sense of the whole in order to fully understand any single section ; but the whole also seems to transform with the interpretation of each new section." (pp.XVIII-XIX)
"Affect: In its most general sense, ‘affect’ is what happens to us when we feel an event: fear, depression, laughter, terror or boredom are all possible ‘affects’ of art. Affect is not the meaning of an experience but the response it prompts. Deleuze refines this notion to argue that art is the creation of ‘affects’ and ‘percepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994)." (p.XIX-XX)
"Assemblage: All life is a process of connection and interaction. Any body or thing is the outcome of a process of connections. A human body is an assemblage of genetic material, ideas, powers of acting and a relation to other bodies. A tribe is an assemblage of bodies. Deleuze and Guattari refer to ‘machinic’ assemblages, rather than organisms or mechanisms, in order to get away from the idea that wholes pre-exist connections (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 73). There is no finality, end or order that would govern the assemblage as a whole; the law of any assemblage is created from its connections. (So the political State, for example, does not create social order and individual identities; the State is the effect of the assembling of bodies. There is no evolutionary idea or goal of the human which governs the genetic production of human bodies ; the human is the effect of a series of assemblages: genetic, social and historical." (p.XX)
"Becoming-woman: This term is tied to ‘becoming-animal’, ‘becoming-intense’ and ‘becoming-imperceptible’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, pp. 232–309). The problem with western thought is that it begins in being, which it then imagines as going through becoming or movement. Furthermore, it has tended to privilege man as the grounding being ; it is man who is the stable knower or subject who views a world of change and becoming. Deleuze, however, insists that all life is a plane of becoming, and that the perception of fixed beings—such as man—is an effect of becoming. In order to really think and encounter life we need to no longer see life in fixed and immobile terms. This means that thinking itself has to become mobile and to free itself from the fixed foundations of man as the philosopher imagines all of being, not just what is given and present." (pp.XX-XXI)
"Desire and Desiring machines : The idea of life as literally a machine (Deleuze & Guattari 1983) allows us to begin with functions and connections before we imagine any produced orders, purposes, wholes or ends. A desiring machine is therefore the outcome of any series of connections: the mouth that connects with a breast, the wasp that connects with an orchid, an eye that perceives a flock of birds, or a child’s body that connects with a trainset. Thinking desire in this way gets us over desire as a fundamental lack. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is not driven by bodies having become separated or cut off from life. They oppose the notion of the death-drive whereby all life wishes to overcome the loss and trauma of birth and return to a state of quiescence. Desire is connection, not the overcoming of loss or separation ; we desire, not because we lack or need, but because life is a process of striving and self-enhancement. Desire is a process of increasing expansion, connection and creation. Desire is ‘machinic’ precisely because it does not originate from closed organisms or selves ; it is the productive process of life that produces organisms and selves." (p.XXI)
"Deterritorialisation: Life creates and furthers itself by forming connections or territories. Light connects with plants to allow photosynthesis. Everything, from bodies to societies, is a form of territorialisation, or the connection of forces to produce distinct wholes. But alongside every territorialisation there is also the power of deterritorialisation. The light that connects with the plant to allow it to grow also allows for the plant to become other than itself: too much sun will kill the plant, or perhaps transform it into something else (such as sun-dried leaves becoming tobacco or sun-drenched grapes becoming sultanas). The very connective forces that allow any form of life to become what it is (territorialise) can also allow it to become what it is not (deterritorialise). The human bodies that assemble to form a tribe or collective (territorialisation) can produce a whole that then allows them to be governed by a chieftain or despot (deterritorialisation, where the power for assembling has produced a collective disempowerment). There can also be reterritorialisation. The tribe can take the deterritorialised term (such as the ruler or despot) and return it to the collective: we are all leaders, or we all govern ourselves (as in modern individualism). Territorialisation can occur at all levels of life. Genes connect or territorialise to produce species, but these same connections also allow for mutations (deterritorialisation). Such mutation can also be used, or turned back, to reinforce the territory that was initially the outcome of random mutation: say in gene therapy or genetic modification, where the motor for change and deterritorialisation (genetics) is used to arrest change and mutation (reterritorialisation). Deleuze and Guattari also write of absolute deterritorialisation, which would be a liberation from all connection and organisation. Such a process can only be thought or imagined, rather than achieved, for any perception of life is already an ordering or territorialisation ; we can think absolute deterritorialisation as an extreme possibility." (pp.XXII-XXIII)
"Differenciation/Differentiation: The world we perceive is made up of differenciated things, distinct terms or objects. But in order for us to perceive a differenciated world there must also be a power of differentiation. We have distinct or differenciated species only because of the differentiation of genetic creation (Deleuze 1994, pp. 206–7). We have the differenciated terms of a language only because there is the power of language to create different sounds and senses. We have the spectrum of different colours only because we have the differentiation of white light." (p.XXIII)
"Genealogy/Geology: Deleuze picks up the concept of genealogy from the late nineteenth-century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Nietzsche challenged the usual notion of history whereby we read back the end of a development into the beginning. Genealogy looks at the chaotic, multiple and chance emergence of the present. Instead of seeing all history as leading up to the moral individual, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals argued that our current ideals of morality and inhumanity grew from arbitrary and inhuman causes (Nietzsche 1967, p. 67). ‘Punishment’, for example, begins as ‘festive cruelty’, the sheer force and enjoyment of inflicting suffering to affirm one’s power. But we subsequently come to imagine a law and morality that would justify and organise this pleasure of asserting force ; in doing so we ‘invent’ man and morality. A genealogy does not accept the current reason or understanding of the present ; it looks to the past in order to unhinge the present, to show that there is no justification for the present. Deleuze and Guattari’s two major works, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, are genealogies of capitalism and humanism; they both attempt to show how ‘man’ and ‘capital’ emerge from the play of forces and interacting bodies. Deleuze and Guattari also explicitly wrote a geology of morals (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, pp. 39–74). This extended the idea that there is not a history or single line of development, but overlaid strata or plateaus: the history of inhuman and inorganic life, as well as differing histories within the human." (pp.XXIII-XIV)
"Immanence: This is one of the key terms (and aims) of Deleuze’s philosophy. The key error of western thought has been transcendence. We begin from some term which is set against or outside life, such as the foundation of God, subjectivity or matter. We think life and the thought which judges or represents life. Transcendence is just that which we imagine lies outside (outside thought or outside perception). Immanence, however, has no outside and nothing other than itself. Instead of thinking a God who then creates a transcendent world, or a subject who then knows a transcendent world, Deleuze argues for the immanence of life. The power of creation does not lie outside the world like
some separate and judging God; life itself is a process of creative power. Thought is not set over against the world such that it represents the world; thought is a part of the flux of the world. To think is not to represent life but to transform and act upon life." (p.XXIV)
"Lines of flight: Any form of life, such as a body, a social group, an organism or even a concept is made up of connections. Genes collect to form bodies; bodies collect to form tribes. The concept of ‘human’, for example, connects rationality, a type of body (white, male), the power to speak and so on. But any connection also enables a line of flight; there can always be a genetic mutation. The definition of the human as rational can also allow for a dispute over just what constitutes the human: is it rational to stockpile nuclear weapons? So any definition, territory or body can open up to a line of flight that would transform it into something else." (pp.XXIV-XXV)
"Minoritarian/Majoritarian: Deleuze and Guattari use the terms ‘minor’ and ‘minoritarian’ not to describe groups in terms of their numbers but in terms of the mode of their formation. Women, for example, are a minority. This is not because there are fewer women, but because the standard term is that of ‘man’. Furthermore, a majority has a fixed standard. There is an image or ideal of the human or man which then governs who can or cannot be admitted ; we exclude those who are deemed ‘inhuman’. But minoritarian groups have no grounding standard ; the identity of the group is mobilised with each new member. The women’s movement, for example, has constantly questioned whether there
is any thing such as ‘woman’. A minor literature, also, does not appeal to a standard but creates and transforms any notion of the standard. If I seek to write a film script that is just like the popular and financially successful Star Wars (appealing to the spirit and tradition of American science fiction), then this is a major work. But if I aim to produce a film that critics may not even recognise as a film, or that will demand a redefinition of cinema, then I produce a minor work. For Deleuze and Guattari all great literature is minor literature, refusing any already given standard of recognition or success. Similarly, all effective politics is a becoming-minoritarian, not appealing to who we are but to what we might become." (p.XXV)
"Monad: This is a term that Deleuze takes from the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). We perceive our world as a set of related terms: the molecules that make up a plant or the bodies that make up a society. But each perceived set of relations is made up of monads, which are the self-sufficient substances prior to all relations. Each monad perceives the whole of the world from its own point of view, creating its own perceived relations. There are, therefore, as many worlds as there Monad This is a term that Deleuze takes from the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). We perceive our world as a set of related terms: the molecules that make up a plant or the bodies that make up a society. But each perceived set of relations is made up of monads, which are the self-sufficient substances prior to all relations. Each monad perceives the whole of the world from its own point of view, creating its own perceived relations. There are, therefore, as many worlds as there." (pp.XXV-XXVI)
"Multiplicity: At its simplest, a multiplicity is a collection or connection of parts. Deleuze uses the term in a number of ways but one of the most significant is his distinction between an intensive and extensive multiplicity, which also relies on the distinction between intensive and extensive difference. Extensive difference can be thought of as beginning from the extension of spatially distinct and bounded points. If we could look at all the members of a family represented on a family tree, each one of them being a ‘Smith’, this would be something like an extensive multiplicity. A multiplicity of this type is always a multiplicity of some distinct, generalised and bounded body. (Such multiplicities can be thought of as collections of things, bodies, numbers, qualities or species.) Alternatively, we could look at the microscopic genetic, social and historical mutations and gradations that cross these bodies, so that a genetic trait might connect two bodies, differentiate another two, alter in a third. Intensive difference cannot be mapped into clear and distinct points; it also becomes different as it expresses itself through time. It is closer to the dynamism, becoming and temporal fluidity of true difference than the spatialised, structured and organised difference of extension. An intensive multiplicity is not a multiplicity of an identifiable measure; it is a substantive multiplicity. What it is is an effect of its connections (or becoming-multiple)." (p.XXVI)
"Nomadology: Most of western thought has tended to operate from a fixed or grounded position: either the position of man or the subject of humanity. Even beyond the human realm, life works through fixed perceptions to produce a perceiver and perceived, an inside and an outside. The aim of nomadology is to free thought from a fixed point of view or position of judgement. Nomadology allows thought to wander, to move beyond any recognised ground or home, to create new territories." (p.XXVII)
"Oedipal: Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex formed the heart of psychoanalytic method. Here, the entry into life and humanity occurs when the child abandons the mother, whose body is first desired because she meets the biological needs of life, but is subsequently fantasised as answering to all desire. The child can only deflect desire away from the mother with the threat of castration. It is the father, as symbol of social power, who represents the punishing law that prohibits the mother ; the child must renounce the mother and identify with the social and phallic (or non-maternal) power of the father. For Deleuze and Guattari, this oedipal structure is the culmination of a western political tradition of lack. We imagine that we enter society and law—the domain of the father or phallus—because we renounced a prohibited and impossible object (the mother). Our desire is oedipal if it is imagined as being a signifier or substitute of a lost object ; we are oedipal subjects if we imagine ourselves as self-punishing or self-prohibiting for the sake of some universal law or guilt." (p.XXVII)
"Rhizome/Rhizomatics: Deleuze and Guattari explain these terms by first distinguishing between the ‘rhizomatic’ and the ‘arborescent’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Traditional thought and writing has a centre or subject from which it then expresses its ideas. Languages, for example, are seen to share a basic structure or grammar which is then expressed differently in French, German or Hindi. This style of thought and writing is arborescent (tree-like), producing a distinct order and direction. Rhizomatics, by contrast, makes random, proliferating and decentred connections. In the case of languages we would abandon the idea of an underlying structure or grammar and acknowledge that there are just different systems and styles of speaking, that the attempt to find a ‘tree’ or ‘root’ to all these differences is an invention after the fact. A rhizomatic method, therefore, does not begin from a distinction or hierarchy between ground and consequent, cause and effect, subject and expression ; any point can form a beginning or point of connection for any other. (This is
typical of Deleuze and Guattari’s own method. They do not use philosophy to interpret biology or biology to explain philosophy ; they allow the two styles of thinking to mesh, transform and overlay each other.) Further, they insist that what looks like a binary or opposition in their thought—such as the distinction between rhizome and tree—is not an opposition but a way of creating a pluralism. You begin with the distinction between rhizomatic and arborescent only to see that all distinctions and hierarchies are active creations, which are in turn capable of further distinctions and articulations." (pp.XXVII-XXVIII)
"Schizoanalysis: For Deleuze and Guattari most of western thought has been built on a paranoid structure. They even refer to the ‘paranoid social machine’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1983). Paranoia is connected with projection and perceiving (hearing) persecuting voices outside oneself. Typically we hear the voice of law, society, conscience or the father (or even, in capitalism, the laws of the market). Paranoia is interpretive: we always ask what things mean, attempting to find the law, ground or authority behind signs. Traditional psychoanalysis merely intensifies this tendency by interpreting all our dreams and desires as messages from our guilty conscience. Against this, Deleuze and Guattari celebrate the ‘schizo’ and ‘schizoanalysis’. Instead of returning all our images and desires to one concealed ground (such as the law, God, the subject or ‘me’), schizoanalysis disconnects and pulverises images to look at molecular intensities. The law, for example, will be made up of a certain magisterial tone of voice, an elevated expression, a male body, a uniform of judge’s robes and so on. Schizoanalysis—unlike psychoanalysis—does not look at psyches or interpret desires to discover the psyche that speaks. Schizoanalysis looks at how the image of the psyche, ego or person has been assembled from the privilege and investment in certain body parts: the brain that thinks, the eye that judges, the self-contained and reasoning body or the judging mouth." (p.XXVIII)
"Transcendence/Transcendental: Deleuze inherits this distinction from the German philosophical tradition, especially Immanual Kant (1724–1804) and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), both of whom, like Deleuze, regarded themselves as transcendental philosophers. Transcendence, or the transcendent, is what we experience as outside of consciousness or experience. We experience the real world as transcendent, as other than us or as external. A transcendental philosophy or method asks how transcendence is possible. For example, I can only have a real or outside world if I make some distinction between what appears to me (perceptions and appearances) and a world that appears (the perceived or appearing thing). Both Kant and Husserl argued that before there could be the transcendent or the real world ‘outside me’, there had to be some concept of ‘me’ (or the subject) from which the real world was distinguished. Deleuze also argues that we should not simply accept transcendence or the outside world (reality) as our starting point, that we need to ask how
something like a distinction between inside and outside (or subject and object) emerges. The error of western thought has been to begin from some already existing thing, some transcendence, some given point of reality (such as matter, the subject, God or being).
Transcendental empiricism: Deleuze’s method is transcendental because it refuses to begin with any already given (or transcendent) thing, such as matter, reality, man, consciousness or ‘the world’. But it is a transcendental empiricism because it insists on beginning with ‘the experienced’ or ‘given’ as such. (Empiricism is a commitment to experience as the starting point of inquiry, rather than ideas or concepts.) The empiricism is transcendental because when Deleuze begins with experience he does not begin with human experience; for Deleuze experience includes the perceptions of plants, animals, microbes and all sorts of machines." (p.XXIX)
"Virtual difference: Difference should not be thought of as that which relates already distinct points or substances. Difference begins as the production of intensities from virtual tendencies. Take human life and animal life: they have their origin in a flow of genetic material that has the tendency to actualise itself in various species. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as the ‘intense germinal influx’ which then needs to be actualised into extended bodies (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, p. 162). Some tendencies will not be actualised ; there are all sorts of genetic misfirings, unpursued paths and potentialities that are not actualised. Western thought, however, has always privileged a politics of the actual over the potential, and does this by stressing human life as already expressed and constituted. We base politics on man or the State, rather than considering the powers that produce the State. Only if we consider those virtual or unfulfilled potentialities can we transform the present into a truly new future. A politics of potentiality or the virtual powers of life looks to all those non-actualised tendencies in order to question what we might become (Hardt & Negri 1994). We would look away from the image of the State as an active expression of who we are to
micropolitical forces: what are the chance events that have produced this particular image of human life ? And what about all those expressions of life that do not actualise themselves as the essence of man ? Deleuze considered certain literary expressions of malevolence, evil and stupidity as truly disruptive of our everyday common sense. Throughout literature, philosophy, and life in general, there are all sorts of expressions that have not been recognised as essentially human. Why should we take the current image of the rational political agent as an expression of what human life is ? If we look at all the bizarre, aberrant and different expressions of human life we begin to intuit the virtual powers that are capable of transforming life beyond what it actually is to what it might become." (p.XXX)
xxxi-XXXII
xxxiv-XXXV
XXXV
"Phenomenology, a movement related to existentialism, also argued that the human world was only possible because human life produces or constitutes the world as a meaningful project ; there is no ‘world’ outside the human project of sense and meaning (Husserl 1970). We have a world only because we have language, but we have language only because we have projects and intentions. Language arises from the specific needs of life— to communicate, be with others, form projects and give our world order. For both existentialism and phenomenology, then, human life is essentially creative, because it lacks any natural foundation ; human beings are historical and world-forming. For this reason, existentialism and phenomenology were highly compatible with a new form of Marxism that would respond to the failures of a strictly economic Marxism. The orthodox Marxist position maintained that if there were an economic revolution—if the people rather than the market controlled production—then all our ideological illusions would be swept away. We would no longer be subject to the capitalist illusion that the market is free and fair and that we are all equal in the marketplace; our ideas would be liberated once we were freed from the ruthlessness of the market and exploitation. Phenomenology and existentialism put human meaning before material or economic forces; if we want to change our world we need to change the way we think. We need to transform the very structure of our ideas.
The Marxism that was tied to phenomenology and existentialism insisted that political revolution could only begin when human life recognised that all those processes which seemed to be natural and unchanging—such as the conditions of labour, exploitation and economic determinism—were actually decisions of human existence that could be changed (Sartre 1976)." (pp.XXVI-XXVII)
"There were protests throughout Europe
in the late 1960s which were random, unthought out, and motivated not by the economically defined class of workers so much
as by students and intellectuals. In the aftermath of these disruptions it was realised that politics was no longer the affair of
economic classes and large or ‘molar’ groupings. Local disruptions at the level of knowledge, ideas and identity could
transform the political terrain. Deleuze and others opened the
politics of the virtual: it was no longer accepted that actual
material reality, such as the economy, produced ideas. Many
insisted that the virtual (images, desires, concepts) was directly
productive of social reality. This overturned the simple idea of
ideology, the idea that images and beliefs were produced by the
governing classes to deceive us about our real social conditions.
We have to do away with the idea that there is some ultimate
political reality or actuality which lies behind all our images.
Images are not just surface effects of some underlying economic
cause; images and the virtual have their own autonomous power.
This is where structuralism and post-1968 politics intersected. We
need to see our languages and systems of representation not just
as masks or signs of the actual, but as fully real powers in their
own right. The way we think, speak, desire and see the world is
itself political; it produces relations, effects, and organises our
bodies.
Post-1968 philosophy and political theory is usually seen to
be a response to this problem: can there be a politics that does not rely on some ultimate notion of shared human recognition?
If there really is no shared human nature or essence, and if history
really is decision and freedom, how can we justify any political
movement? Most importantly, is there a way of thinking politics
that does not rely ultimately on economic groups or classes? Can
there be an inhuman politics that interrogates the ways in which
the image of man as a political subject is produced from the very
forces of life and desire? This would mean—and this was the
general project of post-1968 philosophy in France—that we need
to recognise the positive force of non-economic events. Art,
culture, images and ‘affects’ produce, and do not just represent,
the distinct forces and terms of cultural and political life. This
means that politics is not about the relations between and among
humans. For Deleuze, politics begins with the production of
distinct human agents from forces and flows of life. And this
raises the problem which Deleuze will articulate in different ways
in nearly all that he writes: can thinking grasp the forces or differences that precede and produce it? Or, to use Deleuze’s own
terminology, can there be a micropolitics?" (pp.XXXVIII-XXXIX)
-Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, Allen & Unwin, 2002, 195 pages.
"If our ideas are tied to life and action, then can we always ask of any idea: what type of life does it serve ?" (p.XI)
"Our concepts and beliefs do not just represent our world; they produce relations and forces of power, including class relations, sexual relations and racial relations." (p.XIII)
"Deleuze set himself the task of thinking desire positively: not a desire that someone has for something she wants or lacks ; but a desire that is just a productive and creative energy, a desire of flux, force and difference, a revolutionary desire that we need to think in ways that will disrupt common sense and everyday life." (p.XV)
"Oedipal desire, as defined by Freud, is negative and repressive ; we feel we have to renounce our primitive, chaotic and essential desires in order to enter society. We have to abandon our childhood bonding with our mothers and identify with our fathers. Oedipal desire, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is part of a long tradition of repressive and transcendent thinking. We enslave life to some overriding (or transcendent) value—such as the value of the good social individual who has abandoned their desires to be just like the ‘common man’. Anti-oedipal desire, by contrast, is positive and immanent. Desire is not something we repress to become civilised. Societies, cultures, images of the individual, and ‘man’ are all effects and productions of desire. Ideas do not come from outside to order and repress life ; they are part of (or immanent to) life. Life is desire. When a plant takes in light and moisture it becomes a plant through its relation to these other forces; this is one flow of desire. When a human body connects with another body it becomes a child in relation to a parent, or it becomes a mother in relation to a child ; this is another flow of desire. When bodies connect and become tribes, societies or nations, they also produce new relations and flows of desire. Identities and images are not, therefore, abstract notions added on to life and desire ; they are events within the flow of desire." (p.XVI)
"Spinoza’s philosophy formed a set of interweaving axioms and propositions, a style of philosophy that supposedly mirrored a world that is not an object outside us to be judged, but a dynamic plane of forces within which we are located (Deleuze 1992). Philosophy, for both Deleuze and Spinoza, cannot have a distinct foundation or beginning, for the life it studies has always already begun and the philosopher, scientist or artist who writes about life is also part of the flux of life. A philosophy or form of writing that aims to affirm the mobility of life must itself be mobile, creating all sorts of connections and following new pathways. [...]
Deleuze and Guattari also argued for ‘rhizomatic’ styles of thinking in which there would be not a fixed centre or order so much as a multiplicity of expanding and overlapping connections. [...] You need a sense of the whole in order to fully understand any single section ; but the whole also seems to transform with the interpretation of each new section." (pp.XVIII-XIX)
"Affect: In its most general sense, ‘affect’ is what happens to us when we feel an event: fear, depression, laughter, terror or boredom are all possible ‘affects’ of art. Affect is not the meaning of an experience but the response it prompts. Deleuze refines this notion to argue that art is the creation of ‘affects’ and ‘percepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994)." (p.XIX-XX)
"Assemblage: All life is a process of connection and interaction. Any body or thing is the outcome of a process of connections. A human body is an assemblage of genetic material, ideas, powers of acting and a relation to other bodies. A tribe is an assemblage of bodies. Deleuze and Guattari refer to ‘machinic’ assemblages, rather than organisms or mechanisms, in order to get away from the idea that wholes pre-exist connections (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 73). There is no finality, end or order that would govern the assemblage as a whole; the law of any assemblage is created from its connections. (So the political State, for example, does not create social order and individual identities; the State is the effect of the assembling of bodies. There is no evolutionary idea or goal of the human which governs the genetic production of human bodies ; the human is the effect of a series of assemblages: genetic, social and historical." (p.XX)
"Becoming-woman: This term is tied to ‘becoming-animal’, ‘becoming-intense’ and ‘becoming-imperceptible’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, pp. 232–309). The problem with western thought is that it begins in being, which it then imagines as going through becoming or movement. Furthermore, it has tended to privilege man as the grounding being ; it is man who is the stable knower or subject who views a world of change and becoming. Deleuze, however, insists that all life is a plane of becoming, and that the perception of fixed beings—such as man—is an effect of becoming. In order to really think and encounter life we need to no longer see life in fixed and immobile terms. This means that thinking itself has to become mobile and to free itself from the fixed foundations of man as the philosopher imagines all of being, not just what is given and present." (pp.XX-XXI)
"Desire and Desiring machines : The idea of life as literally a machine (Deleuze & Guattari 1983) allows us to begin with functions and connections before we imagine any produced orders, purposes, wholes or ends. A desiring machine is therefore the outcome of any series of connections: the mouth that connects with a breast, the wasp that connects with an orchid, an eye that perceives a flock of birds, or a child’s body that connects with a trainset. Thinking desire in this way gets us over desire as a fundamental lack. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is not driven by bodies having become separated or cut off from life. They oppose the notion of the death-drive whereby all life wishes to overcome the loss and trauma of birth and return to a state of quiescence. Desire is connection, not the overcoming of loss or separation ; we desire, not because we lack or need, but because life is a process of striving and self-enhancement. Desire is a process of increasing expansion, connection and creation. Desire is ‘machinic’ precisely because it does not originate from closed organisms or selves ; it is the productive process of life that produces organisms and selves." (p.XXI)
"Deterritorialisation: Life creates and furthers itself by forming connections or territories. Light connects with plants to allow photosynthesis. Everything, from bodies to societies, is a form of territorialisation, or the connection of forces to produce distinct wholes. But alongside every territorialisation there is also the power of deterritorialisation. The light that connects with the plant to allow it to grow also allows for the plant to become other than itself: too much sun will kill the plant, or perhaps transform it into something else (such as sun-dried leaves becoming tobacco or sun-drenched grapes becoming sultanas). The very connective forces that allow any form of life to become what it is (territorialise) can also allow it to become what it is not (deterritorialise). The human bodies that assemble to form a tribe or collective (territorialisation) can produce a whole that then allows them to be governed by a chieftain or despot (deterritorialisation, where the power for assembling has produced a collective disempowerment). There can also be reterritorialisation. The tribe can take the deterritorialised term (such as the ruler or despot) and return it to the collective: we are all leaders, or we all govern ourselves (as in modern individualism). Territorialisation can occur at all levels of life. Genes connect or territorialise to produce species, but these same connections also allow for mutations (deterritorialisation). Such mutation can also be used, or turned back, to reinforce the territory that was initially the outcome of random mutation: say in gene therapy or genetic modification, where the motor for change and deterritorialisation (genetics) is used to arrest change and mutation (reterritorialisation). Deleuze and Guattari also write of absolute deterritorialisation, which would be a liberation from all connection and organisation. Such a process can only be thought or imagined, rather than achieved, for any perception of life is already an ordering or territorialisation ; we can think absolute deterritorialisation as an extreme possibility." (pp.XXII-XXIII)
"Differenciation/Differentiation: The world we perceive is made up of differenciated things, distinct terms or objects. But in order for us to perceive a differenciated world there must also be a power of differentiation. We have distinct or differenciated species only because of the differentiation of genetic creation (Deleuze 1994, pp. 206–7). We have the differenciated terms of a language only because there is the power of language to create different sounds and senses. We have the spectrum of different colours only because we have the differentiation of white light." (p.XXIII)
"Genealogy/Geology: Deleuze picks up the concept of genealogy from the late nineteenth-century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Nietzsche challenged the usual notion of history whereby we read back the end of a development into the beginning. Genealogy looks at the chaotic, multiple and chance emergence of the present. Instead of seeing all history as leading up to the moral individual, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals argued that our current ideals of morality and inhumanity grew from arbitrary and inhuman causes (Nietzsche 1967, p. 67). ‘Punishment’, for example, begins as ‘festive cruelty’, the sheer force and enjoyment of inflicting suffering to affirm one’s power. But we subsequently come to imagine a law and morality that would justify and organise this pleasure of asserting force ; in doing so we ‘invent’ man and morality. A genealogy does not accept the current reason or understanding of the present ; it looks to the past in order to unhinge the present, to show that there is no justification for the present. Deleuze and Guattari’s two major works, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, are genealogies of capitalism and humanism; they both attempt to show how ‘man’ and ‘capital’ emerge from the play of forces and interacting bodies. Deleuze and Guattari also explicitly wrote a geology of morals (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, pp. 39–74). This extended the idea that there is not a history or single line of development, but overlaid strata or plateaus: the history of inhuman and inorganic life, as well as differing histories within the human." (pp.XXIII-XIV)
"Immanence: This is one of the key terms (and aims) of Deleuze’s philosophy. The key error of western thought has been transcendence. We begin from some term which is set against or outside life, such as the foundation of God, subjectivity or matter. We think life and the thought which judges or represents life. Transcendence is just that which we imagine lies outside (outside thought or outside perception). Immanence, however, has no outside and nothing other than itself. Instead of thinking a God who then creates a transcendent world, or a subject who then knows a transcendent world, Deleuze argues for the immanence of life. The power of creation does not lie outside the world like
some separate and judging God; life itself is a process of creative power. Thought is not set over against the world such that it represents the world; thought is a part of the flux of the world. To think is not to represent life but to transform and act upon life." (p.XXIV)
"Lines of flight: Any form of life, such as a body, a social group, an organism or even a concept is made up of connections. Genes collect to form bodies; bodies collect to form tribes. The concept of ‘human’, for example, connects rationality, a type of body (white, male), the power to speak and so on. But any connection also enables a line of flight; there can always be a genetic mutation. The definition of the human as rational can also allow for a dispute over just what constitutes the human: is it rational to stockpile nuclear weapons? So any definition, territory or body can open up to a line of flight that would transform it into something else." (pp.XXIV-XXV)
"Minoritarian/Majoritarian: Deleuze and Guattari use the terms ‘minor’ and ‘minoritarian’ not to describe groups in terms of their numbers but in terms of the mode of their formation. Women, for example, are a minority. This is not because there are fewer women, but because the standard term is that of ‘man’. Furthermore, a majority has a fixed standard. There is an image or ideal of the human or man which then governs who can or cannot be admitted ; we exclude those who are deemed ‘inhuman’. But minoritarian groups have no grounding standard ; the identity of the group is mobilised with each new member. The women’s movement, for example, has constantly questioned whether there
is any thing such as ‘woman’. A minor literature, also, does not appeal to a standard but creates and transforms any notion of the standard. If I seek to write a film script that is just like the popular and financially successful Star Wars (appealing to the spirit and tradition of American science fiction), then this is a major work. But if I aim to produce a film that critics may not even recognise as a film, or that will demand a redefinition of cinema, then I produce a minor work. For Deleuze and Guattari all great literature is minor literature, refusing any already given standard of recognition or success. Similarly, all effective politics is a becoming-minoritarian, not appealing to who we are but to what we might become." (p.XXV)
"Monad: This is a term that Deleuze takes from the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). We perceive our world as a set of related terms: the molecules that make up a plant or the bodies that make up a society. But each perceived set of relations is made up of monads, which are the self-sufficient substances prior to all relations. Each monad perceives the whole of the world from its own point of view, creating its own perceived relations. There are, therefore, as many worlds as there Monad This is a term that Deleuze takes from the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). We perceive our world as a set of related terms: the molecules that make up a plant or the bodies that make up a society. But each perceived set of relations is made up of monads, which are the self-sufficient substances prior to all relations. Each monad perceives the whole of the world from its own point of view, creating its own perceived relations. There are, therefore, as many worlds as there." (pp.XXV-XXVI)
"Multiplicity: At its simplest, a multiplicity is a collection or connection of parts. Deleuze uses the term in a number of ways but one of the most significant is his distinction between an intensive and extensive multiplicity, which also relies on the distinction between intensive and extensive difference. Extensive difference can be thought of as beginning from the extension of spatially distinct and bounded points. If we could look at all the members of a family represented on a family tree, each one of them being a ‘Smith’, this would be something like an extensive multiplicity. A multiplicity of this type is always a multiplicity of some distinct, generalised and bounded body. (Such multiplicities can be thought of as collections of things, bodies, numbers, qualities or species.) Alternatively, we could look at the microscopic genetic, social and historical mutations and gradations that cross these bodies, so that a genetic trait might connect two bodies, differentiate another two, alter in a third. Intensive difference cannot be mapped into clear and distinct points; it also becomes different as it expresses itself through time. It is closer to the dynamism, becoming and temporal fluidity of true difference than the spatialised, structured and organised difference of extension. An intensive multiplicity is not a multiplicity of an identifiable measure; it is a substantive multiplicity. What it is is an effect of its connections (or becoming-multiple)." (p.XXVI)
"Nomadology: Most of western thought has tended to operate from a fixed or grounded position: either the position of man or the subject of humanity. Even beyond the human realm, life works through fixed perceptions to produce a perceiver and perceived, an inside and an outside. The aim of nomadology is to free thought from a fixed point of view or position of judgement. Nomadology allows thought to wander, to move beyond any recognised ground or home, to create new territories." (p.XXVII)
"Oedipal: Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex formed the heart of psychoanalytic method. Here, the entry into life and humanity occurs when the child abandons the mother, whose body is first desired because she meets the biological needs of life, but is subsequently fantasised as answering to all desire. The child can only deflect desire away from the mother with the threat of castration. It is the father, as symbol of social power, who represents the punishing law that prohibits the mother ; the child must renounce the mother and identify with the social and phallic (or non-maternal) power of the father. For Deleuze and Guattari, this oedipal structure is the culmination of a western political tradition of lack. We imagine that we enter society and law—the domain of the father or phallus—because we renounced a prohibited and impossible object (the mother). Our desire is oedipal if it is imagined as being a signifier or substitute of a lost object ; we are oedipal subjects if we imagine ourselves as self-punishing or self-prohibiting for the sake of some universal law or guilt." (p.XXVII)
"Rhizome/Rhizomatics: Deleuze and Guattari explain these terms by first distinguishing between the ‘rhizomatic’ and the ‘arborescent’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Traditional thought and writing has a centre or subject from which it then expresses its ideas. Languages, for example, are seen to share a basic structure or grammar which is then expressed differently in French, German or Hindi. This style of thought and writing is arborescent (tree-like), producing a distinct order and direction. Rhizomatics, by contrast, makes random, proliferating and decentred connections. In the case of languages we would abandon the idea of an underlying structure or grammar and acknowledge that there are just different systems and styles of speaking, that the attempt to find a ‘tree’ or ‘root’ to all these differences is an invention after the fact. A rhizomatic method, therefore, does not begin from a distinction or hierarchy between ground and consequent, cause and effect, subject and expression ; any point can form a beginning or point of connection for any other. (This is
typical of Deleuze and Guattari’s own method. They do not use philosophy to interpret biology or biology to explain philosophy ; they allow the two styles of thinking to mesh, transform and overlay each other.) Further, they insist that what looks like a binary or opposition in their thought—such as the distinction between rhizome and tree—is not an opposition but a way of creating a pluralism. You begin with the distinction between rhizomatic and arborescent only to see that all distinctions and hierarchies are active creations, which are in turn capable of further distinctions and articulations." (pp.XXVII-XXVIII)
"Schizoanalysis: For Deleuze and Guattari most of western thought has been built on a paranoid structure. They even refer to the ‘paranoid social machine’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1983). Paranoia is connected with projection and perceiving (hearing) persecuting voices outside oneself. Typically we hear the voice of law, society, conscience or the father (or even, in capitalism, the laws of the market). Paranoia is interpretive: we always ask what things mean, attempting to find the law, ground or authority behind signs. Traditional psychoanalysis merely intensifies this tendency by interpreting all our dreams and desires as messages from our guilty conscience. Against this, Deleuze and Guattari celebrate the ‘schizo’ and ‘schizoanalysis’. Instead of returning all our images and desires to one concealed ground (such as the law, God, the subject or ‘me’), schizoanalysis disconnects and pulverises images to look at molecular intensities. The law, for example, will be made up of a certain magisterial tone of voice, an elevated expression, a male body, a uniform of judge’s robes and so on. Schizoanalysis—unlike psychoanalysis—does not look at psyches or interpret desires to discover the psyche that speaks. Schizoanalysis looks at how the image of the psyche, ego or person has been assembled from the privilege and investment in certain body parts: the brain that thinks, the eye that judges, the self-contained and reasoning body or the judging mouth." (p.XXVIII)
"Transcendence/Transcendental: Deleuze inherits this distinction from the German philosophical tradition, especially Immanual Kant (1724–1804) and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), both of whom, like Deleuze, regarded themselves as transcendental philosophers. Transcendence, or the transcendent, is what we experience as outside of consciousness or experience. We experience the real world as transcendent, as other than us or as external. A transcendental philosophy or method asks how transcendence is possible. For example, I can only have a real or outside world if I make some distinction between what appears to me (perceptions and appearances) and a world that appears (the perceived or appearing thing). Both Kant and Husserl argued that before there could be the transcendent or the real world ‘outside me’, there had to be some concept of ‘me’ (or the subject) from which the real world was distinguished. Deleuze also argues that we should not simply accept transcendence or the outside world (reality) as our starting point, that we need to ask how
something like a distinction between inside and outside (or subject and object) emerges. The error of western thought has been to begin from some already existing thing, some transcendence, some given point of reality (such as matter, the subject, God or being).
Transcendental empiricism: Deleuze’s method is transcendental because it refuses to begin with any already given (or transcendent) thing, such as matter, reality, man, consciousness or ‘the world’. But it is a transcendental empiricism because it insists on beginning with ‘the experienced’ or ‘given’ as such. (Empiricism is a commitment to experience as the starting point of inquiry, rather than ideas or concepts.) The empiricism is transcendental because when Deleuze begins with experience he does not begin with human experience; for Deleuze experience includes the perceptions of plants, animals, microbes and all sorts of machines." (p.XXIX)
"Virtual difference: Difference should not be thought of as that which relates already distinct points or substances. Difference begins as the production of intensities from virtual tendencies. Take human life and animal life: they have their origin in a flow of genetic material that has the tendency to actualise itself in various species. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as the ‘intense germinal influx’ which then needs to be actualised into extended bodies (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, p. 162). Some tendencies will not be actualised ; there are all sorts of genetic misfirings, unpursued paths and potentialities that are not actualised. Western thought, however, has always privileged a politics of the actual over the potential, and does this by stressing human life as already expressed and constituted. We base politics on man or the State, rather than considering the powers that produce the State. Only if we consider those virtual or unfulfilled potentialities can we transform the present into a truly new future. A politics of potentiality or the virtual powers of life looks to all those non-actualised tendencies in order to question what we might become (Hardt & Negri 1994). We would look away from the image of the State as an active expression of who we are to
micropolitical forces: what are the chance events that have produced this particular image of human life ? And what about all those expressions of life that do not actualise themselves as the essence of man ? Deleuze considered certain literary expressions of malevolence, evil and stupidity as truly disruptive of our everyday common sense. Throughout literature, philosophy, and life in general, there are all sorts of expressions that have not been recognised as essentially human. Why should we take the current image of the rational political agent as an expression of what human life is ? If we look at all the bizarre, aberrant and different expressions of human life we begin to intuit the virtual powers that are capable of transforming life beyond what it actually is to what it might become." (p.XXX)
xxxi-XXXII
xxxiv-XXXV
XXXV
"Phenomenology, a movement related to existentialism, also argued that the human world was only possible because human life produces or constitutes the world as a meaningful project ; there is no ‘world’ outside the human project of sense and meaning (Husserl 1970). We have a world only because we have language, but we have language only because we have projects and intentions. Language arises from the specific needs of life— to communicate, be with others, form projects and give our world order. For both existentialism and phenomenology, then, human life is essentially creative, because it lacks any natural foundation ; human beings are historical and world-forming. For this reason, existentialism and phenomenology were highly compatible with a new form of Marxism that would respond to the failures of a strictly economic Marxism. The orthodox Marxist position maintained that if there were an economic revolution—if the people rather than the market controlled production—then all our ideological illusions would be swept away. We would no longer be subject to the capitalist illusion that the market is free and fair and that we are all equal in the marketplace; our ideas would be liberated once we were freed from the ruthlessness of the market and exploitation. Phenomenology and existentialism put human meaning before material or economic forces; if we want to change our world we need to change the way we think. We need to transform the very structure of our ideas.
The Marxism that was tied to phenomenology and existentialism insisted that political revolution could only begin when human life recognised that all those processes which seemed to be natural and unchanging—such as the conditions of labour, exploitation and economic determinism—were actually decisions of human existence that could be changed (Sartre 1976)." (pp.XXVI-XXVII)
"There were protests throughout Europe
in the late 1960s which were random, unthought out, and motivated not by the economically defined class of workers so much
as by students and intellectuals. In the aftermath of these disruptions it was realised that politics was no longer the affair of
economic classes and large or ‘molar’ groupings. Local disruptions at the level of knowledge, ideas and identity could
transform the political terrain. Deleuze and others opened the
politics of the virtual: it was no longer accepted that actual
material reality, such as the economy, produced ideas. Many
insisted that the virtual (images, desires, concepts) was directly
productive of social reality. This overturned the simple idea of
ideology, the idea that images and beliefs were produced by the
governing classes to deceive us about our real social conditions.
We have to do away with the idea that there is some ultimate
political reality or actuality which lies behind all our images.
Images are not just surface effects of some underlying economic
cause; images and the virtual have their own autonomous power.
This is where structuralism and post-1968 politics intersected. We
need to see our languages and systems of representation not just
as masks or signs of the actual, but as fully real powers in their
own right. The way we think, speak, desire and see the world is
itself political; it produces relations, effects, and organises our
bodies.
Post-1968 philosophy and political theory is usually seen to
be a response to this problem: can there be a politics that does not rely on some ultimate notion of shared human recognition?
If there really is no shared human nature or essence, and if history
really is decision and freedom, how can we justify any political
movement? Most importantly, is there a way of thinking politics
that does not rely ultimately on economic groups or classes? Can
there be an inhuman politics that interrogates the ways in which
the image of man as a political subject is produced from the very
forces of life and desire? This would mean—and this was the
general project of post-1968 philosophy in France—that we need
to recognise the positive force of non-economic events. Art,
culture, images and ‘affects’ produce, and do not just represent,
the distinct forces and terms of cultural and political life. This
means that politics is not about the relations between and among
humans. For Deleuze, politics begins with the production of
distinct human agents from forces and flows of life. And this
raises the problem which Deleuze will articulate in different ways
in nearly all that he writes: can thinking grasp the forces or differences that precede and produce it? Or, to use Deleuze’s own
terminology, can there be a micropolitics?" (pp.XXXVIII-XXXIX)
-Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, Allen & Unwin, 2002, 195 pages.
Dernière édition par Johnathan R. Razorback le Mar 8 Fév - 17:06, édité 3 fois
