Discard Deleuze (and the other one, whose name escapes me already, oh yes - -Guattari)
(draft)

Apology

A word about the style of this piece. For years I have heard and read philosophers say that Sociology is philosophically naive, and that they demand a corrective role in clarifying our simple assumptions. For some reason, we have often listened and let them dominate social theory, a part of the general scholasticism that has made social theory into an intellectual game. We have been urged to read hero after hero.

I have long thought it is time we returned the compliment and read philosophers as amateur sociologists. When you do, you focus on the ludicrous generalisations about an unreflected ‘society’, the academicist agenda that says that ideas must come first and always meet scholastic tests of adequacy, and the ambiguity (to say the least) about the basis for many of the assertions about what people must be thinking – their mates? Their students? Their servants?

They can’t help us answer our questions, except by trying to insist we ask their questions first. Let us be done with them!

Enter Deleuze

Great writers and analysts have short careers, mostly because they are subject to the relentless drive to innovation of the modern academy. They are only read by university personnel, willingly by lecturers and unwillingly by students, and they have a limited shelf life as a result. Gramsci was all the rage once, because he fitted really well the situation of British academics in the new discipline of Cultural Studies (Harris 1992). As that very fertile research programme finally exhausted itself, Foucault became the new hope. He seemed to offer powerful critique allied to the politics of identity that was the new fashion. Now he has served his purpose, moving critical work still further into abstract philosophy and away from any tangible links with politics – or sociology. Others can now follow, especially other 1960s heros – Deleuze and Guattari.

Abstract philosophy is the perfect academic form for academic critique. It requires sustained study and research, which means academic specialists alone can do it. It occupies the safe realm of ideas, where commitments and investments carry no implications for the ordinary business of making a career and living a comfortable life. Ideally, there should be some connection with some critical events in the outside world, especially if there is a need to claim that study is more ‘applied’ or ‘relevant’ than traditional philosophy as such (a crucial requirement for ‘new’ academic subjects). Two or three decades ago, radical academics could claim to somehow ‘speak for’, or ‘stand with’ actual political movements based on class, gender, ‘race’ or postcolonialism. British Cultural Studies tried them all and either rejected each group as insufficiently Gramscian or were rejected themselves as irrelevant. Given the passage of time which has opened a safe distance, the protesters of 1968 now seem suitable real world allies, mostly because their politics are as mysterious now as they were at the time: the ‘floating signifiers’ of cultural politics. Deleuze has the clear advantage of identification with this glamorous group since a YouTube video of him exists addressing some student protesters at the time. Current student protests can be connected with 1968, Walkerdine (2011) suggests, making the radical agenda relevant again.

Again, the discovery of a constituency, even an imaginary one, is timely for maintaining morale. The removal of State funding from social sciences and humanities teaching threatens the obvious institutional locations for radical philosophies in university departments teaching those courses. The remaining institutional location seems to be Educational Studies, not at the undergraduate level where teacher training is dominated by Government agendas, but at postgraduate level. Luckily, the demand from teachers and others for postgraduate qualifications seems to be a growing market, as credentialism takes another turn. Educational Studies has actually had a radical heritage at least since 1970 with the emergence of the ‘new sociology of education’ and its gramscian descendants, embodied in influential Open University courses, but sociology, especially the sociology of education itself is not longer viable. The market seems open for the philosophy of education, not the old dull material about ethics, the Greek origins of scholarly discipline, or how knowledge might take different forms, but glamorous and excitingly radical philosophy as a last hurrah – Deleuze and Guattari.

Reading Deleuze?

Those who can grasp his philosophy (for me, the best commentary is DeLanda, especially the superb YouTube videos of his addresses at the European Graduate School) argue that he has made a major contribution, rescuing from obscurity neglected works by Bergson, Spinoza or Liebniz, and coming to terms with new developments in art and mathematics, especially topology. These disciplines describe reality, Zizek argues (or rather Zizek argues that Deleuze argues), and that is the task of modern philosophy too – to do ontology, which is typically neglected in the social sciences.

Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus

I actually think these are the worst books to read, although they are the ones that many social theorists seem drawn to. It is a very unfamiliar kind of ontology on offer for me at least, describing matter as a ‘body without organs’ pulsating with intensities and connective fibres, and featuring ‘singularities’ that provide actual events and actual ‘multiplicities’ (clusters of dimensions) of two basic types [roughly, quantitative and qualitative]. These multiplicities are stratified, and have two main poles, DeLanda, in Flugslang and Soresnson (2006) , suggests  -- one which offers territorialisation or deterritorialisation, and the other which features materiality at one end and expressivity at the other. Multiplicities are never totally discrete but partake of the underlying flow of potentials and intensities. This helps us see events as rhizomatic and flowing rather than arborescent (tree-like and rooted). ‘Becoming’ here is an ontological operation, involving reconnecting specific multiplicities with underlying flows by tracing back specific fibres to the body without organs,  until a ‘zone of proximity’ is encountered between two multiplicities like ‘human’ and ’horse’ or ‘human’ and ‘machine’ (defined in the usual sense, meaning things like lathes or bicycles). Hallucinogenic drugs are seen as possible aids here, but are not recommended. Zizek urges us to consider filmic metaphors in his discussion and specifically mentions an obvious candidate to represent this ontology, even though it was not around when Deleuze and Guattari were writing – the Matrix (but without the sinister controlling aliens).

Operations are best described as ‘machinic’ in more general terms (derived, DeLanda 1991 tells us, from conceptions of mathematical formulae which govern the operation of singularities across all kinds of matter, and which thus can be seen as ‘abstract machines’). In Anti-Oedipus, the operation of desire is machinic, producing actual events in consciousness from the interconnected flows of intensities and expressivities on the body without organs. Freudian accounts explain a particular form of operation in the oedipal triangle where desire is channelled into socially acceptable forms to conform with the bourgeois family (that much has never been denied, I think, by Freud at least). At the methodological level, the oedipal triangle becomes the only way to understand consciousness, though, and is seen to be universal, underlying all attachments to the outside world (pets become substitutes for fathers and so on). Freudians discovered that some conditions were not explicable by such a theory, however – schizophrenics seemed to offer a bewildering variety of desires informing attachments to the outside world. They could not be treated by Freudians. They became resisting heroes and spokespeople for rhizomatic flow for Deleuzians.

Most non-philosophers can get that far, especially after DeLanda’s useful commentaries. Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus are written in sometimes playful ways which are deliberately impenetrable, partly in order to avoid any premature closure of possibilities, which would be a further disciplining, or ‘fascistisation’ to use Foucault’s terms in the Preface to Anti-Oedipus. This has an implication for attempts to ‘apply’ Deleuze to which we will return. They are also uncompromisingly contextual , with many references to important readings and artworks, often in French. One I did recognise was the work of Castenada, a series of cult novels/reports allegedly about the work of a Yaqui sorcerer, part of the 60s yearning for spiritual guidance from ancient mystics. I think the idea of fibres connecting actualities at a deeper level comes from him. 

Having gained this sort of thin overview, what follows for non-philosophers? There might be some obvious ‘political’ implications, which take the general form, as Zizek argues, of attempting to de-reify existing structures. Hints of this are clearly detectable in Anti-Oedipus, since Guattari couples the critique of the oedipal triangle in Freud with a general critique of the mechanisms of ideology in capitalism which makes us want and value psychological repression [quote]. His own connection with the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movements of the 1960s will strike chords with followers of RD Laing in the UK who also proposed that bourgeois families were repressive and schizogenic, suggesting a new liberated sexual politics. Guattari’s own involvement in psychotherapeutic communes of various kinds could also be seen as Trotskyite in inspiration (although he was also a member of a Maoist group says Lotringer’s Introduction to Baudrillard 1987), building a challenge to domination from below by mobilising rank and file opposition and empowerment. Guattari is called a ‘militant’, more generally.

On Cinema

The two massive books on cinema (Cinema 1 and Cinema 2) are a tour de force by anyone’s reckoning, packed with difficult philosophising and illustrated profusely with examples of many films, both commercial and experimental. Amazingly, and no doubt thanks to Deleuze’s interest, many of the more obscure ones are actually available on the Web, on marvellous collections like UbuWeb, but even on YouTube. Probably for the first time for years, you can actually read Deleuze’s comments then access the film itself. Of course, when you do, you realize just how brief and sketchy are his comments.

The general interest arises from his strange views about cinema as a kind of philosophy made real, and, in the second volume especially, as a possible pedagogy to make people think and then realize the cognitive and political limits of normal or commonsense perceptions – as a device to combat ideology in the old terms (and some of the easiest examples draw on marxist cinemas like Eisenstein or Godard). Often these themes are submerged under other sorts of commentary though – philosophical commentary, where Deleuze is using his philosophical resources to understand how cinema works, in contrast to the resources most Media Studies people know ( French linguistic theory – ‘structuralism’ or ‘semiology/semiotics’). Cinema does not work like a language, says Deleuze, but develops special signs and communicative materials of its own. He does try out Peirce’s semiotics as a base of his own account of these special signs – opsigns, son signs, lectosigns and the like.

The basic thesis is easy enough [I jest, of course – it took MONTHS to grasp some of this stuff and I often had to break off and read up on something else - -Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza, for example]. Anyway, here is a plain person’s guide.

Early cinema told characteristically ‘natural’ and ‘real’ stories, using nice normal narratives. They depicted movement and action ( and affect or motivation] in conventional ways. Deleuze gives many examples of how a situation is depicted, then action follows, and then the situation is depicted again. [The usual example for baby Media students is the classic narrative where equilibrium is shown, then disturbed, then the hero acts and equilibrium is restored – a peaceful small town in the West is disturbed by the release of some hoodlums , the marshall reluctantly shoots them, peace and progress are restored]. There are many ingenious ways in which these basics are developed and elaborated, including the use of flashbacks and dream sequences, but the basic realist narrative is left intact. The whole thing makes sense as a kind of dramatised version of every day life and its ‘sensory-motor schema’ -- a model of how we normally understand how action arises to solve a problem etc. Deleuze uses the classic account of realism /naturalism – Bazin. Already , early or classic cinema was starting to introduce new notions of space, something out-of- field, some notion of abstract space – ‘any-space-whatever’

Modern cinema experiments far more, however. Even early cinema had its odd conventions and non-natural bits – close-ups to show emotion, experiments in slow-motion or time-lapse etc, non-naturalist points of view with overhead shots, and so on. Modern cinema gets even more experimental and starts to depict modern philosophical conceptions of reality as dominated by an unusual grasp of time and how it works. In the process, it breaks with realism and naturalism, and starts to show things that challenge our normal conceptions of time and space -- time-images instead of movement-images. Many examples and discussions follow taking in some pretty odd films, of the kind you are likely to see in French arthouses [or on really wacky Film courses like the ones we used to run]. Some of the techniques have also been incorporated in to strange ‘postmodern’ pieces by the likes of Tarantino or Lynch,  which combine the experiemental and the commercial, although Deleuze died before he saw any of those.

Much of this makes little sense until you start to grasp the peculiar philosophical notions of time which Deleuze has in mind. I am no philosopher, but I gather it has to do with Bergson’s notion of time, which I subsequently researched in my amateur way;

 An amateur grasp of Bergson’s notion of time

We need to understand time in general as a relation between past, present and future. We will not understand this relation if we just think of normal notions of time – clock time – or of our usual understandings that we live in the present with the past lost to us forever, and past, present and future connected by some sort of causal links.

Instead, the past dominates the present, almost entirely. We can see this first if we consider it entirely subjectively – our memories clearly deeply affect our current perceptions and behaviour in the present. We act on the basis of what we know and have stored in our memories. I first came across this argument when reading social phenomenology, where Bergson was also a major influence. Life in the present is best understood as like the focal point of a telescope, a spotlight, or, in Bergson’s actual example, the point of a cone, where lots of information from the past is focused down to affect what we are doing right now. What focuses it is our predominantly ‘practical’ and utiltitarian stance to the world [more than one echoes of US pragmatism are detectable]. When we reflect, we can revisit the past more deliberately, and expand or condense the information we find there.

However, Bergson insists that this is not just a description of how consciousness works. The past is real, a passed present. This made me stop dead in my tracks, but the argument that convinced me was the suggestion that the alternative is even wackier -- if the present alone is real, how does a real thing get transformed into something purely subjective. How does the present pass into the past, as it does, constantly, normally – I corrected this typing and the old version is in the past. But how did it somehow become less real? Instead, consciousness selectively neglects and forgets, via the operation of memory. For Bergson, when we recollect something we literally visit the past and form a recollection-image of something existing there.

[Looking back on this, I think it is a bit clearer once you read Massumi. He argues that the past is the same as virtual in Deleuze -- it consists of all those possibilities, forks, sheets and multiplicities that make up lived experience. Some aspects of those will be actualised in the present -- how the past determines the present. Recollection helps us see that.

The examples in Cinema 2 also get a bit clearer. Citizen Kane shows a lived past as a number of real episodes which are different and which represent different possibilities for Kane. Hiroshima mon Amour shows how the past lives of the characters radically affect what they do in the present -- although there is really only a limited ambiguity in the past of the female for me -- I suppose it was shocking to see her as a collaborator for the French, and it shows the way in which this nice lady is capable of all sorts of indiscretions? We know little about the bloke except he was at Hiroshima. I also think both are limited in offering a conventional reading too -- Kane ends by remembering his childhood, the lady could just be seen as a victim of indecision about sex and relationships.  Deleuze talks it all up a bit.]

Some homely analogies

Let’s think in the familiar spatial terms first. Imagine I am trying to find my way out of a darkened building, and I have a small torch. I use the pencil beam mostly pragmatically. T focus o paths which I might think are useful;. I am aware of all sorts of other things around me, partially or totally unilluminated by my torch beam, but clearly ’relevant’, connected to the paths I seek. Implicitly or explicitly I rely on my knowledge of other buildings, recollected from my experience, to guide my actions. I escape and revisit the building in the full light of day – only then can I see the whole.

Or...I am trying to work up a lecture on Deleuze for a specific course and a specific set of students. Naturally, I leave out an awful lot of material that I judge to be irrelevant to them. I am likely to be guided by my own background reading and presuppositions, sometime recalled deliberately in a act of reflection. Only when I retire, and lose that practical compulsion, am I free to immerse myself more fully in the writing, switch off my rational set of concepts and frameworks, and wallow in the delirium of it all

I understand that the subjective awareness of the importance of the immediate and the past provides us with ‘subjective time’ as Schutz calls it. Things that happened years ago can be recollected and joined together with immediate perceptions, overcoming the distance objective time ( measured by clocks). If we abstract from our personal experiences of this experience, we might learn something about consciousness itself and in general. Schutz says that was what Bergson meant by ‘duration’, but Deleuze argues that the purely subjective dimension is an understandable misreading, and what he really meant was the whole objective structure of past sheets and present focuses (apexes of cones – I actually think funnels would be a better metaphor) which underpins that subjective awareness. Social phenomenologists would no doubt argue that that sort of extension into ontology is unnecessary.

Before we go on, that constant use of the word ‘image’ is a puzzle to us normal, non-philosophising folk. In Bergsonian terms it is an intuitive grasp of something, not entirely logical, not purely subjective either, based on experience not utilitarian motives. It is the raw material of subsequent logical scientific thought or of subsequent action. I think! Intuition of this kind is what acts as the course of more limited and focused knowledge like scientific enquiry or rationalist philosophy (which are themselves only a few steps away from everyday pragmatism).

Anyway, back to the structure of time. It is a complex system of layers or sheets. These can occasionally overlap but may not offer a unified structure. The metaphors are unclear to me here. Sometimes time is seen as a matter of levels or strata, piled up so they touch each other, and following some hierarchical principle – the lower strata towards the base of the cone are the most remote in time, for example. I can see that time occupies different regions for us subjectively again – my childhood, my life last week and so on and Deleuze insists that the past appears as a chronological sequence to our consciousness.  It could also be a cognitive hierarchy, with full-blown intuitive knowledge at the bottom, and everyday pragmatism at the top.  I am not at all clear what is the objective dimension – strata or floating sheets?

The notion of the future, discussed this time via Leibniz, is also a challenge. Stripped of some of its C17th philosophical terminology, what it amounts to is saying that past and present generate different futures, instead of smoothly generating something predictable. We know this in one way – I choose in the present to do one thing and not another, and so I generate different possible futures, such as one where I go to make coffee and fall down the stairs, and one where I stay here and go nuts with puzzling out some weird philosophy. These alternative futures are both possible but it is impossible to generate both from the same present. Apparently, Leibniz suggested the term ‘compossible’ to overcome this embarrassment, but it might have been exaggerated for him anyway because of his odd views that all possibilities are somehow rolled up in the present for God to choose the best paths ahead [maybe]. Anyway (again), project this back into the past and I can start to see how the past can also have different possibilities, places where my action ‘forked’ and generated different sheets. [Hmm—I still don’t feel confident about this...]

Somehow, modern cinema is on to this strange new way of thinking about time, and it struggles to depict this new understanding. In the process, it develops new practices and new signs. One new practice is the use of ‘depth-of-field’ as well as montage. In this case, a deep focus technique [actually following from a number of technical and artistic developments with cameras] includes elements from past and present in the same shot. Deleuze illustrates depth of field with one of his favourite directors – Orson Welles. In a famous shot, some adult guardians are discussing the future of the young Citizen Kane, while the kid plays in the far background, glimpsed in full focus through a window. We see the present and the future, the kid and the factors that are going to affect his whole life. Deleuze has many other examples from Citizen Kane, and I did go back and look at the film again – and noticed these astounding depth-of-field shots, many of which combine present and future, or present and past, or rather signs of these different time sheets. In another example, single ‘crystalline’ images can combine elements from different times. I first thought of a simple example of a still photograph of the stars at night – we see spaces but we are also seeing the past since the light from the stars travels for years before it reaches us.

There are other techniques too, many less obvious. Fans of Deleuze have collected some of the scenes in question on YouTube, bless them, and in the longer notes in the cinema books I invite readers to have a look for themselves and see if they can work out what Deleuze means. In one early example, he mentions the work of the Japanese direct Ozu, and you can see the clip in question. Deleuze says it indicates how past emotions influence present conversation, and also how domestic interiors represent the past. It reminds me of the surrealist point that cities can be seen as representing the subjective efforts of people long dead, once we release our conscious minds. As my discussion shows, however, much will depend on the active reading of a film to release those understandings. Deleuze can find those meanings no doubt -- but do you have to be an eminent French philosopher before you see them?

If modern cinema is showing these ‘unnatural’ images, it has to connect them in a new way too. Not in the old naturalist way of following normal action but in some other way, linking images according to some philosophical, artistic or political theme instead – showing how Life acts as an eternal force, or how capitalism systematically conceals its nature , even how communication itself works. Of course, naturalistic sound is also rejected and sound takes on an important role of its own, seen at its simplest in the effects of ‘noises-off’, including music.

There is a useful subtheme too, turning on what cinema actually offers compared to the other arts like painting or theatre. At one level, it is familiar enough -- cinema offers moving images, audio-visual images, interaction in an emergent sense. But above all it shows us the ‘unthought’ and unvoiced, the context, the past.

Some intriguing discussion considers ethnographic film as well. Much of it normally attempts or claims to just record reality, but that is highly dubious, of course, Some French and French-Canadian ethnographers set out to do something more, to openly show how people told stories about their lives, both the usual ‘subjects’ of the film ( the ‘natives’) and the film-makers themselves. Some of this work by Rouch or Perrault is available for current viewing, and it is easily seen how it differs from the usual currently popular (in the UK) ‘visual turn’ in ethnography.

In this way, cinema is an important force in educating people about philosophical developments, breaking the hold of realism and naturalism, offering an important possibility of radicalising the viewers, as Marxists hoped. Will it work?

Unfortunately, Deleuze approaches the whole issue of actual effects on viewers via some odd philosophical (Spinozan?) concept of ‘the automaton’ , an abstract viewer, something that learns automatically (try D's lectures on Spinoza). He also dabbles with the old claims that cinema shocks us directly into thought, somehow bypassing our normal perceptions and thought systems and acting upon us directly. The problem is to get the automaton to escalate from passive learning into ‘spiritual’ learning [some C17th equivalent of critical reflexive learning]. Deleuze knows this is going to be difficult and that Hitler and Hollywood have got there first, keeping the automaton at the uncritical ‘psychological’ level. This is familiar stuff but much better treated with modern resources, in my view, including accounts of ideology and incorporating some of the recent debates about viewers and their actual readings.

Finally, the claims about cinema and philosophy look debateable. Of course, all philosophers tend to idealism, especially French ones aspiring to be public intellectuals. Deleuze does make some odd claims – that cinema just is philosophy, it depicts the way the universe itself thinks, it is interactional sociology; or that it has had an enormous influence of philosophers, sociologists  and anthropologists; that major directors have been explicitly influenced by philosophy and other intellectual commitments. We know that ideas are connected with actions -- but philosophers are rarely able to grasp just what these connections are and how they have actually been established by mundane practices like elite education, class culture and habitus, the reproduction of privilege and so on. Deleuze badly needs Bourdieu!

Politics

We have seen some links with politics already. Cinema can be political in expressing radical philosophies directly or in prompting people to think and thus overcome their opwn imprisonment in reification. Deleuze joins Guattari in the exciting politics of the personal of the 1960s, condemning psychiatry as a control mechanism, celebrating creative thinking as in schizophrenia, postulating some irrepressible life force (desire) which will overcome repression. The theme of life-enhancing creativity is apparent also in Deleuze’s account of Spinoza’a ethics of ‘joy’, and Nietszche and the ‘will to power’. Bergson too, come to think of it, with his stress on élan vital

Then there are actual struggles – May 1968 especially (which Deleuze was involved in), and the associated cultural radicals like the SItuationists with their art-inspired ‘happenings’ and détournements (see Plant). Walkerdine has recently seen that form of rebellious subjectivity as alive again, in the student protests and cmapiagns against tax evaders in the UK in 2011, and she sees an explicit link with the creative impulses of the ‘schiz’ in Anti-Oedipus.

Connections with the Italian group of activists surrounding Negri have also been suggested. Deleuze apparently petitioned the Italian Government to release Negri from prison following his conviction for being associated with the urban guerrilla/terrorist Red Brigade (video of an interview with Negri here)

The implications follow in particular a piece by Deleuze on the society of control. This begins with many of the criticisms outlined above of Foucault’s stress on the functions of various institutions and organizations. Deleuze agrees that these mechanisms of control have lost their relevance, but, instead, that the processes of internalising discipline and repression have gone even deeper. The analysis looks familiar in predicting the emergence of an undifferentiated vulnerable individualism instead, just as with accounts of ‘second’ or ‘liquid ‘ modernity. Deleuze refers to this compromised identity as a bad form of ‘dividualism’. New systems of regulation have merged to form a ‘society of control’. A more diffuse and powerful system of surveillance operates to track the movements and engagements of people using digital technology to record their movements, economic activity, browsing and so on. The ultimate sanction is to withdraw or cancel various digital permissions like credit cards or internet access, but mostly, people have internalised the system requirements and now willingly subscribe to the endless regulation that faces them – endless rivalry and competition against each other at work, like a permanent TV talent show. We also find some concrete examples of schooling as a controlling organisation – assessment is continuous instead of limited to occasional examinations, and ‘lifelong education’ is a required and constant upskilling instead of a pursuit of the good life.

Empire

Negri’s and Hardt’s book is available online, with a very useful set of brief summaries, here and I have my own notes here. On first reading, it seemed to me to be very similar to standard ‘western marxist’ commentary. There is a hint of Habermas and his insistence that the system imperatives of capitalism are even more powerful than before, but can still never finally squeeze out of existence ‘the lifeworld’, the social and creative core of social life. Negri and Hardt think that the system is even worse in that most communication has been colonised by system imperatives - -but the hope for inextinguishable sociability seems to remain (and they tend to refer to this residual sociability in Deleuzian terms as ‘desire’). Then there are obvious references to Gramsci and the balance between the struggle for, and resistance to, capitalist hegemony in the cultural and political spheres. Finally, there are quite a few references to what used to be called stamocap marxism – that the system is ultimately contradictory, that it must only ever benefit a few, that an elite has solidified in economic political and cultural life, excluding the many, and that the system is eventually doomed because it concentrates all those who suffer from it into one rebellious ‘multitude’ who have nothing to lose.

The answer in the old days was ‘popular front’ politics, uniting all those who are excluded under marxist leadership, getting everyone to see that the capitalist system was responsible and could be changed. The approach survived a bit longer in the UK in the form of interest in the various protest groups and ‘new social movements’ – greens, anti-nukes, feminists, gay rights. There was also support for a while for ethnicised politics – encouraging local nationalisms in the former Soviet bloc, for example, Serbs and Croats, Khazaks and Ukrainians, their nationalism and their various colour-coded revolutions.

Negri and Hardt are right to condemn that kind of localism as poor politics and they make a wider claim – that the problem is a global one, there is nowhere ‘outside’ of the global system to oppose it, and that a global form of resistance is necessary – and possible.

However, their optimism sits strangely with their deeply pessimistic analysis of the global system, which is ever more powerful, as we saw. They have to pull off the trick of arguing that, somehow, progressive forces are just as strong, but this is thin stuff, almost entirely about potentials, and pretty idealist in the sense that they seem to think that their philosophical critique somehow must  triumph, as long as they can turn it into a political programme. Being philosophers, they have to discuss what a manifesto might look like first, but they finally get around to listing a few powerful demands [examples]

What material base might there be for such demands? We are back with some old ideas again really. The networked production processes of (post)modern capitalism necessarily put people in touch with each other and encourage them to communicate, a version of Marx’s hope that concentrating the proletariat into factories would foment class politics. They know, of course, that such communication has already been transformed and diminished, turned into ‘market data’ or work instructions. There are the new social movements again, and the need to lead them, but they also say that it is difficult for one protest movement to communicate with others, or even to interest others.

The strange oscillations between optimism and pessimism might be linked to the major problem identified by Zizek. Briefly, as an ontology, Deleuzian philosophy can explain actual events including political systems as arising from some reality-generating process. The repressive system of Empire does. So does the liberating potential of the multitude. At the philosophical level, both are equal. There are no philosophical grounds to distinguish between them. We need additional grounds to do that, and for me, this necessarily means going beyond ontology into some more applied discipline – sociology or politics – with which we can compare repression and deliberation, and decide for the latter not the former.  Although philosophers including Deleuze (in his lectures on Spinoza) try to find grounds for preferring liberation or joy as opposed to slavery and death, it is impossible to do so without introducing arguments that stray beyond the ontological. Zizek argues that Deleuze tried to pull this off by merging the issue of actuality with the issue of representation, but to no real avail. As soon as they start talking about real political systems, their lack of knowledge and idealism becomes apparent  -- how sweet of Negri and Hardt to say the only problem is to found a political movement based on desire! How optimistic of them to think radicals just will dominate communications systems and not repressives. All the real political divisions and interests will melt away in the interests of global citizenship and ‘equal compensation’!

I haven’t written the section yet but I bet right now that the same problems will arise when discussing Deleuzian educators, optimistic philosophers to a person!

War and the machinic phylum

DeLanda has also drawn on Deleuze and Guattari to analyse the development of what they identify as one of the two the main abstract machines – war. The components of the machine include human beings and the social events that mobilise them and consolidate their loyalty. The machines (in the familiar sense) develop initially as a series of experimental assemblages like artillery pieces – types of metal tube, mixtures of elements to produce propulsive charges, early attempts to make projectiles and so on. However, a process of continual abstraction can be detected, an evolution of machines, a ‘progression through the machinic phylum’. First mathematical formulae are developed to describe the activities of machines. This in turn permits more effective descriptions of components and more efficient designs, and then the standardisation of parts in industrialised warfare. However, the breakthrough comes with the development of computers which can connect up various components, especially the machine and the human expert, and begin to model policy in the form of  war games and scenarios. The discussion ends with the prediction that more abstract machines will develop, some of which can remove the human element altogether and become autonomous – current developments of unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator drones in the US and UK airforces – would be examples.

Less alarmingly, a number of Deleuzians have applied the work to understand modern organizations. Attempts to describe current forms in terms of ‘chaos theory’ will be familiar to anyone who has endured a talk on educational management: that usually ends in a plea for some expert to be deployed who can loosen up organisations and revitalise the workforce. Some slightly less gbanal discussions can be found in Flugslang...the trembling organization...

Education

Deleuze himself is rather pessimistic about formal education , seeing it as part of the society of control, especially continuous assessment (quote). His work on the pedagogic (in the broader sense) possibilities of cinema is more mixed. In Cinema 1, he is basically critical of realist or naturalist cinema, but even there admits that some aspects of the context for action can be explored as a sort of investigation of the motives of the actors. In the relevant section in Cinema 2, he summarises some of the great attempts to develop a political cinema – like Eisenstein or Godard ( and some people I know little about like the Straubs). He also discusses ethnographic film, which in the traditions he surveys (including the cinema of Jean Rouch) goes beyond attempting to depict naive realism and starts to show us how important performance is and how an indirect discourse can be developed by a director keen on anthropological explanations of action and a set of actors who willingly help by telling stories about themselves. However, cinema is usually seen as quite a didactic medium, by modern standards, permitting no actual physical intervention and immediate discussion, and relying on people watching to engage in dialogues with others or with themselves after having viewed the film: its nearest ‘educational’ equivalent is the lecture, and these are very unfashionable at present. Deleuze seriously expects us to watch Syberberg’s film about Hitler (here) which lasts all of 510 minutes, while modern educational practice thinks that a 1 hour lecture cannot be defended.

However Deleuze is also critical of these efforts. He knows very well that Eisenstein’s early cinema was dominated by Stalinist propaganda, how Hollywood commercialises and entertains, and how political avant-garde cinema like Godard’s looks incomprehensible or just funny, an exhibition of ‘formalist antics’. I think Rouch also runs the risk of patronising his subjects despite his best intentions, rendering them as exotics or exhibits. Deleuze’s analysis is limited here by his lack of systematic analysis of actual audience reactions, including knowledge of viewing conditions, and he is ready to insist that experiment is justifiable as art rather than as politics anyway.

The same might be said for Deleuze’s account of what actually happens when people learn new material. In the cinema books, his discussion features reference to the ‘automaton’ and its development. For a modern reader, this looks rather like a developmental model (although it is not applied specifically to children), and the nearest contemporary parallels might be Piaget (or, I think, US pragmatists like Dewey or Peirce, but without the autonomous automatic bits). These approaches also have a mixed reception in modern educational thought – Piaget often loses out to Vygotsky of all people, usually over the issue of the social origins of language, while Dewey is usually read as a straightforward ‘progressive’ supporter of child-centred learning in the British sense (actually probably a concoction of Lady Plowden’s in the 1960s).

In other works, his understanding of philosophy as developing new concepts gets attention, above all in Semetsky (below). I have not yet read the key works here, which appear to be Difference and Repetition and What is Philosophy, but I can detect some problems as ever in going from what philosophers do to what normal people do. I know it is fashionable to patronise kids by saying they are natural philosophers, but I am sure everyone agrees that they are not professional philosophers

In any event, I can see no easy parallels between Deleuze and  progressive practice, although there are claims which sees them as united, as with Gale (2007) (below). That would make it a subjective unity, though, one based on the interests and relevance systems of the subjects. Personal conviction of this kind might not travel to other readers, of course, and there are dangers in personal convictions dominating research or teaching. As Adorno says about 'activist' readings of Marx, these can lead to rather authoritarian readings which clearly compromise with the full picture - -which rather undoes the point of activism.

My impression from reading some articles claiming to use Deleuzian concepts is that they are largely derived from the 60s radical works with Guattari, anyway, and classically omit the ontological material, the references to science and mathematics, and the work on the cinema. Deleuze's method is often glossed too -- the denial of 'fascicst' intentions to tie everythig up neatly ( best expressed in Foucault's Preface to Anti-Oedipus) is taken as a license to operate a purely subjective or even a pragmatic reading. Writers claim they have been ‘inspired’ by Deleuze and Guattari or to have met students who were, or to have seen student work that was. I am astonished that such dense and elitist work would be inspiring, given the usual commitments to dialoge more populist forms of teaching,  and  I should add my guess right away that very few such students will have read actually Deleuze and Guattari –even I despaired and never managed to finish Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze says indeed that we should not just ‘apply’ his concepts positivistically, but they are supposed to induce thought at a deeper level than this, surely? There are surely many more accessible inspiring works? As it is, inspiration of this kind remains perfectly compatible with some non-Deleuzian arguments – like holding to social constructivism, the standard notions of the individual subject – and ignoring the remarks that are clearly critical of existing formal education. It is education as the discussion of exciting ideas, just as in Bourdieu's account of elite French university education based on the charismatic performances of professors, not education as credentialising people, disciplining them or forcing them to think.

It is possible to identify these problems in an account like Gale (2007).  The article contains some useful summaries of some Deleuzian concepts – ‘the figures of the rhizome, the fold, the nomad and haecceity’ (474),  although becoming makes an appearance too, and these ‘figures‘ are explained and then ‘applied’ to familiar educational practices. The underlying themes clearly is the 'social justice agenda', with excessive State regulation identified as the reifying threat to complexity and subjectivity. For me, these ‘applications’ are the dominant theme, although this is hard to illustrate in a short discussion. As an example, ‘haecceity’ is summarised briefly and well, but it is promptly identified as some sort of ideal community of ‘researchers, teachers and students alike’ (479), later with the familiar ‘communities of practice’ of Lave and Wenger – thinking of haecceity helps in ‘illuminating and extending’ this notion (481).  Thinking of haecceity  ‘frees the individual  from absorption into fixed categories’ (480).

Overall, reading Deleuze (and several others including Baudrillard, Heidegger, Lyotard and Kant) helps Gale ‘ question and reflexively engage with foundational responses  to the policy implementation and practice that are operating within the sector’ (482). Apart from seeming to be a large sledgehammer to crack a nut, it seems clear that any differences between these philosophers is to be subsumed since they can all be used in the struggle for autonomy and social justice. [So could just about any other philosopher too, of course]. However, it is Gale that seems to provide this unity, and it is supported by his experience. It is a classic act of the unifying subject in the conventional sense, and seems to resemble a kind of social constructivism.

This can look quite selective at times, as suggested. In particular the ontological arguments of Deleuze are minimised (not entirely absent though). As Hodgson and Standish suggest (below), it is clear that the bureaucratic, docile subject is being criticised as a reduction of complexity, but there is no acknowledgement that the heroic, struggling and sceptical subject could also be constructed. The clearest example of what could happen is provided by the quotations from students discussing various conventional understandings. Gale sees fairly mundane ‘expressions of unease’ (478) with these models as a triumph for nomadic thinking and practice, as examples of proto-philosophising, and not as ,say, expressions of anxiety on encountering educational theory, or defensive reassertions of the ideology of ‘common sense’ hoping to stave off any encounters.

These are clearly his constructions, validated, no doubt by his subsequent experience. However, as Semetsky suggests (below), the problem with applying concepts to immediate experience, using experience as some sort of commentary on philosophical issues, or citing experience as some sort of final validator, is that experience and its conventions tend to win out, and an opportunity to encounter an intellectual ‘shock’ is passed over.

Gale (2010), which cites Deleuze as one of several inspirations for progressive practice in teacher training (others include Foucault, Freire, hooks and Butler). The enemy is named as ‘neoliberalism’ and its offshoots which include modern bureaucratic practices of rational planning, and, at the most general level, Cartesian mind-body dualism. Gale cites the work on learning new concepts which is explored further by Semetsky (below), but does not explore in this article the ontological aspects of the theory. We learn little about the actual practice of teaching (and there is, as usual, no discussion of assessment), and so it is hard to say if Gale is able to overcome the ‘paradox of learning’ by delivering ‘shocks’. Although Gale is a skilled and engaging teacher, capable of provoking intense  reflection, there is nothing in practice to stop others teaching Deleuze in a very unenlightening manner, as a mystifying dogma or as a dumbed-down bluffer’s guide.

As with other heroes, Deleuze seems to have been selectively read through a ‘progressive’ lens (to use some popular jargon).This is the suggestion made by Hodgson and Standish (2009) at least. They argue that a combination of a ‘practical’ or ‘commonsense’ notion of the relation of theory to practice, plus a political commitment to anti-oppressive practice and consciousness-raising leads to a highly selective reading of post-strucuralist philosophy. They choose readings of Foucault or Lyotard as examples. These heroes are selectively read to attack the sources of oppression (top –down regulatory policies or standards and testing, and positivism and quantification in research) without realising the critical  depth of the arguments. Properly grasped, this would also lead to doubts about anti-oppressive practice too, for example, or standard narrative research – these are also dominant discourses or metanarratives and they are also more complicit with the more oppressive versions than can appear to be the case.

Strangely, Hodgson and Standish cite using Deleuze as an example of how not to ‘positivise’ post-structuralists, but Deleuze fares no better, even in their own account. They also select congenial concepts (in their case the rhizome) to illustrate the limits of the conventional notions of knowledge. They seem to want to appropriate the discussion about choosing suitable dimensions for analysis without noting its roots in mathematical analysis and models of reality (at least according to DeLanda) and they do not mention any of the other works, especially those on the cinema. As for resistance to incorporation, Baudrillard and Zizek both know that the notions of ‘flow’ and ‘becoming’ have now become the commonplace concepts of management studies and other apologies for digital capitalism. As usual, the point is not to develop abstract concepts but to examine how they are actually used in social and political contexts – a network can connect underdogs, helping them communicate and coordinate resistance, or solidify an elite by building contacts and influence between, say, politicians, senior police officers, and  a major news corporation. Celebrating ‘ the network’, the rhizome, flow, haecceity, multiplicity or any other concept as inherently and necessarily liberating, just because it resists reified power relations is absurd, unless these concepts are also used subsequently to critique more flexible, transient and rhizomatic power relations. Subsequent critique would involve appending serious qualifications to abstract concepts. It would not be enough simply to allude to the abstract logical possibility of a ‘bad side’ emerging.

Semetsky (2009) takes a different approach, citing a larger number of texts by Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari and addressing the broader theme of how new knowledge is acquired. Within that broad project, a number of subthemes are likely to catch the eye of the modern educator -- the role of experience and affect.  With the orthodox reading well-established, I suspect that some readers will come to the article, as I did, expecting it to be about experiential and emotional education in schools as currently understood. In those circumstances, as Hodgson and Standish suggest, the philosophical explorations of percepts and of affect as driving transversal lines of flight back from multiplicities to the plane of consistency will seem excessive and irrelevant to the practical educator. Indeed, there is some doubt about the role of these concepts for Semetsky too, for me at least: the nub of what she says could be rendered as arguing that people need some affective push, some good personal motive, for genuinely extending our knowledge beyond what we know already, to generate radically new concepts. This is the role of the philosopher, she argues, and it is how Deleuze intends we operate after reading his work.

Certainly, mere ‘recognition’ of a concept is insufficient. Deleuze has in mind a ‘shock’ to existing thought (a term repeated in the books on the cinema – eg Cinema 2). Using experience to develop should therefore involve not the confirmation of what we know already, or the uncovering of skilled performances but the sort of shock that arises from meeting people with radically different understandings from one’s own (stressed in US pragmatism and in some writings on the supposed role of seminars in universities). The problem then arises, via the ‘paradox of learning’, of how we actually can grasp something that is radically new, on the other side of a shock that calls into question all that we know already. [The paradox arises, Semetsky tells us, because either we can grasp new knowledge easily, in which case it is not really new and we knew it already, or it is radically new and therefore ungraspable].

The ontological aspects of Deleuze’s thought are taken as providing a ‘foundation’ for Semetsky’s suggestions that we involve more affect in thinking, but they also provide the usual challenges to the conventional notions of the subject. Reality itself generates novelty, for example, and ‘”Something in the world forces us to think”’ (quoting Difference and Repetition, p. 451). Philosophical thought, which might not be the same as ordinary thought, must do something quite specific to Deleuzian ontology – as we saw, they deterritorialize, by ‘flattening’ mulitiplicities back into the underlying plane of consistency, and then reterritorialize in the form of deriving new explanatory concepts: their affect drives this specific effort. They must read actual events as ‘signs’ of some deeper process of actualisation. Again we are left with the suspicion that this particular kind of innovative thought is going to require considerable amounts of cultural and educational capital, and we are far from the claims for experience in school activity days or outdoors lessons. Similarly, affect for philosophers seems to be linked to the ‘joyful’ pursuit of knowledge, not the sentimental attachment to children of other lands. In both cases, there is quite a gap between what Semetsky is discussing and what teachers do, and it is hard to see how Deleuze could be seen to offer any sort of ‘foundation’ for the latter.

St Pierre (2004) reads Deleuze initially in terms of the ‘social justice’ agenda again, and her scholarship is sufficient to indicate that this reading can clearly be grounded on what Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari write, especially in the two ‘60s’ texts. She justifies her reading on the remarks by Deleuze (in Logic of Sense) and in Thousand Plateaus) on the denial that the works are to be read as some systematic philosophical attempt to develop consistent concepts: for St Pierre (even more than for Gale), this warrants a reading connected to existing interests in social justice and to developing opposition to current educational policy specifically. She suggests that Deleuze should be judged according to whether his concepts ‘work’. She testifies that they have helped her and her students develop some creative thinking. She also realizes that the notion of the subject in Deleuze (and in others) is very different from the usual ones involved in qualitative research ( and even convetional ethics), and this comes at the end of the article as setting an agenda for further thought and writing (hinted at in Gale as well).

This seems to be a reasonable way to avoid any suggestion in Hodgson and Smith that there is one single way to grasp Deleuze (or Foucault) , a ‘right’ way instead of a ‘selective reading’. We might expect the works to be complex and capable of yielding several readings. One way to test particular readings would be to use quotations from the texts themselves and to cite various commentaries. This would be sufficient to deny any claim that any one reading is sufficient to explain everything, but it would not take long to realize that interpretation is inevitably involved as some sections are taken as a transparent account of the real Deleuze, and others explained away as requiring (possibly dismissive) interpretation first.

The other main way to compare readings is to look at implications for policy and practice. Claims that Deleuze’s work provides some obvious and clear ‘foundation’ for a particular policy would be absurd. Readings would have to be justified in the name of some wider ‘good’ – a liberating policy, socially just practice or whatever. In those cases, though, Hodgson’s and Standish’s other objections come to the fore – that problems with those good policies are being ignored by a selective reading. The obvious cases are that liberating policies themselves feature repression (perhaps an insistence on participating in full and frank discussions in a way that can become ‘terroristic’ to cite Lyotard); that they ignore complexity (perhaps failing to focus on repressive features such as assessment in favour of idealistic renditions of seminar discussions as pursuing ‘lines of flight’); perhaps unwittingly providing the repressors with useful terminology (in St Pierre’s case she insists that we are allowed to take ‘what works’ from Deleuze then objects to the US Government insisting that teachers take ‘what works’ as their main focus when reading educational research: they would almost certainly bin Deleuze, of course).Selective readings also miss other useful works, especially those on the cinema, with many implications for pedagogy - perhaps an embodied face-to-face pedagogy would fined watching films uncongenial?

To borrow Semetsky’s terms, Deleuze can be read as if he immediately confirmed existing experience, and the chance to really experience a creative ‘shock’ is being minimised: commitments remain as they were before, with Deleuze simply being added as a kind of conceptual garnish, with bourgeois creativity being rendered as ‘nomadicity’, ducking the official syllabus as ‘following lines of flight’, respecting individuals as recognising haecceity – and so on. In particular there is the danger of an easy identification of the emphases on the body, affect and the child as philosopher with those rather more conservative notions found in educational progressivism.

Discussion

Interesting as these applications might be, they all seem rather familiar in a way, heading off in recognisable directions despite the introductory sections on Deleuze’s spectacularly unfamiliar concepts. DeLanda’s  impressive review of the development of mechanised warfare begins helpfully enough with Deleuze on machinic assemblages and abstract machines, but proceeds in terms that probably could be derived from Weber on rationalisation or Marxism on abstract labour. The chapter on social groups begins with the notion of an assemblage with its two poles but rapidly turns into familiar discussions of groups at different levels that looks like – Parsons. The same goes with the other examples I cite. No doubt they are inspired by parts of Deleuze’s work, but they also seem to necessarily abandon that work, especially the ontology. DeLanda does talk about humans becoming machines but in a familiar way not one involving descending to bodies without organs but one which relies on the development of powerful mathematical modelling. Zizek might be right to say that philosophers can see ontological significance in this modelling, but that seems entirely optional. In the cases above, Deleuzian philosophy would simply get in the way.

Negri and Hardt might refer to Deleuze now and then to claim an ontological foundation for their analysis, but they also deploy Marxist concepts. Much educational dicusssion seems to flourish Deleuze and Guattari but to stop short of the ontological arguments and bolt on earlier work from the ‘progressive’ canon. This is no accident, but gets at the major issues – that philosophy cannot be operationalised as politics, whether national or educational, since in its most abstract forms it is indifferent to politics, as Zizek argues. There are both progressive and ideological forms of Deleuzian philosophy, but the direction taken cannot be explained by the philosophical debates alone: they depend on commitments, interests and motives not just the deployment of argument and the clash of ideas. The grounds for such commitments lie elsewhere, and also need clarification and discussion.

There is another reasons for drifting from Deleuzian ontology. It is simply too French, elitist, unfamiliar and too difficult. In those circumstances, there is a tendency to imitate the Protestant faithful when confronted by the difficult and uncompromising theology of Calvin or Knox, according to Weber’s famous account: to improvise a more workable and worldly version for practical purposes. It is possible to see this happening when busy writers snatch at terms like ‘becoming’ or ‘nomadic subjectivity’ and assimilate them directly to what is known and believed already. Progressive educational practice already values more flexible categories for children and more creative forms of expression, and it is tempting to see Deleuzian terms as further support for those understandings and beliefs.

DeLanda to the rescue

Intensive Philosophy... is an attempt to rationally reconstruct Deleuzian ontology, with an audience of scientists and mathematicians primarily in mind.  The idea is to systematize Deleuze a bit, by ignoring some aspects and by introducing new distinctions where they make sense, but, above all, to make explicit a lot of the arguments that are only hinted at in Deleuze himself.  In particular, the mathematics of complexity are spelled out particularly clearly (although it is still a challenging read), and some examples from modern scientific work, especially biology, are used to supply some empirical content.  This empirical content is important since Deleuze wants to move beyond mere speculation, and it also helps to replace mathematical models which otherwise would remain as mere analogies.  This careful discussion of reconstruction could possibly stray too far from Deleuzian texts themselves although a very useful appendix tries to indicate precisely the connections, together with the usual frequent references.  Nevertheless, if this is too much of a departure, DeLanda will accept the label of neoDeleuzeian.  Overall, it is the most clear and well explained account, and the emphasis on the mathematical models means we do not have to rely on literary or historical metaphors or bizarre neologisms.

A summary at the start of chapter two really explains the intention:

Realist ontology describes ‘a relatively undifferentiated and continuous topological space undergoing discontinuous transitions and progressively acquiring detail until it condenses into the measurable and divisible metric space which we inhabit’ (56).

Eventiually, we will have ‘three ontological dimensions which constitute the Deleuzian world: the virtual, the intensive and the actual’ (61).  Concrete individuals in actual worlds are the equivalent of the metric structures which condense out of the virtual.  They can exist in different spatial scales, providing the familiar objects in the actual world.  However, actual empirical objects process qualities as well—such as individual organisms ‘playing a particular role in a food chain or having a particular reproductive strategy’ (62).  Thus the intensive has to describe both extensive properties and qualities.

This is the sparsest way to put the case, and considerable detail follows. Mathematical terms persist in definiitions but are still very helpful. Try this as a defintion of a multiplicity:   'a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry–breaking bifurcations, together with the distribution of attractors which define each of its embedded levels’ (30). Multiplicites occupy manifolds --n-dimensional spaces. This is not as abstract as it soudsn though, since actual objects can be modelled as possessing the potential to occupy different states, and each state is modelled as occupying a dimension. A pendulum has two possible states or 2 dimensions, a bicycyle has 10 possible states depending on the positions of its wheels, handlebars, crank,  and 2 pedals. State spaces are traversed by vectors, and undergo transitions. Stable states are those wher the vectors approach closely a singularity or attractor, and there can be one or several attractors bundled up in a multiplicity, producing steady state, oscillations or even chaos (the useful physical example is convection currents in a liquid being heated).

Other terms can be fitted in around this definition -- eg 'unfolding' refers to the cascade of symmetry-breaking transitions. The analysis goes on to differentiate between metric and non-metric space. The latter is the realm of 'the intensive' processes, non-metric forces, including affects -- not the usual term meaning emotions but, as indicated on the Cinema books, more abstract forces of motion and energy -- the capacity ‘to affect and be affected by other individuals’ (71).

Although the issue os complex and the terminology sometimes overlaps ( one of deLanda's complaints), it seems we can have different sorts of assemblages of hetergeneous elements. The most virtual level has multiplicities, with a series of 'ordinary events' joining them (events which do not feature in phase transitions), woven together into a continuum. The quasi-causal operator does this weaving and meshing, using mechanisms involving 'resonances and echoes'. Then there is a series of processes which individuate and eventually actualise increasingly empirical event and assemblages. The mechanisms here are processes of 'condensation', where potentials settle into fixed patterns, eventually metric cycles or steady states. The mathematical model would see these processes in terms of a systematic unfolding or 'cascade' ,where dimensions are progressively lost and thus symmetry is as well (symmetry and addtional dimensions give objects more degrees of freedom to vary -- a gas is more symmetric than a liquid and a liquid more than a solid).

The most empirical kinds of assemblages are the haecceities -- highly contingent, almost accidental unique combinations of objects joined by having mutual capacities or affordances. The example is the assemblage formed when a particular dog walks on a particular road in particular conditions. Annoyingly, there seem to be virtual haecceities as well, though.

Basically, Deleuze needs to describe these different levels in a rigorous way, which means abandoning  conventional but not very rigorous techniques such as nominating mysterious essences or natural typologies to explain the invariants of empirical forms. Deleuze's accounts are rigorously historical and emergent (and maybe even testable to some extent). To avoid flawed approaches completely, he is forced also to abandon notions like anaology, resemblance  or similarity, all of which tend to smuggle in essences or types. Strictly, he must also avoid empirical content when disucssing the virtual so as to avoid circularity when using the virtual to explain how the empirical gets individuated. This in turn means he needs to show how metrical properties depend originally on ordinal ones, and how processes and objects can influence each other without invoking conventional empirical causals. I think this gets a bit weaselly here, and even DeLanda starts getting a bit cautious when discussing 'quasi-causal operators' or 'isomorphisms'.

Ther eare discussions of actual physical systems to partially 'replace' the abstractions of the mathematical models. The unfolding embryo is a recurrent theme, paralleled with material abot the interactions fo individuals,species and ecosystems. Embryos operate with forms of intensive fluid assembly, not fixed blueprints, and phsycial structures like bones and muscles condense out of these fluids as hormones and materials interact: hormones are produced by genes. The biological examples are also used to argue for a 'flat ontology'. Species are not eternal essential or typological entities but are composed from the interactions between individuals and environments via other agents like 'demes' (breeding populations). As a result, species are individuals themselves, differing only from indiviual animals by scale.

A remarkable closing section suggests that actual scientists themselves act like the cascade of actualisation - -they literally individuate and actualise phenomena in the laboratory for explanatory purposes. This creative activity is usually ignored in accounts that see scientific as emerging via deuction from geternal laws. DeLanda looks quite like Latour here. Philosophers, by contrast go the other way up the cascade from the actual to the virtual, uncovering the work of the virtual concealed behind the 'objective illusion'. They do this in several ingenious ways -- modelling mathematically if appropriate to spell out real but unactualised state spaces, but also inferring the existence of the intensive and virtual from the behaviour of the actualised. IN general, the intention is to study the whole set of state spaces ( 'possibilities' in the old language) inorder to understand better the actualised ones that we can study immediately.

It is a fascinating argument though and one which is more plausible than dodgy leaps to essences (which affects a lot of educational or sociological thinking too -- the essence of Man and all that). Deleuze has certainly thought through the issues in his usual obsessive way,although some of it seems to have a momentum arising from some personal desire for  consistency. Having denied the use of empirical terms, for example, he has to flirt with dodgy new concepts and slender resemblances after all. DeLanda makes far more sense than any other commentator, though, even though I feel uncomfortable with some of the consequences -- you mean there may be something in complexity theory? Maybe Deleuze isn't just a bore and pseud?

Forget Deleuze

The examples above indicate that much of the actual philosophy is in the process of being forgotten already, or rejected as excessive for practical purposes. We need a few basic terms to support what we believe already or to inspire further concrete applications. We might be able to use Deleuze tactically as a ‘big name’ to dismay any critics, but we do not need him more positively. Nor should we.

In 1987, Baudrillard, in an interview with Lotringer, suggested that we forget Foucault. There were two main reasons for doing so. In the first place, Foucault was describing a society that had ceased to exist. The carefully interwoven webs of power permeating the whole of social life, embodied in institutions like the school, the clinic or the prison had failed in their project to create the fully disciplined subject. They had failed because of their own excess. Nazi Germany was the last disciplinary society, with enormous amounts of energy devoted to controlling the public and their views in minute detail. Now, people were so bombarded with strategic attempts to form their opinions that they had become apathetic when faced with any disciplinary attempt. They literally did not know whom to believe. They could no longer distinguish the simulacrum from ‘reality’. They responded with fatalism and became a ‘black hole’ into which all sorts of urgent controlling messages were beamed, while nothing at all ever came back. As a result, the disciplinary society of Foucault became a simulacrum itself -- public opinion was manufactured and so was the need to influence it.

The second issue follows from the first. Foucault himself had become part of the nostalgic attempt to preserve the notion of the disciplinary society, lending it academic credence, attempting to describe new events in the old terms, and still giving warrant to the defenders of State disciplinary apparatuses -- they could still draw their pay packets, and command large quantities of State resources, in order to guard against some imminent upsurge of rebellious subjectivity. State guardians were no longer worried about an armed and confrontational working class movement, but they could still not relax, luckily. Now there was a threat from prisoners, schizophrenics and gay rights activists wanting to care for each other in extensive ways. Like the British Secret Service, who faced threats to their budget after the end of the Cold War, State disciplinarians had a convenient new enemy within, and just in time.

There is an odd bit when Baudrillard is saying sexuality has never existed. What he might mean is that Foucault tells us that modern sexuality has to be produced, that it is not a matter of repressing sexuality any more but making people talk about it and express it. I think Hite’s work on male sexuality makes this clear – young men don’t really even like sexual intercourse and see it  as like work, a source of anxiety about perfomance and all that. Baudrillard says maybe this was always the case, that even societies that openly made a big thing about repressing sexuality had all along be forced to urge people to express it. The only example I can think of is a controversial one –traditional Muslim society seems to have the view that Muslim people are so sexually dynamic that women cannot be trusted to be with men, and men cannot be trusted to look at women unveiled. This seems to me to be pretty unlikely unless a massively dynamic sexuality is imposed culturally in the first place.

Now let’s apply that to desire in general as if sexual desire were its finest accomplishment. Productive desire in a general sense has never existed either would be the argument. It has had to be produced by constant exhortation and cultural pressure. This would fit Baudrillard’s view of the masses as fatalistic and apathetic rather than seething with desire to go out and produce assemblages. It would also meet Zizek’s criticism that Deleuze on desire sounds like an advocacy of digital capitalism – Baudrillard actually says that all the stuff about flow and becoming is a cultural commonplace. Bankers and managers urge us to do it. It is a business model. Let us ask Foucault’s question then – why is there so much talk around these days about desire and becoming? Would it carry on without all this talk?

Walkerdine, V. 2011.From 1968 to 2011: From hope to despair and back again.  Paper presented at the Discourse, Power and Resistance Conference, April 13—15, Plymouth, UK.