Deleuze and the Political

THINKING THE POLITICAL General editors: Keith Ansell Pearson University of Warwick Simon Critchley University of Essex Recent decades have seen the emergence of a distinct and challenging body of work by a number of Continental thinkers that has fundamentally altered the way in which philosophical questions are conceived and discussed. This work poses a major challenge to anyone wishing to define the essentially contestable concept of 'the political' and to think anew the political import and application of philosophy. How does recent thinking on time, history, language, humanity, alterity, desire, sexuality, gender and culture open up the possibility of thinking the political anew? What are the implications of such thinking for our understanding of and relation to the leading ideologies of the modern world, such as liberalism, socialism and Marxism? What are the political responsibilities of philosophy in the face of the new world (dis)order? This new series is designed to present the work of the major Continental thinkers of our time, and the political debates their work has generated, to a wider audience in philosophy and in political, social and cultural theory. The aim is neither to dissolve the specificity of the 'philosophical' into the 'political' nor evade the challenge that the 'political' poses the 'philosophical'; rather, each volume in the series will try to show it is only in the relation between the two that the new possibilities of thought and politics can be activated. Volumes already published in the series are: • • • • • •

Foucault & the Political by Jon Simons Derrida & the Political by Richard Beardsworth Nietzsche & the Political by Daniel W. Conway Heidegger & the Political by Miguel de Beistegui Lacan & the Political by Yannis Stavrakakis Lyotard & the Political by James Williams

DELEUZE AND THE POLITICAL

Paul Patton

© * France

London and New York

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Une, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2000 Paul Patton Typeset in Sabon by BC Typesetting, Bristol Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any elearonic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Patton, Paul. Deleuze and the political/Paul Patton. p. cm. - (Thinking the political) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Deleuze, Gilles - Contributions in political science. 2. Political science - Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. JC261.P37 2000 32(y.01^dc21 99-086552 ISBN O-415-10063-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-10064-X (pbk)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction 1

vii 1

Concept and image of thought: Deleuze's conception of philosophy

11

2

Difference and multiplicity

29

3

Power

49

4 5

Desire, becoming and freedom Social machines and the state: the history and politics of deterritorialisation

68

6

88

Nomads, capture and colonisation

109

Conclusion Notes References Index

132 138 149 159

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the editors of this series, Simon Critchley and Keith Ansell Pearson, and to the two Routledge editors with whom I have worked in the course of this project, Adrian Driscoll and Tony Bruce, for their support and patience. I am especially indebted to Keith Ansell Pearson and to the two readers to whom Routledge sent the manuscript for their generous and helpful editorial comments. I am also grateful to a number of people who read draft versions of all or part of this book and made helpful suggestions: Duncan Ivison, Saul Newman, Kara Shaw and Charles Stivale. I would also like to thank Melissa McMahon for her work both as research assistant and as Deleuze scholar, Carl Power for his helpful guidance with regard to Bergson and Peter Cook for preparing the index. Many others have helped me to understand the work of Deleuze and Guattari, through their publications and in conference presentations and discussions over the last decade, including Ronald Bogue, Bruce Baugh, Rosi Braidotti, Constantin Boundas, Philip Goodchild, Michael Hardt, Eugene Holland, Brian Massumi, Gregg Lambert, Dorothea Olkowski, Jean-Clet Martin, Todd May, Alan Schrift, Daniel Smith and Charles Stivale. Constantin Boundas has played a very special role in creating a community of Deleuze scholars who share his passion. Finally, and most of all, I am grateful to Moira Gatens for her presence, her support and her constructive engagement with this work over many years. Some of the material included here is drawn from my previously published work. I am grateful for permission to reprint passages from the following articles and chapters: 'Conceptual politics and the war-machine in Mille Plateaux', Substance, no. 44/45, 1984, pp. 61-80. 'Anti-Platonism and art', in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds) Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, New York and London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 141-56.

vn

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

'Concept and event', Man and World, vol. 29, no. 3, July 1996, pp. 31526. With kind permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers. 'Deleuze and political thought', in Andrew Vincent (ed.) Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 237-53. 'Strange proximity: Deleuze et Derrida dans les parages du concept', The Oxford Literary Review, 18, 1997, pp. 117-33.

Vlll

INTRODUCTION

Gilles Deleuze does not conform to the standard image of a political philosopher. He has not written about Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau and when he has written on philosophers who rate as political thinkers, such as Spinoza or Kant, he has not engaged with their political writings. He does not address issues such as the nature of justice, freedom or democracy, much less the principles of procedural justification. His work shows an almost complete lack of engagement with the central problems and normative commitments of Anglo-American political thought. Explicitly political concerns are not the largest part of his oeuvre and they emerged relatively late in his career. He co-authored with Félix Guattari only two overtly political books: Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987). In addition, he published a chapter of the Dialogues jointly composed with Claire Parnet entitled 'Many politics' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 124—47), a book on Foucault (Deleuze 1988b), an essay on Foucauldian themes entitled 'Postscript on control societies' (1995b: 177-82), and several interviews which address political issues. Despite his lack of engagement with issues of normative political theory, Deleuze is a profoundly political philosopher. His collaborative work with Guattari offers new concepts and a new approach to thinking philosophically about the political. The profusion of idiosyncratic terminology makes it difficult for many to read this work as political philosophy.1 Deleuze and Guattari discuss society and politics in terms of machinic assemblages, becomings, nomadism, forms of capture and processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Thus, A Thousand Plateaus opens with the blunt declaration that 'All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4). The difficulty in reading their work is further compounded when many readers assume that Deleuze and Guattari employ much of this terminology as metaphor, while the authors insist that their use of language is not metaphoric but conceptual.2 So, for example, in Anti-Oedipus they follow Lewis Mumford in arguing that a society may be regarded as a machine 'in the strict sense, without metaphor' (Deleuze and 1

DELEUZE AND THE POLITICAL

Guattari 1977: 251). In support of their claim that Mumford described certain ancient forms of empire as megamachines in a literal rather than a metaphoric sense of the term, they point out that he justified this term by reference to Reuleaux's classic definition of a machine as 'a combination of resistant parts, each specialised in function, operating under human control to transmit motion and perform work' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 141). Deleuze and Guattari's machinic concept of society is discussed in Chapter 5, while their concept of 'concepts' is discussed in Chapter 1 and compared with Derrida's specifically philosophical and deconstructive concepts. A guiding principle of this study is that Deleuze's contribution to political thought must be assessed in relation to his own conception and practice of philosophy. We start from the premise that Deleuze must be taken at his word when he describes his work with Guattari as 'philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word' (Deleuze 1980: 99). Accordingly, our approach is framed by the conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts which is set out in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Chapter 1 points to connections between this distinctive conception of philosophy and Deleuze's discussions of the nature of thought in his earlier work. The aim is to show that both the distinctive practice of philosophy in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus and the concept of philosophy outlined in What Is Philosophy? are consistent developments from Deleuze's earlier treatments of the nature and task of philosophy. The chapters that follow seek to draw out the conceptual structure that underlies Deleuze and Guattari's 'nomadic' style of thought and writing, and to elucidate some of the key concepts specific to their social and political philosophy. As the discussion of concepts of power and freedom in Chapters 3 and 4 shows, it is possible to translate some of Deleuze and Guattari's terminology into the language of Anglophone political theory. However, there is always a remainder that does not translate and a series of points at which the normative dimensions of their work do not correspond to those of Anglo-American political theory. For example, their conception of power is closer to the idea of capacity to act than to the normative notion of action which adversely affects the capacity of others to act. Their conception of freedom is closer to Nietzsche's ideal of 'self-overcoming' than it is to ideas of negative or positive freedom. This points to a further difficulty in reading their work as political philosophy, namely that they propose concepts that do not readily map on to even the most enduring fictions of Western political thought. In their social theory as well as in their account of individual subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari privilege the processes of creative transformation and the lines of flight along which individuals or groups are transformed into something different to what they were before. They do not refer to individual subjects of freedom or autonomy, much 2

INTRODUCTION

less to notions of contract or consent. Their work is couched entirely in non-subjectivist terms and refers only to abstract lines, movements and processes of various kinds. They appear to be more interested in ways in which society is differentiated or divided than in ways in which it is held together. They are concerned neither with the legitimation of government, nor its delegitimation, but rather with the processes through which existing forms of government of self and others are transformed. Although not a political philosopher in the sense that he belongs to the disciplinary genre, Deleuze has long held the view that philosophy is a political activity. This becomes explicit in the final product of his partnership with Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1994), where the authors endow philosophy with a political vocation. They define philosophy as the creation of 'untimely' concepts in Nietzsche's sense of this term, namely 'acting counter to our time, and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come' (Nietzsche 1983: essay 2, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', foreword). They argue that philosophy should be 'utopian' in the sense of contributing to the emergence of new forms of individual and collective identity, or as they put it, summoning forth 'a new earth and a people that does not yet exist' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108). Their use of the term 'utopia' must be treated with caution since they reject authoritarian or transcendent Utopias in favour of those that are immanent, revolutionary and libertarian. It is with this relation to Utopia, they argue, 'that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 99). The desire for a philosophy that would be both critical and creative may be found throughout Deleuze's work. His first book was a study of Hume's conception of human nature (Deleuze 1991) first published in 1953. In answer to a question from Antonio Negri about the relation of his earlier work to the political, Deleuze replies that what interested him in Hume was not the forms of representation of political life but the forms of collective creation: 'in Hume I found a very creative conception of the institution and right' (Deleuze 1995b: 169, trans, modified).3 He comments further in response to Negri that a constant theme of his work has been the conditions under which new institutions can arise. In this regard, it is not the law which is interesting but jurisprudence in so far as it is 'truly creative of rights' (Deleuze 1995b: 169, trans, modified). For this reason, he suggests that this should not be left to judges but should also involve those most directly affected in the elaboration of new principles of right. Chapter 6 takes up the question of jurisprudence with reference to the elaboration of common law aboriginal land rights in Australia and Canada. Aspects of Deleuze's earlier work have exercised considerable influence on political thought in France. For example, his efforts during the late 3

DELEUZE AND THE POLITICAL

1950s and early 1960s to reformulate and revalue the concept of difference (Deleuze 1956, 1983, 1994) were an important contribution to the subsequent development of unorthodox 'philosophies of difference' by a number of French philosophers. His account of Nietzsche as a systematic thinker who privileged difference over identity is credited with having launched the enthusiasm for Nietzsche among left-wing French thinkers during the late 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 2 looks at the concept of multiplicity that is specific to Deleuze's metaphysics of difference and at the manner in which this concept informed his work with Guattari. This chapter also discusses the anti-Platonism and the resistance to Hegel which are manifest in Deleuze's critique of the philosophy of representation. The final section of this chapter takes up the relationship of Deleuze's concept of difference to what has become known as the 'politics of difference'. Chapter 3 examines his reconstruction of the Nietzschean concept of 'will to power' and shows how this was an important methodological resource for Foucault's critical historical analyses during the 1970s. After outlining his reconstruction of Nietzsche's concept in terms of active and reactive force, affirmative and negative expressions of will to power, we argue that this provides the prototype for the evaluative structure of concepts developed in Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Deleuze belonged to a generation of French intellectuals whose political consciousness was formed, as Guattari once said, 'in the enthusiasm and naïveté of the Liberation'.4 Whereas Guattari had a long career of activism in radical psychotherapy and left-wing organisations, Deleuze first came into contact with political movements and activists after 1968. From this period onwards, he became involved with a variety of groups and causes, including the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP) begun by Foucault and others in 1972, protests against the treatment of immigrant workers, and support for homosexual rights. Later he took public positions on issues such as the deportation by French authorities of a lawyer for the Baader-Meinhof group, Klaus Croissant, and the imprisonment of Antonio Negri and other Italian intellectuals on charges of complicity with terrorism. He also wrote several pieces in support of the Palestinian people, declared his opposition to the French nuclear strike force, and signed letters critical of French involvement in the Gulf War.5 This public intellectual activity did not distinguish Deleuze from a variety of other neo-Marxist, existentialist, anarchist or left-wing liberal intellectuals who signed the same petitions and took part in the same demonstrations. By contrast, his conception of the political role of intellectuals and the relationship between his own political activity and his philosophy set him apart from many of his contemporaries. In a 1972 interview with Deleuze, Foucault tells the story of a Maoist who once said to him:

INTRODUCTION

I can easily understand Sartre's purpose in siding with us; I can understand his goals and his involvement in politics; I can partially understand your position, since you've always been concerned with the problem of confinement. But Deleuze is an enigma. (Foucault 1977b: 205) In reply, Deleuze points to the emergence of a new conception of the relationships between theory and practice in his own work with Guattari as well as in Foucault's writings: a conception that understands these relationships in a partial and fragmentary manner, not as determinate relationships between 'theory' understood as a totality and 'practice' understood as an equally unified process of the application or implementation of theory, but as 'a system of relays within . . . a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical' (Foucault 1977b: 206). The conception of theory as a relay of practice stands in marked contrast to the idea that the intellectual represents the vanguard of a proletarian movement which embodies the forces of social change.6 It is closer to the ideal expressed by Nietzsche in 'Schopenhauer as Educator' when he draws a distinction between academic philosophers in the service of the State and true philosophers who must remain 'private thinkers'(Nietzsche 1983: essay 3, 'Schopenhauer as Educator', sections 7 and 8). Sartre, whom Deleuze admired during his youth and regarded as an important influence, was a modern paradigm of the private thinker who spoke and acted on his own behalf rather than as the representative of a political party or social class. Such thinkers, Deleuze wrote, seek to align themselves with the unrepresentable forces that introduce disorder and a dose of permanent revolution into political and social life (Deleuze 1985: 83—4).7 'Private' is perhaps not the best term to describe such thinkers, since it suggests isolation from social forces and social movements when, for Deleuze, these are essential conditions of the activity of thinking. Foucault's Discipline and Punish provides an example of this 'private' use of reason, to the extent that this book might be regarded as a theoretical relay of the political activity undertaken by the GIP. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus might be understood as a theoretical relay of practical resistance to the role of psychoanalysis in the repression of potentially revolutionary expressions of desire. The aim of their 'schizoanalysis' is practical rather than theoretical: the analysis of the forms of unconscious desire and their political investments is conceived as a means to the 'liberation' or unblocking of the creative or 'schizo' processes present in a given social field. At the same time, with regard to the other side of the relation between theory and practice described above, Deleuze does not hesitate to describe Anti-Oedipus as 'from beginning to end a book of political philosophy' (Deleuze 1995b: 170). This book exemplifies his view, which we discuss in Chapter 1, that philosophy is and should be a 5

DELEUZE AND THE POLITICAL

response to problems that are posed outside of the academy. For Deleuze, such problems are a crucial enabling condition of creativity in thought. The idea that philosophy creates concepts that are inseparable from a form of life and mode of activity points to a constant dimension of Deleuze's conception of thought and philosophy. It implies that the test of these concepts is ultimately pragmatic: in the end, their value is determined by the uses to which they can be put, outside as well as within philosophy. Anti-Oedipus brought notoriety to the authors as founders of the current of post-1968 leftist thought known as 'the philosophy of desire'. It was widely read in the belief that such periods of revolutionary ferment saw the emergence of unadulterated desire and a will to change which was as quickly suppressed by the established organisations of political opposition (such as the communist party and trade unions) as it was by the forces of order. Deleuze and Guattari shared many of the political and theoretical orientations common to the post-1968 libertarian left. These included a concern for the political effectivity of desire and the unconscious investments which play a part in macropolitical movements, a concern for the micropolitics of social life, and a concern for the politics of language and signification. While they were neither semioticians nor theorists of 'discourse' in Foucault's sense of the term, they did acknowledge the importance of language and its pragmatic dimension for modern political life. Finally, while they were not Marxists in any traditional doctrinal sense, an anti-capitalist thematic pervades all their writings, up to and including What Is Philosophy? (1994). In the interview with Negri cited earlier, Deleuze reaffirms his sympathy with Marx and describes capitalism as a fantastic system for the fabrication of great wealth and great suffering. He asserts that any philosophy worthy of being called political must take account of the nature and evolution of capitalism (Deleuze 1995b: 171). In return, Negri finds in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) 'the fundamental elements of the renewal of historical materialism, in function of the new dimensions of capitalistic development' (Negri 1995: 104). Despite their adoption of aspects of Marx's social and economic theory, there are significant points at which Deleuze and Guattari abandon traditional Marxist views. They reject the Marxist philosophy of history in favour of a differential typology of the macro- and micro-assemblages which determine the character of social life. They reject the idea that contradiction is the motor of historical progress and argue that a society is defined less by its contradictions than by its lines of flight or deterritorialisation. They reject any internal or evolutionist account of the origins of the State in favour of a neo-Nietzschean view according to which the form of the State has always existed even if only as a virtual tendency resisted by other processes within a given social field. Actual States are as often as not imposed from without. They reject economic determinism in favour of a 'machinic determinism' according to which collective 6

INTRODUCTION

assemblages of enunciation determine the social usage of language and even the tools employed in a given society 'presuppose a social machine that selects them and takes them into its "phylum"' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 90). In Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari develop their own account of capitalism as a unique mode of economic and political coordination and regulation which is immanent to the social field, in contrast to earlier forms of empire which operated by the transcendent 'overcoding' or capture of existing social and economic processes. Whereas earlier forms of empire extracted rent or other forms of obligatory payment, Deleuze and Guattari argue that capital functions in the manner of an 'axiomatic' system which is indifferent to the content of the propositions it connects. It produces a surplus by means of the axiomatic conjugation of decoded flows of labour, money, commodities and, increasingly, information. Deleuze comments in the interview with Negri that what they found most useful in Marx was 'his analysis^ capitalism as an immanent system that's constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in broader form, because its fundamental limit is Capital itself (Deleuze 1995b: 171). The lesson he and Guattari draw from this is that, at the macrosocial level of economic and political institutions, there is a permanent possibility of piecemeal social change. While the capitalist economy may constitute an axiomatic system inseparable from the fabric of modern social life, this does not mean that particular axioms cannot be removed or replaced by others. In common with Foucault and other poststructuralist political thinkers, Deleuze and Guattari do not envisage global revolutionary change but rather a process of 'active experimentation'8 which is played out in between economic and political institutions and the sub-institutional movements of desire and affect. Hence their sympathy for minority groups, where 'minority' should be understood in a qualitative rather than a quantitative sense. The minor is that which deviates from the majority or standard which is the bearer of the dominant social code. The importance of minority does not reside in the fact of its relative exclusion from the majority but in the political potential of its divergence from the norm. Minority provides an element capable of deterritorialising the dominant social codes. Conversely, it is the process of deterritorialisation which constitutes the essence of revolutionary politics for Deleuze and Guattari: not the incorporation of minority demands by adjustment to the axioms of the social machine, nor the reconstitution of a code, but the process of becoming-minor, of widening the gap between oneself and the norm. What is important, in their view, is a 'revolutionary-becoming' which is in principle open to anyone (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 147). What they mean by this is not simply resistance to the mechanisms of capture and reterritorialisation, but the invention of new forms of subjectivity and new

DELEUZE AND THE POLITICAL

forms of connection between deterritorialised elements of the social field. Deleuze and Guattari provide a conceptual language in which to describe the impact of social movements that impose new political demands upon the qualitative or cultural dimensions of social life. More generally, they contrast the dynamism of such forms of social nomadism with the essentially parasitic and reactive character of forms of capture. They point to examples from logic and computational theory as well as the natural world to show that centralised control mechanisms are not essential to the functioning of complex systems (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 15-18). It is not the control of State power which interests them but rather the forms of social change which take place alongside or beneath any given form of State, and the manner in which these changes impact upon political institutions themselves. The anti-statist and minoritarian tenor of Deleuze and Guattari's politics leads some commentators to represent them as a new species of anarchist. Yet while they share the anarchist suspicion of political representation, they are no less suspicious of attempts to turn the principles of noncoercive and non-hierarchical organisation into a blueprint for society as a whole. Todd May has suggested that the political perspective which they share with some other poststructuralists such as Foucault and Lyotard may be considered an offshoot of the anarchist tradition. He argues that this new anarchism 'retains the ideas of intersecting and irreducible local struggles, of a wariness about representation, of the political as investing the entire field of social relationships, and of the social as a network rather than a closed holism, a concentric field, or a hierarchy' (May 1994: 85). However, May also notes that, in common with other poststructuralist thinkers, Deleuze and Guattari abandon several key assumptions of classical anarchist thought, such as the repressive conception of power and a belief in the essentially benign and cooperative character of human nature. As he points out, their version of poststructuralist politics remains a tactical rather than a strategic style of political thought, directed at particular or local forms of revolutionary-becoming rather than wholesale social change. Such a political philosophy offers no guarantees: it is not a narrative of inevitable progress, nor does it offer the security of commitment to a single set of values against which progress may be judged. Does this entail a pessimism or nihilism about the human condition, a certain tragic note as Negri suggests (Deleuze 1995b: 173)? Deleuze replies that it does not and that, on the contrary, the fact that movements can always become bogged down in history or that revolutionary processes can turn out badly implies the need for a permanent 'concern' or vigilance with regard to the fate of the lines of flight along which movement is possible (Deleuze 1995b: 173). In the interview with Foucault referred to above, Deleuze describes the political function of intellectual work in terms of relays between the

INTRODUCTION

theoretical and practical components of a 'multiplicity of parts'. This is an allusion to the concept of machinic assemblage which he and Guattari first employed in their theory of desire in Anti-Oedipus but subsequently broadened to include social, linguistic and conceptual as well as 'practical' assemblages. Their theory of assemblages provides the conceptual framework for A Thousand Plateaus which, like Anti-Oedipus, is entirely a work of political philosophy. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 discuss several of the key concepts of the political philosophy presented in this mature work, including 'becoming', 'minority', 'nomadism', 'war-machine', 'capture' and 'deterritorialisation'. A central claim of the present study is that it is the concept of 'deterritorialisation' which bears the weight of the Utopian vocation which Deleuze and Guattari attribute to philosophy. This concept is one that they invent in Anti-Oedipus (1977), then refine and extend in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) before applying it to the nature of thought in What Is Philosophy? (1994). The concept of deterritorialisation implies a contrast between 'earth' and 'territory' (terre and territoire) understood as the two fundamental dimensions^ef nature. Territory is in the first instance territorialised earth, but it produces its own movements of deterritorialisation, while conversely the earth gives rise to processes of reterritorialisation and the constitution of new territories. Stable identities or territories are therefore secondary formations upon the mobile earth. Deleuze and Guattari describe a world in which the overriding tendency is deterritorialisation. A Thousand Plateaus is not political philosophy in the sense that it provides tools for the justification or critique of political institutions and processes. Rather, it is a political ontology that provides tools to describe transformative, creative or deterritorialising forces and movements. At one point the authors suggest that politics alone provides the horizon towards which all their efforts are directed: 'before being there is politics' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 249). This ontology is an ethics in the sense that, as for Spinoza, normative commitments are immanent to their philosophy of nature as well as their social ontology.9 In all cases, it presents a world understood as a complex of interconnected assemblages (earth, territory, forms of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation), where the overriding norm is that of deterritorialisation. It is because they conceive of philosophy as an inherently political activity that What Is Philosophy? does not have a separate section devoted to the political. When they describe philosophy as Utopian in the sense that it summons forth new earths and new peoples, Deleuze and Guattari align it with the creative aspect of this complex process of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. By their account, philosophy is Utopian in the sense that it opens up the possibility of new forms of individual and collective identity, thereby effecting the absolute deterritorialisation of the present in thought.10

DELEUZE AND THE POLITICAL

The theory of assemblages developed in A Thousand Plateaus incorporates elements of the concept of multiplicity which was a constant concern of Deleuze's earlier studies in the history of philosophy. Chapter 2 argues that this concept of multiplicity provides the basis for his distinctive contribution to the philosophy of difference, namely a concept of individuality which does not conform to the logic of identity. One of the ways in which Deleuze often sought to present the case for his philosophy of multiplicity was to argue for the priority of the conjunction 'and' over the verb 'to be'. By this means, he sought to carry out a partial overturning of the philosophical tradition and to free the connective power of relationality from its subordination to attribution: Thinking with AND instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 57). As the indeterminate conjunction which subtends all relations, 'and' comes to stand for that which is in-between any two things brought into relation with each other. It becomes an axiom of Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy that new 'becomings', events or beings always emerge from this 'in-between'. In their view, 'and' is always a border between two elements and, as such, a potential line of flight along which things happen and changes take place. In this perspective, it is entirely appropriate that this book should be called Deleuze and the political. It does not aim to present a definitive characterisation of Deleuze's political philosophy, supposing that such a thing were possible. Nor does it seek to recount in detail Deleuze's political activities, although I have made some reference to these in order to help situate his practice of conceptual creation. Rather, the aim of this book is to present some of the ways in which Deleuze's philosophy has already shown itself to be productive for political thought, and to suggest other ways in which it might become so. Deleuze and the political can only refer to an open-ended series of relations between philosophy and politics, a series of encounters between philosophical concepts and political events.

10

1 CONCEPT AND IMAGE OF THOUGHT Deleuze's conception of philosophy

For many critics, Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy remains an enigma. Their language is often unfamiliar, confronting the reader with an apparently endless series of new terms: plateaus, order-words, segmentarity, becomings and nomadic war-machines, to mention only some of their neologisms. The difficulty of their thought is a result both of the proliferation of new concepts and of its form. A Thousand Plateaus (1987) is an avowedly experimental work which appears to lack coherent argument or structure of any kind. As the Introduction suggests, it is a rhizome book which grows in all directions. Its aim is not to represent the world but, through its specific form of conceptual deterritorialisation, to connect with movements of deterritorialisation in other social assemblages. The concept of 'assemblage' provides a kind of formal continuity to the book to the extent that the successive 'plateaus' both define and describe a series of assemblages: machinic assemblages of desire, collective assemblages of enunciation, territorial assemblages and so on. 1 The series is open ended. In each plateau, specific concepts are proposed in order to analyse the relevant content (language, desire, music, the social field) in terms of the assemblages which inhabit that field. While there is a degree of continuity across the different plateaus, there is also continuous conceptual variation: concepts recur, but always in different relations to other concepts such that their identity in turn is transformed. The book itself is a particular kind of assemblage of concepts and conceptual plateaus. Yet Deleuze has always regarded his work with Guattari as philosophy in a very traditional sense of the word: 'A philosophy is what Félix and I tried to produce in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, especially in A Thousand Plateaus, which is a long book putting forward many concepts' (Deleuze 1995b: 136). 2 In order to reconcile such description with the unorthodox content and style of this work, it is helpful to turn to the conception of philosophy outlined by Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy? (1994). At first glance, their definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts is uncontroversial: political philosophy provides many examples of conceptual invention, from Plato's Republic to modern 11

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concepts of civil, liberal and democratic society. However, Deleuze and Guattari's conception of philosophy appears much less traditional once we understand what they mean by 'concept' and what they consider to be the task of philosophy. They propose a constructivist conception of the form of philosophy, agreeing with Nietzsche that philosophers 'must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing' (Nietzsche 1968: para. 409). They also agree with Nietzsche that the creation of new concepts is an inherently political activity. Its goal should be not just the recognition of existing states of affairs or the justification of existing opinions and forms of life, but the absolute deterritorialisation of the present in thought. For this reason, they describe it as an 'untimely' mode of thinking that calls for 'a new earth, a new people' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 99). Deleuzian concepts as open multiplicities Deleuze and Guattari conceive of concepts as complex acts which take the form of singularities in thought: 'the concept as a specifically philosophical creation is always a singularity' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 7). As a complex singularity, every concept has components that may in turn be considered as concepts. There are no concepts with only one component. To take an example from the history of political philosophy, Hobbes's concept of the social contract has a number of component concepts, each with its own history and internal complexity. These include the state of nature, the restless desire for power, the natural laws of human reason and the artificial person or Leviathan which results from the compact. A change in one or more of these elements changes the concept of the contract. For example, in contrast to Hobbes, Locke characterises the parties to the contract not as subjects of a relentless will to power without moral obligations towards one another, but as property owners subject to obligations towards themselves and others derived from divine natural law. Another variation occurs in the shift from philosophers such as Hobbes and Rousseau, for whom the contract involves relinquishing power and authority to a sovereign, to those such as Locke and Nozick, for whom power is simply lent to a sovereign authority on condition that certain important needs are met. In each case, the outcome is a singular concept of a social contract where the nature of this singularity is determined by the components and the complex relations between them. As acts of thought, concepts are intensional rather than extensional objects as in the set theoretical model of concepts as classes. Similarly, the components of a concept are not like individual terms falling under a given concept. Rather, they are intensive elements, pure singularities such as the individual subject in a state of nature, the subject of natural law, 12

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and so on. The relations between these components involve a certain kind of 'rendering consistent' of their components. Deleuze and Guattari describe concepts as the intensive and variable unity of their components: a concept is 'the point of coincidence, condensation or accumulation of its own components' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 20). In this sense, they suggest, concepts are both absolute (considered as wholes, or as they say 'posited all at once') and relative (to their components, to other concepts, and to the problems which they are supposed to resolve). The components and their consistency in a particular concept are two distinct dimensions of the concept, but related in that the consistency is established only by means of a certain 'communication' between the components. For example, in Hobbes, the relative weakness of human beings combined with their rationality ensures acceptance of those rational precepts of selfpreservation in a state of nature which lead directly to the compact to establish a sovereign power. Concepts have a history, which may include their history as components of other concepts and their relations to particular problems. Concepts are always created in relation to specific problems: 'A concept lacks meaning to the extent that it is not connected to other concepts and is not linked to a problem that it resolves or helps to resolve' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 79). The history of concepts therefore includes the variations they undergo in their migration from one problem to another. In any concept, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, 'there are usually bits or components that come from other concepts, which correspond to other problems and presuppose other planes' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 18). The concept of contract has a long history in political thought prior to Hobbes, but this does not mean that there is a single concept or contractarian tradition which stretches all the way from the Greeks via Hobbes and Locke to Rawls. Rather, there are 'a number of traditions in which the contract takes on a distinct character and serves a specific end' (Boucher and Kelly 1994: 1). The contract is transformed in part by virtue of the specific problem to which it relates in each case, whether this be the constitution and legitimation of civil authority, of morality, or the distinctive political relation between ruler and ruled. Hobbes's problem is the constitution and legitimation of coercive political authority. Rawls's contractarian theory of justice (Rawls 1971) is designed to solve a different problem, namely the problem of the principles of a just society. His concept of political liberalism is conceived as a response to yet another problem: 'how is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?' (Rawls 1993: xviii, xxv). To some degree, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of philosophical concepts resembles the Wittgensteinian notion of 'open concepts' which was once used to support the thesis of the 'essential contestability' of political 13

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concepts (Connolly 1983: 225-31). In this view, concepts such as democracy are essentially contestable because they are complex and involve a number of component features, the relative importance of which may be weighted differently. As a result, the conditions of applicability of the concept leave room for dispute in particular cases. For Deleuze and Guattari, too, concepts are open or indeterminate in this sense. However, their primary concern is not with the difficulty of determining the limits of particular concepts but rather with the manner in which concepts are defined by the 'bridges' or pathways along which they may be transformed into other concepts. Because concepts are always created in relation to particular problems, and because different problems themselves may be interconnected, any given concept will be located in a series of virtual relations to other concepts. These virtual relations with other concepts constitute the 'becoming' of the concept in question. Concepts enter into such virtual relations when the elements of one become indiscernible from those of another. These relations in turn form particular paths along which the concept might be transformed into something else. Consider the concept of power which informs Hobbes's account of the social contract: his argument that individuals in the state of nature become caught up in a competitive drive for ever more power appears to anticipate Nietzsche's will to power. In fact, it is not the same concept of power in each case. From the Nietzschean perspective of power as an active force, Hobbes's conception of power is reactive and his social contract amounts to the constitution of a community of slaves, whose only remedy for the inability to keep promises is to establish a power sufficient to compel observance by fear of punishment. Nevertheless, Hobbes does canvass - only to put aside as implausible - another basis upon which people might be held to their contracts, namely the moral strength of those individuals whose pride does not permit them to break their word. By contrast, Nietzsche invokes precisely this noble character type in envisaging the possibility of a sovereign individual 'who has the right to make a promise' (Nietzsche 1994: essay 2, para. 2). Nietzsche is commonly criticised for his individualism and his lack of any concept of political community. Yet by retracing this path from a reactive towards an active power, which must be regarded as a potential inherent in Nietzsche's concept of will to power, we can envisage a transformation in the concept of political community which is the outcome of the social contract (Patton 1993: 158-9). Deleuze's reconstructions of the work of philosophers such as Bergson, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche or Foucault were always attentive to the problems addressed in their work. However, What Is Philosophy? (1994) goes further in making the inherent susceptibility to variation or transformation a defining characteristic of philosophical concepts. Here, the essential indeterminacy of philosophical concepts is contrasted with the determinacy of the mathematical or propositional functions which are the objects of science 14

CONCEPT AND IMAGE OF THOUGHT and logic. Whereas philosophy forms 'concepts' on a 'plane of immanence', science establishes 'functions' on a 'plane of reference'. The history of science involves the construction of such planes of reference and the specification of relevant coordinates in terms of which functions may be determined. In the case of logic, the Fregean definition of a concept as a function from individuals to a truth value defines a thoroughly determinate extensional multiplicity. In both science and logic, the determinate character of functions is ensured by the independence of the variables which define the relevant system of reference. By contrast, in philosophy the components of conceptsare neither constants nor variables but 'pure and simple variations ordered according to their neighbourhood' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 20). Within a given concept, these components are like so many intensive ordinates arranged in zones of neighbourhood or indiscernibility which define the consistency of the concept: 'components remain distinct, but something passes from one to the other, something that is undecidable between them' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 19-20). At this point, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of philosophical concepts enters into a strange proximity with that of Derrida. In their terms, we might say that it is precisely such a zone of undecidability between spoken and written signification or communication that defines the deconstructive concept of writing in general. More generally, there are surprising similarities between the Deleuzian and deconstructive concepts of specifically philosophical concepts. Just as Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the specificity of concepts as they define them to 'philosophy', so Derrida distinguishes his distinctively deconstructive 'concepts' from ordinary philosophical concepts by calling them 'quasi-concepts' or 'aconceptual concepts'. Derrida accepts the ordinary logic of concept-formation according to which a concept only exists when there is distinction: 'it is impossible or illegitimate to form a philosophical concept outside this logic of all or nothing' (Derrida 1988: 117). At the same time, his practice of philosophy as a kind of 'double writing' produces its own distinctive series of philosophical 'quasi-concepts': writing, mark, trace, supplement, différance^ iterability and so on. In effect, the procedure is one by which deconstruction moves from ordinary concepts (of writing, or of cinders) to another kind of concept 'heterogeneous to the philosophical concept of the concept' (Derrida 1988: 118). By 'philosophical concept of the concept', Derrida means the traditional view according to which concepts are determinate ideal entities serving to identify regular kinds. Such concepts are not indeterminate or fuzzy but conform to the logic of exclusive disjunction: things either do or do not fall under them. Iterability implies repetition or recurrence of the same and to the extent that a concept identifies something common to a range of particulars, conceptualisation implies iterability in this sense. Frege's formal definition of concepts as functions from singular terms to truth values captures precisely 15

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this feature of concepts. By contrast, Derrida argues that iterability in this pure sense is never attained in natural language and it is precisely in order to account for this fact that deconstructive philosophy proposes to think the concept of concept otherwise. Iterability in the straightforward sense is never attained because in reality things are never simply instantiations of a uniform concept. In his discussion of concept-formation in 'On truth and lies in an extra-moral sense' (1979), Nietzsche comments that a word becomes a concept in so far as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases . . . One leaf is always different from another one, so the concept 'leaf is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. (Nietzsche 1979: section 1) Derrida points out that this implies that a rigorous concept of the 'iterability' which characterises concept formation would not only signify repeatability of the same but would also signify 'alterability of this idealised same in the singularity of the event' (Derrida 1988: 119 trans. modified). In other words, concepts must be supposed to involve at once repetition of the same and realisation or instantiation of that same in different particulars: 'leaf is both this leaf and that leaf as well as leafhood in general. Since leafhood is determined by the totality of particulars to which the concept applies, past and future, and since there is no possibility of measuring any particular against that ideal totality in the present, a necessary openness or indeterminacy affects the concept. To the extent that the concept of iterability takes this feature of concepts into account, it becomes a complex concept which combines (horizontal) sameness and (vertical) difference: 'it entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event, concept and singularity' (Derrida 1988: 119). Considered as ideal objects defined in terms of the deconstructive logic of iterability, Derridean aconceptual concepts are open multiplicities. They lack the determinacy associated with the traditional concept of concepts. In What Is Philosophy? (1994) Deleuze and Guattari also define concepts as open-ended and potentially variable multiplicities: Every concept 'is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity is conceptual' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 25). The 'zones of undecidability' which render concepts consistent also render them iterable in Derrida's sense of the term. Moreover, in their earlier collaborative works they invent concepts which exhibit these formal characteristics. Like Derrida's 'aconceptual concepts', the concepts put forward in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) are not restricted by the logic of exclusive disjunction which is supposed to govern concept formation in the sciences and all 'rigorous' thought. They undergo continuous variation in their migration from one plateau to another. Against the

CONCEPT AND IMAGE OF THOUGHT arborescent image which has been prevalent in the history of philosophy, they propose a rhizomatic image of thought in which concepts are never stable but in a state of constant flux as they are modified or transformed in the passage from one problem to the next. The novelty of this conception of thought does not lie in its refusal of any systematic character but rather in the nature of the system which it develops. That is why when Deleuze describes himself as a philosopher in a very classical sense who believes in philosophy as a system, he immediately qualifies this comment by pointing out that he envisages a 'system in perpetual heterogeneity' (Deleuze 1993b: 7). It is in Deleuze's earlier writings that the requirements of such a conceptual heterogenesis are worked out in explicit engagement with the philosophical tradition. From his essay on Proust (Deleuze 1972) through to What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994), Deleuze has pursued the question of the nature of thought. What is at stake in this question is the effort to describe an exercise of thought which is 'opposed to the traditional image which philosophy has projected or erected in thought in order to subjugate it and prevent it from functioning' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 16). Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994) provides the most developed analysis of the dominant image of thought and his own alternative conception. In his retrospective comments on this book, Deleuze repeatedly singles out this chapter as the most important with respect to his subsequent practice of philosophy, describing it as 'the most necessary and the most concrete', and as the one which 'serves to introduce subsequent books up to and including the research undertaken with Guattari where we invoked a vegetal model of thought: the rhizome in opposition to the tree' (Deleuze 1994: xvii; cf. 1995b: 204; 1993b: 8). In the Introduction to Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), Deleuze explains the theatrical forms of thought common to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard by reference to their shared interest in movement, not in the sense that they wrote about motion but in the sense that 'they want to put metaphysics in motion' (Deleuze 1994: 8). His own adoption of a method of dramatisation is evidence that he too shared this interest in a thought which moves. However, as he comments in an interview, it is not enough simply to say that concepts possess movement, 'you also have to construct intellectually mobile concepts' (Deleuze 1995b: 122). A Thousand Plateaus (1987) is the realisation of this goal. It does more than simply record the movement to which concepts are subject in the course of the history of philosophy. It creates concepts that are defined by their relations to the outside and hence their capacities for movement and transformation. Only in this way is it possible to map rather than trace the variability inherent in all rhizomatic assemblages. The 'anexactitude' of mobile concepts is unavoidable, Deleuze and Guattari suggest: 'anexactitude is in no way an

17

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approximation; on the contrary, it is the precise movement of that which is under way' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 20, trans, modified). The dogmatic image of thought In many respects, Deleuze's constant engagement in his earlier writings with the question of the nature of thought is a prolegomenon to the distinctive practice of philosophy developed in collaboration with Guattari. Throughout his work from Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983) and Proust and Signs (1972), through Difference and Repetition (1994) to What Is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze returns to the criticism of the 'images' of thought that have held sway in philosophy. All too often, he argues, these images have served to set limits to philosophy's own capacity for thought. By contrast, he finds in the works of philosophers such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche the outlines of a critical and untimely form of thought that breaks with these prevailing images.3 It is from the perspective of the approach to thought shared by these philosophers that he undertakes the analysis and critique of conservative and conformist images of the nature of thinking, along with the characterisation of an alternative form of thinking which would be 'opposed to the traditional image which philosophy has projected or erected in thought' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 16). By the 'image' of thought, Deleuze means more than just a representation of thought but 'something deeper that's always taken for granted, a system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think and to "orient oneself in thought"' (Deleuze 1995b: 148). The image of thought is a pre-philosophical series of presuppositions which structures both the understanding of thinking and the character of the conceptual production which ensues on that basis. It is an image of this kind which allows Descartes to suppose at the outset of his Meditations 'that everybody knows and is presumed to know what it means to think' (Deleuze 1994: 131). In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983) and Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze argues that philosophical reflection upon the nature of thought has been dominated by a series of presuppositions which together make up a single 'dogmatic' image of thought. These presuppositions recur throughout the history of philosophy in variant forms, empiricist as well as rationalist. Together they form an image of thought which is all the more effective because it remains largely implicit. The essential theses of this image of thought derive from the idea that thought is a natural capacity with an inbuilt affinity with the true. Thought naturally seeks truth, 'it loves and wills truth "by right'" (Deleuze 1983: 95; 1994: 131). On this basis, thought is supposed to be naturally sound and the process of true judgement automatic in the sense that it results from the normal operation of the faculties. Conversely, error must be the 18

CONCEPT AND IMAGE OF THOUGHT effect of forces external to thought and hostile to its normal operation: 'the inflation of the concept of error in philosophy shows the persistence of the dogmatic image of thought' (Deleuze 1983: 105). Thought has many misadventures, Deleuze points out, including the effects of madness and malevolence, yet the dogmatic image tends to reduce all these to the single form of error understood as misrecognition or failure of the will. He argues that the analysis of thought should instead take seriously the fact of stupidity: unlike truth or falsity, stupidity comes in many forms and degrees. Whereas the dogmatic image supports the view that thought needs a method, an artifice which enables the thinker to ward off error (Deleuze 1983: 103), Deleuze defends a conception of thought as an involuntary activity which is always the effect of outside forces and elements: 'something in the world forces us to think' (Deleuze 1994: 139). From this perspective, there is no place for the idea that thought must be under the control of a good will and no basis for a conception of method. In Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze argues that the dogmatic image of thought which dominates the history of philosophy takes its model from acts of recognition: 'whether one considers Plato's Theaetetus, Descartes' Meditations or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, this model remains sovereign and defines the orientation of the philosophical analysis of what it means to think' (Deleuze 1994: 134). 4 Implicit in this model is the conflation of thought with knowledge and the supposition that knowledge is ultimately a form of recognition. Recognition is defined by the harmonious exercise of the different faculties upon an object which is supposed to be the same throughout its different representations (sensory, memorial, intellectual, etc). The model of recognition therefore implies an underlying agreement among the faculties which is typically grounded in the unity of the thinking subject: 'For Kant as for Descartes, it is the identity of the Self in the "I think" which grounds the harmony of all the faculties and their agreement on the form of a supposed Same object' (Deleuze 1994: 133; cf. 1963: 135). 5 Deleuze objects that recognition offers a timid conception of thought which draws its exemplars from among the most banal acts of everyday thinking: 'this is a table, this is an apple . . . good morning Theaetetus . . . who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts . . . ?' (Deleuze 1994: 135). In opposition to this model, he argues that it is not the reassuring familiarity of the known which should provide us with the paradigm of thinking, but those hesitant gestures which accompany our encounters with the unknown. Examples that point to an alternative model of thought may be found in Plato, when he draws attention to the responses of the subject of contradictory perceptions which 'provoke thought to reconsideration', or in Heidegger, when he points to the situation of someone learning to swim.6 Apprenticeship or learning may be contrasted with recognition at every point: it is an involuntary activity 19

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which need not involve the application of a method. Apprenticeship is not the natural exercise of a faculty but something to which we are driven by necessity or puzzlement, in any case by the perception of a problem. The antithesis of thought in this case is not error but the failure adequately to perceive a problem or the inadequate specification of the dimensions of a problem which confronts us - in other words, stupidity. The dogmatic image of thought assumes that the primary task of thinking is knowledge, where this is understood in terms of solutions to particular puzzles or problems which can be expressed in propositional form. As a result, this image privileges the propositional form of thought and the relation of designation or reference as the locus of truth. By contrast, apprenticeship is an activity in which progress cannot be measured solely by reference to propositions since it requires familiarity with a given material or milieu. We acquire such familiarity when we acquire the capacity to discern and to pose problems correctly. Deleuze argues that it is from acts of apprenticeship or learning that we ought to derive the transcendental conditions of thought (Deleuze 1994: 166). His objection to the recognition model is therefore normative. He does not deny that recognition occurs or that the faculties may be employed in this manner. Rather, he wants to retain the name of thinking for a different activity which takes place when the mind is provoked by an encounter with the unknown or the unfamiliar. The process of thinking must be brought into being by forces external to the thinker: T o think is to create - there is no other creation - but to create is first of all to engender "thinking" in thought' (Deleuze 1994: 147). Deleuze's second objection to the dogmatic image is that it tells us nothing about the conditions that give rise to thought: 'We are never referred to the real forces that form thought, thought itself is never related to the real forces that it presupposes as thought' (Deleuze 1983: 103-4). By contrast, he argues for a 'genetic' conception of thought, the purpose of which is to give an account of the real conditions which give rise to thought and which determine the form it assumes. By real conditions, he means the transcendental field or field of immanence in terms of which the different forms of thought must be understood. Different philosophers propose different accounts of the nature of this field. Thus, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), Deleuze takes the will to power as the basis for a 'genetic and differential' genealogical analysis of thought, on the grounds that, for Nietzsche, it is the different varieties of will to power that give rise to thought. In these terms, thought may be either affirmative or negative in relation to life, active or reactive in its modality of realising will to power. This principle sustains Nietzsche's questioning of the will to truth in Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche 1973) and in On the ^Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche 1994) when he asks: What is the value of truth? or What it is in us which really wants truth? Understood in this manner, the 20

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'element' of thought is no longer truth and falsity but 'the noble and the base, the high and the low, depending on the nature of the forces that take hold of thought itself (Deleuze 1983: 104). By contrast, in Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze's shift from the recognition model of thought to 'a point of view of effective genesis' (Deleuze 1994: 162) proceeds by way of an account of problems as the transcendental ground of thinking. The importance attached to the invention of problems in philosophy is a recurrent theme in Deleuze's philosophy which may be traced back to his essay on Bergson (Deleuze 1956). He endorses Bergson's view that 'true freedom' and therefore the highest power of thought lies in the capacity to discover or constitute new problems, thereby rejecting the pedagogic conception of thinking as the solving of problems given to us by others or by 'society' (Deleuze 1988a: 15). Similarly, in Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze argues that thought must be understood as the exploration of problems thrown up by history, social life or the development of particular sciences, and in its highest form as the expression or actualisation of transcendental problems. Deleuze's conception of transcendental problems is modelled upon Kant's account of transcendental Ideas. In this respect, Descombes is right to suggest that in his metaphysics of difference Deleuze is above all a postKantian (Descombes 1980: 152). For Kant, the Idea of nature may be regarded as a problem in the sense that it is the undetermined object of empirical knowledge and the embodiment of the ideal of a complete conceptual determination of that object. As such, it regulates the practice of scientific inquiry. For Deleuze, Kant's account of the transcendental ground of reason provides the basis for a novel understanding of the nature and function of problems. In opposition to the traditional view, which defines problems in terms of the possibility of finding solutions, and which sees truth as essentially propositional and prior to problems, he argues that problems must be regarded as the source of all truths: 'problems are the differential elements in thought, the genetic elements in the true' (Deleuze 1994: 162)7 Problems here are understood as the specific objects of thought and, as such, accessible only to thought in its transcendental operation. These objects of pure thought can only be empirically discerned by means of their particular conceptually determined forms: in relation to ordinary empirical thought they remain unthinkable. They are paradoxical objects in the sense that they are at once that which cannot be thought and that which can only be thought. Deleuze's conception of transcendental problems as the genetic elements of thought implies a twofold genesis: a logical genesis of truths in the form of solutions to particular problems and a transcendental genesis of the act of thinking in the discovery or constitution of Ideas or problems. Both genèses are implicated in the activity which Deleuze takes as his model for thought: 'The exploration of Ideas 21

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and the elevation of each faculty to its transcendent exercise amounts to the same thing. These are two aspects of an essential apprenticeship or process of learning' (Deleuze 1994: 164). Deleuze is by no means the only philosopher to suggest that thought is essentially a problem-solving activity. In political philosophy it is hardly controversial to claim that philosophical theories of the nature and foundations of government, or the principles of a just society, arise in response to real problems. Thus, as we saw above, Rawls's concept of political liberalism (Rawls 1993) was designed to solve the problem of defining a stable and just society in which there are divergent and incompatible views of the good. However, there are not only different kinds of problems in philosophy but also different stances which philosophy can take in relation to its problems. Although the aims of political liberalism differ substantially in a number of ways from Kant's defence of reasonable faith, there is a sense in which both seek an apologetic solution to their respective problems. Rawls follows Kant in seeking a solution to his problem based upon practical rather than theoretical reason, and adds that an adequate solution will be subject to the test of 'reflective equilibrium': that is, it will be found when the principles of justice which flow from the principles of construction accord with the widely held convictions of free citizens of a stable and just society. As he describes the procedure, 'we begin from shared fundamental values implicit in the public political culture in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgement' (Rawls 1993: 100-1). To the extent that the goal of reflective equilibrium implies a form of recognition of the fundamental values presupposed at the outset, this approach to the problem remains bound to the dogmatic image of thought. By contrast, Deleuze's principal reason for claiming that the classical image of thought is a profound betrayal of what it means to think is that it sustains a complacent conception of thought which is incapable of criticising established values. Kant is his prime example of a thinker who proposed an all-encompassing critique but who in the end settled for compromise. His version of critique proved incapable of questioning the value of knowledge, faith or morality: There has never been a more conciliatory or respectful total critique' (Deleuze 1983: 89). The reason is^fhat the value of knowledge, morality and beauty is presupposed by the manner in which Kant understands the different systems of collaboration among the faculties. Deleuze points out that there are as many kinds of common sense as there are natural interests of reason (Deleuze 1963: 118; 1994: 136-7). Knowledge, morality and beauty are thus presupposed by the terms of Kantian critique. Claims to knowledge, moral judgement or aesthetic value may be called into question, but not knowledge, morality or aesthetic value themselves.

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CONCEPT AND IMAGE OF THOUGHT Deleuze contrasts Kant's critique with Nietzsche's genealogy, arguing that Nietzsche sought the radicalisation and extension of Kantian critique. Nietzsche's objection was that Kant did not pursue critique to the point at which it would become a true critique of values: 'we need a critique of moral values: the value of these values themselves must first be called into question' (Nietzsche 1994: Pref. 6). It follows that the nature of critique itself must be transformed, for if Nietzsche's critique were to be undertaken in the manner of Kant's, on the basis of some unchallenged set of fundamental values, then it would be vulnerable to the same objection. That is why Nietzsche's genealogy is an immanent critique, in which there is no external standard by which to evaluate but only the will to power as a principle of internal genesis, both of values and of thought: 'only the will to power as genetic and genealogical principle, as legislative principle, is capable of realising internal critique' (Deleuze 1983: 91). Deleuze attributes to Nietzsche an ideal of thought which could equally be considered the goal of his own philosophy, namely a 'thought that would affirm life instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life . . . Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing new possibilities of life' (Deleuze 1983: 101). The nature and task of philosophy In What Is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari set out three distinct conditions of the production of concepts. The first of these is the image of thought redescribed as the 'plane of immanence' 8 upon which the production of concepts takes place: 'The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one's bearings in thought' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 37). Distinct images of thought are defined by reference to the presuppositions which define the nature of thought in principle. Merely contingent or empirical features of thought in a given context are not relevant, since the image of thought implies 'a strict division between fact and right' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 37). Deleuze and Guattari point to a number of such images in the history of philosophy, including the Greek, the classical, the eighteenth-century and the 'modern' image shared by Nietzsche, Heidegger and others (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 54-5). Deleuze's own conception of thought shares several features of this 'modern' image. His earlier approaches to this problem occasionally invoke the language of Heidegger's question concerning the nature of thinking. Thus, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), he interprets Heidegger's declaration that we are not yet thinking as a variant of the Nietzschean claim that we have yet to make thought absolutely active and affirmative: in so far as our thinking is controlled by reactive forces, Deleuze argues, 'we must admit that we are not

23

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yet thinking' (Deleuze 1983: 108). In Difference and Repetition (1994), he refers in passing to Heidegger's 'profound texts' which argue that thinking remains only an abstract human possibility. Ultimately, however, Deleuze does not believe that Heidegger manages to break with the presuppositions of the dominant image of thought or to provide an adequate conception of the highest form of the human capacity for thought (Deleuze 1994: 144 andfn. 11). The second condition of philosophical concept-creation involves recourse to particular characters or conceptual personae who speak in and through the utterances of a given philosophy: 'conceptual personae are . . . the true agents of enunciation' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 65). Like Nietzsche, who employs a whole cast of personae in order to work through the consequences of the death of God, Deleuze invokes a variety of conceptual personae throughout his works. These include, in Difference and Repetition, the apprentice who learns how to deal with problems (Deleuze 1994: 164-6), and in A Thousand Plateaus, the nomad thinker who is aligned with a singular race or tribe rather than a universal thinking subject. Nietzsche's account of Kierkegaard as a 'private thinker' rather than a philosopher in the service of the State, as well as Nietzsche himself, provides the model for this persona (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 376-9). In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari appear in the role of friends of the concept, where 'friend' itself is a complex concept which draws upon Nietzsche and Blanchot as well as the Greek conception of friendship (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 1-12). Third, thought understood as the creation of concepts requires as its means and raw materials a supply of existing concepts. The definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts is a stipulative definition in which the term 'concept' is used to distinguish the object and materials ô& philosophy from those of science and art: 'only philosophy creates concept^in the strict sense' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 5). By contrast, science aims at the representation of states of affairs by means of mathematical or propositional functions. Art does not aim at representation at all but at the capture and expression in a given medium of the objective content of particular sensations. Philosophy's exclusive right to concept-creation means that it has a distinct object and vocation, but no 'pre-eminence or privilege' with regard to these other activities (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 8). It shares certain characteristics with science and art, but also differs from each of these neighbouring forms of thought. Whereas scientific functions provide knowledge of states of affairs and processes which are external to them, philosophy creates concepts which are like artworks in that they do not refer to or represent independently existing objects or states of affairs. Concepts are defined not by their relations to things or states of affairs but by the relations between their elements as well as by their relations to other concepts. In this sense, they argue, the concept 'has no reference: it 24

CONCEPT AND IMAGE OF THOUGHT is self-referential, it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 22). Deleuze and Guattari argue for a twofold semantic difference between scientific functions and philosophical statements, encompassing not only the nature of their respective objects but also their relation to those objects: scientific functions refer to bodies and states of affairs while philosophical statements express pure events. This implies that philosophy does not provide discursive knowledge of the kind provided by the sciences. In particular, it does not provide proof of its claims in a manner that may be disputed from the standpoint of the facts or even from that of another concept. A philosophical concept cannot be disproved, it can only be displaced or discarded. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that philosophy does not provide empirical knowledge nor is it 'inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable or Important that determine success or failure' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 82). Philosophy, as they understand it, is a form of practical reason and, as such, not subject to the norm of truth. Deleuze's criticisms of the dogmatic image had already condemned as an illusion the idea that the genetic element of thought is truth and falsity. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), as we saw above, he took as the basis for a genetic and differential analysis of thought Nietzsche's account of the different qualities of the will to power and the types of forces which correspond to them. This account breaks the connection between thought and truth assumed by the dogmatic image. It points to the forces that determine thought to take a particular form and to pursue particular objects. Having argued that for Nietzsche the sense and value of things are determined by the qualities of the will to power expressed within them, Deleuze writes: 'We always have the truths we deserve as a function of the sense of what we conceive, of the value of what we believe' (Deleuze 1983: 104). The point is not to deny the possibility of truth, but rather to suggest that truth is no more than an 'abstract universal', the precise character of which remains 'entirely undetermined' (Deleuze 1983: 103). There are base truths which are of no interest to a critical thought, while conversely there may be falsehoods which serve the 'higher' purpose of the critique of established values and the creation of new values. Deleuze always aligned his conception of philosophy with that of Nietzsche on two points: opposition to those whose ultimate aim is the recognition of what exists, and preference for an untimely thought which seeks to invent new possibilities for life. Foucault invokes a similar conception when he suggests that philosophy consists in 'the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself, and asks rhetorically: 'In what does it consist, if not the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?' (Foucault 1985: 9). In effect, in describing philosophical concepts as non-referential 25

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and not subject to the norm of truth and falsity, Deleuze and Guattari say no more and no less than Foucault does in claiming that political philosophy (his own included) produces fictions.9 Their account of philosophical concepts as autopoetic, self-positing entities gives a precise sense in which such concepts are fictions. Moreover, it spells out a sense in which philosophical fictions can nevertheless produce real effects and, as Foucault says, help to 'fiction' or bring into being something that does not exist. At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari's own collaborative work is a sustained exercise in concept-creation, culminating in their concept of philosophy as the creation of concepts. In their own terms, the concepts they create cannot be supposed to represent external processes or states of affairs. Yet much of this work appears descriptive and intended to fulfil a cognitive function. As we shall see in Chapter 5, they offer an account of capitalism and trace the evolution of its forms of economic, social and political regulation as an immanent axiomatic system. Deleuze's 'Postscript on control societies' (1995b: 177-82) seeks to supplement Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power by defining new mechanisms of control which, it is suggested, have largely displaced the techniques of power described by Foucault. Commentators such as Negri see in such overtly empirical claims 'a perfectly operational phenomenology of the present' (Negri 1995: 108). 10 However, on Deleuze and Guattari's account, their work is philosophy rather than neo-Marxist social science. How then does philosophy, as they understand it, fulfil a cognitive function? In What Is Philosophy? (1994), the task of philosophy is to create concepts that provide knowledge of pure events: the concept is knowledge, they argue, but 'what it knows is the pure event' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 33). One way to approach the question of what is meant here by 'pure event', and what is the nature of this knowledge, is via Deleuze's earlier account of the task of philosophy in Difference and Repetition (1994). Here Deleuze outlines an alternative to the dogmatic image in terms of which it is transcendental Ideas or problems which are the genetic elements of thought. The task of philosophy then is to specify the elements and relations which make up these Ideas or problems. Pure events share several features of these transcendental problems. Deleuze defines problems as the differential and virtual multiplicities which are the transcendental conditions of both thought and reality. At one point he suggests that 'problems are of the order of events' (Deleuze 1994: 188). n Just as problems are not reducible to the particular solutions in which they become incarnated, so pure events subsist independently of their actualisations in bodies and states of affairs. An example which Deleuze frequently uses to illustrate this difference is Blanchot's distinction between death as a realisable event towards which T may have a personal relation, and death as an impersonal and inaccessible event towards which T can have no relation (Deleuze 1990: 151-2; 1994: 112). 26

CONCEPT AND IMAGE OF THOUGHT In these terms, the concept of the social contract may be considered to express the pure event of incorporation of a legal and political system. As such, the contract is a pure event irreducible to its particular incarnations as the putative origin of morality or civil society. It is as though actual events were doubled by a series of ideal or virtual events which are both immanent and transcendent in relation to them. Deleuze cites Péguy's 'wonderful description' of events in which he deploys 'two lines, one horizontal and another vertical which repeated in depth the distinctive points corresponding to the first, and even anticipated and eternally engendered these distinctive points and their incarnation in the first'.12 Deleuze and Guattari suggest that all historical events are similarly doubled or divided between two planes: 'what History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing concept, escapes History' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110). Pure events are therefore incorporeal abstractions, irreducible to their actualisations in different societies at different times but also immanent in those real events. In this sense, they represent a 'pure reserve' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 156) of being and the guarantee of an open future. Kant makes a similar point when he distinguishes between the concept of a revolution in favour of universal rights of man as this was expressed in the 'enthusiasm' of Europeans for those ideals and the manner in which that concept and those ideals were acrualised in the bloody events of 1789. 13 In Chapter 6 we shall consider the event of colonisation and the different constitutional forms this can assume. When they suggest that the pure events expressed in concepts are identical with the 'pure sense' that runs through their components (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 144), Deleuze and Guattari hint at the continuity between this account of the task of philosophy and Deleuze's theory of sense or meaning in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990). In the course of outlining a theory of sense as that which is expressed in propositions, Deleuze drew upon the Stoic concept of the 'sayable' in order to distinguish the sense or event expressed in a proposition from the mixtures of bodies to which this sense or event is attributed. The Stoics, he argues, were the first to create a philosophical concept of the event, discovering this along with sense or the expressed of the proposition: 'an incorporeal, complex and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition' (Deleuze 1990: 19). Deleuze and Guattari re-utilise this Stoic concept of events in their 'Postulates of linguistics' when they characterise the pragmatic function of language in terms of the effectuation of events or 'incorporeal transformations' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 80-8). Following the Stoics, they argue that all events are incorporeal transformations which are expressed in language but attributed to bodies and states of affairs. In so far as language serves to express such 27

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incorporeal transformations, it does not simply represent the world but intervenes in it. It follows from the account of incorporeals as the 'expressed' of statements, that the individuation of what occurs as an event of a particular kind is dependent upon language. Event attributions do not simply describe or report pre-existing events, they help to actualise particular events in the social field. The manner in which a given occurrence is described determines it as a particular kind of event. That is why politics frequently takes the form of struggle over the appropriate description of events. The Deleuzian conception of events points to the role of language and other forms of representation in the actualisation or effectuation of everyday events. It also points to a critical role for philosophy in relation to the common-sense understanding of events. Deleuze and Guattari see the invention of concepts as a means of breaking with self-evidence. They contrast the effectuation or actualisation of a given pure event in particular circumstances with the 'counter-effectuation' which occurs when a concept is extracted from things: 'the event is actualised or effectuated whenever it is inserted, willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but it is counter-effectuated whenever it is abstracted from states of affairs so as to isolate its concept' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 159). In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze calls this doubling of the actualised event with a counter-effectuation a process of 'miming' what effectively occurs: 'to the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its actualisation, counter-actualisation liberates it, always for other times' (Deleuze 1990: 161). In What Is Philosophy?, philosophy appears in the persona of the mime who isolates the event by constructing concepts: 'Philosophy's sole aim is to become worthy of the event, and it is precisely the conceptual persona who counter-effectuates the event' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 160). In these terms, the concept of a social contract can be regarded as an expression of the pure and indeterminate event of a political system based upon equality before the law. To counter-effectuate everyday events is to consider these events as processes whose outcome is not yet determined. It is to relate them back to the pure event or problem of which they appear only as one particular determination or solution. In counter-effectuating the event, we attain and express the sense of what happens, thereby dissociating the pure event from the particular determinate form in which it has been actualised and pointing to the possibility of other determinate actualisations. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, 'the concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 32-3). 1 4

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2 DIFFERENCE AND MULTIPLICITY

Philosophy of difference Deleuze has long been described, along with Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Lyotard and others, as a philosopher of difference. The work of these French philosophers is often assimilated to the 'politics of difference' which characterises a number of 'minority' social groups and interests: feminists, racial minorities, gay and lesbian movements have all demanded the recognition of differences that were previously assimilated, denied or simply unknown. In some cases, elements of the philosophy of difference J^ave even contributed to the formulation and theoretical expression of such a politics of difference.1 Our ultimate concern in this chapter is the relationship between the 'politics of difference' and Deleuze's approach to the concept of difference. We shall return to the relations between philosophy and politics of difference at the end of the chapter, but we must first ask in what sense may Deleuze be described as a philosopher of difference? The answer to this question may be found in the concern throughout his work with the nature of multiplicity. Deleuze never claimed to abandon or overthrow the concepts of identity, sameness, the One, etc. Rather, he was concerned with the question of how identity is constituted and what forms it takes. The real question is not whether or not there is unity but what form this takes: 'what is the form of unification?' (Mengue 1994: 11-12). In particular, the problem to which he returns over and over again is the problem of how to conceive of a form of identity or unity which is not identical to itself. In this context he insists on the importance of the concept of multiplicity, on condition that this is understood as a substantive and independently of any relation to identity: It was created precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the organic 29

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element of a Unity or Totality yet to come, and instead distinguish between different types of multiplicity. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 32) Deleuze's distinctive contribution to the philosophy of difference lies in his elaboration of a philosophical theory of multiplicities. This concept provides a key to the structure of the concepts invented with Guattari, and thereby to the ethico-political implications of their collaborative work. In the chapter of his Modern French Philosophy (1980) entitled 'Difference', Vincent Descombes argues that, with the work of Deleuze and Derrida, 'We come finally to that remarkable point of modern metaphysics which all preceding discourse had indicated like a flickering compass.' This point was the attempt to elaborate 'a non-contradictory, non-dialectical consideration of difference, which would not envisage it as the simple contrary of identity, nor be obliged to see itself as "dialectically" identical with identity' (Descombes 1980: 136). 2 As Descombes' remark suggests, the revaluation of difference by many French philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s was bound up with a reaction against the prevailing Hegelianism of the preceding decades. Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983) was both a significant contribution and a stimulus to this reaction.3 It offered an interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosopher of difference in terms that subsequently became the hallmark of much poststructuralist theory. For Deleuze, Nietzsche's metaphysics of the will to power is the basis of a profoundly anti-Hegelian ontology and an ethics, at the heart of which lies difference: 'For the speculative element of negation, opposition, or contradiction, Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference, the object of affirmation and enjoyment' (Deleuze 1983: 9). In this account, Nietzsche's theory that in all events a will to power is operating is based upon a concept of force, where forces are defined by their differences from other forces, both in quantity and in quality: 'We must remember that every force has an essential relation to other forces, that the essence of force is its quantitative difference from other forces and that this difference is expressed as the force's quality' (Deleuze 1983: 50). Deleuze defines the will to power as the genetic and differential element which produces the difference in quantity and subsequent difference in quality between forces. He draws on Nietzsche's description of the modes of evaluation characteristic of masters and slaves in order to distinguish between active and reactive forces, and to align the denial of difference with reactive force and the affirmation of difference with active force: 'only active force asserts itself, it affirms its difference and makes its difference an object of affirmation' (Deleuze 1983: 55-6). Nietzsche's characterisation of master and slave morality already dramatises this order of priority: the master affirms himself and his difference from the slave, while the slave negates the values of the other, and affirms himself 30

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only by negating those negated values in turn. This is the strange syllogism of the slave: he needs two negations in order to produce the appearance of affirmation' (Deleuze 1983: 121). We will see in Chapter 3 how the distinction between active and reative force points to an ethical hierarchy among the kinds of interaction possible between bodies of different powers and capacities and how, according to Deleuze, this hierarchy is expressed in Nietzsche's concept of eternal return. Deleuze interprets eternal return as a selective conception of being which functions both as an ethical and a physical doctrine. As an ethical doctrine it favours those forms of interaction associated with productive, affirmative modes of interaction at the expense of restrictive, negative modes. In contrast to a Hegelian world oriented towards the reunification of absolute spirit or species being which has become divided or alienated from itself, the outcome is a world in which reactive forces do not return but only the active, excessive and life-enhancing modes of being. This is a world in which 'multiplicity, becoming and chance are adequate objects of joy by themselves and . . . only joy returns' (Deleuze 1983: 190). As a physical principle too, eternal return implies the primacy of difference over identity: Deleuze points out that, for Nietzsche, natural science seeks to deny difference in favour of logical identity, mathematical equality and thermodynamic equilibrium. To the extent that it denies difference in these ways, Nietzsche considers science to be bound up with the more general enterprise of denying life and depreciating existence that constitutes the nihilism of modern thought (Deleuze 1983: 45). By contrast, eternal return allows us to understand the world not as being or the permanence of the same but as becoming or the repetition of the different. We misinterpret Nietzsche's concept of eternal return, Deleuze argues, if we take it to mean the return of the same: It is not being that returns but rather returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns, but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. (Deleuze 1983: 48) In Difference and Repetition (1994) Deleuze sought to elaborate a concept of difference which involves no necessary connection with the negative or with negation. He rejects the link which Hegel forged between difference and contradiction, arguing that contradiction is not the condition or ground of difference but the contrary: 'It is not difference which presupposes opposition but opposition which presupposes difference, and far 31

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from resolving difference by tracing it back to a foundation, opposition betrays and distorts it' (Deleuze 1994: 51). Limitation or opposition is a distortion of difference, according to Deleuze, because difference in itself implies 'a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences' (Deleuze 1994: 50). However, the notion of a primary field of differences is only the point of departure for Deleuze's concept of difference. He suggests that further conceptual articulation is required in order to speak of oppositions or limitations, and that these presuppose a more complex play of divergence and disparity as well as overlap and communication between the multiple formations of difference. In particular, 'a more profound real element must be defined . . . one which is determined as an abstract and potential multiplicity' (Deleuze 1994: 50). The importance of this figure of abstract multiplicity for Deleuze's concept of difference will be examined below. For Deleuze, as for other philosophers of difference such as Derrida, Hegel was a focus of criticism because he represented the culmination of a metaphysical tradition which treated identity as primary and difference as the derivative or secondary term. A philosophy that seeks to make difference an object of affirmation, and to produce a concept of difference in itself, must therefore overturn the traditional hierarchy between identity and difference. But the mere inversion of hierarchy does not change the fundamental relation between the elements involved, nor does it change the nature of those elements: 'A slave does not cease to be a slave by taking power' (Deleuze 1994: 54). For this reason, deconstruction always envisaged a further stage after the initial hierarchy has been overturned. This would involve 'the irruptive emergence of a new "concept", a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime' (Derrida 1981: 42 ). In this manner, the philosophical concept of différance enabled Derrida to evoke the movement of deferral and differentiation which underlies all production of meaning (Derrida 1976: 56-65). For Deleuze, the concept of simulacra played a similar role in relation to the structure of representation first laid down by Plato. It served to evoke the movement within Platonism by which the primacy of identity and the idea of a model are overthrown. Overturning Platonism To the extent that he outlines a conception of a world whose basic structure is that of a system of representation, Plato is both a source and a privileged example of the subordination of difference to identity and resemblance. In the Platonic world, only the Forms are ultimately and absolutely real, while the earthly manifestations of qualities or material objects are mere copies or imitations of the Forms. Difference is here a derivative term, coming in third place behind the exemplary identity of the Forms 32

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and the resemblance of copies: 'Difference is only understood in terms of the comparative play of two similitudes: the exemplary similitude of an identical original and the imitative similitude of a more or less alike copy' (Deleuze 1994: 127). Yet, Deleuze argues, even within Plato's dialogues, the ordered and hierarchical world of representation is constantly threatened by another kind of figure whose essence lies not in resemblance to the real nature of things but in its capacity to simulate such natures. Figures of this kind appear in a variety of guises throughout the dialogues. They include the Sophist, who is described as 'a sort of wizard, an imitator of real things' (Sophist, 235a); writing, which is 'a kind of image' of living discourse that does not produce true wisdom but only its semblance (Phaedrus, 275b, 276a); and the 'imitative poets' in Book X of The Republic, who do not produce imitations of the true nature of things, but only imitations of their appearances. However, the paradigm of such figures is the mere 'semblances' or simulacra which Plato distinguishes in the Sophist from true \likenesses' of things. In the case of such likenesses, the difference between original and copy is a difference within resemblance, a difference between things that are, in the essential respects, the same. By contrast, the simulacrum is not in essential respects the same as what it simulates: it reproduces the appearance of the original, but only as an effect. This effect is produced on the basis of internal differences between the simulacrum and the object it resembles. The simulacrum 'is built upon a disparity or upon a difference. It internalises a dissimilarity' (Deleuze 1990: 258). With simulacra, in other words, the priority of identity and sameness over difference that characterises the world of representation is reversed: it is difference which is primary, while the appearance of identity or resemblance is a secondary and derived relation. Deleuze argues that the crucial task of Platonism is to establish the distinction between copies and simulacra: 'Platonism as a whole is erected on the basis of this wish to hunt down the phantasms or simulacra which are identified with the Sophist himself, that devil, that insinuator or simulator, that always disguised and displaced false pretender' (Deleuze 1994: 127). 4 The underlying motivation is to establish the priority of the well-founded copy and to exclude the 'false claimant' or simulacrum. It is in the hostility towards these figures, Deleuze argues, that we perceive the moral choice embedded in Platonism. This is a preference for a stable and hierarchical world where neither persons nor things appear as other than they are. Platonism represents a preference for the calm, ordered life of the soul governed by reason to the disorderly and passionate life of the soul moved by poetry. 'What appears then, in its purest state, before the logic of representation could be deployed, is a moral vision of the world. It is in the first instance for these moral reasons that simulacra must be exorcised and difference thereby subordinated to the same and the similar' (Deleuze 1994: 127). However, the victory is by no means assured. 33

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Deleuze's deconstructive reading of Platonism argues that it offers both the elements of a representational conception of the world, albeit in the meagre resources of the theory of Forms, and the means to overturn that conception. To the extent that simulacra are defined in terms of their power successfully to imitate the appearances of things, their existence threatens to undermine the very possibility of distinguishing between real things and mere illusions. Deleuze suggests that this is what occurs at the end of the Sophist, where the Eleatic Stranger offers a definition of the Sophist such that he can no longer be distinguished from Socrates himself: 'Socrates distinguishes himself from the sophist, but the sophist does not distinguish himself from Socrates and places the legitimacy of such a distinction in question' (Deleuze 1994: 128). Simulacra therefore provide the means to overturn Platonism, where 'overturning' means 'denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image; glorifying the reign of simulacra and reflections' (Deleuze 1994: 66). Deleuze's analysis of the overturning of Platonism prefigures his own account of a world in which the play of difference rather than the relations of identity and resemblance expresses the ultimate nature of things. To assert the primacy of simulacra is to affirm a world in which difference rather than sameness is the primary relation. In such a world, there are no ultimate foundations or original identities: everything becomes simulation where this refers not to copying, nor even to copying copies, but to 'the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned' (Deleuze 1994: 69). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze seeks a concept of pure difference or difference 'in itself that would not be subject to the structure of representation first laid down in Platonism. The production of a concept of difference 'in itself goes hand in hand with the elaboration of an ontology in which disparity or difference is the fundamental principle and the identity of objects is understood as something produced from the differences of which they are composed. In effect, the logic and ontology of pure difference are two sides of one and the same project. Deleuze argues for a categorical reversal according to which being is said of becoming, identity of that which is different, the one of the multiple, etc. That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become-, that it revolve around the Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept. (Deleuze 1994:40-1) The characterisation of a such a world in which difference rather than identity is primary necessarily affects other related concepts. Thus, in accordance with the interpretation of Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal 34

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return put forward in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), Deleuze argues that repetition must not be taken to mean the return of the same but rather the production of sameness through the returning of that which differs. He treats the doctrine of eternal return as Nietzsche's formulation of a principle of the univocity of being which presupposes the ontological primacy of difference: 'Returning is being but only the being of becoming' (Deleuze 1994: 41). From the outset, this project is aligned with the conception of a world of simulacra in which identities are only produced as effects by 'the more profound game of difference and repetition' (Deleuze 1994: ix). Ultimately, however, the importance of the conceptVpf simulacra is limited to the predominantly negative phase of Deleuze's project, namely the deconstruction of the world of representation. In a letter published in 1993, Deleuze commented that he had 'completely abandoned the notion of simulacra, which was not worth very much' (Deleuze 1993b: 8). His choice of words suggests that he did not regard 'simulacra' as a well-formed philosophical concept, despite the fact that it was widely taken up and employed to considerable effect, not only in philosophy but in the analysis of social media and contemporary visual art. 5 In Deleuze's own work, the sphere of influence of this concept is largely confined to his analysis of Platonism. As we shall see in the remainder of this chapter, the positive task of producing a new concept of difference relies upon other concepts, the most important of which for his later work with Guattari are the concepts of multiplicity and virtuality. Both of these components of Deleuze's concept of difference are introduced in his 1966 account of Bergsonism. Virtual multiplicity and the concept of difference According to Deleuze, Bergson practised a method of analysis that shares some features with Kantian transcendental analysis. Whereas Kant sought to discover the conditions of all possible experience, Bergson sought virtual conditions of real experience (Deleuze 1988a: 27). However, in both cases the aim is to decompose the given into its underlying conditions. For Bergson, time understood as duration is the ultimate element in which these differences occur, and the method of analysis thus progresses from the superficial, extensive nature of things to their underlying temporal nature. Deleuze argues that Bergson's ontological distinction between duration and extensity corresponds to a distinction between kinds of multiplicity. The extensive or objective reality of things takes the form of 'numerical multiplicity', where this is understood as the kind of multiplicity which divides by differences in degree and where the process of division does not involve changes in kind. Arithmetical number is an example of this kind of multiplicity: numbers are infinitely divisible but the outcome is always further numbers of the same kind. Space is another example. 35

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By contrast, the other type of multiplicity 'appears in pure duration: It is an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers' (Deleuze 1988a: 38). These qualitative or non-numerical multiplicities change in kind as they divide. Bergson draws examples of such multiplicities from the domain of consciousness. Here, a complex multiplicity such as a feeling may contain a number of elements imperfectly perceived, but once these elements are distinctly perceived by consciousness, the feeling inevitably changes its nature as a result. Deleuze points to examples from other domains such as intensities of sound or temperature, or the movements of horses which can be divided into several qualitatively distinct gaits: walk, trot, lope, canter, etc. In all these cases, what is divided 'changes in nature at each moment of the division, without any one of these moments entering into the composition of any other' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 483). The problem of distinguishing between types of multiplicity originated with Reimann and is taken up in different ways by Husserl, Meinong and Russell. Bergson transformed the problem to his own ends in arguing that qualitative multiplicity is characteristic of duration.6 As we shall see below, Deleuze transforms it further by using the Bergsonian distinction between two kinds of multiplicity as part of the logical framework for the theory of assemblages in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). The characterisation of qualitative multiplicities as virtual provides another dimension of that theory. In Bergson's ontology, duration as qualitative multiplicity is linked to the concept of virtuality. According to Deleuze, Bergson bases his philosophy of memory and life on the concept of the virtual, treating duration, pure memory and life or élan vital equally as virtual realities, where the concept of the virtual implies a process of actualisation or 'différenciation'. Deleuze argues that 'the characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is actualised by being differenciated and is forced to differenciate itself, to create its lines of différenciation in order to be actualised' (Deleuze 1988a: 97). Virtuality is distinguished from the concept of possibility externally by its relations to other concepts: possibility is contrasted with reality whereas virtuality is contrasted with actuality. Deleuze employs a formula from Proust to describe the virtual as 'real without being actual, ideal without being abstract' (Deleuze 1988a: 96). Virtuality is also distinguished from the concept of possibility internally by virtue of its content: that which is possible typically resembles or prefigures the real, while the real is typically considered a subset of that which is possible. The virtual, by contrast, does not have to resemble the actual and 'the rules of actualisation are not those of resemblance and limitation' (Deleuze 1988a: 97). The virtual is actualised by a process of différenciation in which difference is primary in two senses: there are differences between the virtual point of departure and the actual outcome, and there are differences between the 36

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various lines along which actualisation can take place, so that, for example, life may be actualised as plant or animal, etc. One of Deleuze's last published texts begins with the claim that 'Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities' (Deleuze 1996: 179). 7 This is an appropriate description of his own philosophy of difference. His studies in the history of philosophy involve recurrent efforts t(\elucidate a vision of a world in which all things are the expression of yirtual multiplicities. His descriptions of a Platonic world of simulacra, Nietzsche's will to power and Bergson's realm of qualitative multiplicities of duration are all examples of this metaphysics of virtual multiplicities. Even in What Is Philosophy? (1994), the pure events to which philosophical concepts give expression are understood as virtual multiplicities which may be incarnated in an indeterminate number of actual states of affairs. However, the clearest exposition of this differential metaphysics is to be found in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), where Chapter 4 outlines the theory of a transcendental field, the constituent elements of which are qualitative or pure multiplicities. These are the 'more profound' real elements which, Deleuze had argued in Chapter 1 of that book, must be determined as abstract and potential multiplicities in order to enable an account of a world of free differences (Deleuze 1994: 50). These positive and differential elements are unique to Deleuze's metaphysics of difference. They provide the key to his conception of difference 'in itself and to his dynamic conception of difference as the 'ground' of being. In Chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition (1994), virtual multiplicities are specified as Ideas, Problems or Structures. They are structures in the sense that these were understood by the structuralist theories of the period. That is, they are composed of purely formal elements defined by the reciprocal relations between their component elements. In the case of language, the ultimate signifying units or phonemes are defined by their reciprocal relations to other phonemes. It is the structure of these relations, prior to their actualisation in a given series of sounds or inscriptions, which defines a given language. In the case of social structures, Deleuze follows the structural Marxism of Althusser and his collaborators in taking the economic structure of society to be a system of 'differential relations between differential elements' (Deleuze 1994: 186). These include relations of property and relations of production established between unspecified 'supports' of ownership and labour power. Defined in this manner, intrinsically rather than by external relations, such structures constitute 'an internal multiplicity - in other words, a system of multiple, nonlocalisable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms' (Deleuze 1994: 183). Deleuze proposes that the relations of reciprocal determination between the elements of a given structure be understood on the model of the differential relationship dy/dx, where the progressive determination of this relationship is supposed 37

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to generate a particular primitive function. Just as the determination of a given differential relation partially specifies the behaviour of a curve at adjoining points, so the specification of a given series of singularities or singular points determines the curve corresponding to the relation between the elements in question. For this reason, Deleuze comments in 'How do we recognize structuralism?', that there are two aspects to any given structure: 'a system of differential relations according to which the symbolic elements determine themselves reciprocally, and a system of singularities corresponding to those relations and tracing the space of the structure' (Deleuze 1998a: 265). 8 As we noted above, Deleuze's structures are virtual in that they are not actual, not in the sense that they lack reality: The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual' (Deleuze 1994: 208). The differential elements and relations, along with the singularities that correspond to them, form the real content of a given structure. They define a completely positive multiplicity which, Deleuze argues, should not be subsumed under the categories of opposition or negation since these play no part either in the constitution of structures or in their actualisation: The process of difference and of différenciation is primary in relation to that of the negative and opposition' (Deleuze 1994: 207). Différenciation is the process by which Ideas become actualised in spatio-temporal events and states of affairs. The agents of différenciation are 'spatio-temporal dynamisms' which are internal to given fields of ideational or material intensity. The embryological example of the egg provides an example of this process of actualisation and of the sense in which the order of morphogenetic processes implies a prior ideal structure of relations embedded in the genetic structure (Deleuze 1994: 214). This account of the relation between virtual structures and spatiotemporal events and states of affairs is the means by which Deleuze circumvents the philosophy of representation: bodies and states of affairs do not resemble the structures or ideal events of which they are the expression. In this sense, he argues, 'actualisation or différenciation is always a genuine creation' (Deleuze 1994: 212). Deleuze's concept of difference therefore has two parts: on the one hand the determination of the virtual content of a multiplicity, which he calls differentiation, and on the other the actualisation of the multiplicity in particular species and component parts, which he calls différenciation: Whereas differentiation determines the virtual content of the Idea as problem, différenciation expresses the actualisation of this virtual and the constitution of solutions . . . Différenciation is like the second part of difference, and in order to designate the integrity or the integrality of the object we require the complex notion of different/ciation. (Deleuze 1994: 209) 9 38

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There is therefore an important sense in which he maintains the primacy of difference over identity. Difference is the fundamental term on the basis of which the identity of all phenomena must be understood. As su^h, difference never refers back to a primary identity but only to further differences. Ultimately, however, difference is a process before it is a category: 'Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing' (Deleuze 1994: 56). Deleuze describes this process of difference differing by reference to the forms of communication which take place between different physical, linguistic, psychic or other differential structures. Such communication between different systems implies the presence of an agent which he calls the 'disparate' or the 'dark precursor'. The differences of electrical potential which cause a signal or flash of lightning to discharge provide one example, but in reality the identity of such 'agents' of communication between heterogeneous systems will vary from case to case, since it will be defined by the particular difference between the systems involved. This difference will be expressed in its effects. In this sense, like the relationship of reciprocal determination between the elements of a structure, the dark precursor may be described as a second-order difference or 'differing difference' (Deleuze 1994: 119-20). In apparent contrast to the account we have given of the metaphysics outlined in Difference and Repetition, Todd May argues that Deleuze is 'not a thinker of difference at all, if by that is meant that he is a thinker who should be read as considering difference to be privileged over unity' (May 1997: 166). May does not claim that Deleuze does not privilege a concept of difference at the expense of unity, in both the ethical and metaphysical senses indicated above. On the contrary, he points out that Deleuze develops a concept of difference intended to serve a 'positive and disruptive function', namely that of resisting the privilege attached to forms of unity and totality within philosophy. The function of the concept of difference, he suggests, 'is at once to attack the unifying forces that have abounded in philosophical discourse and to substitute for such forces a new perspective' (May 1997: 176). However, he argues that Deleuze cannot do this by simply positing a world of pure difference in which unities are explained only as secondary phenomena. To do so would create a number of inconsistencies within Deleuze's philosophy. First, he points out that an attempt to describe a world of difference 'in itself would involve claims about the nature of Being which might readily be construed as claims about a realm which is transcendent to human experience. As a result, 'Being as difference threatens to go transcendent, to become a thing apart from our experience that structures it from the outside' (May 1997: 184). Such a relapse into transcendence is inadmissible for Deleuze, since an essential aim of his philosophy is to refuse 39

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transcendence in all its forms. May reminds us that in What Is Philosophy? (1994) transcendence is identified as foremost among the illusions that inevitably arise from the plane of immanence on which a given philosophy is laid out (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 49). Second, he argues that Deleuze's various characterisations of this world of difference 'in itself, whether in terms of Bergsonian duration or pre-individual singularities, invoke a concept of the unity of the field or plane of immanence upon which these entities are described: a unity of time in the case of duration, a unity of the domain of pre-individual differences subtending all identities, and so on. If this is so, then it cannot be true that difference is prior to unity. May is right to point out that Deleuze's philosophy of difference cannot be understood simply in terms of the dialectical interrelations of the concepts of unity and difference. But his argument for incoherence in the Deleuzian concept of difference does not withstand closer examination. Deleuze provides many indications that his account of difference in itself should not be construed as invoking a transcendent realm. Rather, he proposes a concept of differential conditions which must be understood as transcendental but entirely immanent to real experience. As May himself points out (May 1997: 186), for Deleuze as for Kant, transcendental conditions of experience are not the same as transcendent conditions. Whereas Kant proposes transcendental conditions of possible experience, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism refers to genetic conditions of real experience. His suggestion that the transcendental field is open to quasi empirical investigation points to an appropriate response to May's second objection. In positing time as a condition of experience, Kant does not suppose the unity of time. He does suppose the continuity and uniformity of time, but since he also argues that time is neither finite nor infinite, this uniformity does not imply unity. Similarly, Deleuze posits a uniform transcendental field, whether of duration, difference, will to power or intensities, without supposing the unity of that field. Freedom and the problem of society We saw in Chapter 1 how Deleuze describes thought as problematic in the sense that its highest capacity lies in the constitution of new problems. Like Kant's transcendental Ideas, the problems that define thought are never completely actualised in any given solution. Deleuze's Ideas or virtual multiplicities are treated as problems of this order. They are defined by elements which 'have neither sensible form nor conceptual signification' (Deleuze 1994: 183) and they may be incarnated in material as well as theoretical or conceptual solutions: an organism 'is nothing if not the solution to a problem, as are each of its differenciated organs, such as the eye' (Deleuze 1994: 211). In terms of Deleuze's differential ontology, everything 40

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that exists incarnates a problem of some kind, and there will be as many kinds of problem as there are distinct species of matter and thought, including physical, biological and psychic problems. Languages and societies are solutions to particular species of problem. Language in general may be regarded as a solution to the problem of how to communicate an infinite variety of semantic contents using a relatively small number of signifying elements. The Idea of language as such, or the transcendental Problem of language, will therefore be a virtual structure which includes all of the sets of relations between signifying elements which may be actualised in particular languages. Determinate sets of relations between phonemes will be incarnated in the particular languages which are solutions to the problem of language as such. Similarly, human societies may be regarded as solutions to the fundamental problem of the survival and reproduction of the species in the form in which this arises for human beings, namely the constitution of a mode of production of necessary means of subsistence. Marx showed that social relations are, in the final instance, a means of solving this problem. The Idea or transcendental Problem of society as such will therefore be a virtual set of indeterminate relations between means of production, direct and indirect producers, and consumers, while particular Ideas of society will involve an actual set of determinate social relations. These relations, in turn, will determine the 'synthetic and problematising field' (Deleuze 1994: 186) to which that society's economic, juridical and political arrangements constitute solutions. The crucial events which mark the history of a society will represent the emergence of actual solutions to its economic or other problems, or the replacement of one set of solutions by another. Political theory is not a primary concern of Difference and Repetition (1994). Nevertheless, some political themes emerge in the exposition of the metaphysics of difference. In many cases, these are consistent with aspects of Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche while at the same time prefiguring aspects of the overtly political theory in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). One such theme emerges in connection with the conception of particular forms of society as solutions to the problem of society as such. Deleuze's conception of society implies that, while the specific political problems that confront a given society are the expression or incarnation of the ideal relations which define a given Idea of society, these do not yet express the transcendental Idea of sociability or social organisation as such. The truly differential or 'transcendent object of sociability', Deleuze writes, cannot be lived within actual societies, but 'must be and can only be lived in the element of social upheaval (in other words, freedom, which is always hidden among the remains of the old order and the first fruits of a new)' (Deleuze 1994: 193). In other words, while some Idea or other is immanent in every empirical form of society, the properly transcendental Idea of society is only actualised during those periods of transition from 41

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one solution to the problems which define a society to another. In short, 'the transcendent object of the faculty of sociability is revolution. In this sense, revolution is the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social Idea' (Deleuze 1994: 208). On the one hand, this celebration of exceptional moments recalls the selective character of Nietzsche's eternal return and the manner in which this doctrine privileges the higher forms of existence, where these are understood not as a particular human or social type but rather as the active and affirmative forms, those that go to the limit of what they are capable of doing or being. In the case of social existence in time, these higher forms are realised only in moments of 'creative disorder or inspired chaos which can only ever coincide with a historical moment but never be confused with it' (Deleuze 1994: 54). On the other hand, Deleuze's conception of such revolutionary moments, or freedom, as the expression of the transcendental Idea of society privileges processes of social transformation and metamorphosis in the same way as do certain concepts developed in A Thousand Plateaus. We shall examine in detail some of these concepts, such as becoming, line of flight, absolute deterritorialisation, nomadism and smooth space in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Assemblages and abstract machines In Chapter 1 we suggested that the concept of assemblage is the most important concept in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Not only is the book itself an assemblage but the successive plateaus describe a variety of assemblages in relation to different fields of content: machinic assemblages of desire, collective assemblages of enunciation, nomadic assemblages and apparatuses of capture, ideational, pictorial and musical assemblages. A Thousand Plateaus might be described as a reiterated theory of assemblages in which the concept of assemblage provides formal continuity across the analyses of very different contents in each plateau. At the same time, those analyses transform and deform the concept of assemblage in such a manner that it exemplifies the continuous variation which Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to philosophical concepts (see Chapter 1, pp. 13-17). What Deleuze and Guattari call an assemblage is, in the first instance, a multiplicity (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 132). In accordance with Deleuze's reiterated contrast between numerical and qualitative multiplicities, there are two kinds of assemblage: extensive, molar multiplicities that are divisible, unifiable, totalisable and organisable; and molecular, intensive multiplicities that are not unifiable or totalisable and that do not divide without changing in nature. These two kinds of assemblage may be characterised in a variety of ways: for example, in their Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari contrast arborescent and rhizomatic multiplicities. While the terminology of trees and rhizomes 42

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is chosen for its broad cultural resonance, the differences between them correspond to the differences between numerical and qualitative multiplicities. Arborescent systems are 'hierarchical systems with centres of signifiance and subjectification' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 16). They are 'unifiable' objects in the sense that their boundaries can be clearly defined and their parts connected according to an invariant principle of unity. They embody the principles of organisation found in modern bureaucracies, factories, armies and schools, in other words, in all of the central social mechanisms of power. By contrast, rhizomes are fuzzy or indeterminate objects, defined 'by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature (metamorphose into something else) and connect with other multiplicities' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9). They lack principles of unity or connection such as central axes or invariant elements. They are determined rather by 'magnitudes and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing nature' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 8). 10 Another variation on the distinction between two kinds of assemblage or multiplicity occurs when Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between molar and molecular or between macropolitical and micropolitical levels of social analysis. This is not simply a difference in scale but a difference in kind. On the one hand, politics is played out in conflicts between molar social entities such as social classes, sexes and nations. On the other hand, it is simultaneously played out at the molecular level in terms of social affinities, sexual orientations and varieties of communal belonging. The microsociology of Gabriel Tarde offers an alternative to class analysis which addresses the molecular level of social life. In these terms, for example, in respect of the 1789 revolution 'what one needs to know is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 216). n Deleuze and Guattari explicitly relate the differences in kind between micropolitical and macropolitical analysis to the distinction between kinds of multiplicity drawn by Reimann, Bergson and others when they suggest that We are doing approximately the same thing when we distinguish between arborescent multiplicities and rhizomatic multiplicities. Between macro- and micro- multiplicities. On the one hand, multiplicities that are extensive, divisible and molar; unifiable, totalizable, organizable; conscious or preconscious - and on the other hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular intensive multiplicities composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 33) 43

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Assemblages are defined in terms of a quadripartite structure along two axes. On the first axis, assemblages are composed of discursive and nondiscursive components: they are both assemblages of bodies and matter and assemblages of enunciation or utterance. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between forms of content that involve bodies, their interactions and passions; and forms of expression that involve utterances, speech acts or statements. In this respect, assemblages are close to what Foucault called dispositifs of power and knowledge, such as the modern system of penal imprisonment, or the complex arrangements of discourse and practices which define modern sexuality.12 On the second axis, assemblages are defined by the nature of the movements governing their operation. On the one hand, there is the constitution of territories and fields of interiority; on the other hand, there are points of deterritorialisation, lines of flight along which the assemblage breaks down or becomes transformed into something else. Every assemblage has both movements of reterritorialisation, which tend to fix and stabilise its elements, and 'cutting edges of deterritorialization which carry it away' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 88). For Deleuze and Guattari, these movements are constitutive of any assemblage: the articulation of the corporeal and discursive elements of a given assemblage 'is effected by the movements of deterritorialization that quantify their forms. That is why a social field is defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by the lines of flight running through it' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 90). It is at this point that the second element of Deleuze's concept of difference, the concept of virtuality, plays an important role in the concept of assemblage. While assemblages are more or less concrete arrangements of things, their mode of functioning cannot be understood independently of the virtual or abstract machine which they embody. Deleuze and Guattari propose that the constitutive function of the movements of deterritorialisation is in turn directed by the abstract machine which inhabits the assemblage like its virtual double. They define abstract machines as ontologically prior to the distinction between content and expression within a given assemblage, existing in 'the aspect or moment at which nothing but functions and matters remain' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141). Like the Ideas, Problems or Structures in terms of which Deleuze characterised the transcendental field of thought and matter in Difference and Repetition, abstract machines are virtual multiplicities which do not exist independently of the assemblages in which they are actualised or expressed: they are neither corporeal nor semiotic entities but 'diagrammatic' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141). They are always singular and immanent to a given assemblage. As the diagram of a given assemblage, the abstract machine is vital to the operation of that assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 100). Abstract machines are virtual machines in the same sense as the software program which turns a given assemblage of computer hard-

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ware into a certain kind of technical machine (a calculating machine, a drawing machine, etc.). As the characterisation of abstract machines as diagrammatic suggests, they constitute a dimension of the assemblage not unlike Derrida's writing in general where 'Writing now functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141). Deleuze and Guattari also assign a complex causal function to abstract machines. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze endorsed the concept of structural causality in terms of which Althusser and others sought to make sense of Marx's thesis of economic determination, suggesting that 'this structure never acts transitively, following the order of succession in time; rather, it acts by incarnating its varieties in diverse societies and by accounting for the simultaneity of all the relations and terms which, each time and in each case, constitute the present' (Deleuze 1994: 186). In similar fashion, the abstract machine immanent in a given assemblage 'presides over' the distinction between forms of content and expression and distributes this across the various strata, domains and territories. It also 'conjugates' the movements of deterritorialisation that affect those forms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141). Abstract machines are therefore endowed with a directive power which Deleuze and Guattari are careful to distinguish from other models of causality: an abstract machine 'is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 142). 13 Deleuze and Guattari sometimes speak as if there were but a single Abstract Machine of which all concrete assemblages were more or less complete actualisations. This is because for them the function of mutation, metamorphosis and the creation of the new is ontologically primary. Just as Bergson viewed qualitative multiplicities as associated with the ontologically primary realm of duration, and just as problematic Ideas or Structures formed the fundamental elements of Deleuze's differential ontology in Difference and Repetition, so Deleuze and Guattari treat rhizomatic, molecular and micropolitical assemblages as prior to arborescent, molar and macropolitical assemblages, and the abstract machine of mutation as prior to the abstract machine of overcoding. This priority is implicit throughout the reiterated theory of assemblages in A Thousand Plateaus, even though it is only occasionally made explicit. We saw above that rhizomatic multiplicities are defined not by an internal principle of unity but by the line of flight or deterritorialisation according to which they metamorphose. Elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate their conception of assemblages from that of Foucault in similar terms.14 Given this conceptual connection between absolute deterritorialisation and qualitative assemblages, Deleuze and Guattari assert the ontological primacy of both when they refer to the priority of movements of absolute 45

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deterritorialisation, describing absolute deterritorialisation as 'the deeper movement... identical to the earth itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 143). Politics and difference A meaningful politics of difference requires more than a simplistic formula about the relative priority of difference and identity. As long as the argument remains at the level of an undetermined concept of difference and its supposed priority in relation to identity, there are both political and conceptual limits to the philosophical defence of difference. From a conceptual point of view, since concepts of identity and difference appear inextricably linked to one another, the case for difference readily becomes entrapped in a sterile dialectic which dooms in advance all attempts to argue for the priority of either. The identity of something implies its difference from others. Conversely, since difference is always difference from something, it implies reference to an identity of some kind. Identities presuppose differences and are inhabited by them, just as differences inevitably presuppose and are inhabited by identities.15 From a political point of view, arguments that appeal to the value of difference over that of identity or equality are subject to what Foucault called the 'tactical polyvalence of discourse' (Foucault 1978: 100). Differentialist arguments may be mobilised in support of racism and sexism as well as against these forms of discrimination. For example, since the 1980s, the French 'new right' has argued for the forced repatriation of non-European immigrants on the basis of respect for a cultural 'right to difference'. In the US, in response to a legal case brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, lawyers for Sears, Roebuck &c Company argued that 'fundamental' differences between the sexes rather than the firm's discriminatory practices explained the gender imbalance in its workforce. 16 A politics of difference requires the conceptual determination of difference and the specification of relevant kinds of difference, in an ontological, ethical or political sense. This is how the French philosophers of difference have provided support for a politics of difference: not only by their refusal to treat difference as secondary, derivative or deficient in relation to a presumed identity, but also by providing conceptual grounds for the autonomy of individual differences and rejecting those forms of reductionism which treated particular differences, such as sex and race, as subordinate to one central difference or social contradiction. Deleuze's philosophy of difference is consistent with both of these themes. The conception of a world of free differences outlined in Difference and Repetition (1994) points to a defence of the particular against all forms of universalisation or representation: every time there is representation, Deleuze suggests, there is always an 'unrepresented singularity' which does not recognise itself in the représentant (Deleuze 1994: 52). 17 In A Thousand Plateaus 46

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(1987), Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject the Marxian idea that societies are defined by the contradiction between labour and capital in favour of a 'micropolitical' conception of societies as defined by their lines of flight or deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 216). However, as this thesis suggests, the linkages between Deleuze's philosophy of difference and politics are complex. They are mediated by the theory of assemblages developed in A Thousand Plateaus, and by many of the concepts developed in conjunction with this theory. We shall examine Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of becoming, deterritorialisation and capture in more detail in following chapters, but it is helpful at this point to consider one example which illustrates some connections between a politics of difference and the theory of multiplicities outlined above. Consider their concept of minority and the corresponding advocacy of a minoritarian politics. This might be regarded as Deleuze and Guattari's version of a relational understanding of difference, in contrast to the widespread tendency to recognise and evaluate difference only from the standpoint of an implicit standard or prior identity. They define minority in opposition to majority, but insist that the difference between them is not quantitative since social minorities can be more numerous than the socalled majority. Both concepts involve the relationship of a group to the larger collectivity of which it is a part. Suppose there are only two groups and suppose that there is a standard or ideal type of member of the larger collectivity: the majority is defined as the group which most closely approximates the standard, while the minority is defined by the gap which separates its members from that standard. In a social collectivity, majority can take many simultaneous forms: Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language . . . It is obvious that 'man' holds the majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way around. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 105, 291) A politics of difference might simply defend the right of the minorities to figure in the majority. In other words, it would seek to broaden the standard so that it becomes male or female - European or non-European - hetero- or homosexual, etc. Liberal versions of gender neutrality or multiculturalism take this form. Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the importance of such changes to the nature of majority.18 However, they go further and introduce a third term in addition to the pair majority47

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minority, namely becoming-minor or minoritarian, by which they mean a creative process of becoming-different or divergence from the majority. Becoming-minor involves the subjection of the standard to a process of continuous variation or deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 106). 19 Deleuze and Guattari's third term suggests that social minorities might be conceived in one of two ways: either as outcasts but potentially included among the majority, or as collectivities of an entirely different kind which threaten the very existence of a majority. The difference between these two ways of understanding minority corresponds to the difference between qualitative and quantitative multiplicities. Minorities considered as transformational multiplicities threaten the status of the majority in a manner that recalls the threat posed by simulacra to the stable order of representation. In contrast to much of what goes under the name of a politics of difference, Deleuze and Guattari's political perspective is directed not at the installation of new constants or the attainment of majority status, but rather at the minoritarian-becoming of everyone, including the bearers of minority status. They are advocates of the transformative potential of becoming-minor, or becomingrevolutionary, against the normalising power of the majority. At the end of Plateau 13, '7000 B.C.: apparatus of capture', in the context of their analysis of capitalism as an axiomatic system, Deleuze and Guattari redescribe the difference between majority and minority in terms of the difference between denumerable and non-denumerable sets, suggesting that 'what distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a non-denumerable set, however many elements it may have' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 470). In these terms, the politics of becoming-minor may be recast as a 'formula' which asserts the power of the non-denumerable against that of the denumerable: The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 471)

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3 POWER

Power and will to power Deleuze has had a profound impact on contemporary approaches to the theory of power. Through his studies of the philosophies of Nietzsche and Spinoza, he develops a concept of power which has none of the juridical and moral presuppositions typically associated with power in the tradition of modern political thought. This concept of power none the less enables a form of ethical evaluation which plays an important role in the social and political theory developed in collaboration with Guattari. It informs both the theory of desire that is the basis for their critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus (1977) and the theory of assemblages developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). The key elements of Deleuze's concept of power are presented in his 1962 study, Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983). The aim of this chapter is to outline the concept of power developed through Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, and to show how this is developed further in his subsequent collaboration with Guattari. In order to do so, it will be helpful to trace some of the important continuities with as well as divergences from Foucault's concept of power. To a considerable degree, Deleuze's impact upon contemporary political thought has been mediated by the work of Foucault, who acknowledged the influence of Deleuze's 'superb book about Nietzsche' on his own thinking about power (Foucault 1983a: 203).* Deleuze in turn commented upon and elaborated Foucault's theses about power, first in his review of Discipline and Punish (Deleuze 1975: 1207-27) and then in the additional comments on power in his Foucault (1988b). In fact, there are several 'zones of indiscernibility' between the concepts of power deployed throughout the texts of Deleuze, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, but also a number of differences between them. The most important of these differences has to do with the explicitly normative character of Deleuze's approach to power. We will take up this issue, and the evaluative character of the social theory developed with Guattari, in the third section of this chapter. 49

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Nietzsche is not the first to propose an interpretation of human behaviour in terms of power: Hobbes and Spinoza among others preceded him in this endeavour. But Nietzsche's understanding of power differs from preceding theories in several important respects. First, he refuses any perspective according to which the fundamental drive is to preserve or to increase the power of the body concerned. For Nietzsche, will to power is not a matter of individual bodies striving to maintain their power or persevere in their being, in the manner of Hobbes or Spinoza. It is not energy expended in order to reach a particular goal or end-state, but simply the expenditure of energy itself. The power of a body is expressed when it acts with all of the force or energy with which it is endowed. In paragraph 13 of Beyond Good and Evil (1973), he remarks that we should beware of superfluous ideological principles such as the drive to self-preservation. His own principle is more general, encompassing the drive to self-preservation but also the drive to self-destruction or self-overcoming: A living thing desires above all to vent its strength - life as such is will to power - selfpreservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it' (Nietzsche 1973: part 1, para. 13). 2 It follows that Nietzsche's understanding of power must be distinguished from the homeostatic principle which underpins the Darwinian conception of nature. Deleuze comments that 'Nietzsche criticises Darwin for interpreting evolution and chance within evolution in an entirely reactive way. He admires Lamarck because Lamarck foretold the existence of a truly active plastic force, primary in relation to adaptations: a force of metamorphosis' (Deleuze 1983: 42). The idea that life, in the broadest sense of the term, is essentially active and transformative is a recurrent theme throughout Deleuze's philosophy.3 A second fundamental point of difference between Nietzsche and his predecessors with regard to power is that he treats it as a matter of effective capacity on the part of the body concerned rather than as something represented and therefore able to be recognised or not by others. Deleuze suggests that according to Hobbes, 'man in the state of nature wants to see his superiority represented and recognised by others' (Deleuze 1983: 80). By contrast, for Nietzsche, it is only the slave who understands power in terms of representation since this is a mediocre and base interpretation of power. Any such representational concept of power is prone to an implicit conformism, since it implies that an individual will only be recognised as powerful in accordance with accepted values. By contrast, Nietzsche understands power to involve the attainment of new values: 'against the image of a will which dreams of having established values attributed to it, Nietzsche announces that to will is to create new values' (Deleuze 1983: 85). In his remarks on the history of human moral sentiments in Human, All Too Human (1984) and Daybreak (1982), Nietzsche offers many examples of the analysis of human drives or forms of moral judgement in terms of 50

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power. Although he did not use the term 'will to power' until Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1969a), 4 by the time he wrote On the Genealogy of Morality (1994), the concept had become so established in his thinking that he could refer to his theory that 'in all events a will to power is operating' (Nietzsche 1994, essay 2, para. 12). A common misunderstanding assumes that the will to power is a particular psychological drive, such as the love of power which motivates so many political actors. While Nietzsche certainly recognises this phenomenon,5 this is not what is expressed by his concept of will to power. To interpret will to power as wanting or seeking power, Deleuze argues, is to produce 'platitudes which have nothing to do with Nietzsche's thought' (Deleuze 1983: xi). The will to power is not one drive among others but the immanent principle in terms of which all human drives are to be understood. In treating will to power as central to Nietzsche's system, Deleuze anticipates the argument of a number of more recent studies of Nietzsche.6 In common with a number of these studies and contrary to the widespread view of Nietzsche as an unsystematic or even anti-systematic thinker, he presents him as a rigorous philosopher who 'uses very precise new terms for precise new concepts' (Deleuze 1983: 52). Alongside nihilism and the eternal return, he argues, 'will to power' is one of the most important of the new concepts that Nietzsche creates and introduces into philosophy (Deleuze 1983: 80). Deleuze's systématisation of Nietzsche's theory of will to power takes its point of departure from those passages in the posthumously assembled The Will to Power (1968), in which Nietzsche extends his theory that 'in all events a will to power is operating' to include the physical universe. Against the atomism then prevalent in physics, he proposes a conception of material reality understood as centres of force. This implies a universe in which there are no ultimate, irreducible particles 'but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other quanta' (Nietzsche 1968: para. 635). In these terms, physical bodies are constituted by relations of opposition or collaboration between forces, which are themselves effects of the differential power relations between the centres of force. These point-forces are dynamic quanta, in Nietzsche's view, because each strives to become master over all space and to thrust back all that resists its extension. In doing so, they 'continually encounter similar efforts on the part of other bodies and end by coming to an arrangement with those of them that are sufficiently related . . . thus they conspire together for power. And so the process goes on . . .' (Nietzsche 1968: para. 636). It is this expansive character of forces, the active element internal to them which Nietzsche calls will to power: 'The victorious concept force, by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate will to power9 (Nietzsche 1968: para. 619).

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Deleuze's reconstruction of Nietzsche's concept of will to power begins with this conception of reality as a field of quanta or quantities of force. These forces are virtual capacities to affect and be affected by other forces which are actualised in determinate form in a given material. According to Deleuze, forces are essentially related to other forces and the will to power must be understood as the inner principle of the relation between forces. Chance brings particular forces into relation with one another, but the will to power determines the character and the outcome of the relations between forces: whether a particular force is primarily active or reactive; which force prevails in a particular encounter given that active forces do not always prevail over reactive forces. In any event, both the dominant and dominated forces are manifestations or expressions of the will to power. Taking the differential calculus as his model, Deleuze argues that the will to power is the differential and genetic element which is realised in the encounter between forces or capacities of different kinds. There is a relation of mutual presupposition between, on the one hand, the forces or capacities of particular bodies which are only realised in such encounters and, on the other hand, the will to power which is inseparable from the existence and interrelation of particular determinate kinds of force. That is why the will to power is an 'essentially plastic principle' that is no wider than what it conditions (Deleuze 1983: 50). In Deleuze's usage, the language adapted from Nietzsche's remarks on physics is intended to apply not only to biological forces but also to the psychical, moral, social and political 'forces' which characterise the field of social and political action. 'Force' here assumes a very broad sense which has no necessary connection with violence. Foucault follows Deleuze in this usage of the term. It is because forces are of different 'natural kinds', as well as different magnitudes, that he refers to the space in which forces confront one another as 'a "non-place", a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong to a common space' (Foucault 1977b: 85). Nevertheless, in any given encounter, one force will dominate and another will be subordinated: in one context, the law may prevail over racially discriminatory public opinion; in another, public opinion may force politicians to override the rule of law. In this sense, a certain stable or precarious but always reversible balance of forces will be established. 'Force' should be understood, in abstraction from any determinate kind of action or interaction, to encompass all of the means by which bodies interact with one another. In this sense, 'force' is equivalent to 'power' in its primary sense of capacity to do or to be certain things. Forces are the potentials for acting and being acted upon which constitute bodies as bodies of a particular kind. Deleuze's abstract and relational concept of force leads to an equally abstract concept of bodies, according to which the different kinds of force involved will determine the nature of different kinds of bodies: physical, organic or social. Bodies are understood here as 52

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assemblages of particular kinds of force or capacity: 'every relationship of forces constitutes a body - whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship' (Deleuze 1983: 40). As the inner principle of relations between forces, will to power is manifest both as a capacity to affect and a capacity to be affected. Deleuze points out that, even before Nietzsche had fully elaborated his concept of will to power, he treated power 'as a matter of feeling and sensibility' (Deleuze 1983: 62). The significance of the feeling of power derives from the fact that human beings are animals whose actions give rise to a corresponding subjective affect. Not only do they act, but they are also affected by their own actions. Before he had fully developed his theory of will to power, Nietzsche spoke about the feeling of power as the single most important element of human agency. Although he does not refer to it by name, the concept may be discerned in Human, All Too Human, where phenomena such as pity and teasing are analysed in terms of the 'feeling of superiority' thereby obtained, and where he advances the hypothesis that in all actions 'it is the individual's sole desire for selfenjoyment . . . that gratifies itself in every instance' (Nietzsche 1984: bk 2, para. 107). In Daybreak, Nietzsche suggests that because the feeling of impotence and fear was in a state of almost continuous stimulation so strongly and for so long, the feeling of power has evolved to such a degree of subtlety that in this respect man is now a match for the most delicate gold-balance. It has become his strongest propensity: the means discovered for creating this feeling almost constitute the history of culture. (Nietzsche 1982: bk 1, para. 23) 7 Deleuze points out that this dimension of Nietzsche's concept of power brings him close to Spinoza, who 'in an extremely profound theory, wanted a capacity for being affected to correspond to every quantity of force' (Deleuze 1983: 62). However, this affective dimension of the concept of power is not only a point of contact between Spinoza and Nietzsche: as we shall see in Chapter 4, it forms an important bridge between the Deleuzian concepts of power, desire and becoming. At the level of sociopolitical analysis, the outcome of this differential concept of force and will to power is a proto-deconstructive concept of power, according to which the power of any given body resides not in the body itself but in its relations to other bodies. The suggestion that power is essentially relational is not in itself an original insight. C. B. Macpherson drew attention to the fact that Hobbes defines men's natural powers not in terms of any absolute level of bodily endowments but in terms of the 'eminence' of those faculties (Macpherson 1968: 34). In other words, the 53

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power of a body depends upon its differences from other bodies and an individual in society is more powerful to the degree that his or her capacities exceed those of others; less powerful to the degree that they are exceeded by the capacities of others. There is, of course, a variety of ways in which the relative power of an individual body can be increased, including combining with or capturing the powers of others, or reducing the power of other bodies by imposing constraints on their capacity to act. The techniques of disciplinary power, which Foucault describes in detail in Discipline and Punish, involve both the combination of individual powers and the subordination of the resultant complex power to superior ends. Hobbes points out in Leviathan that the power of an individual in society includes not only the 'natural' powers of the body concerned but also the 'instrumental' powers, where these are the means by which one can command the forces of others, such as riches, reputation or friendship (Hobbes 1968: 150). The greater the instrumental powers, the greater the degree to which the power of an individual will exceed the power of others. Another way for individual bodies to enhance their power is to form alliances with other bodies. Interpersonal relations such as friendship may involve alliances that reinforce the powers of both parties, but so may political movements or institutional arrangements. The body politic of classical social contract theory might be considered a composite body which serves to enhance the power of its individual members, even though in its Hobbesian form it also involves the capture of individual powers by the sovereign.8 Deleuze and Parnet point to another kind of composite body which involves an increase of the powers of its constituent bodies through their example of the symbiosis of the wasp and the orchid. This is a phenomenon of 'double-capture' whereby The orchid seems to form a wasp-image, but in fact there is a wasp-becoming of the orchid, an orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double capture since 'what' each becomes changes no less than 'that which' becomes. The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 2) 9 Such processes of double-capture are only one of the ways in which the powers of an individual body may be transformed by entering into a relation with the powers of another without incorporating or weakening the other body. More generally, this kind of metamorphosis in the powers of a given body or assemblage is what Deleuze and Guattari call 'becoming'. The primary concern of Plateau 10, '1730: becoming-intense, becominganimal, becoming-imperceptible' in A Thousand Plateaus is the analysis of 54

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the affective dimension of certain kinds of relationship between bodies by means of the concept of 'becoming'. This concept is examined in more detail in Chapter 4, pp. 78-83. Because human bodies are complex and possess a range of 'natural' powers, including the power of imagination, they are capable of many different kinds of interaction with other bodies. The kinds of action of which a human body is capable will depend upon its physical constitution, the enduring social and institutional relations within which it lives, and the moral interpretations which define its acts. In Daybreak (1982: bk 1, para. 38), Nietzsche points out that moral interpretations of phenomena are among the most important means by which human beings act upon themselves and others: it is by such means that an individual can enjoy his own magnanimity or arouse pity in others. In On the Genealogy of Morality (1994), following the principle that 'All events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master' (Nietzsche 1994: essay 2, para. 12), he applies the concept of will to power to the historical analysis of moral and cultural phenomena such as punishment, guilt, bad conscience and asceticism. These are events in the evolution of human consciousness which involve the emergence of new forms of human selfinterpretation and which therefore determine the nature of social institutions and possible forms of action. Similarly, the systems of thought in relation to mental illness, punishment and sexuality described by Foucault are elements of the interpretative framework within which Europeans have acted upon themselves and others. These systems of thought serve to integrate and coordinate moral as well as physical and institutional forces.

Descriptive ontology or 'analytic* of power Deleuze's concept of a transcendental field of force relations, encompassing all of the means by which bodies of different kinds may act upon each other, forms the basis of Foucault's novel approach to the analysis of power in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, vol. I (1978): 'Power's condition of possibility . . . is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power' (Foucault 1978: 93). Foucault understands power as the effect of relations between different forces: the power of a body resides not 'in a certain strength we are endowed with', but in the fluctuating field of relations to other bodies. The power even of a single body is dispersed in such a manner that 'power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere' (Foucault 1978: 93). Within the terms of this definition of power as a relation between forces, power relations can take a variety of forms: attraction, repulsion, incorporation, decomposition of one force by another and so 55

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on. Foucault subsequently proposed a definition of power relations which limited the field to interactions between human forces, suggesting that he was concerned only with power relations understood as the 'set of actions upon other actions' (Foucault 1983: 220). However, even within these limits, there are still many ways in which individual or collective agencies can act upon the actions of others: they can provoke, incite, restrict, prohibit, make more or less probable, and so on. As a result, Deleuze suggests, we can imagine an 'open list of variables expressing a relation between forces' (Deleuze 1988b: 70). Among the many ways in which we can act upon the actions of others, only some will have the effect of limiting or diminishing their capacities for action. Conversely, there are many ways in which we can act to enhance or assist others in the exercise of their powers. Foucault does not offer any account of such ways of being or acting outside the relations of government and domination. His studies of power tended to focus on those relatively fixed or congealed relations of force which enable some to govern the conduct of others. Nevertheless, the concept of power as the effect of differential force relations allowed him to abandon a series of assumptions about the nature and operation of power associated with Marxist social theory. He argued that power is not localised in the State but diffused throughout the social field; that power is not the property of a class nor does it operate only by violent or ideological means; that there is no economic essence of power but only purely functional relations involving the dominated as well the dominating force. Deleuze summarises this contribution to the understanding of power by suggesting that Foucault put forward a new 'topology' of social power relations founded on an immanent field of power 'without transcendent unification', without centralisation on the figure of the State, or totalisation in relation to the system of economic relations (Deleuze 1988b: 27). According to the interpretation of Nietzsche's genealogy advanced by Deleuze and Foucault, the nature of an institution such as the prison is determined by the character of the forces in play around it at any given moment. Tracing the history of such an institution will then be a matter of retracing the 'succession of forces' which have taken possession of it (Deleuze 1983: 3). In this manner, genealogy seeks to re-establish 'the hazardous play of dominations' (Foucault 1977a: 83). Contrary to the Marxist view, no single logic of development governs the direction of history understood in these terms. All events are the effects of the interplay of forces, as things are transformed or reinterpreted to serve new ends. It follows that there is no more an enduring essence within social phenomena than there is within biological phenomena: 'the eye was not always intended for seeing, and punishment has had other purposes than setting an example' (Foucault 1977a: 83).

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Foucault's account of the emergence of modern punishment by incarceration provides an illustration of the application of this conception of power to the social field. The fact that prisons became the predominant form of punishment in the early nineteenth century represented a convergence of two quite disparate force-fields: the political economy of punishment in late eighteenth-century society, which involved the widespread revision of penal codes and the realignment of the application of penal discipline to particular acts and segments of the population; and the political technology of disciplinary power, which involved specific techniques for distributing individuals in space and controlling their activities over time. As a specific technology for the exercise of power over groups of individuals, discipline combined the enhancement of productive capacities with the reinforcement of domination. Yet, as Foucault points out, imprisonment was neither envisaged nor implied by the eighteenth-century projects for the reform of the penal system. While the acceptance of imprisonment as the primary mode of punishment makes sense against the background of the spread of disciplinary techniques, Foucault's account of the 'birth' of the prison nevertheless appears incomplete: how does his genealogy acquire the force of explanation with regard to the form of modern punishment? In his review of Discipline and Punish, Deleuze points to an element of Foucault's analysis which enables a complete explanation: his suggestion that there is a generalisable 'diagram' of power which was embodied in the prison and other social institutions such as factories, barracks, schools and hospitals. Foucault called this generalisable form of disciplinary power 'panopticism', after Jeremy Bentham's plan for a building design which could serve as a school, workshop or penitentiary: in short, wherever there was a need 'to impose a particular conduct on a particular human multiplicity' (Deleuze 1988b: 34, cf. 72). Deleuze points out that what Foucault calls a 'diagram' of panoptic power is the name of a pure function applied to an unspecified matter. This is what he and Guattari call an 'abstract machine' capable of actualisation in a variety of concrete assemblages: 'We define the abstract machine as the aspect or moment at which nothing but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141). As we noted in Chapter 2 (p. 45), within the theory of assemblages developed in A Thousand Plateaus, the abstract machine functions as an 'immanent cause' which explains the mutually supportive interaction between the forms of content and expression in any given assembage. It is both a condition of the effects realised in a given assemblage and an abstraction that exists only in those effects, in a manner that parallels the relationship of the will to power to the relations between particular forces in which it is expressed. In this case, the abstract machine of panopticism accounts for the convergence of the discourse of delinquency and the 57

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disciplinary techniques which together make up the social assemblage which Foucault called the carcéral dispositif (Deleuze 1988b: 37). Deleuze's 'Postscript on control societies' (Deleuze 1995b: 177-82) builds on Foucault's suggestion that modern society is disciplinary by proposing the diagram of a new form of power which has taken hold in the course of the twentieth century and which he defines as control or modulation. The principles of control are contrasted step by step with those of discipline. Control involves continuous modulation rather than discontinuous moulding of individuals and activities, competition rather than normalisation: In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything - business, training and military service being coexisting states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation. (Deleuze 1995b: 179) The digital language of control operates by means of codes rather than identifying signatures, passwords rather than orderwords. Just as disciplinary techniques developed alongside industrial capitalism, so the mechanisms of control correspond to the transformation of capitalism into a system dominated by metaproduction, marketing and financial services. Deleuze and Guattari's social 'cartography' takes as its primary task the mapping of the abstract machines at work within a given social field. Every society has its diagrams or abstract machines and different kinds of diagram or abstract machine will correspond to different kinds of social formation. Part Three of Anti-Oedipus outlines the macromachines that characterise distinct kinds of society: the 'territorial' machine of so-called primitive societies, the 'overcoding' machine of state governed societies, and the axiomatic of global capital (see Chapter 5). In A Thousand Plateaus, machinic analysis is developed further by the description of many different kinds of abstract machine which inhabit the social field: the abstract machine of language and its actualisation in collective assemblages of enunciation; abstract machines of thought, desire and social space or segmentarity. Cutting across the analyses of such abstract machines is a recurrent opposition between abstract machines of capture and abstract machines of metamorphosis and transformation. In order to appreciate the sense in which this distinction provides a basis for evaluation, we must understand its origins in Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's will to power.

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Power and evaluation: active and reactive force When political theorists talk about power, they tend to mean ways in which some agents govern or exercise control over the actions of others. This was not always so. The shift from a more general concept of power as capacity to the narrower concept of power which predominates in modern political theory is exemplified in Hobbes's discussion in Leviathan where, after defining power as 'present means to obtain some future apparent good', he goes on to consider only the means by which individuals can enhance their own powers by controlling the powers of others. The fact that he includes friendship as an 'instrumental' power alongside riches and reputation draws attention to an important feature of the concept, namely that there is nothing objectionable about exercising power (Hobbes 1968: 150ff.). As we saw above, to offer advice, instruction or support is also to act upon the actions of others. The widespread view of power as essentially repressive assumes that power is by nature hostile to the interests of those over whom it is exercised. By contrast, for Deleuze and Foucault, power is not always detrimental to the interests of those over whom it is exercised.10 Indeed, in some respects, the exercise of power is what shapes and determines those 'interests'. Their concept of power is non-normative in the sense that it includes all of the ways in which agents are able to act, upon others or upon themselves. That is why Deleuze can comment that there is no point in asking whether a new form of power, such as that embodied in mechanisms of control, is better or worse than the old: in each case there is conflict 'between the ways they free and enslave us' (Deleuze 1995b: 178). The question raised by this approach to power is whether there are evaluative means of differentiation immanent to the exercise of power itself? Can we distinguish between forms of domination and more benign modes of action upon the actions of others in terms intrinsic to the exercise of power? Critics such as Fraser and Habermas have pointed to the absence of any criteria in Foucault which would allow for normative discrimination between ways of exercising power. Others have pointed to his failure to address any of the normative issues which concern liberal political theory and the social contract tradition: when and in what ways is power, especially State power, justified? These issues are largely although not entirely absent from Foucault's discussions of power up to the publication of The History of Sexuality, Volume J, in 1 9 7 6 . n By contrast, in Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), there is a sense in which Nietzsche's theory of will to power does provide grounds for evaluation, but in a manner that is unlikely to satisfy Foucault's critics. Deleuze argues that Nietzsche's project is the realisation and radicalisation of Kant's critique. For Nietzsche, it is values themselves which must be evaluated, in contrast to the uncritical acceptance of established values

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which characterises Kantian critique. According to Deleuze, we find in Nietzsche an explicit qualitative distinction between active and reactive modalities of power, and it is this qualitative dimension of the will to power which enables the evaluation of values. Nietzschean critique takes the form of a genealogical interpretation of phenomena which assesses their sense and their value. The sense or meaning of a given phenomenon is determined by the quality of force which predominates (forces are either active or reactive), and its value by the quality of the will to power which is present (affirmative or negative). In other words, in addition to the differences between the various natural kinds of force, Deleuze draws attention to the distinction between 'active' and 'reactive' force. This finds its clearest expression in Nietzsche's account of the differences between master and slave morality in On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche 1994: essay 1, paras 10, 11). The fundamental difference is between those who distinguish the good (themselves and their like) from the bad, and those who distinguish the evil (the others) from the good (themselves). This is a difference in the direction of what Nietzsche calls 'the value-positing eye', between self-directed action and other-directed action: In order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all - its action is fundamentally reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble mode of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously. (Nietzsche 1994: essay 1, para. 10) In Deleuze's systematic reformulation, this distinction is drawn in the first instance with reference to the relative strength of the forces present: the superior force, by which is meant the one that dominates in a given encounter with another force, is active, while the inferior or dominated force is reactive. The difference between these two kinds of force is thus a difference in their manner of action. Reactive forces are those whose activity is conditioned or constrained by superior forces. They are paradigmatically forces of adaptation or conservation, regulative forces whose 'mechanical and utilitarian accommodations . . . express all the power of inferior and dominated forces' (Deleuze 1983: 41). By contrast, active forces are those appropriative, dominant or superordinate forces that impose forms of activity upon others. While these are to some degree constrained by their own nature, even this constraint is relative, since active forces are essentially transformative: 'the power of transformation, the Dionysian power, is the primary definition of activity' (Deleuze 1983: 42). Deleuze describes the difference between active and reactive forces as a difference between two qualities of force, where the qualities correspond 60

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to a difference in quantity. In effect, since forces exist only in relation to other forces, quantitative difference is the essence of force as such (there are no equal forces in nature). But this quantitative difference in turn gives rise to a difference in quality: 'forces in relation reflect a simultaneous double genesis: the reciprocal genesis of their difference in quantity and the absolute genesis of their respective qualities' (Deleuze 1983: 51). The will to power is the differential and genetic principle which accounts for the relationship between forces. It is the inner principle which gives rise to this double genesis: 'The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation' (Deleuze 1983: 50). While it does not bring the forces into relation, that task being left to chance, the will to power 'produces' the difference in quantity and the resultant quality which each force acquires in a given relation (Deleuze 1983: 53). Although the quality of forces has its origins in quantitative difference, it is not bound by that original state of affairs. Cultural phenomena no less than physical events involve dynamic systems. As Nietzsche repeatedly argues, the weak may triumph over the strong. In On the Genealogy of Morality he analyses some of the principal forms of reactive force which have held sway over human nature, namely ressentiment, bad conscience and the ascetic ideal. Reactive forces may get the better of active ones, but they do not thereby become active, for the reason that their mode of operation is not the same. Nietzsche's view, according to Deleuze, is that the difference between active and reactive forces derives in the first instance from the difference in quantity: active forces are those that dominate while reactive ones are dominated. But this difference in the quality of forces cannot be reduced to quantitative difference alone. If it could, then the distinction would serve no critical purpose, whereas Deleuze clearly wants it to do so: 'inferior forces can prevail without ceasing to be inferior in quantity and reactive in quality' (Deleuze 1983: 58). 12 He therefore draws the distinction in terms of the difference between two modes of operation or functioning: reactive forces are forces of limitation or decomposition which resist the activity of other forces. They 'separate active force from what it can do' (Deleuze 1983: 57), and in this way are able to overcome active forces by neutralising some or all of their power. By contrast, active force is force that acts of its own accord. In doing so, it may impose forms upon lesser forces or otherwise appropriate or subordinate them to its own ends. Active force goes to the limit of what it can do, even to the point of its own destruction and transmutation into something else. At this point, Deleuze argues, a further distinction is necessary to complete the evaluative function of the will to power: 'in order to be the source of the qualities of force in this way, the will to power must itself have qualities, particularly fluent ones, even more subtle than those of force' (Deleuze 1983: 53). These qualities are the affirmative and negative 61

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character of the will to power itself. Although the difference in mode of operation between active and reactive forces may appear to follow from the original quantitative difference - dominant forces are those in a position to pursue their own activity while dominated forces are constrained to respond, and constrained in their possible responses - the difference also corresponds to a difference between affirmation and negation. Active force affirms its own nature rather than seeking to oppose or limit that of the other. Affirmation and negation or denial are primordial expressions of the will to power. They are, Deleuze says, 'the immediate qualities of becoming itself (Deleuze 1983: 54). That is why will to power cannot mean wanting power: what the will wants, to speak in anthropomorphic terms, is 'a particular relation of forces, a particular quality of forces. And also a particular quality of power: affirming or denying' (Deleuze 1983: 85). Given that in all events a will to power is operating, it follows that every phenomenon expresses a certain combination of forces and therefore a certain type. Conversely, while the will to power is expressed in every type of body, it does nevertheless take higher and lower forms. Power in the sense that is praised above all others by Zarathustra is active and creative. It is especially manifest in 'the bestowing virtue': 'the will to power is essentially creative and giving: it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power. It gives' (Deleuze 1983: 85). The introduction of this primordial distinction between qualities of the will to power interjects further complexity into Nietzsche's genealogical interpretation. Interpretation involves determining the sense and value of a thing, where its sense is determined by the quality of force which is present while its value is determined by the quality of the will to power. There is an affinity or complicity between affirmation and active force, and between negation and reactive force, but never a confusion of these two levels. This implies that active forces may in fact possess the value of negative will to power or, what amounts to the same thing, that forces of nihilism, life-denying forces, may become active. Conversely, forces of affirmation may themselves become reactive: 'There are reactive forces that become grandiose and fascinating by following the will to nothingness and there are active forces that subside because they do not know how to follow the powers of affirmation' (Deleuze 1983: 67). The distinction between qualities of force and those of will to power is not one that can simply be read off from the relative strength of the forces in play on a given occasion: that is why it provides the basis for a form of critical evaluation which can judge the present. But this is not the moral form of critique which judges what is against what should be, rather it is a genealogical critique which judges what is by determining the quality of the forces present and their affinity with one or other character 62

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of the will to power. The result is a complex and nuanced system of judgement which does not allow for any simple axiological priority of active over reactive, affirmative over negative. Take the example of Christian religion: for Nietzsche, this has its origins in 'the slave revolt in morality' and possesses an essential affinity with the negative side of the will to power. This apparently doubly negative phenomenon has nevertheless produced some of the highest forms of human life hitherto.13 It is both a 'rigorous and grandiose stupidity' (Nietzsche 1973: part 5, para. 188), yet also the principal means by which the (European) human spirit has been educated and developed to its present state of sensibilities and possibilities. At issue here is the historical diversity of the forms which this religion has assumed, the different character (active or reactive) and nuance (affinity with affirmation or negation) of the forces which have held sway in different contexts. The reactive consciousness of sin that becomes evangelistic and denunciatory is not the same as the active abstention from all that is sinful. There are forms of religious life that display an inner strength of affirmation and enjoyment of themselves. The reactive forces of spiritual discipline and self-denial may acquire an affinity with the affirmative aspect of the will to power. Or take the example of illness or injury which separates the healthy individual from his or her powers and limits the possibilities for action. While this is clearly a reactive force, its value depends on the nature of the subject and how it responds to the illness which acts upon it. The same physiological state may weaken some powers but also open up new possibilities of feeling or bring about new capacities for acting and being acted upon. Nietzsche spoke of his illness in these terms when he suggested that it enabled him to discover life and himself anew and that it was during the years of his 'lowest vitality' that he 'ceased to be a pessimist' (Nietzsche 1969: 'Why I am so wise', section 2). Depending on how the illness is lived, we must ask whether it is the same condition or the same illness in each case: 'is it the same invalid who is the slave of his illness and who uses it as a means of exploring, dominating and being powerful?' (Deleuze 1983: 67). Ultimately, it is the relationship between the illness and the patient which determines the affirmative or negative quality of this reactive force. The dynamic aspects of the interplay between the qualities of will to power and those that supervene on force relations mean that the evaluation of particular phenomena is no simple matter. The internal complexity that is introduced by the possibility that active forces may become reactive, and acquire an affinity with the negative rather than the affirmative quality of the will to power, or the possibility that reactive forces may become active and acquire an affinity with the affirmative dimension of the will to power, implies that the meaning and value of particular phenomena can only be assessed by a patient and meticulous practice of genealogy. There is no algorithm by which we can read off the quality of a given event or 63

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phenomenon. Indeed, as Nietzsche's conception of history as successive events of subduing and becoming master suggests, philosophy conceived as the interpretation of the meaning of things must be an art (Nietzsche 1994: essay 2, para. 12). None the less, defenders of the Enlightenment faith who cling to the possibility of objective judgement might still insist that there must be grounds for reassurance. Even granted the complexity of phenomena and the tortuous paths of their historical development, surely there is an objective value which is theirs alone: in the end, a given phenomenon must be assigned a single, if complex and nuanced, value. At this point, a further bifurcation appears in Deleuze's reconstruction of Nietzsche's metaphysics of power. At the level of empirical acts of judgement by particular, historically constituted subjects, there is no transcendent point or uniform standard of judgement. Ultimately, it is the will to power which interprets and which evaluates (Deleuze 1983: 53-4), and the will to power is divided. As a result, all evaluation must be grounded in one or other character of the will to power, one or other quality of force. Values cannot be abstracted from the standpoint from which they draw their value, and that standpoint is ultimately the affirmative or negative character of the will to power. At this level, evaluations reflect the quality of the forces which make them, and there will be as many evaluations of a given phenomenon as there are subjects of evaluation. There is no transcendent standard, no God's-eye point of view to ground the possibility of objective evaluation. Any particular judgement will be an expression of the nature of that which judges. For this reason, Nietzsche and Deleuze argue, 'we have the hierarchy that we deserve, we who are essentially reactive, we who take the triumphs of reaction for a transformation of action and slaves for new masters' (Deleuze 1983: 61). In this sense, the Nietzschean philosophy of power supports Foucault's refusal to get caught up in the play of justifications, since it shows why there is no possible accommodation between conflicting points of view. At the same time, considered as a transcendental principle of the qualities of force, the will to power does enable a critical perspective on values: High and noble designate, for Nietzsche, the superiority of active forces, their affinity with affirmation, their tendency to ascend, their lightness. Low and base designate the triumph of reactive forces, their affinity with the negative, their heaviness or clumsiness. (Deleuze 1983: 86) The will to power is not only divided but internally ordered such that the affirmative quality and active forces are primary. For Nietzsche, the will to power is ultimately affirmative. Wherever it assumes a negative character, this can only be understood in relation to the more fundamental affirmative character: thus nihilism, the will to nothingness, 'is and remains a

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will' (Nietzsche 1994: essay 3, para. 28). Similarly, there is an important sense in which active force is the primary quality of force: while the reactive is no less present at the origin, it can only be understood as reactive 'in relation to and on the basis of the active' (Deleuze 1983: 42). In this sense, the will to power is already a partisan principle, one that cannot claim the neutral status of 'objective truth' but only consistency with its own fundamental nature. Will to power is itself an affirmative thought, capable of expressing new forces: 'A thought that would go to the limit of what life can do, a thought that would lead life to the limit of what it can do' (Deleuze 1983: 101). There is no independent answer to the following question: in what sense and by what right is nobility higher or better than baseness? There is no external justification for the preeminence of the affirmative and active. It is not enough to point to the logical pre-eminence of the active over the reactive, the affirmative over the negative, since if the will to power only exists in its determinate and qualified forms, then it is no less present on the side of the negative and the reactive. In order to function as a basis for critical evaluation, Deleuze argues, the will to power must be considered in the context of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole. We cannot only consider the will to power 'in itself or abstractly, as merely endowed with two opposite qualities, affirmation and negation' (Deleuze 1983: 86). We must also refer to the 'test' of eternal return. Ultimately, Deleuze's Nietzschean metaphysics implies a selective concept of being, or a concept of being as a selective process, in which it is only the active and the affirmative which return, and in which the negative must eventually be transmuted into the affirmative. Because it implies a principle of selection, Deleuze's Nietzschean philosophy of difference is no less 'moral' in its effect than Plato's. But it involves a different principle of selection, allowing only the return of the excessive and transformative forms, those that go to the limit of their capacities and transform themselves into something else. Since being is conceived in terms of degree of power, this amounts to the selection of the 'higher' forms: those with the greatest capacity to act and to be acted upon, those with the greatest capacity and the greatest sensibility. The eternal return thus defines and selects that which is 'noble' in Nietzsche's sense of the term: 'Eternal return alone effects the true selection, because it eliminates the average forms and uncovers "the superior form of everything that is"' (Deleuze 1994: 54-5). In this sense, unlike Foucault's analytics of power, Deleuze's Nietzschean metaphysics does offer a surrogate for hope. Deleuze and Guattari's sociopolitical analysis relies upon an equally selective and partisan conceptual framework of evaluation. Consider Plateau 9, '1933: micropolitics and segmentarity' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 208-31), where they challenge the anthropological idea that the social space of 'civilised' society is centralised and hierarchical, in contrast to the segmentary space of so-called primitive societies. They point out 65

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that the social fabric of modern capitalist society is no less segmented in its economic and political organisation, its uses of language and its organisation of desire. Segmentarity is present in both forms of society, they argue, but there are two kinds of segmentarity: one supple and molecular; the other rigid and molar. These are distinct 'because they do not have the same terms or the same relations or the same nature or even the same type of multiplicity' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 213). They are inseparable 'because they coexist and cross over into each other' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 213). For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, their conception of social space in general implies a distinction between two simultaneous states of the one Abstract Machine: an abstract machine of overcoding which defines a rigid segmentarity and which is linked to the State and its apparatus of government, and 'an abstract machine of mutation which operates by decoding and deterritorialization' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 223). These concepts and their consequences for social and political theory will be examined in Chapters 5 and 6. What is important here with regard to Deleuze and Guattari's evaluative framework is the manner in which different types of segmentation of social space result in different kinds of line: molar lines which correspond to the forms of rigid segmentation found in bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions; molecular lines which correspond to the fluid and overlapping forms of division characteristic of 'primitive' territoriality. As individuals and as collectivities, Deleuze and Guattari argue, we are composed of different kinds of lines. What they call 'micropolitics', 'schizoanalysis' or social 'cartography' is the study of these different lines and their interactions in a given social field. Molar and molecular lines correspond to different ways of organising or occupying social space. From an evaluative point of view, each has its own advantages and its own dangers. However, for Deleuze and Guattari's structure of evaluation, the important figure is another kind of line altogether: the line of flight or deterritorialisation which traces the paths along which things change or become transformed into something else. The line of flight is privileged in their analysis and throughout A Thousand Plateaus. Preference is accorded to those processes or modes of existence that exhibit the greatest possible degree of creativity or life: lines of flight or deterritorialisation, 'continuous variation', 'becoming-minor' are some of these processes; 'rhizome', 'body-without-organs', 'plane of consistency' and 'nomadism' are some of the figures associated with these creative processes. There is nevertheless an ambivalence inherent in all of these Deleuzian figures of metamorphosis and creativity. Nothing in A Thousand Plateaus is unambiguously good or bad and the line of flight is no exception. It is both the line of maximal creative potential and the line of greatest danger, offering at once the possibility of the greatest joy and that of the most extreme anguish. 66

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As well as being creative lines or potential paths of mutation in an individual or social fabric, lines of flight have their own dangers: they may themselves 'emanate a strange despair, like an odour of death and immolation, a state of war from which one returns broken' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 229). The danger is that, once having broken out of the limits imposed by the molar forms of segmentarity and subjectivity, a line of flight may fail to connect with the necessary conditions of creative development or be incapable of so connecting and turn instead into a line of destruction. When this occurs, the outcome can be a 'passion of abolition' which leads to suicide or worse (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 229). The potential danger and uncertainty associated with lines of flight are the reason for the essential prudence of Deleuzian politics. It is because we never know in advance which way a line of flight will turn, or whether a given set of heterogeneous elements will be able to form a consistent and functional multiplicity, that caution is necessary. At the same time, it is because 'it is always on a line of flight that we create' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 135) that we must continue to experiment with such lines.

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Politics of desire Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus launched a polemical assault on the varieties of uncritical synthesis of Freudianism and Marxism which had become theoretical orthodoxy for much of the extra-parliamentary left in France after May 1968. Their criticism of the psychoanalytic concept of desire and sketch of an alternative schizoanalytic concept immediately became a succès de scandale. The notoriety achieved by their first collaborative work has meant that the names Deleuze and Guattari are firmly associated with a philosophy and a politics of desire. Philip Goodchild represents the opinion of many when he writes that T h e politics of desire is the sole purpose of Deleuze and Guattari's thought' (Goodchild 1996: 5). However, 'the politics of desire' is an ambiguous phrase which can refer to more than one dimension of their collaborative work. Our concern here is not with the details of their historico-political critique of psychoanalysis.1 Rather, our aim is to identify some of the significant features of their 'politics of desire' and to show how these are derived from their non-psychoanalytic concept of desire. The most obvious sense in which they engaged in a 'politics of desire' emerges from their argument that desire is implicated in all social and political processes: There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other . . . We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 28-9)

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This perspective is the basis for their analysis of territorial, despotic and capitalist forms of social organisation in terms of the different abstract machines of desire present in each case. The resultant 'universal history' is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. The analysis of the social field in terms of desire also sustains a sense in which Deleuze and Guattari's social theory may be considered complementary to that of Foucault. If we suppose that all social relations are powerrelations as well as desire-relations, then one and the same social institution may be considered either as an apparatus of power or as a complex circuit of desire: for example, the prison is both a dispositif of micro-power, an assemblage of techniques which purports to train the souls of delinquent subjects by subjecting them to a regime of corporeal discipline, and a complex desire-machine which coordinates bodily activities and the subjective experience of docile behaviour. Of course, this description applies to the prison as envisaged by nineteenth-century social planners and prison reformers: real prisons are altogether more complex circuits of desire and power. From both the point of view of power and the point of view of desire, the relation between them poses a problem for political theory. For Deleuze and Guattari, this problem is raised in stark form by the phenomenon of fascism, once it is acknowledged that the success of fascism cannot be explained by duplicity or ideology. Following Wilhelm Reich, they insist that fascism must be explained in terms of desire. Their account in turn relies upon their own view that desire is inseparable from the machinic assemblages that operate at a micropolitical level to form individual perceptions, attitudes, expectations and ways of speaking: 'Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 215). At one point in AntiOedipus, they suggest that the question of desire's involvement in its own involuntary servitude is 'the fundamental problem of political philosophy' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 29). The same might also be said of the converse problem which Deleuze and Guattari address only at the end of Anti-Oedipus: how is revolution possible? Their concept of desire provides an answer to this problem as well. If by revolution is meant a rupture with the causal determinations previously at work in a given social field, then 'only what is of the order of desire and its irruption accounts for the reality this rupture assumes at a given moment, in a given place' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 377). By this, they mean more than just that revolutions only occur when the configurations of desire shift in such a way that old allegiances no longer hold sway and authorities can no longer rely on their orders being carried out. They mean that desire must be understood to embody the power of

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differential reproduction or becoming-other which is the condition of creativity in culture as well as in nature. Deleuze and Guattari's answer to the question 'how is revolution possible?' points to a further sense in which they may be said to be engaged in a politics of desire. For not all assemblages of desire will sustain revolutionary actions. This raises a number of questions about the nature of desire and the assemblages in which it is determined, which will be examined below. At the heart of the project of schizoanalysis lies a distinction between two poles or states of social libidinal investment: 'the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascizing pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 366). The difference between these two poles is described in terms of the familiar Deleuzian contrast between two kinds of multiplicity or between lines of integration and territorialisation on the one hand, and lines of escape that follow decoded and deterritorialised flows on the other. Schizoanalysis, they say, 'has strictly no political program to propose' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 380). Rather, it offers a series of conceptual contrasts in terms of which we can analyse a given social field or process and evaluate the assemblages in play. We saw at the end of the preceding chapter the kind of ethical or political evaluation which this framework allows. Concept of desire The first distinguishing feature of the theory of desire outlined in AntiOedipus (1977) is its positivity: desire is understood as a primary active force rather than as a reactive response to unfulfilled need. Desire is productive in the sense that it produces real connections, investments and intensive states within and between bodies. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari suggest 'desire produces reality' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 30). This fundamental difference in point of departure sets the Deleuzian theory apart from an entire tradition of thought about desire that extends from Plato through Hegel to Freud. In particular, it sets this conception apart from the idea that desire is constituted by the ever-renewed and impossible attempt to regain a lost object of satisfaction. The point is not to deny that unsatisfied desire may give rise to phantasmatic satisfactions, but to deny that this phenomenon is the essence of desire. Deleuze and Guattari's theory of desire is constructivist in the sense that desire always requires a machine or assemblage. Desire is present in a given assemblage in the same way that, in a musical work, the principle of composition is present in the silences as much as in the audible sounds: 'Lack refers to a positivity of desire and not desire to a positivity of lack' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 91). A second distinguishing feature of their account is that the process of desire is not by nature directed at the production of stable subjects whose 70

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own conscious desires respect the familial and social order. Rather, ego formation and the constitution of subjects involve a historically specific fixation of desire, brought about by the action of social codes, family structures and behaviour towards the child. In this sense, their conception of subjectivity is entirely consistent with Foucault's view that 'it is one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires come to be identified and constituted as individuals' (Foucault 1980: 98). Nor is desire internal to a subject, in their view. Rather, it is the subject which is inseparable from the constitution of a machinic assemblage of fluxes of intensity, particles of affect and a-signifying signs. Desire produces intensities and the consumption of intensities, wherever and in whatever form these may be found. Subjectivity is an effect of this process rather than its origin. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari claim, desire is a-social or revolutionary by nature, not in the sense that it 'wants' revolution but rather 'as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 116). They follow Freud in calling the energy that is transformed in the process of desire libidinal energy. They insist that this energy is not primarily sexual nor directed at other persons and reject the idea that it naturally tends toward the formation of a fixed or centred subjectivity. In their view, it becomes fixed under the influence of Oedipal social and familial structures which impose a particular usage of the primary syntheses. The best evidence, they argue, 'points to the fact that desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings which it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined and in which it introduces breaks and captures' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 292). Alternatively, if we persist in calling such libidinal energy sexual, then we must say that sexuality is everywhere: in the manner in which a bureaucrat fondles his files, the way in which a judge administers justice, or the way in which a film-maker handles her camera, her characters and her story. What is important is the manner in which this energy is invested in its surrounding field: 'we always make love with worlds', Deleuze and Guattari write, 'and our love addresses itself to this libidinal property of our lover, to either close himself or herself off or open up to more spacious worlds' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 294). In Deleuze and Guattari's initial outline of their theory at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus, desire is treated as a process of production. What desire produces, in the first instance, is a machine or circuit of libidinal energy which they call a desire-machine. This is a complex process which has three phases corresponding to the main stages of the production process as described by Marx: first, there is the connection of part-objects and flows of energy or material to form an elementary body or simple machine. Second, the aggregation of these elements to form a complex body involves the constitution of what they call a 'body-without-organs' or 'plane of 71

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consistency'. This is an imaginary body-surface on which the various elementary bodies and energies are recorded, but on which they may also be desexualised and reconnected in different configurations. As such, it embodies the creative or 'schizophrenic' potential of desire.2 Third and finally, there is a phase of consumption involving the experience of intensive states of the resultant psychic body. This implies sensation or selfenjoyment in a broad sense, which includes privation and suffering as well as sensual pleasure. According to Deleuze and Guattari, subjectivity emerges only as a residual effect of this consumption of intensive states which accompanies the connections and recordings of desire. To each phase, they assign a distinct form of synthesis: a connective synthesis of flows and part-objects, a disjunctive synthesis of meanings attached to the elementary machines, and a conjunctive synthesis of resultant differences which give rise to intensities. Desire is the force that animates this process of connection, encoding and consumption. The concept of desire as the principle of co-function or composition which determines the existence of any machinic assemblage echoes Deleuze's metaphysical account of the will to power as the differential principle of force relations: 'Desire: who, except priests would want to call it "lack"? Nietzsche called it "Will to Power'" (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 91). The end-point of the process of desiring production is a form of intensity which is 'consumed' by the body. Intensities are the products of a synthesis of differential forces, the effects of an encounter between different levels or kinds of energy, and the basis of all sensation. They express the difference between one state and another: warm-cold, light-dark, hard-soft, etc. Intensity is thus the primary mode in which desire consumes itself, the primary mode in which a body of whatever kind is affected. For the human body, intensity is the primary affect from which all forms of feeling and emotion are subsequently derived. Both schizophrenic experience and works of art involve such intensive quantities in their pure state. Throughout Anti-Oedipus (1977), Deleuze and Guattari draw upon accounts of schizophrenic delirium to illustrate aspects and stages of the process of desire, on the grounds that such experience is closest to the heart of desire. This assumption serves a polemical function in providing clinical leverage to their disagreement with Freud. It allows them to represent psychoanalysis as a misrepresentation of the nature of desire, and indeed as an institutional and discursive arm of those social forces that seek to repress and inhibit the authentic experience of desire. Beyond this, the more important point of their reliance upon schizophrenic delirium lies in the suggestion that the experience of intensity is the real motor of the process of desire as production. For this reason too, Deleuze and Guattari draw upon the experience of writers and painters to establish the link between a susceptibility to intensities and a creative relationship to the real.

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Art is the capture of sensations in a given medium, and therefore depends upon a susceptibility to the effects of forces in producing intensive states. Like desire, art in its pure form exists in a state of permanent exile, a nomadic state which resists the territorialisation of particular styles, genres or modes of capture. Both art and desire in its schizo form have an affinity with those states that carry the potential for change or metamorphosis. Desire and the affective dimension of power In the preceding chapter we noted the extent to which Deleuze and Guattari shared with Foucault a conception of philosophy as involving the analysis of assemblages or apparatuses. On this basis, Deleuze points to the close proximity between 'what Foucault called the metaphysics of power and Guattari the micropolitics of desire' (Deleuze 1995b: 86). It is tempting to see Deleuze and Guattari's work and that of Foucault during this period as engaged in parallel but complementary projects, and more than one commentator has succumbed to this temptation: for example, Ronald Bogue comments that 'Power for Foucault, like desire for Deleuze and Guattari, permeates all social relations, penetrates the body at a subindividual level, and implements an immediately political investment of the body within larger circuits of action and production' (Bogue 1989: 105). There are a number of formal parallels between their respective theories of desire and power, as well as approving footnotes to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus in Foucault's Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977a: 309). Just as Deleuze and Guattari develop a machinic theory of desire, so Foucault proposes an analysis of panoptic power as a machine for the production of homogeneous effects of power (Foucault 1977a: 202). Just as Anti-Oedipus asserts that desire produces reality (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 30), so Foucault asserts that power is productive, 'power produces; it produces reality. . . The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production' (Foucault 1977a: 194). At the same time, there are important differences between their respective approaches to machinic assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari appear to endorse this conception of their complementary relation to Foucault while drawing attention to their differences in a footnote to the analysis of regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus: Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary,

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which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 531) Stated in these terms, the difference between power and desire all too easily appears to coincide with a difference between the positive force of desire and the negative force of power. The difference between Deleuze-Guattari and Foucault would then turn on the question of whether theoretical priority is accorded to power or to desire. Correspondingly, each approach would confront its own distinctive political problem. In Foucault's case, this would be the problem of explaining how resistance is possible. For Deleuze and Guattari, as we saw above, this would be the Reichian problem of explaining how desire becomes complicit in its own repression. However, this way of presenting the relation between them oversimplifies the issues and seriously underestimates the conceptual resources common to both Foucault's approach to power and the Deleuzian theory of desire. Taking into account the affective dimension of power points towards a different way of understanding the relation between power and desire, which suggests they are not so much parallel and complementary as convergent phenomena. We noted above that Deleuze's concept of power took into account not only the capacity of a body to affect other bodies but also the capacity to be affected. He suggests that there is a Spinozist inspiration to Nietzsche's theory in so far as will to power is manifest both as capacity to affect and capacity to be affected: 'the will to power is not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos' (Nietzsche 1968: para. 635). Whether or not the claim of inspiration is historically accurate with regard to Nietzsche, it is around this affective dimension of the exercise of power that we can trace the outlines of a zone of indiscernibility between the Deleuzian concepts of power and desire. For we also noted that Deleuze explicitly aligns his conception of desire with Nietzsche's conception of life as will to power. This implies that, like Nietzsche's expansive force, desire seeks its own enhancement and tends to reproduce itself on an ever-expanding scale. In other words, both Deleuze's concept of desire and his concept of power involve an inner principle of increase. From the point of view of the affective dimension of power, this principle of increase implies that a body will be more powerful the more ways in which it can be affected, and the greater its range and degree of sensitivity to different kinds of intensive states. A body will increase in power to the extent that its capacities to affect and be affected become more developed and differentiated (Deleuze 1983: 62). Deleuze follows Spinoza in calling such capacities to be affected the 'affects' of a body. Strictly speaking, these correspond to the transition of the affected body from one state to another. Spinoza distinguishes between transitions that involve increase in a body's power of acting and those that 74

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involve a decrease: the former give rise to joy while the latter give rise to sadness (Deleuze 1988c: 49-50). 3 Nietzsche draws a similar contrast between the affective states which accompany transitions in the state of a body's power in terms of the enhancement or depletion of the 'feeling of power'. This term refers to the conscious or unconscious feeling that accompanies all action, what Nietzsche refers to as the 'desire for self-enjoyment' that is gratified in every individual action (Nietzsche 1984: bk 2, para. 107). The feeling of power is a sign of our own power to act; however, it is not a reliable sign. The history of culture provides many examples of illusory means by which individuals and groups seek a feeling of power: sacrifices to gods, cruelty to others and to animals, fast cars and alcohol, to name but a few. Just as the actions of others produce sensations in us, so too do our own actions. To the extent that these actions are successful, the feeling of power will be enhanced: to the extent that they fail, the feeling of power will be depleted. In turn, these affective states which accompany actions will react upon the agent's capacity to act. In other words, there is a feedback loop between the success or otherwise of attempts to act and the agent's capacity to act. This is why the feeling of power has become the 'strongest propensity' of human beings and why Nietzsche suggests that the means for producing it retrace the history of our culture.4 The component of the Deleuzian concept of desire which corresponds to Spinoza's affect or Nietzsche's feeling of power is the concept of intensity. Deleuze and Guattari describe the final phase of the production process of desire, after the construction of a plane or body without organs on which intensities circulate, as the experience or 'consumption' of pure intensive states. The principle of increase implies that desire will be enhanced the greater the range and degree of intensities available. In extreme cases, the process gives rise to raw feelings such as those Nietzsche describes in his letter to Gast of 14 August 1881: unable to go out because his eyes were inflamed from weeping 'tears of joy' while wandering in the mountains, he fears that he is 'one of those machines that can burst apart'.5 These states are typically associated with transitions from one affective state to another: in Nietzsche's case, this transition is related to his ecstatic revelation of eternal return; in the case of another of Deleuze and Guattari's examples in Anti-Oedipus, Judge Schreber, the transition relates to his experience of becoming-woman; in the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald (see p. 86), the transition relates to his 'crack-up' and subsequent experience of a strange despair which led him to describe 'a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 229). In all cases, it is a question of new possibilities for affecting and being affected. The feeling of power is an affect which is associated with a process of becoming-other than what one was before. In Anti-Oedipus (1977), Deleuze and Guattari 75

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tend to draw their examples from the celibate machines of writers, artists and psychotics. Although these give the impression that intensities are solitary affairs and individual desiring machines are like characters from Beckett, nothing in the theory of desire limits the experience of joy to cases such as these. Consider the principle of increase or 'inner will' at work in the Deleuzian theory of desire: desire produces intensities, but these intensities are tied to the physical, emotional or intellectual capacities of the body concerned. As a result, a typical path to increase in the range or degrees of intensity available to a given body will pass through the subject's involvement with activities outside itself. Activities or forms of engagement with the world and with other bodies, which are inseparable from action upon the actions of others, are the means by which we can bring about increase in our own desire. Jane Gallop's account of a pedagogic encounter which gave rise to an experience of erotic intensity may be understood in these terms (Gallop 1992). She recounts an episode in which a graduate student confronts her after receiving a bad grade on a paper he has written and challenges her to go through the paper with him. Reluctantly, she agrees to do so and eventually, after a long and intense session working through the text together, the student is left bowed and vulnerable while the teacher finds herself similarly exhausted but agitated in a manner that she describes as indistinguishable from sexual desire. This was not the familiar scenario of erotic desire intruding upon the scene of pedagogy, but a more interesting story 'of desire arising within the scene of pedagogy, where it is troublingly unclear whether this is really teaching or really sex' (Gallop 1992: 212). The episode involved an exercise of intellectual or pedagogic power over the student, apparently to good effect. Moreover, this was an exercise of power over another which conforms to the open agonistic structure rather than the structure of domination. In the course of what began as a pedagogic confrontation, each party acted upon the other in ways that could not have been predicted at the outset: he caused her to reschedule a previous engagement, she changed his appraisal of his own work. The outcome was not an affair but a distinct improvement in the student's powers as a writer and in Gallop's sense of her own power as a teacher. It was an event of considerable intensity in which the powers of both teacher and student were enhanced. Gallop's description of the student's reaction illustrates the sense in which the joy that accompanies an increase of power is not always a pleasurable experience: 'He sat there huddled over and seemed very vulnerable' (Gallop 1992: 211). While the teacher was no less exhausted by their marathon session, her response is one of increasing agitation that turns into erotic desire. However, the origin of this desire is anything but sexual in the narrow sense. For, in her own words, the desire was rather awakened by the nature of the pedagogic encounter: by

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the experience of working closely with the student and 'the intimate experience of being good together' (Gallop 1992: 215). In short, what produced her erotic state was the experience of her successful exercise of her own power as a teacher, in a manner and to a degree she had never done before; in other words, her feeling of her own power to enhance the power of the other. Gallop's experience shows how the feeling of power obtained by contributing to the power of others may be indistinguishable from an intense experience of desire, and vice versa. If this is so, then it matters little whether we speak of desire or the feeling of power. What matters is the manner in which we act upon the actions of others, and the kinds of assemblage in which and through which we desire. We noted above that schizoanalysis does not propose a political programme (see p. 70). Yet even though, as Deleuze and Guattari say, 'there are no revolutionary or reactionary loves', there are none the less 'forms of love' that are indices of the reactionary or the revolutionary character of the libidinal investment in a given social field (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 365-6). The distinction between these two forms of love or two poles of social libidinal investment goes to the heart of the schizoanalytic 'politics of desire'. It is stated in various ways in the course of Anti-Oedipus (1977), in terms of different uses of the syntheses which define the process of desire, or in terms of the difference between molar and molecular states of desire. The same distinction is later drawn between the two states or sides of any machinic assemblage: one side which faces the strata which make it an organism, subject or complete entity of some kind, and the other which faces the body without organs or plane of consistency on which the organism tends to break down or is transformed into something else. Both sides are equally states of desire, but it is only in the latter state that pure intensities arise or circulate (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4). Just as Foucault contrasts relations of domination with open or agonistic relations in which an agent acts upon the actions of another (Foucault 1983b), so Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between, on the one hand, assemblages of desire that are fixed or delimited in particular ways, shut off from all but certain specified relations to the outside, and on the other, more fluid and open-ended assemblages in which new connections and new forms of relation to the outside are always possible, even at the risk of transforming the assemblage into some other kind of body. They attach systematic conceptual and ethical priority to the latter kind of assemblage which enables new connections and relations to the outside. In this sense, the Deleuzian concept of desire justifies the view that 'Desire is revolutionary because it always wants more connections and assemblages' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 79).

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Becomings The concept that best expresses the intimate connection between power and desire in Deleuze and Guattari's thought is their concept of 'becoming'. We saw in Chapter 1 how they define philosophical concepts in part by reference to their 'becomings', by which they mean the pathways along which a concept may be transformed while retaining a family resemblance to its former incarnation. In similar fashion, they define material bodies in part by reference to the ways in which they can 'become-other'. Corporeal becoming is a different process to conceptual becoming, but similar in so far as it is 'the action by which something or someone continues to become other (while continuing to be what it is)' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 177, translation modified). Deleuze often uses Spinoza's term 'affect' to refer to such transformations in bodily capacities. The concept of affect therefore establishes a conceptual connection between the understanding of bodies in terms of power and in terms of becoming. Bodies undergo modification or change when they act upon other bodies or when they are acted upon by other bodies. These modifications which result from entering into relations with other bodies are what Spinoza calls 'affections'. He distinguishes such affections or modifications from the 'affects' or variations in degree of power to which they give rise in the body concerned.6 In these terms, a body may be defined by the affects of which it is capable. Children often think of bodies in these terms: for example, Freud's Little Hans defines a horse by means of affects such as 'having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker, pulling heavy loads . . . e t c ' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:257). Affects can be either active or reactive and, in his discussion of Foucault's concept of power, Deleuze relies upon this distinction in order to classify the different ways in which a body can act upon others and the ways in which it can be acted upon: 'to incite, provoke or produce . . . constitute active affects, while to be incited, or provoked, to be induced to produce, to have a "useful" effect, constitute reactive affects' (Deleuze 1988b: 71). Defining bodies in terms of the affects of which they are capable is equivalent to defining them in terms of the relations into which they can enter with other bodies, or in terms of their capacities for engagement with the powers of other bodies. In A Thousand Plateaus, what Deleuze and Guattari call processes of 'becoming' are precisely such engagements with the powers of other bodies. This is the reason for their assertion that 'affects are becomings' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256). Plateau 10 is devoted to the analysis of a variety of different kinds of 'becoming'. The list is open-ended but includes at least: becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-woman and becoming-imperceptible. From the perspective of desire, becomings may be defined in terms of the affects or intensities that correspond to a body's relations with other

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bodies: 'to the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256). In the case of Little Hans, his own becoming-horse is an attempt to construct an assemblage which would include some of the intensities associated with the affects of the cart-horse. Deleuze and Guattari ask in what way the elaboration of a becoming-horse might 'ameliorate Hans's problem, to what extent would it open a way out that had been previously blocked?' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 258). In the case of the experience of intensity described by Gallop, we saw how the same event might be described in terms of desire or in terms of the feeling of power: her exercise of pedagogic power over the student produced a feeling of power that was for her indistinguishable from erotic desire. We can now see that this event involved a process of becoming in the strict Deleuzian sense: a becoming-student on the part of the teacher, to the extent that she was forced to come to terms with his version of what he had wanted to say in the paper, and a becoming-teacher on the part of the student to the extent that he was forced to see his own text through the eyes of a more experienced reader. From the perspective of power, becomings may be regarded as processes of increase or enhancement in the powers of one body, carried out in relation to the powers of another, but without involving appropriation of those powers. One way in which bodies can increase their powers is by entering into alliances with other bodies that serve to reinforce or enhance their own powers. The symbiotic relation between wasps and orchids (see p. 54) is an example of a double-becoming which involves real interaction between the two parties. In some cases, such as alliance between individual bodies in the form of a social contract, the mutual reinforcement of powers may amount to the formation of a new and more complex body. Yet another kind of becoming-other occurs when bodies form a kind of virtual alliance with other bodies or states of being. In relation to human beings as a whole, becomings are by definition perverse processes which involve a relation to the unnatural or the inhuman. For example, we learn from myths, anthropological accounts and religious practices that human beings are capable of a variety of becomings-animal. These are not a matter of literally becoming the animal, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, but rather of enhancing the powers one has or of acquiring new powers by entering into a proximity to the animal. Thus, the first stages of becoming-wolf are marked by improved senses of smell and hearing. It is not that the real powers of the animal are in fact always assumed by the subject of the becoming, although in some cases something akin to those powers may be acquired. Rather, it is a question of the production of affects, or forming an inter-individual body with the real or imagined powers of the animal in question. Even an engagement with the powers attributed to the animal in the social imaginary may serve to enhance the 79

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feeling of power and thereby the real capacities of those engaged in the becoming: sorcerers, warriors, actors and so on. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the processes of animal-becoming are essentially related to marginal social groups or movements. From a historical point of view, [there is] an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 247) 7 Becomings may be realised in the social imaginary or in the unconscious desires of individuals, but they are always linked to a qualitative multiplicity of some kind: 'We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 239-40). 8 The animal which humans become always appears in the form of a pack or band. The pack is an assemblage of affects and powers which, in turn, affect the quality of the human which enters into relation with them. Melville's Moby Dick is Deleuze's favoured example of a becominganimal in which the relation to the multiplicity is mediated by the relation to an anomalous figure who stands at the border of the pack. Through his pursuit of the white whale, Ahab enters into a becoming-whale while the object of his pursuit becomes the white wall of human weakness through which he desires to pass: 'How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough' (Melville 1994: 167). Ahab's becoming is a line of flight which takes him beyond life itself, even if in doing so he confronts his own death. The white whale stands for all those figures with whom we can enter into a pact in order to pass beyond a given state of life or being. He is anomalous not just in being an exception but in marking a limit or frontier beyond which everything changes. Anomalous does not mean abnormal but 'the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of deterritorialization' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 244). The becomings which interest Deleuze and Guattari are not simply becomings-other but minoritarian becomings. There is no such thing as becoming-majoritarian. The concept of becoming is therefore intimately linked to the concept of the minoritarian, and through this to the processes of deterritorialisation which define a given qualitative multiplicity. We noted at the end of Chapter 2 how they distinguish between minorities conceived as subsystems or determinate elements within a given majority and the process of becoming minor or minoritarian, which refers to the

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potential of every element to deviate from the standard or norm that defines that majority. In these terms, to become-minoritarian is to embark upon a process of deterritorialisation or divergence from the norm, while conversely 'all becoming is minoritarian' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 106, 291). In so far as the subject of modern European society and political community is masculine, then women and children as well as animals are minorities, and becoming-animal, becoming-child or becoming-woman are potential paths of deterritorialisation of the majority. Becoming-woman should be understood as a becoming of the same type as becoming-animal, in the sense that it involves a virtual alliance with the affects and powers that have been traditionally assigned to women. The reality of the becoming has little to do with a relation to real women, but everything to do with a relation to the incorporeal body of woman as it figures in the social imaginary. This body might be defined in terms of the affects associated with the nurture and protection of others, or the affects associated with dependent social status such as a capacity for dissimulation or for cultivating the affection of others, delight in appearances and roleplay.9 Becoming-woman does not involve imitating or assuming the forms of femininity but rather creating a molecular or micro-femininity in the subject concerned by reproducing the characteristic features, movements or affects of what passes for 'the feminine' in a given form of patriarchal society. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari argue that there is a sense in which becoming-woman is primary in relation to the other kinds of social and political becoming-minoritarian. Only minorities can function as agents or media of becoming, but they can do so only on condition that they cease to be 'a definable aggregate in relation to the majority' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 291). For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari argue that women themselves must undergo a becoming-woman, and that their doing so is a condition of the becoming-woman of all, men and women alike. It is in so far as they form the other term of a binary opposition which defines the majority that women may be subjects of a becoming-woman. It is in so far as they form a minority within the majority that they can function as a medium of becoming. Becomings are molecular not molar. While they are careful to acknowledge the importance of 'molar' feminist politics aimed at the establishment of women's rights on an equal footing with those of men, Deleuze and Guattari also insist on the necessity of a 'molecular women's politics' alongside the molar. In this sense, all becomings are molecular and they all 'begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 277). The only reason they give for this primacy is the 'special situation' of women in relation to the male standard (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 291), which is to point to the fundamental role of the domination of women by men in relation to the differential assignment of power and affect to the sexes. 81

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Their claim is that the acquisition of affects through other forms of becoming, such as animal-becoming, presupposes a degree of becoming-woman: that this is the 'first quantum' of becoming-minoritarian in all its forms. The concept of becoming-woman and the special place accorded to it in the spectrum of minoritarian becomings has been a focus of much feminist criticism of Deleuze and Guattari.10 There is no doubt that they adopt the speaking position of the masculine subject of the majority, even as they advocate the deterritorialisation of the structures of domination which sustain that position. It is also true that their concepts and methods of analysis are different from those that have informed much feminist theory. Nevertheless, it is not clear that they are guilty of all of which they have been accused. One recurrent criticism takes their priority claim for becomingwoman to imply that, in the context of gender politics, it is women who must take the lead in breaking with the stereotypical assignment of affects and roles. Such a view would be sexist since it places the burden of change primarily upon women (Massumi 1992: 89). However, Deleuze and Guattari assert the primacy of becoming-woman not that women must 'go first' in the practical politics of challenging the mechanisms of male domination. Becoming, in their view, is transhistorical and 'cannot be conceptualized in terms of past and future' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 292). As Moira Gatens points out, there is no justification in terms of their social cartography for regarding the priority of becoming-woman as a temporal priority in the processes of becoming (Gatens 1996: 175). Underlying this temporal reading of the priority of becoming-woman is another, more significant confusion with regard to Deleuze and Guattari's political perspective. This is the confused idea that the end of gender politics is the destruction of gender (of the molar organisation of the sexes under patriarchy) - just as in their view the end of class politics is the destruction of class (of the molar organisation of work under capitalism). The goal would be for every body to ungender itself, creating a nonmolarizing socius that fosters carnal invention rather than containing it. (Massumi 1992: 89) In the first place, it is a mistake to think that becomings are subject to this kind of teleology. A line of becoming, they claim, 'has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 293). As such, it makes no sense to regard becomingwoman as a necessary stage in a broader process of abolition of molar subjectivity or human liberation.11 Second, the idea of a 'nonmolarizing socius' is an illusion of the same order as the idea of a society without power relations. Deleuze and Guattari are not theorists of liberation but 82

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theorists of becoming-revolutionary. The latter implies the possibility of transformation in the forms of social organisation of work and desire, and the possibility of redistribution of the molar assignment of differential power and affects to the sexes, but not the abolition of molarisation as such. Becoming-revolutionary is a process open to all at any time. Moreover, its value does not depend on the success or failure of the molar redistributions to which it gives rise: 'The victory of a revolution is immanent and consists in the new bonds it installs between people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution's fused material and quickly give way to division and betrayal' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 177). Freedom is manifest in such moments of becoming-revolutionary, whether in a personal or a social sense, but this is a different concept of freedom to that which underpins liberal and liberation theories alike. Critical freedom The Deleuzian ethic that we have so far described in terms of assemblages, power and desire might also be described as an ethics of freedom. However, in order to do so, it is necessary to clarify the concept of freedom that is involved. We have seen how the theory of assemblages developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) systematically privileges processes of creative transformation and metamorphosis through which individual and collective bodies may be transformed. Implicit in this theory is a concept of critical freedom, where 'critical' is understood not in the sense that relates to criticism or judgement, but in the technical sense which relates to a crisis or turning point in some process. In these terms, a critical point is an extreme or limit case; a point at which some state or condition of things passes over into a different state or condition. Critical freedom differs from the standard liberal concepts of positive and negative freedom by its focus upon the conditions of change or transformation in the subject, and by its indifference to the individual or collective nature of the subject. By contrast, traditional liberal approaches tended to take as given the individual subject and to define freedom in terms of the capacity to act without hindrance in the pursuit of one's ends or in terms of the capacity to satisfy one's most significant desires. For example, in both Isaiah Berlin's classic description and defence of negative liberty (Berlin 1969) and Charles Taylor's criticism of that concept (Taylor 1985), the focus is upon the preservation or continuity of the individual subject of freedom rather than its transformation. Berlin defines negative liberty in terms of 'the area of non-interference' within which subjects are left to do or be what they are able to do or be (Berlin 1969: 16). His concept of freedom involves two elements: first, a majoritarian subject of action, where this is supposed to be a 'normal human being' with desires, goals and capacities for action which fall within the range of 83

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normality for a given time and place. Second, the presence of external limits to the individual's sphere of action. The implication of his spatial metaphors is that freedom lies in between agents and the constraints upon their action.12 While the boundaries of that space may vary over time, freedom is a matter of where the line is drawn at any given moment. At any particular historical moment, freedom presupposes a static subject with given capacities and interests. By contrast, Taylor's concept of positive freedom is based upon a more complex concept of the subject of action as an individual capable of 'strong evaluation'. The resulting concept of freedom thus includes an element absent from Berlin's concept, namely the concept of internal limits to freedom. Taylor defends a view of positive freedom as 'the exercising of control over one's life' (Taylor 1985: 62). This control or self-realisation demands that one have a sense of one's identity, of who or what one is, on the basis of which one can discriminate between one's authentic or essential desires and those that are inauthentic or inessential. Such discrimination is what Taylor means by strong evaluation, and his argument is that even negative liberty presupposes this kind of qualitative judgement about the purposes or kinds of action that are significant to persons. However, Taylor's concept of freedom also remains tied to a concept of the subject as a given, determinate structure of interests, goals or desires. Freedom still refers to the capacity of the subject to act in pursuit of a given set of fundamental interests, rather than the capacity to alter those interests. In other words, Taylor's concept of positive freedom overlooks the important sense in which a person is deemed free only to the extent that they are able to distance themselves from the structure of values with which they grew up and to acquire others. Any defensible account of freedom must allow for the possibility that agents will act in ways that lead them to alter their desires, preferences and goals, and even for the possibility that they might consciously question certain forms of selfunderstanding which sustain their accepted goals. Such questioning may occur in isolation, but it is more likely to arise in the course of a movement for change in the relevant area of social life, or in the context of exposure to other ways of thinking and acting. In these ways, for example, feminist criticism of assumptions about the respective capacities of men and women to affect and be affected may raise questions about the traditional distribution of affects, or an influx of immigrants in a formerly monocultural society may challenge the core values of both residents and newcomers. Liberal political philosophy now takes note of this dimension of freedom, insisting that freedom must include not just the individual's capacity to act without interference and in accordance with his or her fundamental values, but also the capacity critically to evaluate and revise those values. Liberalism, it is now argued, guarantees not only the individual's right to

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choose their own conception of the good, but also their right to revise and reformulate that conception. Thus, James Tully uses the term 'critical freedom' to refer to this capacity to 'question in thought and challenge in practice one's inherited cultural ways' (Tully 1995: 202). Moreover, if we accept that a person is defined by the values and beliefs that determine their structure of strong evaluation, then a possible outcome of the exercise of such critical freedom is that one becomes a different person: Our conceptions of the good may and often do change over time, usually slowly but sometimes rather suddenly. When these changes are sudden, we are likely to say that we are no longer the same person. We know what this means: we refer to a profound and pervasive shift, or reversal, in our final ends and commitments . . . (Rawls 1993: 31) In contrast to the traditional concepts of negative and positive freedom, critical freedom thus concerns those moments in a life after which one is no longer the same person. It is the freedom to transgress the limits of what one is presently capable of being or doing, rather than just the freedom to be or do those things. In the course of a life, individuals make choices which may significantly affect the range, nature or course of their future actions: the decision to become a parent, to embark upon one particular career or course of study, or to leave one's country of birth and live in another culture, are all cases of significant action upon one's future actions. To the extent that these events may have the effect of opening up certain paths and closing off others, and to the extent that the individual's capacities to affect and be affected will change as a result, they are possible occasions of 'becoming' in Deleuze and Guattari's sense of the term. They are limits beyond which an individual's desires, preferences or goals may be irrevocably changed. It is no objection to point out that all moments in a life carry this potential, since for Deleuze and Guattari the possibility of becoming-other is indeed present at every moment. It is realised in those moments when a qualitatively different kind of transition is involved. Following Deleuze's mathematical model of qualitative multiplicity, we might consider a life as a series of points at which decisions are made, or events are experienced. The critical points will then be the distinctive as opposed to the ordinary points upon a curve: they are the 'events' that ultimately determine the shape of a life. In these terms, a life will manifest more critical freedom the more it is capable of variation of this kind. To be capable of such variation does not imply a commitment to experiencing it at every opportunity, just as radical change in the circumstances of a life does not necessarily imply critical freedom on the part of the subject.13 Deleuze and Guattari do not offer a concept of persons but a concept of assemblage which can be applied equally to social or to personal identity. 85

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Different identities can be specified in terms of the lines or processes that make up different kinds of assemblage. As individuals or collectivities, they argue, we are composed of different kinds of 'lines': molar lines that correspond to the forms of rigid segmentation found in bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions; molecular lines that correspond to the fluid or overlapping forms of division characteristic of 'primitive' territoriality; and finally, lines of flight that are the paths along which things change or become transformed into something else. The manner in which differences between these lines may be used to express different kinds of personal transformation is demonstrated by Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novella, The Crack Up (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 198-200). Fitzgerald distinguishes three different kinds of transition from one state or stage in a life to another: first, there are the large breaks between youth and adulthood, between poverty and wealth, between illness and good health, between success or failure in a chosen profession. These, Fitzgerald writes, are 'the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside'. In his own life, they include an adolescent illness which affected his college career, an encounter with class difference in the form of a failed relationship, the rise of cinema and its perceived effect on the novel, and the onset of alcoholism. But these are not the most significant breaks: the important breaks are those almost imperceptible cracks which affect a person's concept of self. These are the subtle shifts of feeling or attitude which distance the person from his or her former convictions. They involve molecular changes in the structure of a person. They are, in Fitzgerald's words, 'the sort of blow that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it'. A person does not recover from blows of this sort, he writes, 'he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about'. In the autobiographical case recounted in the novella, the subject is confronted with a particularly severe break-down which involved a loss of faith in his former values and the dissipation of all his convictions. He seeks to effect what he calls 'a clean break' with his past self (Fitzgerald 1956: 69-84). By this means, he resolves to become 'a writer only' and to 'cease any attempt to be a person, to be kind, just or generous'. Fitzgerald's novella recounts an experience of what Deleuze and Guattari call 'becoming-imperceptible'. The desire to be like everyone else and to go unnoticed is connected to a desire to reduce oneself to a minimal set of traits on the basis of which to forge new connections with the world: 'To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one's zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 280). Of course, in many senses of the term, Fitzgerald's subject remains the same person after as before, but not in the senses that matter for the liberal

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concept of freedom. The subject of Fitzgerald's novella no longer has the same interests nor the same desires and preferences. His goals are not the same, nor are the values that would underpin his strong evaluations. As a result, the kind of freedom that is manifest in a break of this kind cannot be captured in the definitions of negative and positive freedom. By contrast, Fitzgerald's experience of the 'clean break' is precisely what interests Deleuze and Guattari. Such a break amounts to a redistribution of desire such that 'when something occurs, the self that awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 198-9). This kind of sudden shift towards another quality of life or towards a life which is lived at another degree of intensity is one possible outcome of what they call a line of flight. It is on this kind of line that critical freedom is manifest. We noted at the end of Chapter 3 the dangers associated with lines of flight: Deleuze and Guattari's argument is not that lines of flight will always turn out badly, but that they may do so, for example in the absence of productive connections with other forces, or in the aftermath of an allencompassing or too-abrupt refusal of one's past or prior self. In view of these dangers, it is apparent that critical freedom is indifferent to the desires, preferences and goals of the subject in the sense that it may threaten as much as advance any of these. As a result, whereas the normative status and the value of liberal freedom is straightforwardly positive, critical freedom is a much more ambivalent and risky affair: more ambivalent since it involves leaving behind existing grounds of value, with the result that it is not always clear whether it is a good, or indeed by what standards it could be evaluated as good or bad; risky because there is no telling in advance where such processes of mutation and change might lead, whether at the level of individual or collective assemblages.

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5 SOCIAL MACHINES AND THE STATE The history and politics of deterritorialisation

Machinic theory of society Deleuze and Guattari propose an outline of 'universal history' which in some respects resembles Marx's materialist theory of history. For Marx, it is the mode of production of essential goods and services which explains the nature of society in each epoch. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the abstract machines of desire and power which define the nature of a given society: 'We define social formations by machinic processes and not by modes of production (these on the contrary depend on the processes)' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 435). While they distinguish three major kinds of social machine - territorial, despotic and capitalist - unlike Marx, they do not consider these to be successive stages in a single process of evolution. Rather, they are understood as virtual machines which may be operative in a given social field. Concrete social formations are then specified by the extent to which the different abstract social machines are actualised within them in varying combinations. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari propose a form of philosophical knowledge of history which remains indebted to the structuralist Marxism of Althusser. Their aim is not primarily to describe particular societies but to present concepts, along with historical examples and illustrations, which may in turn be applied to the analysis of concrete social formations. We noted in Chapter 4 that Deleuze and Guattari propose a concept of desire which treats it as a process of production, where the successive stages of this process parallel the stages of material production as these are described by Marx. In Part 3 of Anti-Oedipus (1977), this concept of 'machinic' production forms the point of departure for their theory of society as a machine. Social life is machinic in so far as it involves the differentiation and distribution of material flows, the recording of primary processes by the establishment of chains of signification, and the resultant differentiation of social subjects and 'consumption' of social being. In these terms, social life may be conceived as 'a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of 88

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recording and the productions of consumption' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 142). Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between different kinds of social machine according to the manner in which the coordination and control of material social flows are carried out. What they call the socius is the imagined surface upon which this control and coordination take place. The socius thus appears to be the agent of the social production process: the business of the socius, they argue, is to code desire: 'The prime function incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 33). Capital, as Marx describes it, provides both a model and primary exemplar for this concept of the socius. In Marx's account, capitalism is a system of coordination of the flows of social production and reproduction in which capital itself appears to be the cause of the entire process of social production: it forms a surface on which the forces and agents of production are distributed and the surplus appropriated. To the extent that capital is 'the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 10), the socius is the imaginary body of society as a whole, the full body from which the material flows are supposed to emanate. The socius takes different forms according to the means of codification of flows: 'flows of women and children, flows of herds and seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows: nothing must escape coding' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 142). The first form of socius is the primitive territorial machine: 'territorial' not because it operates upon territories but because in these societies it is the earth itself which is the recording surface or full body of all social processes: The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production . . . It is the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and the means of labour are recorded, and the agents and the products distributed. It appears here as the quasi-cause of production and the object of desire (it is on the earth that desire becomes bound to its own repression). The territorial machine is therefore the first form of socius, the machine of primitive inscription, the 'megamachine' that covers a social field. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 140-1) This machine effects a collective investment of bodily organs (mouth, anus, penis, vagina, etc.) which 'plugs desire into the socius and assembles social production and desiring-production into a whole on the earth' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 142). This collective social investment involves literal

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inscription upon bodies via marks of initiation. These transform individual biological bodies into social bodies, codifying the organs in accordance with the requirements of social existence. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari call this process of enculturation a system of cruelty, but also a principal means by which humanity first forged for itself a memory. It therefore corresponds to the earliest stages of human culture. The method of codification practised by the territorial machine is primitive not only in the sense that it is characteristic of so-called 'primitive' societies, but also in the sense that it remains the basis of human culture: to the extent that all societies presuppose forms of collective social investment of the body, pre-capitalist social machines are 'inherent in desire' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 139). The primitive territorial socius is above all a system of organising people, and its principal mechanism for doing so is the kinship system. Kinship systems specify the classes or groups to which individuals belong and the relationships between them. Deleuze and Guattari argue for a conception of kinship systems as practices or strategies of alliance rather than structures. They argue that lines of filiation and alliance are equally important determinants of the operation of the social machine, being neither derived from nor reducible to the other: 'it is essential to take into consideration how ties of alliance combine concretely with relations of filiation on a given territorial surface' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 147). By means of the relationships which they establish between groups and the forms of exchange between them, kinship systems determine the flows of material production within primitive societies. They establish the deductions that constitute a minimal stock or inherited accumulation of goods, as well as the detachments such as those that occur in the context of marriage: 'A flow is coded insofar as detachments from the chain and deductions from the flows are effected in correspondence' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 149). Following Nietzsche and Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the economy of the primitive territorial machine is governed not by equal exchange but by the principle of fundamental disequilibrium which corresponds to relations of debt and credit. Nietzsche's analysis of the psychic economy of punishment in On the Genealogy of Morality (1994) provides the model for their account of the 'code surplus' which explains the equivalence of pain inflicted for the injury experienced. The same phenomenon of surplus value of code, they suggest, accounts for the manner in which, in some societies, the accumulation of perishable wealth converts into imperishable prestige (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 150). The second form of socius is the full body of the despot which accompanies the 'Barbarian Despotic Machine'. By contrast with the territorial machine, Deleuze and Guattari argue that this social machine is characterised by the instauration of a new system of alliance and a new form of

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filiation. The despotic machine substitutes hierarchical castes or classes for the lateral alliances of the territorial machine and introduces a new form of filiation which connects the people through the despot directly to the deity; 'new alliance and direct filiation are specific categories that testify to the existence of a new socius, irreducible to the lateral alliances and extended filiations that are declined by the primitive machine' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 194, trans, modified). There is a profound discontinuity between this social machine and the primitive, but also a degree of continuity to the extent that it retains the old territorialities of lineage and alliance, while integrating them as subordinate working parts of the new machine. As in Nietzsche's genealogical conception of history, changes in the nature of social institutions are understood to be the result of their being overtaken by new forces and subjected to new meanings (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 196). The despotic machine does not suppress the old regime of lateral alliances and extended filiations but rather displaces their character as determinant relations of social organisation by subordinating them to its own system of alliance and filiation. For example, the forms of local alliance debt are subordinated to an 'infinite debt' owed to the despot, who annuls existing debts or provides credit in the form of protection and infrastructure only to create an interminable debt to himself. Marx's analysis of Asiatic production provides a model for this analysis of a form of social organisation in which 'the autochthonous rural communities subsist and continue to produce, inscribe and consume; in effect they are the State's sole concern. The wheels of the territorial lineage machine subsist, but are no longer anything more than the working parts of the State machine' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 196). Whereas the earth was the socius or full body of the primitive territorial machine, this place is now filled by the body of the despot or the deity, who in turn becomes the quasi-cause of all production and the final destination of all consumption. What counts is not the person of the sovereign, nor even his function, which can be limited. It is the social machine that has profoundly changed: in place of the territorial machine there is the 'megamachine' of the State, a functional pyramid that has the despot at its apex, an immobile motor, with the bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and its transmission gear, and the villagers at its base, serving as its working parts. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 194) We noted above that for Deleuze and Guattari, the essential task of the socius is to code the flows of desire and matter which make up a society. The essential mechanism and the novelty of the despotic state machine is that it introduces a system of overcoding. By this means, a new form of 91

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inscription is overlaid upon the forms of primitive inscription, forcing them into alignment with the new alliance of despot and people and the direct filiation of despot and deity. Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Barbarian Despotic Machine implies a theory of the origin and nature of state-governed societies. They contrast their concept of the state with those accounts that represent it as the result of a treaty or contract (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 195), arguing instead that 'overcoding is the operation that constitutes the essence of the State' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 199). They argue that, far from being tied to the establishment of a territory, the state is the result of a movement of deterritorialisation which substitutes abstract signs for the signs of the earth and makes the land into an object of property. Nevertheless, the despotic state machine remains a system of code: it shares with the territorial machine a horror of decoded flows. While it emerges as a result of a process of deterritorialisation in relation to the territorial machine, the despotic machine immediately reterritorialises the new forms of property on the new socius. At the same time, it introduces its own forms of deterritorialisation, such as the invention of money, which initially serves the needs of taxation rather than those of commerce (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 197). As such, money under the conditions of the despotic machine amounts to a limited deterritorialisation and corresponding reterritorialisation of the flows of product. The 'Civilised Capitalist Machine' differs in several important respects from the previous social machines. First, whereas both the territorial and the despotic machines give rise to processes of deterritorialisation and generate decoded flows of various kinds, capitalism is the only social machine which is defined by 'the generalised decoding of flows'. Within pre-capitalist societies, the development of private property and commodity production, the extension of markets and the accumulation of money all amounted to deterritorialised flows of social product and activity. A primary task of the early modern states was to contain such flows by the creation of new social institutions and codes. Capitalism emerges only once these decoded flows are brought together in a new economic and social system which effects what Deleuze and Guattari call the conjunction of deterritorialised flows. It is this conjunction of decoded flows that allows capitalism to develop and capital to become 'the new social full body' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 226). Deleuze and Guattari follow Marx's account of the process of 'primitive accumulation' in describing the contingent encounter between flows of deterritorialised money and labour which gave rise to industrial capital. It is this encounter which alone makes possible capitalism as a self-reproducing and dynamic system of social production. The capitalist machine is not assembled until money in the form of capital takes direct control of the process of production itself. But this only occurs because of a series of historical accidents which bring together in the 92

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same place and time the necessary elements: 'on the one side, the deterritorialized worker who has become free and naked, having to sell his labour capacity; and on the other, decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying this labour capacity' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 225). Once properly capitalist production is established and takes over the principal sectors of industry within society, capital becomes the full body or quasi-cause that tends to appropriate all the productive forces. Capital is thus the third form of socius and the one that accompanies the Civilised Capitalist Machine. The second feature which distinguishes the capitalist machine from the territorial and despotic machines has to do with its mode of coordination and control: whereas the other two both involve the extraction of a code surplus, the capitalist machine extracts a surplus of flux or 'flow surplus'. Deleuze and Guattari rewrite Marx's account of the origin of surplus value under the conditions of capitalist production. Whereas Marx locates the secret of the process whereby money is able to beget more money in the peculiar capacity of labour power to create more value in a given period than it costs to buy, Deleuze and Guattari confine their analysis to the sphere of exchange in order to argue that the surplus results from the conjunction of decoded flows of constant and variable capital. Capitalism is the generation of a surplus by means of the differential relation between flows of constant and variable capital. They describe the essence of capital as a differential relation in the mathematical sense, Dy/Dx, where Dy represents the fluctuation of variable capital and Dx represents the fluctuation of constant capital, and they attribute to it a generative power in a manner that recalls Deleuze's metaphysics of the calculus in Difference and Repetition. It is this differential relation which defines 'the immanent social field peculiar to capitalism' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 227). Understood in this manner, the generation of surplus value is in principle without limit, subject only to the conditions of the reproduction of capital which are immanent to the process. With the emergence of capitalism, society passes from a regime of code surplus to a regime of flow surplus (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 228). Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this analysis provides a means of understanding certain features of capitalism which remain opaque to orthodox Marxist economic analysis, such as the fundamental incommensurability of money as capital or credit and money as a means of payment for consumption goods and services, which is reflected in the different treatment of these two forms of money in banking practice. This lack of common measure between the value of enterprises and the value of the labour capacity of workers is put forward as a reason why the tendency of the rate of profit to fall remains operative without ever reaching its ideal limit. Another aspect of the problem of the falling rate of profit which

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Deleuze and Guattari suggest their account of flow surplus can accommodate is the contribution of technological innovation to surplus value: There is a machinic surplus value produced by constant capital which develops along with automation and productivity, and which cannot be explained by factors that counteract the falling tendency - the increasing intensity of the exploitation of labour, the diminution of the price of the elements of constant capital, etc. - since, on the contrary, these factors depend on it. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 232) Their explanation of the contribution of technological change to capital's expanded reproduction amounts to a generalisation of the notion of flow surplus to include the surplus that derives from the flows of intellectual, scientific and technological code. Such flows of code are the basis for the creation and adoption of new technical machines. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the condition of their adoption is the social machine which 'organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 233). Ultimately, the crucial form in which this machine is actualised is the world market. However, as we shall see in the following section, it includes among its elements the various nation-states which play a crucial role in the regulation of capital movements and in the realisation of surplus value. Whereas the previous social machines operate by means of the codification of social processes, capitalism is unique in that it functions by means of a formal connection of decoded flows which Deleuze and Guattari call 'axiomatisation'. This is the third and most significant aspect of their characterisation of the difference between the capitalist social machine and the preceding machines. The concept of capitalism as an axiomatic system is a distinctive contribution which provides a privileged point of entry into Deleuze and Guattari's political thought. As we saw in Chapter 1, their concept of philosophy allows no place for metaphor. Their use of the term 'axiomatic' must therefore be regarded as the invention of a new concept by means of the adaptation of elements of the concept of an axiomatic system in mathematical logic and their transposition to the socioeconomic field. They argue that it is 'the real characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and present-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 461). Chief among these characteristics is the difference between an axiomatic system and a code. Whereas a code establishes a systematic correspondence directly between the elements of different signifying systems, an axiomatic system is defined by purely syntactic rules for the generation of strings of non-signifying or uninterpreted symbols. The resultant strings of symbols may be given an

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interpretation by the specification of a model and the assignment of significations to elements of the formal language. In these terms, capital may be supposed to function as 'an axiomatic of abstract quantities' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 228). As a universal equivalent, money is a purely quantitative measure that is indifferent to the qualitative character of flows of different kinds. Commodity production under capitalist conditions generalises this formal equality of all social goods and relations. Factors of production appear in the balancesheet of an enterprise simply as units of monetary value. Objects produced under non-capitalist regimes of code may also be drawn into the global market, where they are exchanged equally as items of value alongside capitalistically produced goods. To the extent that they are subsumed under the exchange relation, objects produced under the most diverse regimes of code, such as artefacts of indigenous handicraft, and products of fully automated production systems, may be 'formally united' within the capitalist axiomatic.1 Whereas capital is a directly economic means of regulating the production, circulation and consumption of social goods, pre-capitalist economies operate through codes that are extrinsic means of regulating the flow of economic materials and forces on the socius. Social codes determine the quality of particular flows, for example, prestige as opposed to consumption goods, thereby establishing indirect relations between flows of different kinds. They also determine the manner in which, within certain limits, a surplus is drawn from the primary flows: in code-governed societies, surplus value invariably takes the form of code surplus. Finally, because they are extrinsic to the processes of production and circulation of goods, systems of codification imply the existence of forms of collective belief, judgement and evaluation on the part of the agents of these processes. By contrast, capitalism has no need to mark bodies or to constitute a memory for its agents. Since it works by means of an axiomatic intrinsic to the social processes of production, circulation and consumption, it is a profoundly cynical machine: 'the capitalist is merely striking a pose when he bemoans the fact that nowadays no one believes in anything any more' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 250). Deleuze and Guattari speak of the capitalist axiomatic in both a restricted and primarily economic sense, and also in a broader sense where this refers to a social machine that includes a juridical and a political as well as a technocratic apparatus. It is as though there were two aspects of capitalism, or a distinction to be drawn between capital understood as 'a general axiomatic of decoded flows' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 453), and capitalism understood as a mechanism or set of mechanisms for the maintenance of a relatively stable assemblage of the social factors required to sustain the extraction of flow surplus. Capitalism as an economic system forms an axiomatic but so does capitalist society: 95

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The true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which takes the place of the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 233) This points to a second distinctive feature of axiomatic systems which justifies this adaptation of the concept. Subject to certain overriding constraints such as consistency or the generation of surplus value, there is considerable scope for variation in the axioms that may be appropriate for a given model. The history of capitalism has involved experimentation and evolution with regard to axioms. Its successive crises each provoke a response which may take the form of the addition of new axioms (the incorporation of trade unions, centralised wage fixing, social welfare, etc.) or the elimination of existing axioms (the elimination of trade unions and currency controls leading to the deregulation of banking, finance and labour markets). None of these axioms is essential to the continued functioning of capital as such, any more than are the axioms of bourgeois social life. Economic activity is increased when family members dine individually at McDonalds. As Marx and Engels pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism threatens to sweep away all the values of civilised social existence and replace them with the 'cash nexus'. The circulation of capital through the differential relation between the flows of finance and the flows of personal income, along with the circulation of information through the electronic circuits of mass communication, propels the entire world towards a society in which all the signs of the past are detached from their origins and written over with new signs, and the motley representatives of the present appear as 'paintings of all that has ever been believed'.2 Capitalism constantly approaches this limit only to displace it further ahead by reconstituting its own immanent relative limits. The capitalist axiomatic generates schizo-flows which are the basis of its restless and cosmopolitan energy while at the same time setting new limits on the socius. In this sense, the capitalist axiomatic is a machine that represses the very social forces and flows of matter and energy which it produces: 'it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any other' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 246). Like Marx, Deleuze and Guattari propose a universal history written from the standpoint of a present which provides a privileged point of view on the past. In this sense, they argue that 'capitalism has haunted all forms of society' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 140). As the only social machine that operates by means of a generalised decoding of flows, capitalism reveals the secret of the earlier forms of society, namely their 96

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abhorrence of decoding and their commitment to 'coding the flows and even overcoding them rather than allowing anything to escape coding' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 153). The Civilised Capitalist Machine thus haunts the earlier forms of social codification not as the inevitable endpoint of a single process of development but as their other and their absolute limit. The absolute deterritorialisation of social life also haunts capitalism in the form of a limit that is continually approached but never attained. This external limit is the end-point of the process of decoding and deterritorialisation. Were it ever realised, it would amount to a form of social schizophrenia, the point at which the flows of desire 'travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 246). However, just as schizophrenia is an unsustainable and unlivable mode of personal and social existence, so absolute deterritorialisation remains an ideal and unattainable state of social existence. Capitalist societies simultaneously reterritorialise what they deterritorialise, producing all manner of 'neoterritorialities' which may be 'artificial, residual or archaic' but which have the effect of resuscitating or reintroducing fragments of earlier social codes, or inventing new ones: examples range from the more virulent forms of religious or nationalist fundamentalism to the relatively benign constitutional monarchisms or civic nationalisms. Capitalism as a distinctive form of social organisation has a limit which is the absolute decoding of flows 'but it functions only by pushing back and exorcising this limit . . . the strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 250). The state and deterritorialisation Deleuze and Guattari allow that particular kinds of state, such as the ancient empires, city-states and feudal states, succeed one another in history. At this level, they follow Nietzsche's hypothesis with regard to the emergence of actual states, arguing that these do not result from the internal dynamics of the territorial machine but are imposed from without. Citing Nietzsche's remarks on the founders of the state in On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche 1994: essay 2, para. 17), they insist that 'the death of the primitive system always comes from without: history is the history of contingencies and encounters' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 195). Equally, in accordance with the principle of Nietzsche's genealogical method that 'the events that restore a thing to life are not the same as those that gave rise to it in the first place' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 261), they argue that the state is transformed and adapted to new ends within the capitalist axiomatic. Once the newly decoded flows of capital and labour converge and begin to transform European societies, 97

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[the State] can no longer be content to overcode territorial elements that are already coded, it must invent specific codes for flows that are increasingly deterritorialized, which means: putting despotism in the service of the new class relations, integrating the relations of wealth and poverty . . . everywhere stamping the mark of the Urstaat on the new state of things. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 218) The capitalist state represents a transformation of the earlier apparatus of overcoding in so far as it has now become a key mechanism for the coordination and control of the decoded and deterritorialised flows which are coextensive with capitalism itself. The functioning of the capitalist axiomatic implies agents of decision, administration and inscription, in other words a bureaucracy and a technocracy which function as an apparatus of regulation. The state has always performed this regulatory role, beginning with the regulation of the conditions of labour, including wages, the granting of monopolies and the acquisition of colonial territories. Deleuze and Guattari also point to a more directly economic function which has been assumed by the state in its 'military industrial' form since the Second World War, namely the realisation and absorption of surplus value through the costs of administration and military expenditure (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 235). Over and above these economic and technical functions within the capitalist axiomatic, there is another function of the state in which the shadow of the Urstaat continues to hover over modern societies. A principal function of the state is the reterritorialisation of the mutant flows generated by the dynamic of the system as a whole. The state reterritorialises those flows so as to prevent them breaking loose at the edges of the social axiomatic (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 258). As a result, Deleuze and Guattari argue, modern capitalist societies are caught between the two poles of an extreme futurism and an archaism, between a deterritorialisation which, if left unchecked, might carry them towards an absolute threshold and 'the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 260). These negative and positive functions of the modern state reflect the dual character of the capitalist social axiomatic as Deleuze and Guattari describe it, but they also point to the singular role played by the concept of the despotic state machine in their universal history. Despotism is at once the primordial form of the state, as it appeared in the ancient empires, and the figure of the state in general.3 In the terms of their account, the concept of the state is a 'special category', actualised in different concrete forms, but not identifiable with any of these, since it is also an abstraction which haunts all subsequent forms of sovereign power. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987) the distinction between the state as pure abstract machine 98

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and historically specific forms of state is made explicit by the introduction of the concept of the state-form and the distinction between this and specific forms of state, such as ancient archaic empires and early modern monarchical states. As an abstract machine, the state-form may be rigorously defined by a specific form and a function, prior to any concrete instantiation. The essential function of the state is capture: it is inseparable from 'a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 386). In the West, the form in which this function has appeared is political sovereignty: 'the State is sovereignty' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 360). However, the underlying abstract form of the state is an inferiority of some kind, since 'sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of interiorizing, of appropriating locally' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 360). The exercise of sovereignty therefore requires the institution of borders and the constitution of a milieu of interiority. This form and this function are in fact two aspects of the same assemblage, since it is by means of capture that the state establishes a milieu of interiority. Historically, the most important mechanisms of capture have been those exercised upon land or its produce, upon labour, and upon money. These correspond to Marx's 'holy trinity' of ground rent, profit and taxes, but they have long existed under other forms. All three modes of capture occur in paradigmatic form in the ancient empires, as described in Mumford's analysis of the primitive megamachine or Marx's account of the Asiatic mode of production. In the despotic machine, the body of the despot assumes the role of 'full body' and becomes the quasi-cause and the destination of all social production (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 194). To that extent this implies a form of capture of the primary social flows; Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of despotism already hinted at what they later call the abstract machine of capture. The concept of the state-form as machine of capture will be examined more closely in Chapter 6, in connection with the specific case of colonial capture. For the moment, it is important to follow through the consequences of this distinction between the state-form and particular kinds of state for Deleuze and Guattari's historical and political analysis. Most importantly, this distinction enables them to posit an evolution of the state while still maintaining the thesis that, in certain fundamental respects, there has only ever been a single form of state. It is with respect to the abstract machine or state-form that they deny all evolutionary theses concerning the origin of the state, insisting instead that it 'was not formed in progressive stages; it appears fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once; the primordial Urstaat, the eternal model of everything the State wants to be and desires' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 217). Deleuze and Guattari's universal history is remarkable both for its level of abstraction

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and its resolute anti-historicism. The territorial, despotic and axiomatic social machines are not considered as successive stages in an evolution, in the sense that one can be regarded as resulting from the effects of another. However, this does not mean that there are not historical progressions from societies dominated by one machine to societies dominated by another, or that there are not 'evolutionary' developments across the successive actualisations of a particular machine. Deleuze and Guattari's view is that all three abstract social machines co-exist in a perpetual state of becoming or virtuality. Concrete history, as they later suggest, is simply the working out of these processes in particular cases: 'All history does is to translate a co-existence of becomings into a succession' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 430). Within the perspective of their universal history, they introduce a typology of different kinds of state, distinguishing three major kinds. The first is the imperial archaic state, which corresponds to the despotic megamachine described in Anti-Oedipus (1977). This is the 'immemorial Urstaat, dating as far back as Neolithic times, and perhaps farther still' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 427). It is a type of state which operates primarily by means of overcoding and which is characterised by the absence of private property and money except as these relate to the universal obligation towards the despot. Money exists only in the form of the tax owed, while property is held only in virtue of the individual's membership or function within the community. The net result is a form of generalised servitude of the population which Deleuze and Guattari call machinic enslavement. The second type of state is one in which machinic enslavement is replaced by a regime of social subjection. Under this type of state, property has become private and the bond that ties the individual to the sovereign has become personal. Relations of personal dependence or allegiance replace those based upon public functions and the modern form of law emerges as an important aspect of the maintenance of rule. There are many forms of state corresponding to this type, including feudal systems, monarchies and city-states. They form the immediate historical precursor to the modern nation-states which appear in the context of the emergence of capitalism. The nature of these modern states cannot be understood independently of the processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation which capitalism develops to a higher level. The internal principle of the evolution in forms of state derives from the tendency of states to produce their own forms of deterritorialisation and decodification. Even the archaic empires did not overcode 'without also freeing a large quantity of decoded flows that escape' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 448). In particular, their own mechanisms gave rise to flows of certain kinds of materials and agents: the construction of public works generated flows of metals and metallurgy, while the collection of taxes gave rise to flows of money which, in turn, allowed the emergence 100

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of merchants and banking. The statecraft manual of the Chinese Qin dynasty described these flows generated by the operations of the body politic as 'lice of the empire'.4 Freed slaves, or more generally the forms of social 'outsider', were another deterritorialising flow which, in turn, fed into the existing flows of metallurgy, trade and commerce: what matters is that 'in one way or another the apparatus of overcoding gives rise to flows that are themselves decoded - flows of money, labour, property' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 449). It is against this background that Deleuze and Guattari identify a new function for the state, namely the organisation of conjunctions of decoded flows. This new function in turn leads to a transformation in the nature of the state and the development of mechanisms of capture based upon social subjectification to replace those of machinic enslavement. However, this new kind of state only performs local and 'topical' or qualitative conjunctions of flows through such means as the organisation of corporations in the towns or the maintenance of feudal relations in agriculture. While these inhibit the propagation of flows, the state cannot prevent new flows from continuing to escape and so in effect it prepares the way for the generalised conjunction of decoded flows that is capitalism: 'Capitalism forms when the flow of unqualified wealth encounters the flow of unqualified labour and conjugates with it' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 453). With this, a new threshold of deterritorialisation is reached. In the Conclusion to A Thousand Plateaus (1987), deterritorialisation is defined with deceptive simplicity as the movement or process by which something escapes or departs from a given territory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 508). In fact, as Deleuze and Guattari go on to point out, the concept is complex in a number of ways: 'deterritorialization is never simple but always multiple and composite' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 509). First, it always involves at least two elements, namely the territory that is being left behind or reconstituted and the deterritorialising element. A territory of any kind always includes 'vectors of deterritorialisation', either because the territory itself is inhabited by dynamic movements or processes or because the assemblage that sustains it is connected to other assemblages. In the case of Marx's account of primitive accumulation, the development of commodity markets is one such vector of deterritorialisation in relation to the social and economic space of feudal agriculture, encouraging the shift to large-scale commercial production. The conjugation of the stream of displaced labour with the flow of deterritorialised money capital provided the conditions under which capitalist industry could develop. Second, deterritorialisation is always 'inseparable from correlative reterritorialisations' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 509). Reterritorialisation does not mean returning to the original territory, but rather refers to the ways in which deterritorialised elements recombine and enter into new relations in the constitution of a new assemblage or the 101

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modification of the old. In this context, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the connection of deterritorialised flows, which refers to the ways in which distinct deterritorialisations can interact to accelerate one another, and the conjugation of distinct flows, which refers to the ways in which one may incorporate or 'overcode' another, thereby effecting a relative blockage of its movement (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 220). It is significant that capitalism is born as the result of a generalised conjunction or conjugation of deterritorialised flows of capital and labour, since the conjugation of flows implies a different form of reterritorialisation to that found in the case of connection and a less positive outcome of the prior deterritorialisations. In effect, this concept of conjugation introduces a 'zone of indiscernibility' through which the concept of reterritorialisation is connected to the concept of the state-form as an abstract machine of capture. Unlike capitalism, capital is not in the first instance a machine of capture but a nomadic and 'universal cosmopolitan energy which overflows every restriction and bond' (Marx 1964: 129, cited in Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 453). Capital is one of those non-territorially based organisations which have always formed part of the external environment of states, a polymorphous machine of deterritorialisation which exists only in its own metamorphoses (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 360). For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that from its inception 'capitalism has mobilized a force of deterritorialization infinitely surpassing the deterritorialization proper to the State' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 453). This superior power of deterritorialisation may be glimpsed in the form in which capital appeared in the aftermath of financial deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s, namely as an enormous monetary mass which circulates ceaselessly through foreign exchange and stock markets around the globe, beyond the control of any one government or organisation and subject only to the vicissitudes of the market. Unlike all existing forms of state hitherto, capital is not a territorially based machine since its object is neither a portion of the earth nor a people but value pure and simple, the commodity form of private property where this has become a type of convertible abstract right, an entitlement to profit share, a futures contract or a financial derivative. As a result, 'it could be said that capitalism develops an economic order that could do without the State. And in fact capitalism is not short on war cries against the State, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its superior deterritorialization' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 454). At the same time, capitalism is inseparable from the state since it is the state which codifies the conditions under which the axiomatic can operate and regulate the flows of capital. As such, modern nation-states function as models of realisation of the immanent axiomatic. This is the third type of state within Deleuze and Guattari's typology: no longer transcendent apparatuses of overcoding or subjection but models of realisation of an axiomatic of decoded flows. They define the modern nation-state as a 102

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territorially based group of productive sectors among which labour and capital circulate freely, without barriers to the homogeneity of capital or to the conditions of competition between capitals. Just as the purely economic relations of capital are realised in the relations between 'factors of production' in diverse sectors of economic activity, so nation-states group together a certain number of sectors of production, according to their wealth, natural resources, population, level of industrialisation, etc. Thus, 'States under capitalism are not canceled out but change form and take on a new meaning: models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds them. But to exceed is not the same thing as to do without' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 454). Equally, not to be able to do without is not the same as to be wedded to the existing forms of state. We can see in this definition the possibility of the kinds of supra-state association already beginning to emerge in Europe, North America and South-East Asia. Deterritorialisation and the political We noted in Chapter 4 Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion that schizoanalysis proposes no political programme. We can now see that the axiological structure of Anti-Oedipus (1977) is in many respects conducive to an anti-political stance. The theory of capitalist society outlined in the book establishes a fundamental dualism at the heart of the axiomatic and within capitalist society as a whole, between the deterritorialising tendency of capital and the necessary reterritorialisation effected by the state and its agents. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the revolutionary path lies not in the attempt to set limits to market forces and the impetus of deterritorialisation, but in the opposite direction, pursuing ever further the movement of decoding and deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 239). Some commentators, such as Nick Land, sharpen this antagonism to the point that the deepest tendencies of the capitalist axiomatic are taken to be so fundamentally at odds with the social codes of bourgeois civilisation that it appears in the guise of a 'social suicide machine': 'Only by an intensification of neurotic attachments does it mask the eruption of madness in its infrastructure, but with every passing year such attachments become more desperate, cynical, fragile' (Land 1993: 68). Pursuing the idea that the political axiology of Anti-Oedipus supports a politics of alliance with the deterritorialising process of capital, Land recommends the systematic dismantling of all social codes and forms of reterritorialisation: 'Always decode . . . believe nothing, and extinguish all nostalgia for belonging. Ask always where capital is most inhuman, unsentimental and out of control. Abandon all attachment to the state' (Land 1993: 67). This political perspective is consistent with some aspects of the Nietzschean framework of evaluation which run through Deleuze's writing. 103

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In Difference and Repetition, for example, we find a defence of the singular against the general, the individual against the herd, and a resistance to forms of equality and equalisation. This 'anti-political' theme emerges from the conception of the social field (like every other) as a field of free differences and the rejection of representation: every time there is representation there is always 'an unrepresented singularity' who does not recognise himself or herself in the représentant. Hence the misfortune of speaking for others (Deleuze 1994: 52). 5 Similarly anti-political theses might be derived from the application of the theory of power outlined in Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze 1983) to the social and political field. This is not something Deleuze does in Nietzsche and Philosophy: there is no discussion of Nietzsche's views on politics and the state, only comments on his theory of culture and, at the end of the book, on the implications of Nietzsche's theory for practice. If he had done so, the argument might run as follows: power is fundamentally active and relational, appearing in the interaction between different kinds and degrees of force. In the state of nature, individual and collective bodies collide in the pursuit of their activities. However, purely chaotic interaction is not a state of social existence: at best, life under such conditions will be uncertain, at worst it will be brutish and short. Hence, it can be argued, the overriding aim of political society is the establishment and maintenance of relatively stable forms of interaction. Social relations require the stabilisation and fixation of certain forms of interaction, including the institution of forms of government which enable stable and predictable forms of action upon the actions of others. In these terms, government is a form of action upon individual or social forces which seeks to limit or constrain their possibilities for action. From the perspective of the forces governed, the government of individual and collective bodies is essentially reactive. Deleuze and Guattari's account of the state as a process of capture operating upon the primary flows of matter and activity in the social field renders explicit this reactive character of the political apparatus. The state, they argue, captures flows of population, commodities, or money in order to extract from these flows a surplus which then becomes a means to maintain and enhance its own power. It is an institution whose primary mode of operation is one of limitation or con? straint, a matter of separating active forces from what they can do. In these terms, the state is by definition always a secondary formation, and the political sphere is always reactive by nature. If we supposed that Deleuze's Nietzschean concept of power implied a simple axiological priority of the active over the reactive and the affirmative over the negative, then the outcome would be a fundamentally anti-political orientation. Much of the analysis of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus (1977) supports such a reading. For example, the authors describe the capitalist axiomatic as a system of enslavement in which all are subject to the constraint of its 104

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axioms. By contrast with the form of slavery established by the despotic state, which at least retained an apparatus of anti-production distinct from the sphere of production and a corresponding class of masters, capitalism installs 'an unrivalled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation' in which 'there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 254). Here, there is only one class and bourgeois and proletarian alike are slaves of the social machine. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari point to 'the revolutionary potential of decoded flows' and suggest that the opposition to this machine, which is relevant from the point of view of revolutionary politics, is not that between capitalist and worker but that between 'the decoded flows that enter into a class axiomatic on the full body of capital, and on the other hand, the decoded flows that free themselves from this axiomatic' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 255). Eugene Holland comments that, in the terms of this account of capitalism, 'deterritorialization looked "good" and reterritorialization looked "bad", inasmuch as deterritorialization designated the motor of permanent revolution, while reterritorialization designated the power relations imposed by the private ownership of capital' (Holland 1991: 58). Nor are such binary oppositions entirely absent from A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Deleuze and Guattari defend the idea that capitalism restores a system of machinic enslavement. They also maintain that there is an opposition between the axioms which constitute the 'semiological form' of the apparatus of capture and the 'living flows' which are conjugated and controlled by the axiomatic: 'there is always a fundamental difference between living flows and the axioms that subordinate them to centers of control and decision making' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 464). However, there are other elements of Deleuze and Guattari's mature political philosophy which disallow a simplistic anti-political point of view. First, the axioms of the capitalist social machine do not simply repress a natural state of free and undirected social existence. They are also constitutive of new social forces and forms of life. Deleuze and Guattari are not romantic anarchists who believe in a realm of social being beyond the subjection to political power. It would be an error, they argue, 'to take a disinterested stance toward struggle on the level of the axioms' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 463). The reason is not simply that the conditions of people's lives are at stake in those axioms, but also because forcing changes at the level of the axiomatic is itself an indispensable mechanism of effecting future concrete changes. As we have seen, it is a fundamental feature of the axiomatic that it cannot reterritorialise existing flows without creating conditions that will generate new forms of deterritorialisation. Second, as Holland points out, the range and complexity of the concepts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation are greatly increased in A Thousand Plateaus (Holland 1991). In Anti-Oedipus, the terms were used in the 105

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context of Deleuze and Guattari's historical account of the emergence of state-governed societies and of capitalism, but also in the context of their theory of desire to refer to the freeing of the 'schizophrenic' libido from previous objects of investment. This psychoanalytic dimension of the concept derives from Lacan's use of the term 'territorialisation' to refer to the imprint of maternal care and nourishment on the child's libido and the resultant formation of part-objects and erogenous zones out of the conjugation of particular organs and orifices such as mouth-breast.6 In A Thousand Plateaus, the concept is applied to a variety of different domains, such as the analysis of painting and music. Deleuze and Guattari define (European) painting in terms of the deterritorialisation of faces and landcapes, and (European) music as the deterritorialisation of the refrain and the human voice (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300-2). These are not simply applications of the concept but also means through which it is complicated. Ultimately, processes of deterritorialisation are the movements that define a given assemblage. Deterritorialisation is 'the operation of a line of flight' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 508) and lines of flight are the primary elements of a given assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 531). Lines of flight or deterritorialisation are the determining elements in a given assemblage in the sense that they define the form of creativity specific to that assemblage, the particular ways in which it can effect transformation in other assemblages or in itself. In the terms of Deleuze's concept of power, what a given assemblage is capable of doing or becoming will be determined by the lines of flight or deterritorialisation which it can sustain. Theorem Eight says that one assemblage does not have the same forces or even speeds of deterritorialization as another; in each instance, the indices and coefficients must be calculated according to the block of becoming under consideration, and in relation to the mutations of an abstract machine... . One can only calculate and compare powers of deterritorialization. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 307) Thus, from the point of view of personal, social or political change, everything hinges on the nature of the forms of deterritorialisation present in a given situation. At the end of A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Deleuze and Guattari outline a normative typology of processes of deterritorialisation which distinguishes four types. The result is a complex conceptual and axiological structure, not unlike the typology of expressions of the will to power outlined in Nietzsche and Philosophy, within which the character of events and processes can be evaluated. Deterritorialisation is either relative or absolute. It is relative in so far as it concerns only movements within the actual - as 106

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opposed to the virtual - order of things. Relative deterritorialisation can take either a negative or a positive form. It is negative when the deterritorialised element is immediately subjected to forms of reterritorialisation which enclose or obstruct its line of flight. It is positive when the line of flight prevails over secondary reterritorialisations, even though it may still fail to connect with other deterritorialised elements or enter into a new assemblage with new forces. By contrast, absolute deterritorialisation refers to a qualitatively different type of movement. Deterritorialisation is absolute in so far as it concerns the virtual - as opposed to the actual - order of things. This is the state in which there are only qualitative multiplicities, the state of 'unformed matter on the plane of consistency' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 55-6). Relative deterritorialisation takes place on the molar dimension of individual or collective life, but absolute deterritorialisation takes place on the molecular plane of social existence. Absolute deterritorialisation is not a further stage or in any sense something that comes after relative deterritorialisation. On the contrary, it exists only in and through relative deterriorialisation: 'There is a perpetual immanence of absolute deterritorialization within relative deterritorialization' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 56). It follows that, corresponding to the distinction within relative deterritorialisation between its negative and positive forms, absolute deterritorialisation also has two poles. The dangers of the line of flight which we noted in Chapter 4 are also the dangers of absolute deterritorialisation. Which way things turn out will depend on the nature of the assemblages through which these movements are expressed. Absolute and relative deterritorialisation will both be positive when they involve the construction of 'revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic9 (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 473). Real transformations in a given field require the recombination of deterritorialised elements in mutually supportive and productive ways. In this sense, social or political assemblages are truly revolutionary only when they involve assemblages of connection rather than conjugation. These are the conditions under which absolute deterritorialisation leads to the creation of a new earth and new people: 'when it connects lines of flight, raises them to the power of an abstract vital line or draws a plane of consistency' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 510). Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari argue that societies are defined by their lines of flight or deterritorialisation, they mean there is no society that is not reproducing itself on one level, while simultaneously being transformed into something else on another level. In other words, fundamental social change happens all the time. Often it happens by degrees and even imperceptibly, as we have seen with the steady erosion of myths and prejudices about sexual difference and its implications for social and political institutions. But sometimes revolutionary social change occurs through the eruption of events which force a break with the past and 107

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inaugurate a new field of social, political or legal possibilities. These are not necessarily violent or bloody events. May 1968 was an event of this kind, 'a becoming breaking through into history' (Deleuze 1995b: 153). Other recent examples include the sudden collapse of Eastern European communism, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, or the belated decision by the Australian High Court to recognise a form of aboriginal title to land (see p. 126). These are all in their way manifestations of critical freedom. They are turning points in history after which some things will never be the same as before.

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As we saw in Chapter 1, for Deleuze and Guattari the purpose and value of philosophy are external to philosophy itself. They conceive of philosophy as a critical practice of thought which has a Utopian vocation, namely the creation of new concepts supposed to contribute to the emergence of 'new earths and new peoples' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108). Up to this point, we have examined a number of the political-philosophical concepts which they propose - including their concepts of multiplicity, assemblage, segmentarity, becoming, socius and deterritorialisation - without asking whether or how these concepts fulfil this Utopian vocation. In this final chapter, we shall examine more closely Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the state-form or apparatus of capture and its Other, the nomadic war-machine. While there are reasons to doubt that the war-machine concept is likely to be effective in the form in which it is presented, the idea of a type of assemblage which has an affinity with processes of deterritorialisation may still turn out to be useful. In the latter part of this chapter we shall redescribe the jurisprudence of aboriginal or native title as a war-machine with deterritorialising effect on the legal institutions and apparatus of colonial capture in common-law countries. This example provides an opportunity to test the degree to which this family of Deleuzian concepts (war-machine, capture, deterritorialisation) enables an effective counter-actualisation of the legal forms of internal colonisation to which indigenous peoples are subject in common-law countries such as Australia, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Metamorphosis machines Deleuze and Guattari contrast the state-form with another type of assemblage which they call the 'war-machine'. This is one of the most curious concepts invented in the course of A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and also one of the most widely misunderstood. It is a concept which is betrayed by its name since it has little to do with actual war and only a 109

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paradoxical and indirect relation to armed conflict. It should not be confused with what is commonly understood by 'the war-machine'.1 The real object of Deleuze and Guattari's war-machine concept is not war but the conditions of creative mutation and change. Consider the links between the war-machine and lines of flight or deterritorialisation. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the effectuation of such lines always requires the intervention of a war-machine: the assemblage that draws lines of flight is of the war-machine type. Mutations spring from this machine, which in no way has war as its object, but rather the emission of quanta of deterritorialization, the passage of mutant flows (in this sense all creation is brought about by a war-machine). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 229-30) Becoming is also a kind of metamorphosis, particularly when it is defined as a becoming-minoritarian which affects only elements of the majority (see Chapter 4, pp. 80-3), and the assemblages which institute and sustain such becomings are also of the war-machine type. Given that its primary object is not war, even though as we shall see below it maintains a necessary synthetic relation to war by virtue of its antipathy to the striated space of apparatuses of capture, it might be preferable to think of this type of assemblage not as a war-machine but as a machine of metamorphosis. A metamorphosis machine would then be one that does not simply support the repetition of the same but rather engenders the production of something altogether different. As rhizomatic or qualitative multiplicities which function to produce lines of flight or deterritorialisation, metamorphosis machines would be the conditions of actualisation of absolute deterritorialisation and the means by which relative deterritorialisation occurs: 'they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 423, emphasis added). As abstract machines of mutation and change, assemblages of the war-machine type may be actualised in a variety of different material domains: they can appear in thought as well as in material practices of resistance to capture.. Such a machine might take the form of a new invention or process in a given technological phylum, a new individual or collective affect in the stratum of desire, or a revolutionary judgement or new branch of jurisprudence in the law. Machines of this kind can emerge in any domain or stratum of the social field so long as they are propagators of smooth space: 'an "ideological", scientific or artistic movement can be a potential war-machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to a phylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 422-3). 110

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In their initial characterisation of the war-machine, Deleuze and Guattari present it as a general name for those social assemblages that are outside and hostile to the state. The war-machine is the Other in relation to the state-form. Defined as a process of capture and constitution of a field of inferiority, the state necessarily implies a domain external to itself. Every time there is an insurgency of some kind against the state, whether this takes the form of revolution, riot, guerrilla warfare or civil disobedience, 'it can be said that a war-machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a manner of being in space as though it were smooth' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 386). In these terms, assemblages of the war-machine type support all those processes that remain outside the forms of state and all those movements that resist the process of capture. Historically, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, there have been two main kinds of non-state social machine: large-scale global or ecumenical organisations, such as religious or commercial networks, and local groups or marginal communities which continue to affirm the nature and rights of segmentary societies against the organs of state power. No less than the different kinds of state-form, organisations of both the ecumenical and marginal kind are always present in any given social field. Moreover, both of these non-state organisations are different in kind from the forms of state. Deleuze and Guattari argue for the radical exteriority of the war-machine in relation to the state-form: 'In every respect, the war-machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the state apparatus' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 352). They provide examples of this difference drawn from Indo-European and African mythology as well as epistemology: even the history of natural sciences such as mathematics and geometry provides them with material for a distinction between state and nomad science (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 361-74). Alternatively, the difference between these two kinds of assemblage might be supposed to appear in the different ways in which a body can increase its power. As an apparatus of capture, the state-form represents a purely quantitative or linear model of increase of power. It involves the incorporation of other bodies, either because their substance feeds the powers of the capturing body, or because their powers may be added to its own. By contrast, the metamorphosis machine represents a more qualitative or multi-dimensional model of increase of power: 'it comprises something other than increasing quantities of force' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 422). However, their primary description of the difference between state and war-machine type assemblages is in terms of the different kinds of space or spatial determination associated with each: 'Smooth space and striated space - nomad space and sedentary space - the space in which the warmachine develops and the space instituted by the state apparatus - are not of the same nature' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 474). Smooth space is 111

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Deleuze and Guattari's term for the heterogeneous space of qualitative multiplicity, while striated space is the homogeneous space of quantitative multiplicity. Smooth space is a rhizomatic or 'patchwork' space in which local regions are juxtaposed without reference to an overarching metric principle or directionality. It is a fluid space of continuous variation, characterised by a plurality of local directions. The terms 'smooth' and 'striated' are taken from the composer Pierre Boulez who uses them to differentiate two kinds of musical space (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 477). In the final plateau, '1440: the smooth and the striated', Deleuze and Guattari provide a number of examples of this opposition drawn from fields as diverse as art history, physics, mathematics and textile manufacture. In geometrical terms, the difference may be expressed in terms of an inversion in the relationship between points and lines: striated space treats the line as something between two points, as in Euclidean geometry. By contrast, smooth space gives priority to the line and treats points simply as relays between successive lines. Moreover, the lines themselves are different in each case. In the case of smooth space, they are locally directional with open intervals, whereas in striated space they are subordinate to a global dimensionality and have closed intervals. Striated space 'closes a surface, divides it up at determinate intervals, establishes breaks, whereas a smooth space involves distribution across a surface, by frequency or along paths' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 481, trans. modified). We saw in Chapter 3 how Deleuze's Nietzschean conception of philosophy as the invention of 'new possibilities for life' implies an evaluative distinction between the reactive power of incorporation or capture and the active power of transmutation or metamorphosis. In the same manner, the differences between striated and smooth space must also be understood in evaluative terms. Smooth spaces are the geometrical equivalent of lines of flight or deterritorialisation. Although they do not in themselves amount to spaces of pure freedom, it is nevertheless in these spaces that political struggles undergo transformation or their goals are displaced. The emergence of smooth spaces is a condition under which 'life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 500). However, in accordance with the complexity that is always present in the Deleuzian structure of evaluation, we must always assess what kind of smooth space we are dealing with: is it one that has been captured by state forces or one that results from the dissolution of a striated space? Does it allow more or less freedom of movement? Above all, we should never believe 'that a smooth space will suffice to save us' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 500). The fundamental antipathy between war-machine and state derives from their relations to two incompatible kinds of space. In each case, this is a constitutive relation. It follows from the essence of the state as a machine 112

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of capture that it creates homogeneous and measurable or striated spaces. The constitution of a milieu of inferiority implies the drawing of boundaries and the installation of common measures which enable the determination of similarities and differences: 'One of the fundamental tasks of the state is to striate the space over which it reigns' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 385). By contrast, war-machine assemblages are metamorphosis machines which propagate smooth space. The fundamental tendency of the war-machine lies in this active relation to smooth space: the warmachine is 'in its essence the constitutive element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacement within this space and the corresponding composition of peoples: this is its sole and veritable positive objective (nomos). To increase the desert' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 417, trans, modified). The antipathy between state and war-machine is in turn the basis of Deleuze and Guattari's account of how war can result from an assemblage which has no necessary relation to war. It is precisely when contact occurs between these two modes of being that conflict erupts and the warmachine's affinity with absolute war is actualised. By 'war', Deleuze and Guattari understand the use of force in order to achieve the annihilation or capitulation of enemy forces (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 417). It follows that not every collective use of force or regime of violence constitutes 'war': the forms of limited or sporadic violence practised within or between non-state societies do not amount to war in this sense (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 447-8). It also follows that the state, no more than the war-machine, does not have a necessary relation to war. In support of this thesis, Deleuze and Guattari invoke the work of anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who argues in Society against the state (Clastres 1977) that in some primitive societies war-like activity is a means of preventing concentrations of power which may give rise to forms of state (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 357-9). They also draw upon Clausewitz, both in order to reinforce their thesis that the state has no necessary relation to war and also for their concept of war itself. In his classic treatise On War (Clausewitz 1958), Clausewitz distinguished between the Idea of 'absolute war' and the actual wars undertaken by states in pursuit of their political objectives. Understood in these Kantian terms, absolute war is like a pure flow of violence, the goal of which is the annihilation of an enemy. States can be more or less good conductors of this flow, but there is no essential relation to war on the part of states. Deleuze and Guattari's argument is not that the state is fundamentally benign, but rather that it disposes of a different regime of violence. In and of itself, the state relies upon a structural or lawful violence, a violence of capture, whose institutional manifestations are juridical and penal institutions of capture and punishment such as police and prisons. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari argue, the essential characteristic of state violence is that 113

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it consists in capturing while simultaneously constituting a right to capture . . . There is lawful violence wherever violence contributes to the creation of that which it is used against, or as Marx says, wherever capture contributes to the creation of that which it captures. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 448) We shall argue below that the capture of colonial territory by European states is a paradigm of lawful state violence. But even within the modern forms of state, as Foucault and others have pointed out, the juridico-penal system contributes to the constitution of the very criminal underclass against whom it is overwhelmingly deployed and the punishment of some citizens is integral to the constitution of all as equal subjects before the law. Assemblages of the war-machine type are defined by their tendency to propagate smooth space. They may engage in war, but this is a synthetic rather than an analytic feature of the war-machine. It is only by default that war-machines become engaged in war. This default is triggered by the encounter with states, since as apparatuses of capture, these are by nature hostile to the extension of smooth space. Only when its fundamental strategy is thwarted by contact with the state does the conduct of war become an objective of the war-machine. To the extent that state apparatuses resist the tendency of the war-machine to increase smooth space, war-machines must undertake their annihilation as a secondary consequence of the pursuit of their primary objective. The synthetic relation of the war-machine to the flow of pure war becomes actualised and the warmachine becomes a conductor of total war directed against the state. War is not essential to the war-machine considered as an abstract machine of pure exteriority and metamorphosis. But the fact that the war-machine is defined by its constitutive relation to smooth space implies a fundamental antipathy to the apparatus of capture and striated space. Actual war is triggered by the encounter between forms of state and war-machine. In other words, war is at once both accidental to the nature of the warmachine and inevitable, since the forms of state and war-machine are coeval elements of any social field. To the extent that assemblages of the war-machine type coexist alongside apparatuses of capture, war remains a contingent but inevitable feature of the social field. The war-machine therefore has a 'supplementary' relation to the conduct of war, in Derrida's sense of the term 'supplement' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 417). War is therefore not a basic principle of Deleuzian social theory, but a result of the inevitable conflict between two contradictory modes of being. At the same time as war becomes the object of the war-machine, the state in turn is compelled to appropriate its own war-machine. Throughout Plateau 12 '1227: Treatise on nomadology - the war-machine', Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the war-machine in so far as it has been 114

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appropriated and turned into a military apparatus of the state, and the war-machine in its 'natural' state, external and unrelated to the stateform. From the point of view of universal history, they suggest, the appropriation of forms of war-machine has been one of the most important tasks undertaken by states. This appropriation takes a variety of forms, from the annexation of a warrior caste or the employment of mercenaries to the creation of modern professional armed forces. In all cases, however, the relationship between the state and war-machine is fraught with danger. As examples drawn from Dumézil's studies of Indo-European mythology and Shakespeare's Richard HI attest, the mutual suspicion of the statesman and warrior is widely borne out in myth and in history. In turn, the persistence of this antagonism testifies to the exteriority of these two assemblages. Contemporary cinema also provides many examples of the mutual suspicion between warriors and servants of the state. In Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz is a soldier formerly in the service of the state who has surrendered to the flow of total violence and become a war-machine outside the control of the military apparatus. As a warrior gone out of control, he has become a threat to the overriding political objectives of the conflict which can no longer be tolerated. 2 Real or imagined nomads Deleuze and Guattari establish the exteriority of state and war-machine by pointing to qualitative differences in two directions: externally, where it is a matter of the most general characteristics of the assemblages in relation to one another and to third-party phenomena such as war and space; and internally, by analyses of the different elements and modes of articulation which compose each type of assemblage. As an example of their internal analysis of the differences, consider their comparison of tools and weapons. They argue that the elements of a particular assemblage are only defined as such by the play of differential traits and affinities under which they belong to that assemblage. The difference between a tool and a weapon may be abstractly specified in terms of the use to which each is put. Beyond that, it is difficult to establish a list of intrinsic qualities that will differentiate one from the other: weapons and tools 'have no intrinsic characteristics. They have internal (and not intrinsic) characteristics relating to the respective assemblages with which they are associated' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 398). The same physical object, such as an axe, may serve either as a tool or a weapon. In each case, the object will involve a particular relation to the application of force or to movement, but it is not the same force or the same movement. Weapons stand in an internal relation to speed, in contrast to the essential gravity of tools. Absolute speed is a characteristic of the war-machine, whereas the state has an affinity with 115

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gravitas. Both weapons and tools involve the application of force, but it is not the same mode of application in each case: weapons are projective, whereas tools are introceptive. Tools involve an expenditure of force as work, confronting resistance and being consumed in the process, whereas weapons involve the exercise of force according to a model of free action where this does not aim at overcoming a resistance so much as at impelling the weapon itself in such a manner that it creates and occupies a smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 397). Ultimately, the distinction between weapons and tools refers back to the difference between assemblages of the war-machine and state kinds. Weapons and tools must be understood in terms of the nature of the assemblages to which they belong. Assemblages are essentially functional apparatuses and they are primary in relation to their components. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari assert that: 'weapons and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 398). We saw above that Deleuze and Guattari argue for the exteriority of the war-machine and its irreducibility to the form of the state. In addition, they claim that it is not enough to assert the exteriority of the war-machine and the state, but that 'it is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the warmachine as itself a pure form of exteriority' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 354). In other words, war-machine assemblages are the expression of a peculiar kind of abstract machine, one that 'exists only in its own metamorphoses' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 360). It follows that there can be no concept of the war-machine in the traditional sense of a series of features or marks that will determine necessary and sufficient conditions for something falling under the concept. War-machines are rhizomatic assemblages which can only be defined by their relations to the outside and their concept is delineated by tracing a line of continuous conceptual variation in relation to elements and phenomena 'external' to assemblages of the war-machine type. In this sense, the war-machine concept is a limit case of the potential variability inherent in all concepts. For these reasons, Deleuze and Guattari define the characteristics of the war-machine by reference to the conditions of nomadic existence. However, the question is: 'what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence?' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 380). In effect, the relation to smooth space is the principle of nomadic existence as they define it. This is the 'territorial principle' of the nomad: to be 'distributed in a smooth space which he occupies, inhabits, holds' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 381, see also 410). It is on this basis that they distinguish nomads from migrants, itinerants and transhumants who also move about, some of them no less incessantly than nomads.3 For the migrant or transhumant, a journey is simply a trajectory between two points, whereas for the nomad, it is the journey that matters, the points along the way being 'strictly subordinated to the paths they determine' 116

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(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 380). In contrast to the roads and highways that connect the regions of sedentary social space, the paths of nomadic existence serve to distribute individuals and groups across an open and indeterminate space. Whereas sedentary space is striated by enclosures and paths between enclosures, the territory of nomadic peoples is a pure surface for mobile existence, without enclosures or fixed patterns of distribution. Deleuze and Guattari draw upon accounts of the life of desert peoples to make the connection between nomadism and smooth space, but in the end this means that the desert in their text is little more than a rhetorical expression of smooth space. Ultimately, it is the active relation to smooth space which defines the fundamental nature of the war-machine and that of the nomad as well: 'the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it. They are vectors of deterritorialization' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 382). To say that nomadic existence is essentially deterritorialised and deterritorialising is not to say that real nomads have no attachment to territory, but rather that their relationship to their territory is different to that of sedentary peoples. They do have territories, which they are reluctant to quit unless driven away by force as they often were under the pressure of colonial occupation, but these territories are not homelands which belong to them so much as the ground or support of their existence. The different relationship to territory is one of the reasons why European colonists were typically unable or unwilling to recognise indigenous inhabitants as proprietors of their lands. Deleuze and Guattari's references to actual nomads are largely confined to peoples of North Africa, the Middle East and the Eurasian steppes. We shall consider in the next section how the colonial capture of indigenous territories led to the dispossession of nomadic peoples in other parts of the world. Deleuze and Guattari's axiom linking nomads and war-machines means that the phrase 'nomadic war-machine' is a pleonasm and the detailed account of the conditions of nomadic existence no more than a means to specify key characteristics of the war-machine. The connection between nomads and war-machine assemblages appears to be justified by their historical claim that processes of becoming-nomad tended to involve the constitution of a war-machine. In reality, they make it an axiom that the war-machine is a nomadic invention. This procedure draws attention to the fact that they are engaged in the invention of a concept rather than empirical social science. In an important and well-informed critique of Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology, Christopher Miller argues that their reliance upon anthropological sources, however limited, commits them to 'anthropological referentiality' and leads them to make anthropological statements (Miller 1993: 11-13). 4 However, while he points to passages in which Deleuze and Guattari deny that they are making empirical claims, Miller does not take sufficient account of the abstract nature of the assemblages which they seek to define, much less the sense in which 117

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they are attempting to define a novel type of abstract machine which exists only in its multiple variations. As an abstract machine, the war-machine is not to be confused with any concrete social or military apparatus. The axiom that the war-machine is invented by nomads means that the nomadism which they describe must be regarded as abstract to the same degree as the war-machine. It follows that Deleuzian nomads are virtual or conceptual objects whose features are settled not by observation, but by definition. The quasi-empirical claims made about nomadic existence only serve to specify the characteristics of the abstract machine which defines assemblages of the war-machine type. It is therefore no criticism to suggest that, through their reliance on dubious anthropology, they 'risk superficiality and imprecision in their understanding of specific situations' (Miller 1993: 20). The appropriate response, from the point of view of their real aim in outlining a concept of nomadism, would be to abandon such material and look for other ways to specify the concept. Further, in so far as the concept of nomadism is understood as the expression of an abstract machine of pure exteriority, it cannot be considered bound to any given form of expression. In their own terms, Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in philosophy understood as the construction of concepts. The manner in which they define nomadic existence in terms of its relation to smooth space follows directly the conceptual paths traced out by the nomad distribution of being which Deleuze describes in Difference and Repetition. There he discovers among the philosophers of univocity a completely other distribution which must be called nomadic, a nomad nomos, without property, enclosure or measure. Here, there is no longer a division of that which is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves in an open space - a space which is unlimited, or at least without precise limits. (Deleuze 1994: 36) The hostility to figures of unity, totality and closure which is expressed in the Deleuzian world of 'free differences' is a direct antecedent of the concept of nomadism. In turn, the figure of the state-form embodies all the conceptual as well as political forces of unity, totality and closure. Nomadic existence is defined not so much in opposition to those forces as in relation to a different kind of space such that there is no common measure between them. Nevertheless, to say that the accounts of nomadism and the war-machine serve the philosophical purpose of constructing concepts of a certain kind does not mean that the conditions of nomadic social life offer the most effective means to present key features of the concept in question, or that 118

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the result is a good concept which counteractualises certain kinds of transformative agency. I suggested above that the war-machine concept is betrayed by its name and that it might be better to think of the abstract machine in question as a metamorphosis machine. Another aspect of Miller's criticism of the concept of nomadism gives reason to think that 'nomadism' might not be the most helpful path to understanding the nature and workings of such machines: this is his suggestion that, behind all the questions that can be raised with regard to the reliability of the anthropological sources on which Deleuze and Guattari draw for their accounts of nomadic existence, there lies the more profound and unsettling issue of the historical condition of anthropological discourse in general: 'colonialism and its project of controlling by knowing' (Miller 1993: 20). The choice of the term 'war-machine' to represent assemblages of mutation and transformation is understandable in the context of the language of struggle and class war which was characteristic of the post-1968 French left. Might not the choice of nomads to specify the characteristics of warmachines and smooth space betray a Eurocentric primitivism and a fascination for the Other, the limits of which were already apparent to the authors?5 While there may be some truth in this diagnosis, it would be a mistake to suppose that this was all that lay behind the appeal to a concept of nomadism in order to counteractualise the modern forms of resistance to state and capture. For, as in Deleuze's revalorisation of simulacra or processes of becoming, the association of nomadism with qualitative multiplicity, smooth space and the conditions of transformation is intended to controvert a deep stratum of the European social imaginary. In particular, it is a concept designed to overturn the priority attached to sedentary forms of agriculture and social life at the expense of more fluid and mobile relations to the earth. If, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, 'history is always written from the sedentary point of view' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 23), their nomadology is an attempt to provide another perspective. The relationship of sedentary peoples to the earth is mediated by a regime of property or a state apparatus whereas in the case of nomads, they argue, 'it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 381). Throughout the history of European colonisation, a recurrent form of justification for the expropriation of inhabited land has been the claim that the indigenous inhabitants were not sufficiently settled or had not tilled the land in a manner that made them rightful owners. J. G. A. Pocock argues that the crucial premise in this justification is that of vagrancy: 'the premise that a wandering condition dehumanizes or must precede humanization' (Pocock 1992: 36). In practice, the absence of sedentary institutions and agricultural practices was considered sufficient to relegate the native peoples of North America and Oceania to a condition of primitive savagery and to a cultural time 119

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before the advent of civilisation. Pocock points out that the presumptions associated with the 'Enlightened' preference for sedentary over nomadic forms of social existence still served to legitimate the expropriation of Maori land in Aotearoa/New Zealand well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 'when the tangata whenua [people of the land] were theorised as "savages", and denied any relation with the whenua on the grounds that they had not appropriated it through the arable techniques of agriculture' (Pocock 1992: 40). In the remainder of this chapter, we shall consider the legal history of colonisation from a nomadological perspective. We noted above that assemblages of the war-machine type are revolutionary machines of mutation and change. Their natural tendency is to emit quanta of deterritorialisation and draw lines of flight or deterritorialisation along which they, as well as the apparatuses of capture, may be transformed. We saw too that it is a consequence of the concept of abstract machines that they are susceptible to actualisation in more than one material domain. That is why Deleuze and Guattari can demonstrate their axiom that war-machine assemblages are external to the state by reference to distinct modes of thought in science and philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 361-80). It follows that, just as capture is not confined to the forms of political capture associated with sovereign states, so the key characteristics of metamorphosis machines (such as a productive relation to smooth space) are not confined to political forms of resistance to capture. Deleuze points to the possibility of metamorphosis machines in the law when he suggests in an interview that, within constitutional states, the parallel to nomadic processes of liberation lies not in 'established and codified constitutional rights' but in 'everything that is legally problematic and constantly threatens to bring what's been established back into question' (Deleuze 1995b: 153). In constitutional states, political creativity often takes the form of the problematisation of existing rights or the creation of new ones.6 Moreover, if as Deleuze suggests, 'it is jurisprudence which is truly creative of rights' (Deleuze 1995b: 169, trans, modified), then jurisprudence must also be considered a potential site of metamorphosis machines capable of deterritorialising legal regimes of capture. Colonisation Deleuze and Guattari's blunt assertion that 'The state is sovereignty' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 360) points to the intimate connection between sovereignty and the stratification of global political space in a system of territorial states. Nicholas Onuf suggests that the modern concept of sovereignty has three constituent elements, namely unchallenged rule over a given territory, majesty and 'agency' where this means the exercise of governance over a given territory and people (Onuf 1991: 426). 120

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From a historical point of view, these different elements of sovereignty may appear over time in relative independence of one another. From an analytic point of view, they are all components of the concept of sovereignty in its modern form. Onuf suggests that the peculiarly modern combination of majesty, uncontested rule and government in the supposed interests of those governed forms the 'primary architecture' of the modern state, to the extent that it is redundant to speak of 'sovereign' states. He writes: The state is the land, the people, the organisation of coercion and a majestic idea, each supporting each other, so that they become indivisible. Sovereignty describes this conceptual fusion and thus the territorial organisation of early modern Europe. Simply by adding states to its margins, the early modern world irresistibly grew to its present proportions. (Onuf 1991: 437) The historical process by which the European world added states to its margins involved the incorporation of indigenous peoples and their territories into the sovereign territory of existing states. Deleuze and Guattari offer no explicit theory of colonisation; however, their theory of the state as apparatus of capture is particularly suited to describe this process. Consider the elements of modern sovereignty identified by Onuf. Each of these elements appears in Deleuze and Guattari's characterisation of the state. The state is sovereignty, they argue, but 'sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 360). In other words, the state is inseparable from the exercise of ultimate authority over a given territorial domain or 'milieu of interiority'. Second, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that sovereignty has two poles. On the one hand, it involves a form of 'magical capture' through which authority is irrevocably imposed. In the terms of Georges DuméziPs analysis of Indo-European mythology, this corresponds to the action of the magician-king who casts a net and 'captures' the people or territory by quasi-magical means. This aspect of sovereignty corresponds to what Onuf calls 'majesty'. In the case of modern colonialism, magical capture persists in the form of the belief that certain symbolic acts, such as the raising of flags or the reading of proclamations, are sufficient to establish sovereignty over newly 'discovered' territories. On the other hand, sovereignty always implies the activity of a jurist-legislator who builds a political structure by means of laws and political institutions. This aspect of sovereignty corresponds to the element of governmental agency which is characteristic of modern sovereign rule and which, in the colonial case, comes after the initial acquisition of territory. In addition to the locus of sovereign power, Deleuze and Guattari claim, the basic constituents of a nation-state are a land and a people, where 121

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'land' is understood to mean a deterritorialised geographical area and where 'people' is understood as a decoded flow of free labour (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 456). In this sense, a modern nation-state is one particular solution to the problem of society in general, involving a particular configuration of fundamental economic relations, including the division of labour and the relation to the means of labour such as land. In the colonial case, the equation is complicated by the fact that the geographical surface is already occupied by indigenous peoples with their own distinctive relation to the earth. The social organisation of hunter-gatherer peoples involves a very different solution to the problem of society, one that realises an altogether different abstract machine from that expressed in the modern nation-state. In cases such as this, where the indigenous inhabitants lived an itinerant existence in accordance with the requirements of a territorial assemblage, both 'land' and 'people' were lacking. The colonial authorities had either to import other people in order to provide labour (slaves or convicts), or to transform indigenous inhabitants into subjects of labour. First, though, they had to transform the earth into land fit for appropriation and exploitation by the establishment of a system of property. Law and the capture of territory As we saw in Chapter 5, Deleuze and Guattari propose a concept of the state as a particular expression of an abstract machine which they call the state-form. The essence of this abstract machine is capture and the establishment of a modern nation-state involves a particular form of capture of both the earth or geographical surface and the people or their productive activity: it requires land as opposed to territory, labour as opposed to free activity. Consider first the capture of human activity in the form of labour, a mechanism perfected by capitalism but already practised in the archaic imperial states. Productive activity may proceed under what Deleuze and Guattari call a regime of 'free action' or activity in continuous variation, such as may be found in the territorial assemblages of huntergatherer societies. Productive activity becomes labour once a standard of comparison is imposed, in the form of a definite quantity to be produced or a time to be worked. The transformation of free activity into labour by the imposition of a standard in turn allows the extraction of a surplus. In order for surplus labour to be extracted in the form of profit, labour itself must become a commodity. In effect, Deleuze and Guattari's argument is that 'labor (in the strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labor'. With reference to the work of anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, they note that in contrast to colonial perceptions that indigenous peoples were unsuited for work, 'so-called primitive societies are not

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societies of shortage or subsistence due to an absence of work, but on the contrary are societies of free action and smooth space that have no use for a work-factor' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 490-1). It is because the indigenous inhabitants of the New World did not labour in this strict sense of the term that they were considered by colonists not to work, much less to work the land in a way that afforded them rights over it. In the case of the capture of portions of the earth's surface which make these portions lands rather than territories, Deleuze and Guattari describe the conditions which enable the extraction of ground-rent as 'the very model of an apparatus of capture' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 441). The imposition of ground-rent involves the establishment of means of comparing the productivity of different portions simultaneously exploited, or means of comparing the productivity of the same portion successively exploited. The measure of productivity provides a general space of comparison, a measure of qualitative differences between portions of the earth's surface which is absent from the territorial assemblage of huntergatherer society. Thus, land stands to territory as labour stands to free activity: 'labor and surplus labor are the apparatus of capture of activity just as the comparison of lands and the appropriation of land are the apparatus of capture of territory' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 442). In each case, we find the same two key elements: the constitution of a general space of comparison and the establishment of a centre of appropriation. However, a further condition is necessary to sustain the politicoeconomic capture of the earth and its resources. In order for ground-rent to be extracted, the difference in productivity must be linked to a landowner: 'Ground rent homogenizes, equalizes different conditions of productivity by linking the excess of the highest conditions of productivity over the lowest to a landowner' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 441). The colonial extension of the European state system therefore requires a system of private property in land. In order for surplus labour to be extracted in the form of profit, both land and labour must become commodities. In the colonial case, the precondition of the productive employment of labour was the deterritorialisation of indigenous territories by their conversion into land. The extraction of ground-rent is not only the very model of an apparatus of capture but 'inseparable from a process of relative deterritorialization' because 'instead of people being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed among people according to a common quantitative criterion' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 441). The conversion of portions of the earth inhabited by so-called primitive peoples into an appropriable and exploitable resource therefore requires the establishment of a juridical centre of appropriation. The centre establishes a monopoly over what has now become land and assigns to itself the right to allocate ownership of portions of unclaimed land. This centre is the

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legal sovereign and the monopoly is the assertion of sovereignty over the territories in question. The fundamental jurisprudential problem of colonisation is therefore the manner in which the territorial domains of the prior inhabitants become transformed into a uniform space of landed property. This points to the fundamental role played by law in the capture of indigenous peoples and their territories: 'law, regarded by the West as its most respected and cherished instrument of civilisation, was also the West's most vital and effective instrument of empire . . . above all . . . Europe's conquest of the New World was a legal enterprise' (Williams 1990: 6). Law was particularly important in the case of those settler societies established by the British Crown relatively late in the European diaspora such as Canada, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. These were colonies which, from the outset, were supposed to be governed in accordance with British common law. As a result, the basis of their property law lay in the feudal doctrine of tenure whereby all title to land is ultimately derived from the Crown. The Crown is the ultimate authority with regard to ownership of land in the territory and the centre of appropriation and alienation of land title. By virtue of its right of sovereignty or imperium, the Crown has the power both to create and extinguish private rights and interests in land. In this sense, Crown land amounts to a uniform expanse of potential real property which covers the earth to the extent of the sovereign territory. It follows that, within these common-law jurisdictions, the imposition of sovereignty constitutes an apparatus of capture in the precise sense which Deleuze and Guattari give to this term. The legal imposition of sovereignty effects an instantaneous deterritorialisation of indigenous territories and their reterritorialisation as a uniform space of Crown land centred upon the figure of the sovereign. The mere fact of a change of sovereignty means nothing to the indigenous inhabitants. The occupation of their territory by settlers proceeds slowly and with varying degrees of legal regulation. The legal institutions of the colony do not immediately impact upon their communities: internal disputes continue to be settled according to traditional customary law. However, once the reality of colonisation begins to take hold, they are inevitably driven to seek recognition of their rights to land and the protection of their traditional way of life. The only peaceful avenues open to them involve the institutions of law and representative government introduced along with Crown sovereignty. In the absence of negotiated settlements or a sympathetic hearing from colonial legislatures, they are compelled to seek the protection of the law. In common-law countries, the doctrine of aboriginal rights and title to land provides one of the few available remedies against the capture of their traditional territories.

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Aboriginal or native title Different forms of legal capture resulted from the manner in which, and the degree to which, indigenous customary law and property rights were accommodated by the colonial legal system. A variety of legal instruments were employed, including treaties, the doctrine of conquest and the occupation of territory supposed to be uninhabited or terra nullius. Under the socalled extended principle of terra nullius, inhabited land was considered open to settlement when the indigenous inhabitants were considered so uncivilised by European standards that they lacked the elementary forms of 'political society'. This remains the accepted basis for the British claim to sovereignty over its Australian territories. 7 In colonies where treaties were signed, these often allowed that aboriginal peoples would retain their lands along with their right to live according to their own laws and cultural institutions. However, even where there were no explicit treaties, the principles of British colonial constitutional law which had become established in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries guaranteed the survival of aboriginal customary law and property rights. 8 Although the doctrine of aboriginal rights was an established body of unwritten law, the degree to which and manner in which these principles were implemented varied considerably from one colony to the next. In the United States, a strong concept of aboriginal title and a right to selfgovernment was laid down in a series of decisions by the Supreme Court, beginning with Johnson v. M'Intosh in 1823. Chief Justice Marshall relied upon the notion that 'discovery' gave exclusive underlying title to the European colonial state to argue that the rights of the original inhabitants to complete sovereignty were necessarily diminished. They could no longer enter into treaties with or sell land to anyone but the overriding sovereign. They did, however, retain the right to continue their traditional way of life and to exercise control over their own lands. 9 The doctrine of aboriginal rights meant that the imposition of British sovereignty did not in and of itself adversely affect the property rights of aboriginal peoples. However, it was a consequence of the feudal doctrine of land tenure that, along with sovereignty, the Crown acquired the underlying or radical title to all land in the colony. This underlying title is the basis of the Crown's power to grant or to extinguish property in land. Where the Crown chose not to exercise this power, the laws and customs of the aboriginal inhabitants could remain in force. The common-law doctrine of native title was, in effect, a mechanism through which the colonial legal system could recognise and protect aboriginal territory and customary law. Aboriginal or native title of this kind was recognised in New Zealand as early as 1847 and in Canada from 1888. 10 Australia was a notable exception. Until the establishment of statutory land rights legislation in the 1970s, the legal capture of territory involved the total exclusion of 125

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indigenous law and custom. Before the historic 1992 judgment of the High Court in Mabo v. Queensland, there was no legal recognition of any rights to land other than those derived from the Crown.11 This case involved a claim to ownership of land on the Murray Islands off the northern coast of Queensland. The majority judges affirmed for the first time that aboriginal or native title formed part of Australian common law. They drew attention to the distinction between radical or ultimate title and ownership, in order to separate property rights from the underlying title to land assumed by the Crown with the imposition of sovereignty, and in order to argue that the importation of English property law was not of itself an obstacle to the recognition of indigenous people's pre-existing interests in land. As a result, a form of title to land grounded in the native law and custom which existed prior to colonisation could now be recognised and protected by the common law. The Mabo decision appeared to many elements of Australian settler society to pose a serious threat to the moral as well as the legal basis of colonial rule. Because the introduction of native title into the Australian legal system threatened important interests by its effects on mining investment and pastoral property values, successive federal governments were impelled to undertake a secondary reterritorialisation by legislative means: a Native Title Act passed at the end of 1993 served to validate mining and pastoral leases, and to regulate the procedure by which native title claims could be made. Revisions to this legislation in 1998 had the effect of further limiting the scope for aboriginal land claims. The government's response thus amounted to an attempt to reaffirm the integrity of a colonial society founded upon a primary reterritorialisation of aboriginal territory and a marginalisation of aboriginal cultures, laws and peoples. At the same time, statements by some of the judges and their supporters demonstrate the sense in which Mabo represented a profound shift in public attitudes towards the aboriginal population and previous ways in which they had been treated by the law and government.12 The controversy which accompanied this decision also showed that the micropolitical attitudinal shift among the non-indigenous population was by no means universal. It was more a question of the opening up of a fissure within the social imaginary with respect to its colonial past and the treatment of the indigenous population. This could represent the beginning of a becomingindigenous of the social imaginary, a line of flight along which legal and social change is possible, or it could represent little more than a minor readjustment of the legal terms in which colonial capture was carried out. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the question is whether the introduction of native title jurisprudence into a colonial jurisdiction from which it had been excluded could be anything more than a partial or relative deterritorialisation of an antiquated and discriminatory system of legal capture. Could it carry the potential for a larger transformation of the colonial 126

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body politic or would it be all too readily subject to a definitive reterritorialisation within the framework of the existing nation-state?13 We should not be too quick to discount the deterritorialising power of new rights. Their effectivity in legal and constitutional space might be compared to that of those singular points which determine the shape of a curve in mathematics and which are themselves, by Deleuze's account, the expression of a particular differential. Rights too are virtual singularities, the consequences of which are only actualised in specific court decisions, legislative enactments and the interactions between these. Although the doctrine of aboriginal title had long been accepted in Canadian law, it had little impact on the relations between aboriginal communities and the state before the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Colder in 1973. 14 Since then, this doctrine has been the site of a developing body of jurisprudence which has significantly altered the capacity of aboriginal peoples to reassert control over traditional territories and resources. Similar developments have occurred in Australia post Mabo, and in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, although the jurisprudence in that country is complicated by its relation to the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and the Tribunal established in 1975 to hear claims under the terms of the Treaty. Prior to the revival of aboriginal title jurisprudence in Canada, the nature and scope of the legal right in question were uncertain. The 1887 case of St Catherine's Milling and Lumber Company defined it as a mere 'personal and usufructuary right, dependent on the good will of the sovereign'. In addition, the applicability of this legal right to aboriginal peoples tended to be judged in the light of nineteenth-century colonial assumptions about relative levels of civilisation and their implications for the existence of legally enforceable rights. An influential statement of this 'barbarian principle' was offered by the Privy Council in 1919 in the form of the opinion that Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organisation that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilised society. Such a gulf cannot be bridged. It would be idle to impute to such people some shadow of the rights known to our law and then to transmute it into the substance of transferable rights of property as we know them.15 The view that the indigenous inhabitants were barbarians without settled law had long been accepted in New South Wales as the basis for the refusal to recognise aboriginal customary law. 16 Similar views were expressed by the trial judge in the 1991 case of Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, when he described aboriginal peoples at the time of first European contact as too primitive to have a form of law capable of recognition by the colonists.17 The rejection of these colonial assumptions in a series of 127

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landmark decisions that began with Calder in Canada and Mabo in Australia opened the way for a process of judicial and political elaboration of aboriginal property rights, the result of which has been to create new opportunities for enhanced economic and political autonomy on the part of indigenous peoples. In Mabo v. Queensland (1992), the High Court of Australia explicitly rejected the 'barbarian' principle which had allowed the land to be treated as though it were terra nullius, both because it was based upon false assumptions about the nature of aboriginal society at the time of colonisation, and because it represented a discriminatory and racist judgment about the nature of aboriginal society which could no longer be tolerated. The Court found that rights to the use of land in accordance with traditional law and custom could be recognised and protected, at least where these rights had not been extinguished by a valid exercise of the Crown's prerogative. The Court also held that native title could be extinguished by the Crown without consent or compensation. Despite a rhetorical commitment to respect for the rights of the indigenous inhabitants, it was clear that the Court considered native title to be a lesser form of property subject to a number of important restrictions. In the appeal case of Delgamuukw v. British Columbia decided in 1997, the Canadian Supreme Court laid down guidelines for defining and proving aboriginal title. The Court rejected the idea that this was limited to traditional uses of land and resources in favour of a more robust conception of native title as encompassing the right to exclusive use and occupation of the land held pursuant to that title for a variety of purposes, which need not be aspects of those aboriginal practices, customs and traditions which are integral to distinctive aboriginal cultures . . . However, that range of uses is subject to the limitation that they must not be irreconcilable with the nature of the attachment to the land which forms the basis of the particular group's aboriginal title. (Delgamuukw 1998: 86) Although protected by Section 35 (1) of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982, aboriginal title may still be overridden by the legislature acting in the broader national interest. Even though it is no longer dependent on the good will of the sovereign, aboriginal or native title remains subject to a number of conditions which serve to protect the overarching sovereignty of the colonial state. In strictly legal terms, aboriginal or native title amounts to little more than a limited and relative deterritorialisation of the legal apparatus of capture of indigenous territory. In the terms of Deleuze and Guattari's account of the modern state as a model of realisation of the capitalist axiomatic, native 128

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title jurisprudence amounts to the addition of an axiom to regulate the distinct but subordinate status of internally colonised peoples. At the same time, because of the manner in which native title implies reference to a body of indigenous law and custom, there is a sense in which the concept of native title has the potential to undermine the legal capture of aboriginal territory. The concept of aboriginal or native title was always a curious hybrid of indigenous and common law, which one commentator described as 'an autonomous body of law that bridges the gulf between native systems of tenure and the European property systems applying in the settler communities. It overarches and embraces these systems, without forming part of them' (Slattery 1987: 745). The Australian High Court defined native title as straddling the border between the common law and systems of indigenous law in a manner which emphasised the inherent undecidability of this concept: 'native title, though recognised by the common law, is not an institution of the common law' (Bartlett 1993: 42). Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson has suggested that native title should be understood as a 'recognition concept', by which he means a concept in terms of which one body of law recognises the other under certain conditions. As such, he argues, native title belongs to the space between two systems of law (Pearson 1997: 154). The consequences of this interpretation of the concept of native title are far-reaching. In jurisprudential terms, the concept of aboriginal or native title expresses a novel kind of right which opens up a smooth space in between indigenous and colonial law. The interpretation of native title as a recognition concept belonging to the space between the law of the coloniser and the law of the colonised affirms that we are dealing with two bodies of law in relation to the land, both of which claim to be final and absolute in their own terms. It implies that there would no longer be just one body of law which holds sway over the same territory but two or more 'law ways'. In terms of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming, the recognition of native title involves a becoming-indigenous of the common law to the extent that it now protects a property right derived from indigenous law; and a becoming-common law of indigenous law to the extent that it now acquires the authority along with the jurisprudential limits of the common law doctrine of native title. In terms of their concept of capture, the recognition of native title is a partial deterritorialisation of the legal apparatus of capture by means of a refusal of its primary stage: the establishment of a uniform space of comparison and appropriation. It amounts to the assertion of an irreducible difference where before there had only been a uniform legal space of alienated or unalienated Crown land. In this manner, aboriginal or native title gives effect to the absolute deterritorialisation of the judicial apparatus of colonial capture. In effect, the legal recognition of indigenous law and custom returns to the fundamental jurisprudential problem of colonisation and rewrites the 129

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terms of that event. It opens up the possibility of a reconfiguration of the constitutional form of the colonial polity and the emergence of a different solution to the problem of the colonial nation-state. To the extent that aboriginal law would constitute distinct internal limits to the authority and jurisdiction of the common law, there would no longer be a unique locus of sovereign power. Sovereignty itself was not an issue in the Mabo case and the decision bears only upon what follows from the acquisition of sovereignty by the Crown. The judges were careful to avoid the issue and to reaffirm the common-law doctrine that the extension of sovereignty to a new territory was an 'act of state' that was immune to challenge in municipal courts. Nevertheless, the judgment creates a degree of uncertainty with regard to the legitimacy of the British claim to have acquired sovereignty over land that was 'desert and uninhabited'. To the extent that the argument of the majority judges rejected the common-law equivalent of the extended terra nullius doctrine - the 'absence of law' or 'barbarian' principle - the case poses an implicit challenge to the official doctrine that Australia was settled rather than conquered. As a number of commentators have pointed out, if the High Court accepts the prior existence of aboriginal customary law and interests in land for the purposes of the common law, then it seems committed to the view that prior indigenous societies were 'sovereign' in the sense that they saw themselves as ruled by a law that was absolute and subject to no higher authority (Patton 1996d; Ivison 1997). Conversely, it is difficult to see the law as consistent when it rejects the barbarian principle for domestic purposes while relying upon it as the justification of its own authority. Henry Reynolds suggests that this is the fundamental problem at the heart of Australian jurisprudence. The doctrine of the settled colony only works if there literally was no sovereignty - no recognisable political or legal organisation at all - before 1788. And that proposition can only survive if underpinned by nineteenth-century ideas about 'primitive' people. (Reynolds 1996: 13-14) In a survey of the jurisprudence of aboriginal rights in Canada between the 1973 Colder case and the 1996 case of Van der Feet v. The Queen,18 Michael Asch argues that a similar contradiction emerges in recent Canadian jurisprudence: The view that indigenous peoples were uncivilised at the time of settlement was repudiated in Calder, and to uphold it in order to explain state sovereignty is not only contradictory; it is also repugnant to contemporary values. The idea is ethnocentric and racist, a direct holdover from the colonial era . . . Yet the state has derived 130

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no thesis to supplant it; the government has chosen not to address it; and the court has chosen either to ignore it in the Calder era, or to define it away in Van der Peet. (Asch 1999: 441) Although critical of the way in which the Supreme Court has sought to characterise aboriginal rights in a manner that excludes any associated political rights such as self-determination, Asch does not rule out the possibility that a more fundamental renegotiation of the political relationship between indigenous peoples and the state may yet take place. His argument that the opportunity to do so has not so far been taken up by the courts confirms the suggestion here that the concept of aboriginal title creates a jurisprudential smooth space which may develop in unexpected directions. To the extent that it is able to connect up with other lines along which the sovereignty of the colonial state is under challenge, and to avoid definitive conjugation and reterritorialisation, native title jurisprudence as it continues to develop in Australia and Canada is a machine of constitutional metamorphosis.

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Deleuze's contribution to political thought is concentrated in the books he co-authored with Guattari, particularly Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In the course of this brief survey, we have done little more than chart the salient features of this complex body of work and indicate some of the ways in which it offers new resources and new directions for thinking the political. We sought to show that these philosophically experimental and politically engaged books are not an aberration or a detour in relation to Deleuze's earlier work. Rather, they exemplify a conception of philosophy which grows out of his engagement with the history of philosophy and which displays the same virtues that he discerns in the tradition which runs through Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche, namely a rejection of negativity, a belief in the externality of forces and relations, a hatred of inferiority, and a commitment to the cultivation of joy by means of the invention of concepts. In order to demonstrate this continuity, we argued in Chapter 1 that Deleuze's earlier criticisms of the prevailing 'image of thought' in philosophy set the scene for his later attempts in collaboration with Guattari to 'put concepts in motion'. We also pointed to some of the concepts and themes which connect this collaborative work with Deleuze's earlier studies in the history of philosophy, especially the theory of qualitative multiplicities derived from Bergson and the structure of immanent evaluation derived from Nietzsche's genealogy of morality. Finally, we argued that some aspects of Deleuze's earlier writings exercised considerable influence on political thought in their own right, notably the metaphysics of difference elaborated on the basis of the concept of multiplicity and the theory of differential force outlined in Nietzsche and Philosophy. Above all, we have sought throughout to present Deleuze's contribution to political thought as philosophy in the sense that he and Guattari define it in What Is Philosophy} (1994). Deleuze and Guattari share with Marx, Nietzsche and many others the conviction that the task of philosophers is to help make the future different from the past. For this reason, they endow philosophy with an explicitly political vocation, defining it as the 132

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creation of 'untimely' concepts. Philosophy is untimely and 'worthy of the event' when it does not simply respond to social events as they appear but rather creates new concepts which enable us to counter-actualise the significant events and processes that define our historical present. Philosophy, as they understand it, has both a cognitive and a critical function. The cognitive function is achieved by the creation of concepts that provide knowledge of pure events. The critical function is achieved not by the creation of glorious images of new earths and new peoples but by the creation of new concepts that afford new means of description of the forces which shape our future and therefore new possibilities for action. Remarkable or interesting concepts are those that can be taken up again and again in new circumstances, continuing to work their subversive way through history. Our discussion of aboriginal rights in Chapter 6 shows how the concepts of equality before the law and the equality of peoples continue to function as means of counter-actualisation of the treatment of indigenous peoples in colonial countries. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze described the act of thought as a dice-throw, by which he meant that thinking is a form of experimentation, the success or failure of which lies outside the control of the thinker. Similarly, in What Is Philosophy} he and Guattari suggest that philosophy is a form of experimentation in the creation of new concepts, by which they mean that it is a form of critical practical reason which aims to produce new means of acting upon the present. Their account of the political vocation of philosophy is therefore linked to a pragmatic conception of the value of philosophical concepts. Obviously, the creation of concepts can neither bring about nor controvert what those concepts express, whether this be political society under a rule of law, justice, equality between the sexes or racial equality. Rather, philosophical activity contributes to making the future different from the past by affording new forms of description, thought and action. As a result, the value of philosophical concepts is not measured by their truth value but by their novelty, remarkability and degree of interest in relation to the present. It follows that the effectiveness of philosophy as they conceive it cannot be decided by philosophy alone. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari present their own concepts as rhizomatic conceptual assemblages, the purpose of which is precisely to 'function' in relation to other concepts and practices outside of themselves. The only appropriate test of the concepts they invent lies in the attempt to make them function in new contexts. Deleuze and Guattari do not offer a concept of the political as such. Rather, they provide a series of concepts in terms of which we can describe significant features of the contemporary social and political landscape. These include concepts of social, linguistic and affective assemblages; concepts of a micropolitics of desire founded on the dynamics of unconscious affect and the different ways in which this interacts with individual and 133

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collective subjectivities; a concept of capital as a non-territorially based axiomatic of flows of materials, labour and information; a concept of the state as an apparatus of capture which, in the forms of its present actualisation, is increasingly subordinated to the requirements of the capitalist axiomatic; a concept of abstract machines of metamorphosis which are the agents of social and political transformation; and concepts of processes of becoming-minor or becoming-revolutionary which embody a politics of difference defined in opposition to all attempts to capture or reconfigure the position of majority. Our survey of Deleuzian political philosophy retraced the path of this fragmentary approach to the political. We began with an account of their concept of philosophy, focusing on their concept of philosophical concepts, and ended with one of the most heterogeneous and mobile concepts which they invent, namely the concept of nomadic metamorphosis machines. In keeping with the nature of this concept and the imperative of pragmatic evaluation, we sought to re-present it by describing the common-law concept of aboriginal or native title as a metamorphosis machine in relation to certain legal forms of colonial capture. The purpose of the discussion of colonisation and native title jurisprudence in Chapter 6 was not to suggest a simple application of the concept of capture to the colonial case, but rather to show that capture takes on a specific legal form in the case of constitutional colonial states, and to suggest that in this context the jurisprudence of aboriginal or native title amounts to a smooth legal space with the potential to alter significantly both the rights of indigenous peoples and the constitutional form of those states. It was not the aim of this discussion to invoke the aboriginal peoples of the new world as exemplary Deleuzian nomads. Rather, the aim was to demonstrate the complexity of their concept of nomadism by showing that it has no necessary connection with actual nomads, just as the concept of metamorphosis machines has no necessary connection with war. At the same time, we sought to emphasise the abstract character of the concepts of capture, metamorphosis machine and smooth space by showing how these could be brought to bear on the phenomenon of colonisation. It is precisely the abstract character of these concepts which allows them to be deployed in contexts other than those in which they were first developed. Our examination of Deleuzian concepts relevant to the political is incomplete in the sense that other concepts could just as well have been the focus of attention. Among the many novel concepts proposed in the course of A Thousand Plateaus which we have not discussed are those of strata, bodies without organs, faciality, the order-word and the refrain. Even the concepts selected for discussion have sometimes been truncated in the interests of simplicity and clarity. However, over and above these contingent limitations of the present survey, there is an important sense in which any discussion of particular concepts will necessarily constitute an incomplete account of Deleuzian political thought. For what Deleuze and 134

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Guattari created in A Thousand Plateaus is a heterogeneous assemblage which has no built-in end-point or conclusion and a textual machine for the creation of new concepts. That is why A Thousand Plateaus ends with a series of definitions and rules rather than a conclusion. These are, on the one hand, the rules of their own construction of concepts, but also rules which might be adapted to the creation of new concepts. Thus, in guise of a conclusion the authors provide a series of facultative rules under the following headings: strata, stratification; assemblages; rhizome; plane of consistency; body without organs; deterritorialisation; abstract machines (diagram and phylum). Even this list itself is provisional since it relates back to the concepts actually elaborated in particular plateaus. The point of abstracting these rules is to show how the process could be continued and new concepts could be elaborated. In this sense, the body of philosophy created by Deleuze and Guattari is an open-ended conceptual corpus analogous to the common law. While it possesses its own internal consistency in the form of a skeleton of principles which are subject to certain formal constraints, it can be modified, extended or developed so long as these constraints are respected. It is a rhizomatic body of concepts which can allow indefinite proliferation and self-transformation. We suggested at the outset that the conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts whose function and value cannot be measured simply in terms of their power of representation has particular relevance to the activity of political philosophy. More generally we sought to show that Deleuze and Guattari's own work is properly regarded as political philosophy, both in its normative and its descriptive dimensions. To that end, we pointed to the distinctive concepts of power and freedom which inform their account of social, linguistic, intellectual and other assemblages. Our aim in doing so was not to suggest that these are better concepts of power and freedom than those that are more common in Anglo-American political theory, but simply to show that there are points of connection as well as similarities and differences between them. To the extent that Deleuze and Guattari describe a world in which the possibility of creative differentiation from the past is ever present, they share with other poststructuralist thinkers a commitment to what Foucault called 'the undefined work of freedom'. In Chapter 4 we argued that this orientation relies upon a concept of critical freedom which implies more than the absence of restraints or limits to our capacity to realise fundamental goals: it implies the ability to question and revise those goals and desires which determine the present limits of individual and public reason. In Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, this commitment is manifest in the way that their concepts accord systematic preference to certain kinds of movement or process over others: becoming-minor over being majoritarian, metamorphosis over capture, deterritorialisation over reterritorialisation and so on.

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Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of the natural and social world provides both an open-ended machinic ontology and a normative framework within which to describe and evaluate movements or processes. As such, it is an ethics in Spinoza's sense of the term. We showed how this structure of immanent evaluation could be found in Deleuze's reconstruction of Nietzsche's will to power, but also how this structure was reiterated in a series of conceptual oppositions throughout Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: schizophrenic and paranoiac assemblages of desire; molar and molecular lines versus lines of flight; processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. In retracing the conceptual contours of this evaluative ontology, we focused on some concepts and pairs of concepts at the expense of others: becoming, lines of flight or deterritorialisation, nomadism and metamorphosis machines rather than destratification, the constitution of a body without organs or the opposition between the plane of consistency and the plane of organisation. While this choice of concepts was necessarily selective in the sense that other concepts developed in A Thousand Plateaus could have been discussed, it was not unmotivated. For we argued that the concept of deterritorialisation lies at the heart of Deleuzian ethics and politics, to the extent that Deleuze and Guattari's mature political philosophy might be regarded as a politics of deterritorialisation. For this reason, we endeavoured to retrace some of the internal complexity of the concept of deterritorialisation. We pointed to the distinction between the conjunction or conjugation of deterritorialised flows which occurs when one process of deterritorialisation is blocked or taken over to the benefit of another on which reterritorialisation occurs, and the connection of deterritorialised flows which occurs when these enter into mutually reinforcing interactions which lead to the formation of new territorialities. The difference between these two forms of interaction between deterritorialised flows corresponds to a distinction between the exercise of power where this is reciprocal and mutually beneficial and the exercise of power in relations of domination. We also drew attention to the fundamental distinction between relative and absolute deterritorialisation, which corresponds to the distinction Deleuze draws between the two dimensions of any event, or between events as actualised in bodies and states of affairs and the pure event which is never exhausted by such actualisations. Absolute deterritorialisation is like a reserve of freedom or movement in reality or in the earth which is activated whenever relative deterritorialisation takes place. For Deleuze and Guattari, thought can also be a vector of absolute deterritorialisation: 'Thinking consists in stretching out a plane of immanence that absorbs the earth (or rather "adsorbs" it). The deterritorialisation effected on such a plane does not preclude reterritorialization but posits it as the creation of a new earth to come' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 88, trans, modified). Philosophy

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achieves this ambition by the creation of new concepts. In one sense, Deleuze and Guattari's contribution to political thought must be judged by reference to the concepts that they have created. In another, their legacy to thinking the political lies in this idea of a philosophy which aims at new and creative forms of counter-actualisation of the present.

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INTRODUCTION 1 We are not concerned in this book to separate the contributions of Deleuze and Guattari to the work published under both their names. However, the focus is on Deleuze's political thought and we read their collaborative work against the background of his earlier philosophy. 2 See Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 69; Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 117. On Deleuze's concept of concepts and their relation to metaphor, see Patton 1997c. 3 The original title of this book is Empirisme et subjectivité: essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume. Deleuze argues that Hume presents an idea of society that is opposed to that of the social contract theorists. 'The main idea is this: the essence of society is not the law but the institution. The law, in fact, is a limitation of enterprise and action, and it focuses only on a negative aspect of society . . . The institution, unlike the law, is not a limitation but rather a model of actions, a veritable enterprise, an invented system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect means . . . The social is profoundly creative, inventive, and positive . . . Society is a set of conventions founded on utility, not a set of obligations founded on contract' (Deleuze 1991: 45-6). 4 Guattari's exact words were: 'Nous faisons partie d'une génération dont la conscience politique est née dans l'enthousiasme et la naïveté de la Libération, avec sa mythologie conjuratoire du fascisme' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 15). 5 Several short publications by Deleuze dealing with Palestine and the Gulf War have been translated in a special issue of Discourse, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall 1998. On Palestine, see Deleuze 1998b, 1998c, 1998d and Deleuze and Sanbar 1998. On the Gulf War, see Deleuze et al. 1998 and Deleuze and Scherer 1998. 6 'We no longer maintain an image of the proletarian of which it is enough to become conscious' (Deleuze 1995b: 173 trans, modified). 7 See also the discussion of public and private thinkers in '1227: Treatise on nomadology - the war-machine' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 376-7). 8 'Politics is active experimentation, since we do not know in advance which way a line is going to turn' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 137). 9 In this manner, Gatens and Lloyd suggest that 'Spinoza's own political philosphy is folded into the metaphysical and ethical concerns addressed in the Ethics' (Gatens and Lloyd 1999: 8). 10 The important distinction between absolute and relative deterritorialization is discussed in Chapter 5, pp. 106-7.

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NOTES 1 C O N C E P T A N D IMAGE OF T H O U G H T 1 Our concern here is not with the nature of these assemblages but the practice of philosophy which gives rise to a book of this kind. Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblage is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, pp. 42-6. 2 In an interview published after his death, Deleuze described A Thousand Plateaus as the best thing he had ever written, alone or with Guattari (Deleuze 1995a: 114). 3 The 'secret link' which unites these thinkers is their 'critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power' (Deleuze 1995b: 6). 4 In What Is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari suggest that both contemporary analytic and communicational or conversational images of thought remain bound to the recognition model (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 138-9, 145-6). 5 In the Critique of Judgement, Kant explicitly grounds this accord among the faculties by means of a 'common sense' (Kant 1987: 89-90). However, in Kant's Critical Philosophy (Deleuze 1984), and in his article published in the same year, 'L'Idée de genèse dans l'esthétique de Kant' (1963), Deleuze argues that the notion of such an accord between faculties or common sense is implicit in the accounts given in the preceding Critiques. Common sense is defined as 'an a priori accord of the faculties, an accord determined by one of them as the legislative faculty' (Deleuze 1984: 35). In the case of knowledge claims, it is the imagination, understanding and reason which collaborate under the authority of the understanding to form a logical common sense, while in the case of moral judgment, it is reason which legislates. Kant 'multiplies common senses', creating as many as there are 'interests of reason' (Deleuze 1994: 136-7). 6 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze uses Heidegger's example (Deleuze 1994:165) but the analogy holds for any individual body attempting to coordinate bodily movement with a greater force, such as the novice rider attempting to coordinate his or her bodily movement with that of the horse. In an interview, Deleuze points to the contemporary passion for surfing (Deleuze 1995b: 121). For the example from Plato, cf. The Republic, 523b-c, and Deleuze 1994: 138-9. 7 In The Logic of Sense (1990) and later writings, Deleuze proposes that the Leibnizian domain of the event is the ultimate element of thought. In What Is Philosophy? (1994), transcendental or 'pure' events are singled out as the external conditions of philosophical thinking: concepts express pure events. Deleuze's concept of events and the relation between philosophical concepts and events is discussed further below. 8 Deleuze and Guattari insist on the difference between concepts and the plane of immanence which is not a concept but the region or milieu of thought in which particular concepts may be formed: 'Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 36). In order to highlight continuities between the concept of philosophy outlined in What Is Philosophy? and that in Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition, we focus on the identity asserted between the conceptual plane of immanence and the image of thought. However, it should be noted that the concept of the plane of immanence also has links to the important concept of the plane of consistency developed in A Thousand Plateaus: see for example Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 70-3, 265-72.

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NOTES 9 'I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or manufactures something that does not as yet exist, that is, "fictions" it' (Foucault 1980: 193). 10 In similar fashion, Best and Kellner read Anti-Oedipus (1977) as 'a materialist, historically grounded, Foucauldian-inspired critique of modernity with a focus on capitalism, the family and psychoanalysis' (Best and Kellner 1991: 85). At the other extreme, Philip Goodchild argues that Deleuze and Guattari's theory 'should never be judged according to its apparent "truth" or "falsehood" . . . Deleuze and Guattari's social theory does not tell us about society in general, nor about the society in which we live; it only tells us about the social unconscious which Deleuze and Guattari have created, out of the resources which lie to hand, and it provides a resource through which we may create our own social meanings and relations' (Goodchild 1996: 46). 11 The equivalence of transcendental problems and pure events is reaffirmed in Deleuze's account of the logical genesis of propositions in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990: 123). 12 The passage Deleuze cites from Péguy's Clio reads as follows: 'Suddenly, we felt that we were no longer the same convicts. Nothing had happened. Yet a problem in which a whole world collided, a problem without issue, in which no end could be seen, suddenly ceased to exist and we asked ourselves what we had been talking about. Instead of an ordinary solution, a found solution, this problem, this difficulty, this impossibility had just passed what seemed like a physical point of resolution. A crisis point. At the same time, the whole world had passed what seemed like a physical crisis point. There are critical points of the event just as there are critical points of temperature: points of fusion, freezing and boiling points, points of coagulation and crystallization. There are even in the case of events states of superfusion which are precipitated, crystallized or determined only by the introduction of a fragment of some future event' (Deleuze 1994: 189; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 111-13; 156-7). Note that it is in this context that Deleuze first introduces the categories of importance and distinctiveness as criteria for the evaluation of thought, suggesting that the problem of thought 'is not tied to essences but to the evaluation of what is important and what is not, to the distribution of singular and regular, distinctive and ordinary points, which takes place entirely within the inessential or within the description of a multiplicity, in relation to the ideal events which constitute the conditions of a "problem"' (Deleuze 1994: 189). 13 Kant 1992: 153-7; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 100. 14 Deleuze and Guattari's characterisation of the event as the contour of an event 'to come' is mirrored by Derrida's concept of the 'to come' as 'the space opened in order for there to be an event, the to-come, so that the coming be that of the other' (Derrida 1993: 216). A concept of the pure event appears in Derrida's accounts of the undecidable objects of his quasi-concepts: for example, his discussion of signature explains the 'enigmatic originality' of every such mark of identity by reference to 'the pure reproducibility of the pure event' (Derrida 1988: 20). In effect, all the objects of deconstructive a-conceptual concepts might be described as pure events, or as variations upon the one pure event of sense or meaning: writing, iteration, differance, incineration, justice, etc. The experience of the undecidable, which is associated with all of these objects, is also an experience of the event or an experience of that which is necessary in

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NOTES order for there to be an event. For Derrida as for Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of the pure event functions as an inaccessible incorporeal reserve of being which guarantees a freedom in things and states of affairs. 2 DIFFERENCE A N D MULTIPLICITY 1 For example, Iris Marion Young acknowledges the importance of discussions of difference in the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault and Kristeva for her approach to the politics of difference (Young 1990: 7). Similarly, Seyla Benhabib notes that 'the term "difference" and its more metaphysical permutations, "différance" in the work of Jacques Derrida, and "le différend" in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, have become rallying points for two issues: a philosophical critique of Enlightenment type rationalism, essentialism and universalism, and a cultural battle cry for those who insist on the experience of alterity, otherness, heterogeneity, dissonance and resistance' (Benhabib 1996: 5). 2 Similarly, Alex Callinicos argues that 'Deleuze's significance is in part that, starting from [a] fundamentally Nietzschean position . . . he has sought, drawing on a variety of sources ranging from Kant and Bergson to Artaud and Scott Fitzgerald, to develop a comprehensive philosophy of difference' (Callinicos 1982: 85). 3 See Bogue 1989: 15; Schrift 1995b: 6 0 - 1 . Other authors who point to the importance of this book in establishing Nietzsche as a key figure in poststructuralist thought include Leigh 1978, Pecora 1986 and Perry 1993. Derrida makes reference to Deleuze's concept of power as the effect of difference between forces in his essay 'Différance' (Derrida 1982: 17). Foucault also testifies to the enduring effect of Deleuze's differential reading of the will to power on his own work: see Chapter 3, note 1. In his inaugural address to the Collège de France, Foucault remarked, speaking of his teacher Jean Hyppolite, 'I am well aware that in the eyes of many his work belongs under the aegis of Hegel, and that our entire epoch, whether in logic or epistemology, whether in Marx or Nietzsche, is trying to escape from Hegel' (Foucault 1984a: 134). His own work develops the theme of difference in a variety of ways: in his account of Nietzsche's conception of genealogy, in his theory of discourse, and in his theory of power. Foucault returns to this theme in the anti-teleological manner in which he interprets Kant's question about enlightenment: Kant, he writes, 'is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?' (Foucault 1984b: 34). 4 In Plato, Deleuze argues, 'a moral motivation in all its purity is avowed: the will to eliminate simulacra or phantasms has no motivation apart from the moral. What is condemned in the figure of simulacra is the state of free, oceanic differences, of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchy, along with all that malice which challenges both the notion of the model and that of the copy' (Deleuze 1994: 265). 5 Notably by Baudrillard (1983). See also the entry 'Simulacrum' by Michael Camille in Nelson and Shiff 1996: 31-44, as well as the discussion of simulationist art and art criticism in Foster 1996: 99-107, 127-8. 6 See the extensive discussion of Bergson's distinction between two types of multiplicity and its relation to his theory of duration in Turetzky 1998: 194-210. On Deleuze's use of Bergson's concept of multiplicity and his relation to neoDarwinism, see Ansell Pearson 1999: 155-9. 7 Similarly, in Negotiations he comments: 'I see philosophy as a logic of multiplicities' (Deleuze 1995b: 147).

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NOTES 8 Deleuze is not guilty here of misusing or mystifying mathematical concepts in the manner suggested by Sokal and Bricmont 1998: 160-5. Rather, he draws upon the history of metaphysical interpretations of the calculus in order to develop a philosophical concept of transcendental Problems or Ideas from a genetic point of view, in full awareness that this is a philosophical rather than a scientific enterprise (Deleuze 1994: xvi, xxi, 170-82). For mathematically as well as philosophically informed comment on Deleuze's remarks on the calculus, see Salanskis 1996. 9 Constantin Boundas discusses this concept of different/ciation and its relation to Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson in Boundas 1996: 90-8. 10 In their discussion of pack, herd and swarm multiplicities typically found in cases of becoming-animal (see Chapter 4), Deleuze and Guattari point out that these continually cross over into one another as in the case of werewolves which become vampires when they die. As such, these mythological pack animals illustrate the transformative character of all qualitative multiplicities: 'Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 249). 11 Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) was a French philosopher, criminologist and psychologist. Along with Durkheim, he was one of the founding figures in French sociology. His major works include Lois de l'imitation, Paris: Alcan, 1890 (translated as The Laws of Imitation, Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1962); La logique sociale, Paris: Alcan, 1893; Essais et melanges sociologiques, Lyon: Stock, 1895; and L'opposition universelle, Paris: Alcan, 1897. Other works by Tarde translated into English include Penal Philosophy, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968, and On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Tarde as the founder of a 'microsociology' in which the social is considered from the perspective of infinitesimal gestures which form waves of influence both beneath and beyond the level of the individual, and 'differences' and 'repetitions' that elude the dialectic of identity and opposition. Tarde is cited in Difference and Repetition (1994: 25-6, 76, 307, 313-4, 326), Foucault (1988: 36, 142) and The Fold (1993: 109-10, 154), and in A Thousand Plateaus (1987: 216, 218-219, 548, 575). In part owing to the revival of interest in Tarde inspired by thinkers such as Deleuze, a series of his major works is currently being reissued by Synthélabo/Les empêcheurs de penser en rond with prefaces by Eric Alliez, Isaac Joseph, Bruno Karsenti, Maurizio Lazzarato, Jean-Clet Martin and René Scherer. 12 In his discussion of Foucault's theory of discourse, Deleuze comments that the primary elements of discourse, statements or énoncés, are not only inseparable from multiplicities (discursive formations) but are themselves multiplicities (Deleuze 1988b: 6). With reference to his own concept of substantive multiplicity, he suggests that Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge represents 'the most decisive step yet taken in the theory-practice of multiplicities' (Deleuze 1988b: 14). 13 'There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal infrastructure. It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or deterritorialization; this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities of another nature' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 283).

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NOTES 14 See Chapter 4, pp. 73-4. 15 'Since every search for identity includes differentiating oneself from what one is not, identity politics is always and necessarily a politics of the creation of difference' (Benhabib 1996: 3). 16 On the differentialist arguments of the French new right, see Taguieff 1994. On the case of EEOC v. Sears see Scott 1988 and Milkman 1986. 17 See also Deleuze 1994: 130. In this context, note Deleuze's comment in 'Intellectuals and power' concerning the practical lesson provided by Foucault with regard to 'the indignity of speaking for others': 'We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this "theoretical" conversion - to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf (Foucault 1977b: 209). 18 At the end of Plateau 13 '7000 B.C.: apparatus of capture', they assert: 'this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the axioms is without importance: on the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse levels: women's struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and minorities in the East or West' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 470-1). 19 Compare William Connolly's discussion of the politics of becoming where he comments that 'To the extent it succeeds in placing a new identity on the cultural field, the politics of becoming changes the shape and contour of already entrenched identities as well' (Connolly 1999: 57). 3 POWER 1 In an interview published in 1972, Foucault said to Deleuze: 'If reading your books (from Nietzsche and Philosophy to what I imagine will be Capitalism and Schizophrenia) has been so important for me it is because they seem to me to go very far in posing this problem [who exercises power and where is it exercised?]: underneath the old theme of meaning, signified and signifier etc., at last the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles See 'Intellectuals and Power' (Foucault 1977b), originally published as 'Les intellectuels et le pouvoir', L'Arc, 49, 1972: 3-10. Deleuze's thinking about power has also influenced others such as Negri, who admitted that without Deleuze's work on Spinoza, his own 'would have been impossible' (Negri 1991: 267). See also Hardt 1993. 2 See also The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974: bk 5, para. 107). 3 In his critical discussion of Nietzsche's complicated relation to Darwinism in Viroid Life, Keith Ansell Pearson points to his rejection of the reactive concept of life prevalent in 'English Darwinism' in favour of an active concept of life which emphasises the priority of the 'spontaneous', 'expansive' and selfoganising 'form-shaping forces at the expense of adaptation (Ansell Pearson 1997a: 92). At the same time, he argues that Nietzsche is 'in fact, closer to Darwin in his thinking on evolution and adaptation than to the explicit Lamarckian position frequently attributed to him' (Ansell Pearson 1997a: 87). In Germinal Life (Ansell Pearson 1999), he makes Deleuze'e engagement with biological thinkers the focus of an account of Deleuze's own 'philosophy of germinal life'. 4 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche writes 'where I found a living creature, there I found will-to-power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master' (Nietzsche 1969a: part 2, 'Of self-overcoming').

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NOTES 5 See, for example, Daybreak, bk 4, para. 262: 'Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men.' 6 See, for example, Schacht 1983; Schutte 1984; Warren 1988; Ansell Pearson 1994; Owen 1995. 7 The concept of the feeling of power is vital to understanding the application of Nietzsche's theory of the will to power to human culture and society. The reading of Nietzsche as a champion of violence and hierarchy is only possible because of the failure to notice this concept. While in the past there have been societies in which exploitation and cruelty towards others were glorified, this does not imply that this is an inescapable feature of human social relations. The history of human culture is in part a history of the development of new means for attaining the feeling of power. There are many evaluative comments throughout Nietzsche's writings which suggest a hierarchy among the possible means of acting upon others. These imply that the feeling of power obtained from contributing to the feeling of power of others is preferable to all other means of obtaining this feeling. For examples and further comment, see Patton 1993. 8 At least, it might be considered to enhance the powers of all so long as it is considered as an association entered into by equals, without regard to the bodies of women and others whose incorporation is simply a consequence of their prior subordination. But even if we imagine a body politic founded upon the effective equality of all its adult members, there are further distinctions to be drawn before we can judge the effect of this composite body on the powers of individual members: what is the quality of the power which predominates in its formation? Does this involve a primarily negative form of capture or is it an affirmative combination and transformation of the powers of its citizens? These kinds of evaluative questions raised by Deleuze's theory of power will be considered in the next section of this chapter. 9 See also Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 238, 293. 10 Similarly, but contrary to widespread opinion, Nietzsche's concept of power does not imply that the exercise of power is inherently conflictual. Discussions of Nietzsche, as well as discussions of those influenced by him such as Deleuze and Foucault, tend to overlook this point of fundamental importance with regard to the potential utility of Nietzsche's concept of power within political theory. See, for example, Read 1989; Bogue 1989: 33. 11 For criticisms of Foucault's failure to address normative issues, see Fraser 1989: 17-34; Habermas 1987: 282ff. For responses to these criticisms and discussions of the manner in which Foucault addresses normative issues in his later work, see the essays collected in Moss 1998 and Ashenden and Owen 1999. 12 In this respect, Deleuze suggests that Nietzsche is close to Callicles in the argument with Socrates over nature versus convention in Gorgias (Deleuze 1983: 58). 13 'From this spirit and in concert with the power and very often the deepest conviction and honesty of devotion, it has chiselled out perhaps the most refined figures in human society that have ever yet existed: the figures of the higher and highest Catholic priesthood' (Nietzsche 1982: bk 1, para. 60). 4 DESIRE, BECOMING A N D FREEDOM 1 See Holland 1999: 36-57, 78-91. 2 Deleuze and Guattari employ the term 'schizophrenia' in this context to refer not to a clinical condition but rather to a semiotic process inherent in the nature of desire. See Holland 1999: 2-3, 26-33.

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NOTES 3 Gatens and Lloyd point out that, for Spinoza, 'Desires arising from joy will, by definition, be increased by affects of joy; while desires of sadness will be diminished by affects of sadness. There is in this contrast an inherent orientation of joy towards engagement with what lies beyond the self, and hence towards sociability; and there is a corresponding orientation of sadness towards disengagement and isolation. The force of desire arising from joy will be strengthened, rather than weakened, by the power of external causes. The mind's increase of activity, which is joy, will be strengthened by its understanding of the external causes of its joy' (Gatens and Lloyd 1999: 53). 4 See the passage from Daybreak, bk 1, para. 23, cited in Chapter 3, p. 53. Mark Warren draws attention to the importance of the 'feeling of power' in Nietzsche's account of human agency. He argues that Nietzsche's theory of the will to power must be understood primarily as an account of the conditions of the human experience of agency and that, for Nietzsche, it is the self-reflective dimension of agency as expressed in the feeling of power which is paramount: 'In being conscious and self-conscious, humans increasingly strive less for external goals than for the self-reflective goal of experiencing the self as agent' (Warren 1988: 138). 5 Cited in Allison 1977: 107; also Klossowski 1997: 55. 6 'By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained' (Ethics, III, def. 3). See Deleuze's discussion in 1988c: 48-51. 7 See Charles Stivale's discussion of a contemporary politics of becoming in cyberpunk science fiction (Stivale 1998: 124-42). 8 At one point they suggest that 'becoming and multiplicity are the same thing' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 249). 9 These are the affects which Nietzsche associates with actors, women and others who had to survive under conditions of dependency. See Nietzsche 1974: bk 5, para. 361, 'On the problem of the actor'. 10 See Jardine 1985; Braidotti 1991, 1994; Grosz 1994a, 1994b; Battersby 1998. Grosz provides a useful summary of previous feminist criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari in Grosz 1994a: 163-4, 173-9. Olkowski 1999: 32-58 and Goulimari 1999 undertake critical readings of earlier feminist responses to Deleuze and Guattari: both offer a more positive assessment of the prospects for a 'minoritarian feminism'. Lorraine 1999 explores common ground between Irigaray and Deleuze. 11 Grosz reads Deleuze and Guattari in this manner, taking them to be suggesting that 'the liberation of women' is a necessary phase in the larger process of human liberation. See Grosz 1994a: 179; 1994b: 208. 12 Diana Coole (1993: 84-7) points out the extent to which Berlin relies upon a series of spatial metaphors in order to define negative liberty. 13 Deleuze's concept of critical freedom has affinities with Bergson, especially in Time and Free Will, where free acts are regarded as rare exceptions to the habitual actions of everyday life (Bergson 1913: 168). Later, he argues that 'freedom must be sought in a certain shade or quality of the action itself and not in the relation of this act to what it is not or to what it might have been it really consists in a dynamic progress in which the self and its motives, like real living beings, are in a constant state of becoming' (Bergson 1913: 182-3). See also Cohen 1997: 153-4.

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NOTES 5 SOCIAL MACHINES A N D THE STATE 1 Kenneth Surin draws attention to this feature of Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of capitalism, suggesting that the capitalist axiomatic is capable of regulating the interaction of a series of cultural and social 'accords', such that in its current phase it should be regarded as a meta- or mega-accord: 'As a set of accords or axioms governing the accords that regulate the operations of the various components of an immensely powerful and comprehensive system, capital is situated at the crossing-point of all kinds of formations, and thus has the capacity to integrate and recompose capitalist and noncapitalist sectors or modes of production. Capital, the "accord of accords" par excellence, can bring together heterogeneous phenomena and make them express the same world' (Surin 1998). 2 This phrase from Nietzsche, cited by Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 34, comes from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 2, 'Of the land of culture'. 3 Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the despotic machine involves a 'formation' that may be found in spiritual as well as in secular empires. They point to paranoia as the equivalent formation of desire, suggesting that 'the despot is the paranoiac' (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 193). 4 See the commentary on the Qin dynasty treatise on government, The Book of Lord Shang, by Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi (1992: 11-71). 5 Elsewhere in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze points out that for every philosophy that begins from a subjective or implicit claim about what everybody is supposed to know, there is another that denies this knowledge or fails to recognise what is claimed. Such philosophies rely not upon the common man but on a different persona: 'Someone who neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything' (Deleuze 1994: 130). In the interview 'Intellectuals and Power', he suggests that it was Foucault who taught the intellectuals of his generation the indignity of speaking for others: 'We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this "theoretical" conversion - to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf (Foucault 1977b: 209). 6 Holland 1991: 57. See also the extended discussion of deterritorialisation and decoding in Holland 1999: 19-21. 7 See the theorems of deterritorialisation elaborated in Plateau 7, 'Year Zero: faciality' and in Plateau 10, '1730: becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 174-5; 306-7). 6 N O M A D S , CAPTURE A N D C O L O N I S A T I O N 1 For a long time, the term 'war-machine' was associated with the type of military-industrial complex which emerged in the advanced industrial countries after 1945. Deleuze and Guattari use the term in this sense in their description of the post-war evolution of the nation-state, when they suggest that it is now plausible to view the major industrial states as subordinated to a global warmachine, a single many-headed monster whose most striking feature is its awesome destructive power: 'We have watched the war-machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 422). Since the publication of A Thousand Plateaus in France in 1980, and in the aftermath of the 'wars' against Iraq and Serbia, the term has become commonly used to refer to anything remotely connected to the military capacity of a nation-state or multinational organisation such as NATO.

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NOTES 2 See Stivale's extended schizoanalytic analysis of this film and the documentary sequel Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness (Stivale 1998: 27-70). Stivale comments that 'Colonel Kurtz's apparent desire and (narrated) "becomings" that so tempt Willard during his journey relate directly to the dream of merging with the flows of a warrior band in a nomadic military operation supposedly beyond the limited logic of the US Government's war machine' (Stivale 1998: 34). 3 The forms of nomadism in actual societies are typically to be understood as a mixture of these distinct modes of social existence. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the formal differences are important since 'it is only on the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judgement on the mix' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 410). 4 'The authors' reservations about anthropology do not prevent them from using it in two important ways: first, they borrow heavily from anthropological sources, and second, they make anthropological statements of their own' (Miller 1993: 13). 5 See their defensive comment at the end of Plateau 12: 'We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war-machine to the nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that the war-machine as such was invented' (Deleuze and Guatttari 1987: 422). 6 See William Connolly's micropolitical analysis of the emergence of a right to die in Connolly 1999: 146-9. 7 Despite the fact that the first Governor of the colony of New South Wales was under instructions to take possession of lands only 'with the consent of the natives' and despite the long history of colonial negotiations and treaties with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, the British authorities chose not to regard the indigenous inhabitants of Australia as settled peoples with their own law and government. Instead, they opted for the fiction that New South Wales had been acquired 'as desert and uninhabited'. This principle was clearly stated by the British Privy Council in an 1889 case, Cooper v. Stuart, when it declared Australia to be a Crown colony acquired by settlement on the grounds that it was 'a tract of territory practically unoccupied without settled inhabitants or settled law' (Reynolds 1996: 16, 110). 8 'Just as eighteenth century colonial law harboured rules governing such matters as the constitutional status of colonies, the relative powers of the Imperial Parliament and local assemblies, and the reception of English law, it also contained rules concerning the status of the native peoples living under the Crown's protection, and the position of their lands, customary laws, and political institutions. These rules form a body of unwritten law known collectively as the doctrine of aboriginal rights. The part dealing specifically with native lands is called the doctrine of aboriginal title' (Slattery 1987: 737). 9 Johnson v. MTntosh 21 US (Wheat) 543 (1823) at pp. 547, 573-4. 10 For Aotearoa/New Zealand see R v. Symonds (1847) NZPCC, 387; for Canada, see St Catherine's Milling and Lumber Company v. The Queen (1888) 14 AC 46. 11 Mabo v. Queensland (1992) is reported at 175 CLR 1; 66 ALJR 408; 107 ALR 1. It is published in book form, with commentary by Richard H. Bartlett, as The Mabo Decision, Sydney: Butterworths, 1993. 12 For example, the Chief Justice said in his judgment that 'the common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notion of terra nullius and to persist in characterising the indigenous inhabitants of the Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social

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NOTES

13

14 15 16

17 18

organisation to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land' (Bartlett 1993: 41). In a Deleuzian analysis of Canadian aboriginal politics (which in several respects parallels this account of aboriginal title jurisprudence) Kara Shaw emphasises the degree to which both the trial judge's 1993 decision in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia and the 1997 Appeal decision by the Supreme Court amount to a reassertion of the sovereignty of the colonial State as the ground of any claim to special rights. At the same time, with reference to Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the politics of minority and the majoritarian politics of the axiomatic (see Chapter 2, pp. 47-8), she points to the important sense in which these legal decisions also serve to expose the irreducible gap between the aspirations of the Gitskan and Wet'suwet'en plaintiffs and the available forms of recognition within the axiomatic of the colonial State. Without seeking to deny the importance of changes at the level of the axioms, she shows the sense in which, for the aboriginal plaintiffs as for Deleuze and Guattari, the domain of politics is not exhausted by struggle at this level (Shaw 1999: 280-308). Colder et al v. Attorney-General of British Columbia (1973) 34 DLR (3d) 145. Re Southern Rhodesia 1919 AC 211, at 233-4. Cited in Bartlett 1993: 26-7, 144. This view was enshrined in the common law of the colony in R v. Murrell (1 Legge 72). This case, heard in 1836, involved the trial of two aboriginal men for killing another aboriginal man. The defence argument that the defendants should not be tried under British law since they were acting in accordance with tribal law was rejected on the grounds that native customs were not worthy of recognition as laws. Rather, these customs were considered 'only such as are consistent with a state of greatest darkness and irrational superstition' (Reynolds 1996: 62). In an 1847 case, Attorney-General v. Brown (1 Legge 312), the judge explicitly refused to recognise any aboriginal customary law in relation to land when he asserted that 'the waste lands of this colony are, and ever have been, from the time of its first settlement in 1788, in the Crown', for the simple reason that there was 'no other proprietor of such lands'. Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1991) 3 WWR 97 at 219-23. Cited in Asch 1999: 438. Van der Peet v. The Queen (1996) 137 DLR (4th) 289 (SCC). In this case the Canadian Supreme Court directly addressed the question of the nature and content of aboriginal rights, arguing that these should be understood as the means whereby the assertion of Crown sovereignty is reconciled with the fact of prior occupation by distinctive aboriginal societies.

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INDEX

aboriginal rights see rights aboriginal title see native title absolute deterritorialisation see deterritorialisation abstract machine 42-5, 57-8, 66, 69, 73, 88, 98-9, 102, 106, 110, 114, 116, 118-20, 122, 134-5, 139; of capture 58, 99, 102, 113 action 2, 52-3, 55-6, 60, 63-4, 75, 83-5, 104, 133, 145; free 116, 122-3; upon actions 56, 59, 76-7, 85, 104 active see affect, force, power affect 7, 52-3, 55, 71-5, 78-84, 110, 133, 145; active and reactive 75, 78-9 affective dimension of power see power affirmation 4, 20, 23, 30-2, 42, 60-5, 104, 144; see also difference, negation Althusser, L. 37, 45, 88 analytic of power see power anarchism 4, 8, 105 Ansell Pearson, K. 141, 143, 144 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1-2, 4-7, 9, 11, 49, 58, 68-73, 75, 77, 88-100, 103-5, 132, 136, 140, 146 anthropology 65, 79, 113, 117-19, 122, 147 apparatus of capture see capture apprenticeship 19-20, 22, 24 art 24, 35, 72-3, 110, 141 Artaud, A. 141 Asch, M. 130-1, 148 Asiatic production see production assemblage 6, 9, 11, 42-6, 53-4, 69-70, 73-4, 77, 79-80, 83, 86, 95,

99, 101, 106-7, 109-10, 115, 117, 135, 139, 142; collective 6, 11, 42, 58, 87; concept of 11, 42, 44, 46, 85, 139; conceptual 11, 133; concrete 45, 57, 139; of desire 11, 42, 70, 73, 77, 136; of enunciation 6, 11, 42, 44, 58; machinic 1, 9, 11, 42, 69, 71-3, 77, 109; political 45, 107; rhizomatic 17, 116; social 11, 58, 111, 133; territorial 11, 122-3; theory of 9, 36, 42, 45, 47, 49, 57, 83; two kinds of 42-3, 111; of the war-machine type 109-11, 113-14, 116-20 axiomatic 26, 48, 58, 94-8, 100, 102-3, 105, 107, 128, 134, 143, 146, 148; of flows 7, 95, 102, 134; immanent 26, 102; see also capitalist axiomatic axiomatic system 7, 26, 48, 94, 96 Bataille, G. 90 Battersby, C. 145 Baudrillard, J. 141 Beckett, S. 76 becoming 1, 7-1, 14, 27, 31, 34-5, 42, 47-8, 53-5, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 74-5, 78-83, 85-6, 100, 106, 10810, 117, 119, 126, 129, 134-6, 142, 143, 145, 147; animal 78-82, 142; conceptual 14, 27, 78; double 79; imperceptible 78, 86; indigenous 126, 129; master 55, 64; minor 7, 48, 66, 80-2, 110, 134-5; nomad 117; other 70, 75, 79-80, 85; politics of 143, 145; revolutionary 7-8, 48, 83, 134; woman 75, 78, 81-2

159

INDEX Benhabib, S. 141 Bentham, J. 57 Bergson, H. 14, 18, 21, 35-7, 40, 43, 45, 132, 141, 142, 145 Bergsonism 21, 35-6 Berlin, I. 83, 84, 145 Best, S. 140 Blanchot, M. 24, 26 body 25-7, 31, 38, 44, 50-5, 62, 69-79, 81-3, 89-90, 95-6, 104, 111, 136, 139, 144, 145; full 89-93, 99, 105; imaginary 72, 81, 89; -politic 54, 101, 127, 144; without organs 75, 77, 89, 97, 135-6 body of the despot see despot Bogue, R. 73, 141, 144 Boulez, P. 112 Boundas, C. 142 Bourdieu, P. 138 Braidotti, R. 145 Bricmont, J. 142 calculus 52, 93, 141 Colder et al. v. Attorney-General of British Columbia 127-8, 130-1, 147 Callinicos, A. 141 Camille, M. 141 capital 7, 47, 56, 89, 92-7, 99, 101-3, 105, 134, 146 capitalism 6-7, 26, 48, 58, 66, 69, 82, 89, 92-8, 100-6, 122, 140, 146 capitalist axiomatic 48, 58, 94-8, 103-5, 128, 134, 146 capitalist machine 88, 92-5, 97, 105 capitalist society see society capture 7, 9, 47, 54, 71, 73, 99, 104, 109-14, 119-20, 122-4, 129, 134-5, 144; abstract machine of 58, 99, 102, 113, 122; apparatus of 42, 48, 105, 109-11, 114, 120-1, 123-4, 128-9, 134, 143; colonial 99, 109, 114, 117, 126, 129, 134; double 54; of flows 99, 104; forms of 1, 8; legal 125-6, 128-9; magical 121; mechanisms of 7, 99, 101; modes of 73, 99; political 120, 123; of territory 122-5, 128-9; see also abstract machine Clastres, P. 113 Clausewitz, K. 113 code 7, 58, 90, 92, 94-6; social 7, 71, 92, 94-5, 97, 103; see also surplus

codification 89-90, 94-5, 97-8, 102; of desire 89-91; of flows 89-91, 97-8 Cohen, P. M. 145 collective assemblage see assemblage colonial capture see capture colonisation 27, 109, 117, 119-24, 126-9, 134 commodity production see production common law see law concepts 1-3, 6, 10-17, 23-8, 30, 32, 35, 51, 78, 88, 94, 106, 109, 116-20, 129, 132-5, 137, 138, 139, 142; as open multiplicities 12-18; history of 12-13; see also creation of concepts conceptual assemblage see assemblage conceptual production see production conceptual variation see variation conjugation or conjunction 7, 45, 72, 92, 101, 102, 105, 107, 110, 131, 136 connection 7, 10-11, 43, 67, 72, 87, 94, 101-3, 107, 110, 131, 136 Connolly, W. 143, 147 continuous variation see variation contradiction 6, 30-1, 44, 46-7, 114, 130 control 57-9, 89, 98, 105, 115, 119; mechanisms of 8, 26, 59, 93 Coole, D. 145 Coppola, F. F. 115 counter-actualisation 28, 109, 119, 132, 137 creation 2-3, 10-12, 20, 24-6, 38, 45, 66-7, 72, 74, 83, 92, 94, 107, 109-10, 114-15, 120, 133, 135-6, 143; of concepts 2-3, 6, 10-14, 17, 24, 26, 109, 133, 135, 137; of new values 25, 50 creativity 6, 66, 70, 72, 106, 120 critical freedom see freedom critique 4, 9, 18, 22-3, 25, 49, 59-60, 62,68, 117, 139, 140, 141 Croissant, K. 4 customary law see law Darwin, C. 50, 141, 143 Dean, K. 146 deconstruction 2, 15-16, 32, 34-5, 53, 140 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia 127-8, 148

160

INDEX Derrida, J. 2, 15-16, 29-30, 32, 45, 114, 140, 141 Descartes, R. 18-19 Descombes, V. 21, 30 descriptive ontology see ontology desire 3, 5-7, 9, 11-12, 42, 49-50, 53, 58, 62, 66, 68-78, 80, 83-9, 91, 97, 99, 106, 110, 133, 135-6, 144, 145, 146, 147; concept of 68-75, 77, 88; politics of 6, 68-70, 73, 77, 133; process of 70, 72, 75, 77; psychoanalytic concept of 68, 72; theory of 9, 49, 70, 73, 76, 106; see also assemblages of desire, codification of desire, flows of desire desiring machine 69, 71, 76 desiring production see production despot 91-2, 100, 146; body of 90-1, 99 despotic machine 90, 92-3, 99, 146 deterritorialisation 1, 6-7, 9, 11-12, 42-5, 47-8, 66, 70, 74, 80, 82, 88, 92, 96-8, 100-3, 105-7, 109-10, 112, 117, 119-20, 122-4, 126, 128-9, 135-6, 138, 142, 146; absolute 9, 12, 42, 46, 97, 107, 110, 129, 136; and the political 103-8; relative 107, 110, 123, 126, 128, 136, 13$; see also conjugation or conjunction, connection, flows, State Dialogues 1, 7, 10, 17-18, 42, 54, 67, 70, 72, 77, 138 difference 4, 10, 16, 29-40, 60-2, 141; affirmation of 30, 32; concept of 4, 29, 31-2, 34-5, 38-40, 44, 46; differing- 39; of force 30, 60-2; free 37, 47, 104, 118; and identity 4, 30-4, 39-40, 46-7; internal 33; in itself 32, 34, 37, 39-40; in kind 36, 43; metaphysics of 4, 21, 37, 41, 132; philosophies of 4, 10, 29-32, 37, 39-40, 46, 65, 141; play of 34; politics of 4, 29, 46-8, 134, 141; qualitative 115, 123; quantitative 30, 61, 62; and repetition 35; sexual 107 Difference and Repetition 4, 17-24, 26, 31-5, 37-9, 41-2, 44-6, 65, 93, 104, 118, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146 différenciation 36, 38, 41 different/ciation 39, 142

differential force see force differential ontology see ontology differential structures see structures differentiation 3, 32, 36-8, 59, 88, 135 disciplinary power see power discipline 57-8, 69 domination 47, 52, 56-7, 59-62, 76-7, 81-2, 110, 136; see also structures of domination double becoming see becoming double capture see capture Dumézil, G. 115, 121 duration 35-7, 40, 45, 141 Durkheim, E. 142 earth 3, 9, 12, 46, 89, 91-2, 102, 107, 109, 119, 122-4, 133, 136 EEOC v. Sears 46, 143 Empiricism and Subjectivity: an Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature 3, 138 Engels, F. 96 eternal return 31, 35, 42, 51, 65, 75 evaluation 4, 23, 49, 58-67, 70, 84, 87, 95, 103, 106, 112, 134, 136, 140, 144; modes of 30, 60; of values 59-60; strong- 84-5, 87; see also power and evaluation, structures of evaluation evaluative ontology see ontology events 16, 27-8, 38, 41, 55, 85, 107-8, 133, 136; pure 25-8, 37, 133, 136, 139, 140, 141 feeling of power see power Fitzgerald, F. S. 75, 86, 141 flows 7, 71, 89, 92-3, 95-102, 104-5, 134, 147; capture of 99, 104; of code 94, 96; codification of 89-91, 97-8; decoded 70, 92-7, 102, 122; of desire 89, 91, 97; deterritorialised 70, 92, 102, 136; material 88-90; mutant 98, 110; of violence 113-15; see also conjugation or conjunction, connection, surplus The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque 142 force 5, 9, 19-21, 25, 39, 50-7, 59-68, 72-4, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95-6, 102-7, 111, 113, 115-16, 132, 139, 143, 145; active and reactive 4, 14, 23,

161

INDEX Ideas 21-2, 38, 40-2, 113; as problems 21, 26, 37-8, 41, 44-5; transcendental 21, 26, 40-2, 45, 142; see also language, society image of thought 11, 17-18, 22-3, 132, 139; dogmatic 17-23, 25-6; modern 23; rhizomatic 17 imaginary body see body immanent axiomatic see axiomatic increase of power see power intensities 1, 36, 38, 40, 71-2, 75-9, 87 intensive: elements 12-13, 15, 42-3; states 70, 72-4; quantities 72, 75 internal difference see difference internal multiplicity see multiplicity Irigaray, L. 29, 145

30-1, 52, 59-67, 70, 104; concept of 30-1, 51-3; differential 30, 36, 51-3, 55-6, 60-2, 72, 132, 141 Foster, H. 141 Foucault, M. 1, 4-8, 14, 25-6, 29, 44, 46, 49, 52, 54-9, 64-5, 69, 71, 73, 77-8, 114, 135, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146 Foucault 1, 49, 56-8, 78, 142 Fraser, N. 59, 144 free difference see difference freedom 1-2, 21, 40-2, 83-5, 87, 108, 112, 135-6, 141, 145; concept of 83-4, 87; critical 83-7, 108, 135, 145; liberal concept of 83-4, 86-7; negative 2, 83-5, 145; positive 2, 83-5, 87 Frege, G. 15 Freud, S. 68, 70-2, 78 full body see body

Jardine, A. 145 Johnson v. M'Intosh 125, 146 jurisprudence 3, 109, 110, 120, 124, 126-7, 129-30, 134, 148

Gallop, J. 76-7, 79 Gatens, M. 82, 138, 145 genealogy 20, 23, 56-7, 60, 62-3, 91, 97, 132, 141 genesis 21, 23, 25-6, 30, 38, 40, 52, 61, 140, 142 Goodchild, P. 68, 140 Goulimari, P. 145 government 3, 22, 56, 66, 92, 95, 102, 104-5, 20-1, 124-6, 146, 147 Grosz, E. 45 Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons 4-5

Kant, I. 1, 14, 19, 21-3, 27, 35, 40, 59, 113, 139, 140, 141 Kant*s Critical Philosophy 139 Kellner, D. 140 Kierkgaard, S. 17, 24 Klossowski, P. 145 Kristeva, J. 29, 141

Habermas, J. 59, 144 Hardt, M. 143 Hegel, G. W. F. 4, 30-2, 70, 141 Heidegger, M. 19, 23, 139 history 6, 8, 21, 27, 41-2, 50, 55-6, 63-4, 68, 82, 88, 91-2, 96-100, 106, 108, 111-12, 115, 119-21, 133, 144, 147; critical 4, 140; of culture 53, 55, 75, 144; materialist 6, 88; universal 69, 88, 96, 98-100, 115 history of philosophy see philosophy Hobbes, T. 1, 12-14, 50, 53-4, 59 Holland, E. 105, 144, 146 Hume, D. 3, 18, 132, 138 Husserl, E. 36 Hyppolite, J. 141

labour 7, 47, 89, 92, 97-9, 101-3, 122-4; power 37, 93; see also surplus Lacan, J. 106 Lamarck, C. 50, 143 Land, N. 103 land rights see rights language of 6-7, 27-8, 47, 58, 66, 95; . idea of 37, 41 law 3, 28, 52, 100, 110, 114, 120-1, 122-7, 129-30, 133, 138, 147, 148; common 3, 109, 124-6, 129-30, 134-5, 147; customary 125-30, 147, 148, property 124, 126; rule of 52, 133 legal capture see capture legal recognition see recognition liberalism 13, 22, 47, 59, 83-4; see also freedom, political, politics 'L'Idée de genèse dans l'esthétique de Kant' 19, 22, 139

162

INDEX lines of flight 1-2, 6, 8, 10, 42-5, 47, 66, 73, 80, 86-7, 106-7, 110, 112, 120, 126, 136, 142 Lloyd, G. 138, 145 Locke, J. 1, 12-13 The Logic of Sense 26-8, 139, 140 Lorraine, T. 145 Lucretius 18, 132 Lyotard, J. F. 8, 29, 141 Mabo v. Queensland 126-8, 130, 147 Machiavelli, N. 1 machine, 1, 2, 139; mega- 2, 89, 91, 99-100; see also abstract machine, capitalist machine, desiring machine, despotic machine, metamorphosis machine, social machine, state machine, territorial machine, virtual machine, war-machine machine of capture see capture machinic assemblage see assemblage machinic enslavement, 100, 101, 105 machinic ontology see ontology machinic theory of society see society Macpherson, C. B. 53 macropolitics 6, 43, 45; see also micropolitics magical capture see capture Marx, K. 6-7, 41, 45, 71, 88-9, 91-3, 96,99, 101, 114, 132, 141 marxist analysis 4, 6, 26, 37, 47, 56, 68, 88, 93 Massumi, B. 82, 146 master see slave May, T. 8, 39-40 mechanisms of control see control Meinong, A. 36 Melville, H. 80 metamorphosis 42-3, 45-6, 50, 54, 66, 73, 83, 110, 112, 135; machines 58, 102, 109-15, 119-20, 131, 134, 136 metaphor 1-2, 84, 94, 138 metaphysics of difference see difference micropolitics 6, 43, 45, 47, 66, 69, 73, 126, 133, 147 Milkman, R. 143 Miller, C. 117-19, 147 minority 7, 9, 29, 47, 48, 80-1, 143, 148 modes of production see production molar 42-3, 45, 66-7, 77, 81-2, 86, 107, 136

molecular 42-3, 45, 66, 69, 77, 81, 86, 107, 136 multiplicity 4-5, 8-9, 15-16, 29, 31-2, 35-8, 42-3, 57, 66-7, 70, 80, 85, 109, 112, 119, 132, 140, 141, 142, 145; concept of 4, 9, 29, 132, 141; internal 36-7; kinds of 30, 35-6, 43, 70, 141; numerical 35; of parts 5, 8; qualitative 36, 80, 85, 112, 119; quantitative 112; theory of 30, 37, 47; virtual 35-40; see also philosophy of multiplicity Mumford, L. 1, 99 music 11,42, 106, 112 mutant flows see flows mythology 79, 107, 111, 115, 121, 142 native title 108-9, 125-31, 134, 147, 148 negation 30-1, 38, 62-3, 65; see also affirmation negative freedom see freedom Negotiations 1972-1990 3, 5-8, 11, 17-18, 26, 58-9, 73, 108, 120, 138, 139, 141 Negri, A. 3-4, 6-8, 26, 143 Nietzsche, F. 2-6, 12, 14, 16-18, 20, 23-5, 30-1, 34-5, 37, 41, 49-53, 55^6, 58-65, 72, 74-5, 90-1, 97, 103, 106, 112, 132, 136, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146 Nietzsche and Philosophy 4, 18-23, 25, 30-1, 35, 49-52, 56, 59-65, 74, 104, 144 nihilism 8, 31, 51, 62, 64 nomad 2, 1-2, 8-9, 11, 24, 42, 66, 73, 102, 109, 111, 116-20, 134, 136, 141, 147; real or imagined 115-20; science 111; space 111 nomadism 1, 8-9, 42, 66, 117-19, 134, 136, 147 Nozick, R. 12 Olkowski, D. 145 ontology 9, 30, 34-6, 44-6; descriptive 55-8; differential 30, 41, 45-6; evaluative 136; machinic 136; political 9; social 9 Onuf, N. 120, 121 overturning Platonism see Platonism Owen, D. 144

163

INDEX Parnet, C. 1, 54 Pearson, N. 129 Pecora, V. P. 141 pedagogy 21, 76-7, 79 Péguy, C. 27, 140 Perry, P. 141 philosophy 3-5, 6, 9-11, 15, 17-18, 21-3, 25-6, 28, 39, 109, 118, 120, 132-3, 136, 141, 146; concept of 2, 11-12, 25-6, 73, 94, 112, 132, 135, 139; définition of 11, 24; Deleuze's 10, 21, 39-40, 46, 50; of difference 4, 10, 29-32, 37, 39-40, 46, 65, 141; history of 10, 17-19, 23, 37, 132; of multiplicity 10; of nature 9; political 1-2, 5-6, 8-12, 22, 25, 69, 84, 105, 134-6, 138; of power 64; practice of 2, 15, 17-18, 139; of representation 4, 38; as a system 17, task of 12, 23-8, 132 Plato 11, 19, 32-4, 65, 70, 139, 141 Platonism 4, 32-7; overturning 32-7 play of difference see difference Pocock,J. G. A. 119 political 1, 3, 10, 103-8, 132-4, 137; activity 3-5, 9-10, anti- 103-5; 12, 52; concepts 13-14, 109; liberalism 13, 22; movements 4, 6, 54; theory 1-2, 41, 49, 59, 66, 69, 135, 144; thought 2-3, 8, 10, 13, 49, 94, 132, 135, 137, 138; see also deterritorialisation, ontology, power political assemblage see assemblage political capture see capture political philosophy see philosophy political power see power political rights see rights political society see society political structures see structures politics 1, 5, 7, 9-10, 28, 43, 46-8, 67-70, 80-2, 94, 104, 120-1, 136, 138, 143, 148; liberal 59, 84; revolutionary 7, 105; see also body politic, macropolitics, micropolitics politics of becoming see becoming politics of desire see desire politics of difference see difference positive freedom see freedom poststructuralism 7-8, 30, 135, 141; see also structuralism power 2, 4, 8, 10, 12-14, 20-1, 23, 25-6, 30-2, 34, 37, 40, 42-5,

47-65, 69, 71-83, 88, 93, 98, 102, 104-7, 111-13, 121, 124-5, 127, 130, 135-6, 139, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147; active 14, 112; affective dimension of 73-77; analytic of 55-8, 65; concept of 14, 49-50, 53, 56, 59, 74, 78, 104, 106, 141, 144; disciplinary 26, 54, 57; and evaluation 59-67; feeling of 53, 75, 77, 79-80, 144, 145; increase of 76, 111; political 105; reactive 112; relations 51, 55-6, 82, 105; sovereign 13, 98, 121, 130; state 8, 59, 111; theory of 49, 104, 141, 144 primary reterritorialisation see reterritorialisation private property see property problem 6, 13-14, 17, 20-2, 24, 26, 28, 36-8, 40-2, 44, 69, 74, 124, 129-30, 140; see also ideas, language, society production 37, 68, 73, 88-9, 91, 93, 95, 103, 105; Asiatic 91, 99; commodity 92, 95; conceptual 18, 23, 34; desiring 68, 71-2, 75, 88-9; modes of 41, 88, 146; process of 71, 88-9, 92, 95; material 88, 90; social 68, 89, 92, 95, 99 property 12, 37, 92, 100-1, 118-19, 122, 124-9; private 92, 100, 102, 123; see also law, rights Proust, M. 17-18, 36 Proust and Signs 17-18 psychoanalysis 5, 49, 68, 72, 106, 140; see also desire pure events see events qualitative difference see difference qualitative multiplicity see multiplicity quantitative difference see difference quantitative multiplicity see multiplicity Rawls, J. 13, 22, 85 reactive see affect, force, power recognition 19-22, 25, 47, 50, 104, 139, 146; legal 108, 117, 124-30, 148 Reich, W. 69, 74 Reimann, G. 36, 43 relative deterritorialisation see deterritorialisation relay 5, 8, 112

164

INDEX representation 5, 8, 11, 24, 26-8, 32-5, 47-8, 50, 104, 135, 143, 146; see also philosophy of representation reterritorialisation 1, 7, 9, 44, 92, 97-8, 100-1, 103, 105, 107, 124, 126, 131, 135-6; primary 126; secondary 107, 126 Reuleaux, F. 2 revolution 5, 8, 27, 42, 69-71, 77, 83, 105, 107, 111, 120 revolutionary becoming see becoming Reynolds, H. 130, 147, 148 rhizome 11, 17, 43, 45, 66, 110, 112, 116, 133, 135; see also image of thought rhizomatic assemblage see assemblage rights 3, 111, 120, 123, 125, 127, 134; aboriginal 124-5, 130-1, 133, 147, 148; constitutional 120; homosexual 4; land 3, 124-6, 148; political 131; property 125-6, 128; universal 27; women's 81 Read, J. H. 144 Rousseau, J-J. 1, 12 rule of law see law Russell, B. 36 Sahlins, M. 122 Salanskis, J-M. 132 Sartre, J-P. 5 Schacht, R. 144 schizoanalysis 5, 66, 68, 70, 72, 77, 96-7, 103, 106, 136, 144, 147 Schutte, O. 144 science 14-16, 21, 24-6, 31, 94, 110-11, 117, 120, 142 Scott, J. W. 132 Sears case see EEOC v. Sears secondary reterritorialisation see reterritorialisation sedentary space see space segmentarity 11, 66-7, 69, 109 segmentary space see space Shakespeare, W. 115 Shaw, K. 148 simulacrum 32-3, 35, 37, 48, 119, 141 singularity 12, 16, 38, 40, 47, 104, 127 Slattery, B. 147 slave 14, 31-2, 50, 63, 101, 105, 122; and master 30, 60, 64; morality, 30, 60,63 smooth space see space

social assemblage see assemblage social contract 12, 14, 26, 28, 54, 59, 79, 138 social machine 7, 88-92, 94-6, 100, 105, 111 social ontology see ontology social production see production social space see space society 3, 6-8, 12, 21, 27, 37, 54, 84, 88-9, 91, 93, 96, 104, 107, 123, 126, 128, 138, 140, 144; capitalist 66, 93, 95-6, 103; forms of 41-2, 58, 66, 81, 96; just 13, 22; machine theory of 1-2, 58, 88-97; modern 58, 81; political 104, 125, 133; as problem 40-2, 122 socius 82, 89-93, 95-6, 109 Sokal, A. 142 sovereign 12, 54, 91, 100, 124-5, 127-8, 130; power 13, 98, 121, 130, states 120-1, territory 121, 124 sovereign power see power sovereignty 99, 120-1, 124-6, 128, 130-1, 148 space: sedentary 111, 117; segmentary 65; smooth 42, 110-14, 116, 118-20, 123, 129, 131, 134; social 58, 65-6, 117; striated 110-14 Spinoza, B. 1, 9, 14, 18, 49-50, 53, 74-5, 78, 132, 136, 138, 143, 145 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 75, 145 state, the 5-6, 8, 24, 56, 59, 66, 80, 87, 91-2, 97-104, 109, 111-15, 120-2, 125, 127-8, 130-1, 133, 146, 148; and deterritorialisation 97-103; forms of 99-100, 102-3, 109, 111, 114-16, 119, 122; machine 91-2, 98 state power see power Stivale, C. 145, 147 Stoics 27-8 striated space see space strong evaluation see evaluation structuralism 37-8, 88; see also poststructuralism structures 32, 34, 37-8, 40, 44-5, 90, 136; differential 39; of domination 76, 82; economic 37; of evaluation 66, 84-5, 112, 132, 136; of interests 84; political 121; social 37; virtual 38,41 SurinK. 146

165

INDEX surface 27, 72, 89-90, 112, 117, 122-3 surplus 7, 89, 93-4, 122; code 90, 93, 95; flow 93-5, 104; labour 122-3; value 90, 93-6, 98 Taguieff, P-A. 143 Tarde, G. 43, 142 task of philosophy see philosophy Taylor, C. 83-4 terra nullius 125, 128, 130, 147 territory 9, 44-5, 89, 92, 98, 101, 114, 117, 120-30, 147; see also capture territorial machine 89, 90, 91, 92, 97 theory of assemblages see assemblage theory of desire see desire theory of multiplicities see multiplicity theory of power see power A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1-2, 4, 6-9, 11, 16-18, 24, 27, 30, 36, 41-9, 54, 57-8, 65-7, 69, 73-5, 77-83, 86-8, 94-5, 98-103, 105-6, 109-17, 119-23, 132, 134-9, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 thought 2, 6, 9, 12, 16, 26, 31, 40-1, 44, 65, 109-10, 120, 133, 136-7, 139, 140; untimely 3, 12, 18, 25, 28, 133; see also image of thought, political thought time 35, 40, 45 transcendental ideas see ideas truth 18-21, 25, 65, 140; value 15, 133; value of 20-1 Turetzky, P. 141

universal history see history Utopia 3, 9, 109 value 6, 25, 31, 46, 62, 64, 83, 87, 93-5, 102, 109, 133, 135; see also truth, surplus value values 8, 20-3, 30, 59-60, 64, 84; established 22, 25, 50, 59; new 25, 50; see also truth Van der Peet v. The Queen 130-1, 148 variation 43, 78, 85, 96, 118, 140, 142; conceptual 11-16, 42, 116; continuous 11, 16, 42, 48, 66, 112, 116, 122, 142 violence 52, 56, 108, 113-15, 144; see also flows virtuality 35-6, 38, 44, 100, 107 virtual machine 45, 88 virtual multiplicity see multiplicity war 67, 109-11, 113-15, 119, 134 war-machine 9, 11, 109-18, 120, 146, 147; see also assemblage of the war machine type, metamorphosis machines Warren, M. 144, 145 What Is Philosophy? 2-3, 6, 9, 11-18, 23-8, 37, 40, 78, 83, 109, 132-3, 136, 139, 140 will to power 4, 12, 14, 20, 23, 25, 30, 37, 40, 49-55, 57-9, 61-5, 72, 74, 106, 136, 141, 143, 144, 145 Young, I. M. 141

166