Human without Image: Deleuzian Critique beyond the Neighbourhood Effect

Abstract

In this article, I draw resources from Deleuze's Difference and Repetition to develop an explanation and critique of invasive policing techniques on certain populations in the United States. First, I analyse recent studies revealing the neighbourhood effects of aggressive policing on those who never directly encounter officers. Second, I use Deleuze's concepts of the virtual, potentiality, the Idea and problems to illuminate the limitations to studying these effects that are inherent in a social scientific approach. I then use Deleuze's discussion of the Image of Thought to theorise (and then problematise) a racialised Image of the Human that justifies the aggressive policing policies in certain neighbourhoods. I argue instead for an open, unsettled, in-process category of the human that continues to creatively actualise. Finally, I offer two normative claims that again derive from Deleuze's philosophy: the first is a preliminary strategy for mitigating the non-localisable and virtual effects of policing policy by ‘conjugating’ oneself in a complex set of neighbourhood relations, particularly in response to inequitably distributed spaces of oppression; the second is an attempt to avoid reducing humanity to calculability by ‘fully explicating’ the other. In combination, the goal is to undermine the dogmatic Images of Thought and the Human that ground oppressive policing practices, and to foster an intensive potentiality for newness that might take these Images' place.