Guattari's Concept Research Articles

The Open Society and the Democracy to Come: Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.

Why Pluralism = Pluralism ≠ Monism: A Decolonial Feminist Critique of Deleuze and Guattari's Concept of Becoming

This essay offers a critical engagement with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming, from the perspective of postcolonial and decolonial feminism. It starts by exploring the main characteristics of becoming, including the provisional continuity of affective liberation among its various modalities. It then foregrounds the concept of ‘racialised gender’, to trace a very different sequence of affective recomposition sponsored by the colonial state. Over and against Deleuze and Guattari's monological perspective as a universal narrative of emancipation (pluralism = monism), the article calls for a multilingual approach in the semantics of evaluating its deployments (pluralism = pluralism ≠ monism).

Pema Tseden's The Search: the making of a minor cinema

ABSTRACTThis paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘minor’ to examine Pema Tseden's second full-length feature film, The Search. Expanding on Deleuze's definition of minor cinema, this paper shows how The Search, through various strategies and narrative devices, deconstructs the myth of a pre-existing Tibetan people, and builds upon individual and fragmented narratives to create a new collective subjectivity, thus opening the way for a new understanding of Tibet. This case study demonstrates how Pema Tseden's in-between position (between languages, cultures and geographical areas) permits him to develop a cinema that gives space for Tibetans to become, giving the viewer a rare insight into contemporary Tibet.

Chaosmic spasm: Guattari, Stiegler, Berardi, and the digital apocalypse

In this paper I explore the intersections of digital media, psychoanalysis, and the subject through reference to Felix Guattari's notion of the chaosmic spasm, which the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi picks up in his work and most recently his book And. Guattari's idea, which appears in his Chaosmosis, designates the fatal acceleration of the media semio-universe towards spasm, or apocalyptic collapse, and the emergence of some new form of schizoid organisation. Following an exploration of Guattari's idea, and a broader discussion of its relationship to his wider thought and Anti- Oedipal collaborations with Deleuze, I consider how Bernard Stiegler may be seen to provide a meta-historical account of Guattari's concept of the spasm in his Technics and Time. According to Stiegler's account, the hyper-acceleration of media forms results in a process of disorientation and de-subjectivization where the individual is destroyed because of their inability to situate themselves in social, symbolic, structures that have collapsed towards hyper-rational, meaningless forms. In Lacanian terms, psychosis becomes a kind of generalised condition. In response to this generalisation of madness, Stiegler imagines the need for a new politics of knowledge and grammar that is able to suture individuals back into wider social systems and provide the kind of secure, careful, space that D. W. Winnicott writes about in his work on play. In order to unpack what this politics of culture and knowledge might comprise, I turn to Guattari's work on schizoid subjectivity, or endless subjectivization without subjectivity, and Berardi's contrast between financial semio-capitalism and poetry, in order to suggest an ethical mode of thought and cultural expression that might capture the political core of Stiegler's vision and paint a picture of what human thought might look like on the other side of the new media apocalypse, the chaosmic spasm.

From the sensation to the concept and back: Philo-aesthetic encounters between Pierre Boulez and Gilles Deleuze

It is known that Deleuze and Guattari took the famous concepts of the smooth (lisse) and striated (strié) from the last chapter of A Thousand Plateaus from Boulez, who used them to describe the morphology of sound spaces, while Deleuze and Guattari used those concepts in an ontopolitical way - in order to invent an ontology abstract enough to describe the constitution of space and time within the conditions of the capitalist axiomatic and find the corresponding lines of flight. Another important point in the encounter between Boulez and Deleuze is the concept of difference. In Deleuze, difference is the key ontological concept, which (un)grounds the image of thought based on representation and leads to becoming the basic form of thinking the world. According to Campbell, in Boulez, difference appears in a number of ways - from heterophony as a virtual line, through an accumulative development to athematism as a virtual form. It should be mentioned that virtual (virtuel) is another important concept of Deleuze's philosophy, (un)grounded precisely through difference. Furthermore, there is a certain similarity between Boulez's concept of diagonal and Deleuze's and Guattari's concepts of deterritorialization and transversality in the sense that all three of these designate the creation of the new in movement between the already known coordinates. In the end, Deleuze translates Boulez's concepts of temps pulsée and temps non pulsée into the concepts of Chronos and Aion, where Aion designates the qualitative time of becoming, while Chronos the quantitative time of representative thought. The goal of this paper is to research these complex philosophical-aesthetic encounters between Boulez and Deleuze in order to shed light on the ways in which philosophical concepts are created based on art practices, and art practices on the basis of philosophy.

The European Central Bank, machinic enslavement, and the Greek public sector

Abstract This article investigates the role of the European Central Bank (ECB) in transferring financial and moral responsibility for the Eurozone crisis from the private to the public sector. Focusing on Greece, I argue that the ECB constructed the morality of the public debtor in such a way as to make this transfer of responsibility easier and the imposition of austerity measures justifiable. This in part relied on a shift in the ECB's discourse, which came to define the crisis exclusively in terms of public sector responsibility. However, the ECB also employed a range of non-linguistic policy measures aimed at intervening in the crisis. To interpret these measures I draw on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘machinic enslavement’, arguing that the ECB contributed to the Greek crisis not only by defining it discursively but also by reshaping the country's financial infrastructure in crucial ways.

Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome concept in architecture, art and design

The author deals with the rhizome concept in art, design and architecture pointing to the fact that these disciplines are a combination of esthetic, psychological and political differences which are constantly exposed to complex interactions. The rhyzome concept fits into the Postmodern where all dots connect, where there is no more growth and everything relates to anything. The division into reality (of the world), the representation (books) and the subjectivity (author) no longer exists. The idea of the rhizoma connects with the Rem Koolhaas's narrative on the modern city of Junkspace, which is compared to a postmodern airport space, referring to its architectural and spatial features.

Sticky currents: Drawing folds in serial exhaustion

The affective qualities of surfaces (and the skin) in drawing operations, wedging clay, and video are developed in this research exposition by activating them with both the concept and the practice of exhaustion in emergent series. The practical and conceptual framework emerges along side Deleuze's 'The Fold', Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the 'smooth' and the 'striated', and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's 'The Undercommons'. The images, videos, poetics, and concepts of the exhibition develop folding textures and generate charged affective worlds with the force to modulate habits and attunements. As these emergent worldings intensify an emergent corporeal, they also activate a research process that continually folds over and across itself, opening up to new affects, concepts, and subjectivities. Folds exhaust themselves in the multiple, unspeakable midst, until the gentle vibration sparks a current and starts to resonate the fine hairs on the surface of the skin so that they again become sticky.

Rhizomic Resistance Meets Arborescent Assemblage: UNESCO World Heritage and the Disempowerment of Indigenous Activism in New Caledonia

This article draws on Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of arborescent and rhizomic assemblages to examine encounters between large-scale conservation and grassroots resistance to industry. I explore how the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) World Heritage listing of New Caledonia's reefs contributed to the demise of Rhéébù Nùù, an indigenous activist group that had been targeting a multinational mining project. I also interrogate how an assemblage's form enables certain modalities of power while constraining others and how these differences in power modalities inform relationships between types of assemblages. Mistakenly expecting assistance in protecting their coral reef from mining impacts, Rhéébù Nùù relinquished the coercive power inherent to their rhizomic form in favor of participation in UNESCO's arborescent structure via World Heritage “management committees”—a globally promoted, but locally inappropriate, comanagement diagram that targeted local fishing activities despite an absence of overfishing. Thus, this article argues that rhizomic structures have unique means of influence, exercised through particular modalities of power, which might be lost through cooptation into arborescent assemblages that exercise different modalities of power and might employ locally inappropriate diagrams. Ultimately, conservation does not only result in the extension of state powers, as the literature has shown; as this study demonstrates, it can surreptitiously support the extension of environmentally damaging industrial development at the expense of grassroots action.

The Take and the Stutter: Glenn Gould's Time Synthesis

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Glenn Gould as an illustration of the third principle of the rhizome, that of multiplicity: ‘When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate’ (1987: 8). In an attempt to make sensible their ostensibly modest statement, I proliferate the relationships between Glenn Gould's philosophy of sound recording, Deleuze's theory of passive synthesis, and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the stutter. I argue, ultimately, that Glenn Gould's radical recording practice stutters and deterritorialises the temporality of the recorded performance. More generally, the Deleuzian perspective broadens the scope of Gould's aesthetic practices that highlights the importance of aesthetic acts in the redistribution of sensory experience. But the study serves a broader purpose than celebrating a pianist/recordist that Deleuze admired. Rather, while his contemporaries began to use the studio as a compositional element in sound recording, Gould bypassed such a step towards the informational logics of recording studios. Thus, it is inappropriate to think of Gould as having immersed himself in ‘technology’ than the broader concept of a complex, one that redistributed the striated listening space of the concert hall.

Philosophy, Science, and Virtual Communism

This paper considers how science, philosophy, and “the virtual” inform the political potential of the communism that emerges within capitalism. It looks to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in particular What is Philosophy?, to set the terms of an anti-capitalist science and philosophy. Their understanding of the contrasting roles of the virtual in science and philosophy is then used to draw points of distinction between the theories of Manuel DeLanda, Jason Read, and Maurizio Lazzarato. DeLanda's work demonstrates the uses of science, specifically the non-linear tracking of emergent phenomena. Read's work demonstrates the uses of philosophy, specifically the historical tracing of the capitalist mode of production. And Lazzarato's work demonstrates a combination of philosophy and science, specifically the theoretical identification of becomings not captured by capitalism. Throughout, the paper employs Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the “the virtual” to map the potentiality of communism within capitalism as suggested by these three approaches.

New Uses for Old Records: A Rhizomatic Approach to Archival Access

Abstract Although some archives have begun to embrace Web 2.0 technologies in their outreach activities to facilitate greater access to their collections, many archives continue to promote traditional hierarchical methods of access. This article posits that archives should develop a more radical approach to user engagement. To begin to conceptualize this new approach, the authors introduce Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome, an open, nonhierarchical, and acentric system, as opposed to the arborescent model that currently informs and structures the way archivists arrange, describe, and provide access to their archival materials. They then describe recent collaborative projects and techniques that encourage a reworking of the traditional arborescent model and make new rhizomatic connections into the archives, including social media crowdsourcing projects, gamification techniques, GIS interactives, mobile applications, and remixed archival photographs. The concluding section discusses the implicat...

John Forbes, the Australian Poet: Representations of National Identity inA Layered Eventon ABC Radio National

John Forbes was an Australian poet who lived from 1950 to 1998 and was one of the so-called 'generation of 68' who were deeply influenced by contemporary American poetics and culture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)'s Radio National paid tribute to Forbes's life and work in 1999, in the posthumous radio adaptation A Layered Event. This article analyses representations of national identity in A Layered Event, using Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the 'arboreal' or unified versus the 'rhizomic' or networked. I argue that, through edited biographical interviews on the one hand, and adaptations of Forbes's poems on the other, A Layered Event cultivates two distinct images of national identity - arboreal and rhizomic - and that it plays these off against each other. The article asks why Forbes and Forbes's work is represented in these ways in the program. I use this reading of A Layered Event to reflect on the ABC's role as a national public service broadcaster at the turn of the millennium. I argue that A Layered Event's handling of national representations may be read as an allegory for the ABC's negotiation of its Charter aim to 'contribute to a sense of national identity', in an age of increasingly trans-national and fragmented identities and audiences.

Using Guattari's Metamodeling to Decipher Neighborhood Images

This paper discusses the implications of Guattari's concept of metamodeling, used to set up an emergent methods design, in a study on neighborhood images and urban development. Related to a theoretical background coming from Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy, metamodeling is used as a conceptual tool that enables the creation of a flexible and adaptable methods design, which draws on methods that are not completely fixed at the beginning of the research but rather developed in an iterative way. By investigating the questions of how neighborhood images emerge and how they perform citizens’ everyday lives, we developed a methodological dispositive composed of four methods—one based on the use of photography, a second based on drawings, a third based on qualitative geographic information system (GIS), and a fourth that is a quantitative survey—that revealed multiple facets of neighborhood images.

Cultural Translation of a Subject in Transit:

Cultural Translation of a Subject in Transit:

Deleuze and Guattari in the Labyrinth: Mille Plateaux and Dans Le Labyrinthe

This article proposes that the early novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet produce philosophical concepts which resemble those found in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In taking as its primary source Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux (1980), it responds to the call for an open exchange of concepts between disciplines issued not only by these philosophers, but also by Robbe-Grillet himself. A close reading of Robbe-Grillet's fourth novel, Dans le labyrinthe (1959), is undertaken, focusing on the notions of space and movement and connecting them with Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the rhizome, smooth space and nomadology. The novel is seen to break down any distinction between interior and exterior spaces, and so creates an open, indefinite space akin to the rhizome. The figure of the soldier negotiates the redefined coordinates of this space like the nomad, treating points as lines of flight and connecting spaces unexpectedly.

The non-implementation of the nursing process: reflection based on Deleuze's and Guattari's concepts

The nursing process can contribute to consolidate nursing as a science, as it evidences the systematization of its thinking and its actions, providing visibility to the work that is done. However, national and international studies have reported many difficulties that are faced when implementing it. These difficulties motivated the development of this study, which had the objective of discussing and reflecting on nursing work from a theoretical revision supported by aspects of subjectivity according to Deleuze and Guattari, considering that they may be unconsciously expressed by nurses in their daily professional tasks, resulting in the non-implementation of the nursing process.

Rhizocurrere: a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to curriculum autobiography

This paper introduces rhizocurrere, a curriculum autobiographical concept I created to chart my efforts to develop place-responsive outdoor environmental education. Rhizocurrere brings together rhizome, a Deleuze and Guattari concept, with currere, Pinar’s autobiographical method for curriculum inquiry. Responding to invitations from Deleuze, Guattari and Pinar, to experiment, I have adapted their ideas to create a philosophical~methodological concept that draws attention to relationships between my pedagogical and curriculum research and the contexts that have shaped my life~work. This paper outlines rhizocurrere, its parent concepts and how I have enacted my attempts to think differently about curricula and pedagogy. The central question is not ‘what is rhizocurrere?’ but rather ‘how does/could rhizocurrere work?’ and ‘what does/might rhizocurrere allow me to do?’

THE 2013 ANTIPODE RGS‐IBG LECTURE New Materialisms and Neoliberal Natures

AbstractThe rise of non‐deterministic understandings of nature, with their emphasis on intensive difference and non‐linear processes, has occurred in conjunction with the neoliberalization of environmental governance, which at once emphasizes and financializes the inherent productivity of nature. This paper accepts the position that there is a link between the two, but argues that if we are to maintain a crucial ontological distinction between capital and non‐capital, this link must be understood as contingent rather than necessary. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “universal history”, I argue that the neoliberalization of nature must be understood, in part, as the strategic containment of the critical energies of new materialist thought, and that the role of critical historiography is to recognize within processes of containment the contents and qualities of more radical possibilities. If such critical efforts are to succeed they must continually distinguish between nature's innovative force and the mechanisms that seek to capture this force in the service of capital and state. In turn, if we are to remember the radical potential of these ideas, the neoliberalization of nature must be understood as a response to these critical energies, and not their origin.

Autopoiesis in P. K. Page's ＂Arras＂: The Peacock Image as a Vision Machine

This essay explores Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of autopoiesis, primarily focusing on its machinic aspect of self-positing creation, through a reading of Canadian modernist P. K. Page's early poem ＂Arras.＂ The poem reveals itself as an artistic model for understanding visual imagery as it takes up the ecological theme of the transformative renewal of living elements. Rather than interpret Page's poetic imagery as allegories of the conceptual terms theorized by Deleuze and Guattari, this essay reads ＂Arras＂ as envisioning the process of imagerization in terms of the relationship between the new and the classical-a relationship embodied in its images of the habit and the peacock. The self-positing aspect of autopoiesis builds a machinic system in the habit-image, which unfolds across a passage between territorialization and deterritorialization and in all directions across ethico-political concerns. The poem illustrates what the plane of the virtual expresses, what the machine does, and specifically what the peacock becomes. The peacock image functions to expose the speaker's vision and transforms the poem's linguistic elements. Whereas this new but classical habit is read to indicate the function of the machinic, the peacock exposes the image quality that operates as the deterritorializing trajectory and so reveals an auto-generative relevance in artistic production.