Guattari's Notion Research Articles

A Band Apart Together: Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs as Deleuzian Assemblages

Abstract: This article will examine Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) within the context of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notions of the "assemblage," complex multiplicities that are composed of disparate elements to produce specific effects. It will be argued that Tarantino consistently demonstrates a preoccupation with meta, postmodernist filmmaking, illustrated through nonlinear narrative strategies. When examined in tandem, both films share numerous elements which can be understood as "rhizomatic" connections that form the foundation of Tarantino's singular practice that continues to fascinate and influence to this day.

Octavia Butler's Bloodchild and the Posthuman Complexities: A Process of Becoming

This paper examines the human-nonhuman relationship for co-reproduction and co-existence between two species in Octavia Butler's speculative fiction "Bloodchild". The humans called the Terrans and the aliens called the Tlics make a contract for reciprocity to save the futurity of both. This research analyzes Butler's speculation of some posthuman complexities related to identity, gender, reproduction and forceful bonding in the far future. The multifaceted female protagonist T'Gatoi, the male human surrogacy, non-normative pregnancy and experimental birth foreground the horror of dystopian future that Butler attempts to make humans aware of. Based primarily on the textual evidence, the paper uses Donna Haraway's concept of "speculative feminism", Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming" and Rosi Braidotti's theory of critical posthumanities to argue for the author's warning to humanity against futuristic crises and call for a critical thought exercise to retrospect on human tyranny, egotism and sense of otherness. It proposes that overcoming the anthropocentric rule over nature and the "others" for the sake of natural equilibrium and socio-cultural harmony can help instill collective consciousness and promote community building to save this planet and the others for a sustainable future.

Woolrich: Toward a Minor Literature

In 1937 Harold Hersey pointed out in Pulp Editor that pulps had two components, tawdry tales of crime and horror (and westerns) and advertising for magical cures for human frailty and inadequacy – ‘parallel lines spoken by two sets of people with but a single thought’. Both played to anxiety, and it is that anxiety that concerns this essay. Speaking to a primarily working-class readership, this anxiety is distinct from that inspired by upward mobility in a middle class that survived the Depression and was saved from impoverishment by the war – an anxious imperative to have and to be more. Ads in the pulps targeted a working class positioned as both under-educated and de-skilled in the rapidly rationalizing economies of the Depression and World War II. Building on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a minor literature as a deflection from the majority position, this essay argues for reading the pulps – stories with lurid covers in both magazines and in books – as a distinct expression of a minority exception to the increased regulation of daily life, and to the normative requirements of upward mobility. Woolrich was, more often than not, the author of despair, of regret, and of futility – of pathology as objection.

Minor Orientalism: Spain in James Joyce's Ulysses

AbstractJames Joyce's Ulysses is rife with Western fantasies about the East: seductive odalisques, damsels with dulcimers, exotic medinas dotted with carpet shops. In invoking them, however, Joyce disarms what Edward Said called Orientalism, or Europe's imperialist stereotypes about Asia and North Africa. Postcolonial critics have seen in Joyce's reformulation of Orientalism an example of his rejection of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and colonialism in Ireland and elsewhere. This essay expands and complicates this scholarly narrative through an examination of Orientalized images of Spain in the novel. A European yet Orientalized country like Ireland, Spain offers Joyce a point of reference to contextualize marginalized national identities beyond colonizer-colonized tensions. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the “minor,” I show how Joyce's engagement with Spain can be conceptualized as a form of Orientalism that decouples Irish identity from British imperialism and the anticolonial nativism that pervaded the Irish Free State after it was established in 1922, the year Ulysses was published.

Indigenous articulations of social media and digital assemblages of care

Studies show that, in times of need, Indigenous people across the continent now referred to as ‘Australia’ tend to rely more on the ‘informal’ connections of support, care and trust made with family, friends and community—connections which are increasingly mediated through digital technologies. Australian researchers have recently begun attending to the possibilities social media offers in sustaining networks of support ‘outside’ settler geographies of institutionalised health. This burgeoning digital health research, however, has tended to frame Indigenous people only as recipients of care; and it has mostly focused on the narrow remit of connecting Indigenous social media users with formal sources of health information and support. In this paper, we instead explore the already-existing ‘informal’ care practices of and between Indigenous social media users. We draw on recent developments in cultural and health geography, which have sought to understand care, health and wellbeing through Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) notion of ‘assemblage’, to chart the geographies of care that digital media makes possible. We show that Indigenous social media users are engaged in the production of distinct territorial arrangements of care. In identifying people in their networks who appear in need of help, they actively and creatively work to establish a suitable working arrangement to meet that need, which participants variously described through expressions of intimacy, networks, formality and atmosphere. These Indigenous articulations of digital media, we argue, are reterritorialising new spaces of care, safety and strength, against and outside the settler geographies that lead to widespread health disparities, and they challenge dominant narratives about Indigenous digital life.

The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation

The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation

Periphaural Vision: Sound and the Rhizomatic Re-tuning of Tele-vision in Fellini's La voce della luna

Abstract This essay argues that Federico Fellini's La voce della luna contrasts two differing modes of viewership: a dominant, commercialized mode of vision occasioned by the medium of television, and what the author calls “periphaural vision: a creative mode of visual perception that expands and transforms along sonically rhizomatic pathways. The essay notes Fellini's frequent late-career critique of television and identifies in Fellini's critique a kind of “tele-vision” destructive of creative spectatorship. Noting, through close analysis, the importance of the peripheral and the sonic in La voce della luna, and relating it to Deleuze and Guattari's notions of the rhizomatic and “far-seeing,” the essay reads – and listens to – the film as an opportunity both to denounce “tele-vision” and to guide viewers toward more creative and intuitive modes of perception beyond conventionally cinematic and televisual regimes of the visual.

ANIMAL REVOLT AND LINES OF FLIGHT IN LUCRETIUS, BOOK FIVE

Lucretius is the first classical author to have written a history of animal resistance. In a fifty-line passage from Book Five of De rerum natura, the ‘animal revolt’ (5.1297–349), Lucretius describes the rise of empire and its instrumentalization of animals for war. When the animals are led onto the battlefield, however, they swerve against their ‘armed teachers and savage masters’ (1311). The linear rise of empire, built on the abuse of animals’ bodies, is deterritorialized by those same animal bodies in a chaotic scene that takes place on what Monica Gale has called a ‘cosmic battlefield’. This paper follows Lucretius’ account in Book Five of De rerum natura of the linear rise of empire, its increasing capture of animal life, and the rupture of empire's linear trajectory by a clinamen, or ‘swerve’, of rebel animals. I compare Lucretius’ account of the rise of empire to what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘molar line’, and the swerve of rebel animals to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘line of flight’.

Nabokov's ‘Diabolical Task’: Translation as Capture and Becoming-Butterfly

The lepidopteral imaginary that animates Nabokov's relationship to translation can be understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's notions of ‘apparatus of capture’ and ‘rhizomatic becomings’. On the one hand, Nabokov's scientific fascination with butterflies frames his radically literal approach to translation. The scientific dissection of texts and butterflies ‘captures’ an original and singular content as it flutters, reducing it to the homogenised content of a target source. On the other hand, in Speak, Memory's engagement with ‘multiple metamorphoses, familiar to butterflies’, Nabokov as both literary artist and autobiographical personage becomes-butterfly with translation itself, entering into affective intensities with butterflies that include lepidopteral relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness.

The swarm that we already are: artificially intelligent (AI) swarming ‘insect drones’, targeting and international humanitarian law in a posthuman ecology

Over the last fifty-odd years the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has launched programs aiming at emulating and incorporating insect technologies in military technology. The US Army Unmanned Aircrafts Systems Roadmap 2010–2035 has specified insect swarming as a field of development for Unmanned Aviation Systems. While legal scholarship has paid substantial attention to drones, autonomous weapons systems and artificial intelligence (AI), developments based on insect swarming technologies have been largely ignored. This article takes emerging AI swarming technologies in military warfare systems as its starting point and asks about the significance of the swarming insect in and through contemporary International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and warfare. Taking up Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notions of ‘the swarm’ and the ‘war machine’, and drawing on critical environmental legal scholarship, the article argues that rather than dispersing the human from its central position in the ‘targeting loop’, the increased interest in insects for commercial and warfare purposes is an intensification of transhumanist desires and an acceleration of late capitalism. As a counter-move, and as a contribution to a posthumanist turn in IHL, the article calls for becoming-insect, swarm and minoritarian as an epistemological practice and ontological shift in IHL and its critical scholarship, resulting in a posthumanitarian legal ordering of becoming.

HERTA MÜLLER, OSKAR PASTIOR, AND ATEMSCHAUKEL AS POETIC ASSEMBLAGE

AbstractThis study explores Herta Müller's engagement with the poet Oskar Pastior's life and work in her novel Atemschaukel (2009). The novel is largely based on Pastior's experience as one among the thousands of Romanian‐Germans deported to Gulags in 1945, and the poet worked with Müller both as a source and a literary collaborator before his death. Müller does not directly reproduce Pastior's poetics or his experience in her novel, but she engages with both using dynamic, paratactical structures reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of ‘assemblage’. Müller's interaction with Pastior benefits from an overlap between their poetic concerns: both writers’ oeuvres are marked by traumatic experiences of totalitarianism, and by a desire to undermine the master‐narratives of ideology. In Atemschaukel their poetics become entangled, evoking both resistance to totalitarian structures, and the trauma these same structures inflict. The dynamic poetic forms Müller uses to engage with Pastior also help her to negotiate a fraught memory space that not only includes Soviet crimes, but is also overshadowed by Nazi atrocity. Through the use of paratactical poetic motifs Müller acknowledges the presence of multiple painful historical currents, without shaping them into an undifferentiated whole.

Towards a Minor Poetry: Reading Twentieth-Century French Poetry with Deleuze–Guattari and Bakhtin

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of minor literature, deterritorialization and agrammaticality, this article explores the possibility of a ‘minor poetry’, considering various interpretations of the term, and interrogating the value of the distinction between minor poetry and minor literature. The article considers Bakhtin's work, which offers several parallels to Deleuze and Guattari's in its consideration of the language system and the place of literature within it, but which also addresses questions of genre. It pursues Christian Prigent's hypothesis, in contrast to Bakhtin's account of poetic discourse, that Deleuze and Guattari's notion of deterritorialization might offer a definition of poetic language. Considering the work of two French-language poets, Ghérasim Luca and Olivier Cadiot, the article argues that the term ‘minor poetry’ gains an additional relevance for experimental twentieth-century poetry which grapples with its own generic identity, deterritorializing established conceptions of poetry, and making ‘minor’ the major poetic discourses on which it is contingent.

Loud Ladies: Deterritorialising Femininity through Becoming-Animal

Modern feminist movements run the risk of being appropriated by capitalist agenda and commodified for mass appeal, thus stripping them of their revolutionary potential. I would propose that in order for feminism to challenge this, movements may want to consider the subversion of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari's notions of becoming-animal and becoming-woman emphasise a subjectivity not confined by rigid identity, such as man/woman. However, feminists have challenged this theory, suggesting it is difficult to both fight for and dispel the very same notion, that is, woman. I argue that in first considering the feminine subject via the Lacanian understanding of ‘Woman’, it can be argued that feminine subjects can engage with becoming-animal to destabilise the notion of ‘Woman’. Riot Grrls, FEMEN and Pussy Riot all demonstrate tactics which could be said to utilise becoming-animal and have had varying success in avoiding commodification.

Kiki and the ‘girl’: A Moment of Reading between Deleuze and Feminism

The essay reads as a moment of alliance – a moment of reading of two disparate things together. The event of alliance remains inspired by Gilles Deleuze's theorisations of becoming. This marks the coming together of unrelated things – one into the fold of another – without being subordinated in the process. It reads an anime, Kiki's Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki, 1989), with Deleuze and Guattari's writings on ‘the girl’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987) – where the girl represented as ‘real’ in a fantasy meets the girl written as a metaphor in a theoretical intervention. This inflicts a sense of violence, of abstraction, to both the figures of ‘girl’. On the one hand, Miyazaki's work, removed from the discourse of anime, is placed under a feminist scrutiny, while on the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘girl’, extracted from the logic of the original texts, is reinserted into feminist renditions. The two readings are coordinated by a specific intention. This is to imagine the feminist potential of the ‘girl’. Occasionally the two works appear to talk to each other, yet sometimes they stand incommensurable. The texts animate each other without being subsumed by each other – inhabiting and following the movements to trace the other as fields of singularities which cannot be reduced to fixed identities or parallels. This transversal act of reading does not aim at coercing the Deleuzian notion of the girl upon Kiki, but rather looks forward to the conversations generated between the two narratives.

‘What is to be Done?’: Grammars of Organisation

The question ‘what is to be done?’ is most often uttered at moments of great urgency and political crisis. It operates in a divide between theory and practice, when thinking should end, and action must proceed. This article considers how the grammar of this question produces relationships between subjects, action and the future, drawing a relationship between the constituent grammar of the question and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the collective assemblage of enunciation. For Deleuze and Guattari, the collective assemblage of enunciation denotes amongst other things an immanent relationship between language and action: a relationship in which politics and language are bound together in a relationship of forces. This approach aims to rethink the urgency and force that is associated with the question through examining and re-proposing the connection between the linguistic organisation of the question and the different forms of political organisation that the question might produce. In so doing, Deleuze and Guattari provide a conceptual and linguistic apparatus for rethinking the plane of political action and organisation.

Form IV: From Ruyer's Psychobiology to Deleuze and Guattari's Socius

From the point of view of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Ruyer's work appears to bear out two distinct tendencies of unequal appeal. On the one hand, Ruyer appears to be an anti-Aristotelian thinker of formation, rejecting any hylomorphic account of the production of reality. However, and notably despite his serious commitment to the work of the sciences of his day, he remains wedded to the ultimately conservative Leibnizian principle of closure. Nowhere is this dichotomy more striking than in his account of human society. The aim of this paper is to show how his positive account of form(ation) finds a significant and convincing extension in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of social surface or socius in Anti-Oedipus.

The ethical (and political) status of theorizing the subject: Deleuze and Guattari

With Lacan's exhortation that the subject's ethical task is to “take up” his or her desire as its point of departure, this paper thematizes the question of the ethics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of the subject, as articulated (mainly) in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). It is argued that, given their ontological conceptualization of the subject as an open, complex “agency-assemblage” that is ineluctably characterized (“virtually”, if not “actually”) by a rhizomatic and multiplicitous structure (every subject always already being “a crowd”), their conception enables one to address the issue of the ethical status of theory in psychology in an exemplary manner. The reason for this claim is that their complex, multifaceted theorization of the subject construes it in a nonsubstantialist, “machinic”, or rather “structural-machinic” manner (that is, with a complex structure that operates like a becoming-machine). This stresses the enduring possibility for change on the part of the subject – something that has to be presupposed in any psychological or psychoanalytic theory of the subject, lest the possibility of efficacious therapeutic intervention be theoretically and ethically compromised. Another way of putting this is that, at the level of what Deleuze and Guattari termed “the abstract machine”, the subject is overdetermined insofar as it comprises an indefinite sphere of “virtual” possibilities that may be actualized under certain conditions – the subject is always already more than what has been historically actualized. Moreover, such a theory allows for the “deterritorialization” of the subject along “nomadic” “lines of flight” that effectively resist its endless “territorialization” by the “state apparatus”.

Turning Listening Inside Out: Brian Eno'sAmbient 1: Music for Airports

ABSTRACTBrian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a seminal album in the history of electronic music. Using Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the assemblage, I explore the album's compositional structure as well as its ambient function, by attending to specific tracks and locating the album in musical history, particularly relative to the work of John Cage, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. In an extended discussion of its ambient function, I argue that the LP offers music for reverie that is capable of initiating processes of potential self-transformation.

Homeless Tongues. Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora by Monique Balbuena

HOMELESS TONGUES. POETRY AND LANGUAGES OF THE SEPHARDIC DIASPORA By Monique Balbuena. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2016. 253 pp.In 2008, which coincidentally also was the International Year of Languages, the Catalan government sponsored an exhibit, The Sea of Languages: Speaking in the Mediterranean. A short catalogue that accompanied the exhibit lists the of the Mediterranean, a total of 24, detailing the family of specific languages, the number of its speakers, where is spoken, and its legal status.When comes to Judeo-Spanish (also labeled Ladino, Sephardic, and Djudeo-espanyol), the catalogue lists 110,000 speakers, that is spoken in Israel, Salonika, and Turkey and, with regards to legal status, that it is not recognized anywhere. Ladino shares this lack of legal recognition with Coptic (deemed a dead language) Aramaic, Corsican, and Romani. It is important to point out that this Mediterranean framework only partially works for the corpus Monique Balbuena discusses in Homeless Tongues, as neither do all the authors she discusses write in Judeo-Spanish, nor do all of them have a Mediterranean origin. Moreover, Balbuena's book shows that Ladino is as intimately and inescapably connected with Sephardic identity as is with exile and Diaspora. In spite of Ladino's lack of status, in the Mediterranean or anywhere in the world, literature in Ladino not only exists, also needs to be taken as seriously as any literary production in languages that have official status. Indeed, paying attention to literature written in languages that lack official status leads to crucial insights about identity, memory, and, in this particular book, Jewish literatures.Homeless Tongues centers on the complex ways in which three Sephardic writers make meaning, using not only Ladino, but also as a tool and as a medium. The bulk of the book consists of close readings of poems by three authors (the Algerian Sadia Levy, who writes in French and Hebrew in Algeria; the Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, who writes in Hebrew and Ladino in Israel; and the Argentine Juan Gelman, who writes in Spanish and Ladino). These readings also are rigorously historically contextualized, making this book very useful for anyone working in Jewish studies, and exemplary for scholars and students of poetry, in any language, and anywhere in the world. To state differently, the book, as its title itself indicates, lies at the crux of language, poetry, memory, and identity.Balbuena initiates her discussion of her corpus addressing Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a literature, referring to the literature that minority authors (in this specific case, Franz Kafka) construct in a major language. Balbuena suggests that multilingual authors and authors writing in minor languages like Ladino represent a blind spot within Deleuze and Guattari's work, as for them, writes Balbuena, multilingualism figures only as a metaphor. …

Non-representational thinking: Methodologische Überlegungen anhand des Bonner Sperrmüllassemblages

Abstract. This paper undertakes a creative exploration of bulky rubbish [sperrmüll] in the City of Bonn by expanding on and utilising what has come to be known as non-representational thinking. Through a non-representational engagement with sperrmüll, I shed light on waste as a significant human-nonhuman ecology as it appears in an especially routinised manifestation in urban space. In doing so, the paper contributes to a discussion about enacting non-representational methodologies within German-speaking human geography. Here, there are three methodological interventions for a non-representational endeavour: (1) interfering, (2) material thinking, and (3) writing and presentation. These interventions are supported by revisiting Deleuze and Guattari's notion of assemblage; using it as a way to attend to sperrmüll as an area-sized fabrication connecting humans and various other materialities, and which directs thought towards a wide array of agencies. In conclusion, non-representational perspectives are advanced as a way to expose the affective ecologies that enable certain actions and hamper others.