Repetition + Cinema (Section R), The Deleuze Dictionary

Chapter Title: R Book Title: The Deleuze Dictionary Revised Edition Book Editor(s): Adrian Parr Published by: Edinburgh University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09vhf.21 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Deleuze Dictionary Revised Edition This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms REAL 223 Schizophrenia organises desires outside of mainstream Oedipal models, whose purpose is to block the flows of desire. When Deleuze and Guattari deploy the term in the political context, schizophrenia refers to both the system of liquidated flows on which capitalist deterritorialisation depends, as well as the tendency of these flows to leak from all sides even when they are blocked or captured by the analyst or the state. Schizophrenia provides a path toward liberation and it is the operative mode of capitalism, which now dominates the planet because it has understood, captured, and channeled desire more thoroughly than any other regime ever has. R REACTIVE – refer to the entry on ‘active/reactive’. REAL James Williams Deleuze subverts the concept ‘real’ through his distinction drawn between the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’. For him, the actual is more like what we would ordinarily understand as the real, that is, a realm of things that exist independently of our ways of thinking about them and perceiving them. Whereas the virtual is the realm of transcendental conditions for the actual, that is, things that we have to presuppose for there to be actual things at all. More seriously, with respect to any discussion of his work in terms of realism, Deleuze denies any priority accorded to human subjects, to their minds, ideas, perceptual apparatuses or linguistic capacities. If we traditionally frame the opposition between real and unreal through the distinction drawn between a thing that is dependent on us (the chair I dream of, or imagine) and an independent existent (the real chair), then we shall have started with a conceptual framework that does not fit Deleuze’s philosophy well at all. Rather, Deleuze provides us with critical angles against traditional realism and a new metaphysical framework for developing a concept of the real. According to this concept the real is the virtual and the actual. This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 223 10/08/2010 16:17 224 REICH, WILHELM (1897–1957) It is hence better to think of real things in terms more of complete things rather than independent ones. Note that this commits Deleuze to degrees of reality and unreality or illusion.We should not say real or unreal, but more or less real, meaning a more or less complete expression of the thing. It is questionable whether we can say that a thing is completely real, in Deleuze’s work, other than the metaphysical statement that the real is all of the actual and of the virtual. Whenever we give an expression of a thing it will be under an individual form of expression that allows for further completion. More importantly, that completion will involve a synthetic alteration of the components of any earlier reality, to the point where no component can be claimed to be finally real or complete. For example, for Deleuze, a mountain exists as real with all the ways it has been painted, sensed, written about and walked over. It also exists with all the virtual conditions for them, such as ideas and different intensities of sensations. The real mountain changes completely when it is painted and sensed anew: when its name changes, when it is mined, or moved through differently. This means that traditional forms of realism are completely at odds with Deleuze’s philosophy, since the notion that the real stands in opposition to something unreal or imaginary already sets the real as something incomplete. So to speak of the real chair as if it could be identified independently of our ideas about it is a mistake concerning the significance of things. Reality goes hand in hand with ideal and emotional effects, rather than being free of them. Does this mean that Deleuze is an idealist, denying the existence of an independent external reality and bringing all things into the mind? Deleuze’s philosophy is beyond the idealist and realist distinction. There are actual things and we should pay attention to them. Without them it does not make sense to speak of virtual ideas or intensities. But, reciprocally, it makes no sense to speak of real or actual things as if they could be abstracted from the ideal and emotional fields that make them live for us. Connectives Actuality Virtual/Virtuality REICH, WILHELM ‘schizoanalysis’. (1897–1957) – refer to the entry on This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 224 10/08/2010 16:17 REPETITION 225 REPETITION Adrian Parr The concept of ‘repetition’, as it appears in the Deleuzian corpus, encompasses a variety of other concepts such as ‘difference’, ‘differentiation’, ‘deterritorialisation’, and ‘becoming’. To begin with, it should be noted that for Deleuze, repetition is not a matter of the same thing occurring over and over again. That is to say, repetition is connected to the power of difference in terms of a productive process that produces variation in and through every repetition. In this way, repetition is best understood in terms of discovery and experimentation; it allows new experiences, affects and expressions to emerge. To repeat is to begin again; to affirm the power of the new and the unforeseeable. In so far as life itself is described as a dynamic and active force of repetition producing difference, the force of which Deleuze encourages us to think of in terms of ‘becoming’, forces incorporate difference as they repeat giving rise to mutation. The first question that arises is: How is repetition produced? For Deleuze, repetition is produced via difference, not mimesis. It is a process of ungrounding that resists turning into an inert system of replication. In fact, the whole Platonist idea of repeating in order to produce copies is completely undermined by Deleuze. For Deleuze maintains this approach is deeply flawed because it subsumes the creative nature of difference under an immobile system of resemblance. Deleuze refuses to seek an originary point out of which repetition can cyclically reproduce itself. He insists that the process does not depend upon a subject or object that repeats, rather it is self-sustainable. Whilst repetition is potentially infinite, consisting of new beginnings, it is crucial we do not mistake this to be a linear sequence: the end of one cycle marking the beginning of the next. In his innovative discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, Deleuze turns his back on a teleological understanding of repetition condemning such interpretations to be flawed. Instead, he insists that the process Nietzsche outlines is considerably more complicated than that: the return is an active affirmation that intensifies as it returns. Put differently, heterogeneity arises out of intensity. In addition, the return points to a whole that emerges through difference and variation: one and the multiple in combination. In his reading of Nietzsche, Deleuze explains in his 1968 work Difference and Repetition that this is the ‘power of beginning and beginning again’ (D 1994: 136). This now leads us on to the second question: What is repeated? First, it is important to note that repetition is not unidirectional, there is no object of repetition, no final goal toward which everything that repeats can be This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 225 10/08/2010 16:17 226 REPETITION + CINEMA said to direct itself. What repeats, then, is not models, styles or identities but the full force of difference in and of itself, those pre-individual singularities that radically maximise difference on a plane of immanence. In an early essay from 1956 on Henri Bergson, Deleuze insists repetition is more a matter of coexistence than succession, which is to say, repetition is virtual more than it is actual. It is this innovative understanding of the process of difference and differentiation that mutates the context through which repetition occurs. Thus, in a very real sense, repetition is a creative activity of transformation. When Deleuze speaks of the ‘new’ that repetition invokes, he is likewise pointing to creativity, whereby habit and convention are both destabilised. The ‘new’, for Deleuze, is filled with innovation and actually prevents the trap of routines and clichés; the latter characterise habitual ways of living. As a power of the new, repetition calls forth a terra incognita filled with a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity. For instance, this is a far cry from Sigmund Freud who posited that we compulsively repeat the past, where all the material of our repressed unconscious pushes us to reiterate the past in all its discomfort and pain. Actually, psychoanalysis limits repetition to representation, and what therapy aims to do is stop the process entirely along with the disorders it gives rise to. Deleuze, on the other hand, encourages us to repeat because he sees in it the possibility of reinvention, that is to say, repetition dissolves identities as it changes them, giving rise to something unrecognisable and productive. It is for this reason that he maintains repetition is a positive power (puissance) of transformation. Connectives Active/Reactive Becoming Difference Eternal return Psychoanalysis REPETITION + CINEMA Constantine Verevis Deleuze’s books on cinema – Cinema 1: The movement-image and Cinema 2: The time-image – are about the possibility of ‘repeating’ a film (or films) within the institution of cinema studies. As in Roland Barthes’ account This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 226 10/08/2010 16:17 REPETITION + CINEMA 227 of re-reading, this repetition would not be the re-presentation of identity (a re-discovery of the same), but the re-production – the creation and the exhibition – of the difference that lies at the heart of repetition (B 1974). For film studies, Deleuze’s Cinema books can be seen as an attempt to negotiate the tension between (film) theory and history via a non-totalising concept of difference, one which can attend to the heterogeneity – the local and specific repetitions – of historical material. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze puts forward two alternative theories of repetition. The first, a ‘Platonic’ theory of repetition, posits a world of difference based upon some pre-established similitude or identity; it defines a world of copies (representations). The second, a ‘Nietzschean’ theory of repetition suggests that similitude and identity is the product of some fundamental disparity or difference; it defines a world of simulacra (phantasms). Taking these formulations as distinct interpretations of the world, Deleuze describes simulacra as intensive systems constituted by the placing together of disparate elements. Within these differential series, a third virtual object (dark precursor, eternal return, abstract machine) plays the role of differenciator, the in-itself of difference which relates different to different, and allows divergent series to return as diversity and its re-production. As systems that include within themselves this differential point of view, simulacra evade the limit of representation (the model of recognition) to effect the intensity of an encounter with difference and its repetition, a pure becoming-in-the-world. The idea of the intensive system, and its frustration of any attempt to establish an order of succession, a hierarchy of identity and resemblance between original and copy, is nowhere more evident than in the serial repetition of new Hollywood cinema, especially the film remake. The majority of critical accounts of cinematic remaking understand it as a one-way process: a movement from authenticity to imitation, from the superior selfidentity of the original to the debased resemblance of the remake. For instance, much of the discussion around the 1998 release of Gus Van Sant’s close remake (‘replica’) of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) was an expression of outrage and confusion at the defilement of a revered classic. Reviewers and ‘Hitchcockians’ agreed that Van Sant made two fundamental mistakes: the first, to have undertaken to remake a landmark of cinematic history; and the second, to have followed the Hitchcock original (almost) shot by shot, line by line. Even for those who noted that the remake differed in its detail from the Hitchcock film, the revisions added nothing to what remained an intact and undeniable classic, a semantic fixity (identity) against which the new version was evaluated and dismissed as a degraded copy. Rather than follow these essentialist trajectories, Deleuze’s account of This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 227 10/08/2010 16:17 228 REPRESENTATION repetition suggests that cinematic remaking in its most general application might – more productively – be regarded as a specific aspect of a broader and more open-ended intertextuality. A modern classic, Psycho has been retrospectively coded as the forerunner to a cycle of slasher movies initiated by Halloween (1978) and celebrated in the sequels and series that followed. More particularly, the 1970s interest in the slasher movie subgenre saw the character of Norman Bates revived for a number of Psycho sequels (II–IV), and the Hitchcock original quoted in a host of homages, notably the films of Brian De Palma. Each of these repetitions can be understood as a limited form of remaking, suggesting that the precursor text is never singular, and that Van Sant’s Psycho remake differs textually from these other examples not in kind, but only in degree. While the above approach establishes a large circuit between Psycho-60 and Psycho-98, there is another position: namely, that Van Sant’s Psycho is not close enough to the Hitchcock version. This suggestion – that an irreducible difference plays simultaneously between the most mechanical of repetitions – is best demonstrated by an earlier remake of Psycho, Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993). So named because it takes twenty-four hours to run its course, Gordon’s version is a video installation that re-runs Psycho-60 at approximately two frames per second, just fast enough for each image to be pulled forward into the next. Gordon’s strategy demonstrates that each and every film is remade – dispersed and transformed – in its every new context or configuration. Gordon does not set out to imitate Psycho but to repeat it – to change nothing, but at the same time allow an absolute difference to emerge. Understood in this way, Psycho-98 is not a perversion of an original identity, but the production of a new event, one that adds to (rather than corrupts) the seriality of the former version. REPRESENTATION John Marks ‘Representation’, for Deleuze, entails an essentially moral view of the world, explicitly or implicitly drawing on what ‘everybody knows’, and he conceives of philosophy as an antidote to this view. Representation cannot help us to encounter the world as it appears in the flow of time and becoming. It constitutes a particularly restricted form of thinking and acting, working according to fixed norms, and which is unable to acknowledge difference ‘in itself ’. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze challenges the representational conception of philosophy. Here, he contrasts the ‘poet’ to This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 228 10/08/2010 16:17 REPRESENTATION 229 the ‘politician’. The poet speaks in the name of a creative power, and seeks to affirm difference as a state of permanent revolution: he is willing to be destructive in the search for the ‘new’. The new, in this sense, remains forever new, since it has the power of beginning anew every time. It enables forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, but the powers of an unrecognisable terra incognita. The politician, on the other hand, seeks to deny that which differs in order to establish or maintain a particular historical order. In philosophical terms, Deleuze proposes to ‘overturn’ Platonism, which distinguishes between the original – the thing that most resembles itself, characterised by exemplary self-identity – and the copy, which is always deficient in relation to the original. Platonism is incapable of thinking difference in itself, preferring to conceive of it in relation to ‘the thing itself ’. In order to go beyond representation, it is necessary, therefore, to undermine the primacy of the original over the copy and to promote the simulacrum, the copy for which there is no original. A key influence on Deleuze as far as the anti-representational orientation of his thought is concerned, is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s speculations on metaphor show that there is no ‘truth’ behind the mask of appearances, but rather only more masks, more metaphors. Deleuze elevates this insight into something like a general metaphysical principle. For him, the world is composed of simulacra: it is a ‘swarm’ of appearances. Deleuze’s Bergsonism, which emphasises a radical analysis of time, is an important element of his challenge to representation. In his books on cinema in particular, Deleuze draws on Henri Bergson’s very particular materialism in order to claim that life is composed of images. Rather than human consciousness illuminating the world like a searchlight, it is the case that the world is ‘luminous’ in itself. Bergson’s critique of the problematics of perception and action, and matter and thought, springs from the claim that we tend to think in terms of space rather than time. This tendency immobilises intuition, and to counter this Bergson conceives of materiality in terms of images that transmit movement. This has important consequences for perception, which can no longer be conceived of as knowledge that is rooted in consciousness. All life perceives and is necessarily open to the ‘outside’ and distinctions between automatism and voluntary acts are only differences of degree, rather than differences in kind. This alternative, non-psychological metaphysics, according to which the world is ‘luminous in itself ’, rather than being illuminated by a beam of consciousness, is at the heart of Deleuze’s non-representational project, and is explored at length in his books on cinema. Following Bergson’s materialist ontology, according to which our body is merely an image among images, Deleuze opens the self to the outside, the pure form This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 229 10/08/2010 16:17 230 REPRESSION of time. The self comes into contact with a virtual, non-psychological memory, a domain of diversity, difference, and with potentially anarchic associations, that jeopardise the sense selfhood. Such forms of anti-representational thought are threatening and potentially disorientating. As Bergson argues, human beings choose on the basis of what is the most useful. As such they tend to spatialise the fluidity of duration, reducing it to a static and impersonal public form. We separate duration into dissociated elements and reconfigure these elements in a homogeneous spatial form organised around the conventions of ‘public’ language that conveys widely recognised notions. We like ‘simple thoughts’, Bergson remarks, and we prefer to rely on custom and habit, replacing diversity with simplicity, foregoing the novelty of new situations. In short, we prefer the comforts and conventions of representation. This helps to explain why art – literature, painting and cinema – plays such an important part in Deleuze’s work. For Deleuze, art is not a way of representing experiences and memories that we might ‘recognise’: it does not show us what the world is, but rather imagines a possible world. Similarly, art is concerned with ‘sensation’, with creating ‘sensible aggregates’, rather than making the world intelligible and recognisable. In order to challenge representational views of art, Deleuze talks of ‘affects’ and ‘percepts’. These are artistic forces that have been freed from the organising representational framework of perceiving individuals. Instead, they give us access to a pre-individual world of singularities. In this way, Deleuze sees art as a way of challenging the interpretative tendency of representation to trace becomings back to origins. Connectives Affect Art Becoming Difference Sensation REPRESSION Claire Colebrook On the one hand, Deleuze might appear to be a philosopher set against the dominant image of repression, that being repression in its everyday sense and in its technical psychoanalytic sense. At its most general the concept This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 230 10/08/2010 16:17 REPRESSION 231 of ‘repression’ would seem to imply a natural self or subject who precedes the operation of power of socialisation (so that all we would have to do is lift the strictures of repression to arrive at who we really are). The concept of repression seems, then, to be associated with the idea of a pre-social self who must then undergo socialisation or structuration. Deleuze wants to avoid this naïvety, and so to a certain extent he accepts the productive nature of repression as it was put forward by Sigmund Freud and then Jacques Lacan. It is only because of our existence within a symbolic order, or perceived system, that we imagine that there must have been a real ‘me’ prior to the net of repression. For psychoanalysis, then, it is not the self who is repressed, for the self – the fantasy of that which exists before speech, relations and sociality – is an effect of the idea of repression. Repression is primary and produces its own ‘ before’. Deleuze accepts this Lacanian/Freudian picture up to a point. With Guattari he argues that there are Oedipal structures of repression. Living in a modern age, we are indeed submitted to a system of signification. We then imagine that there must have been a moment of plenitude and jouissance prior to Oedipal repression, and that we must therefore have desired the maternal incest prohibited by the structures of the family. But Deleuze and Guattari regard repression – or the internalisation of subjection – as a modern phenomenon that nevertheless draws upon archaic structures and images. Deleuze and Guattari’s main attack on what Michel Foucault (in The History of Sexuality: Volume One) referred to as ‘the repressive hypothesis’ occurs in Anti-Oedipus. Whereas Freud’s Oedipus complex seeks to explain why and how we are repressed – how it is that we submit to law and renounce our enjoyment – Deleuze and Guattari argue that we suffer from the idea of repression itself, the idea that there is some ultimate object that we have abandoned. Psychoanalysis supposedly explains our repression by arguing that we all desired our mothers but had to abandon incest for the sake of social and cultural development. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this repressive idea of renunciation and submission is a historical and political development. Desire, they insist, is not the desire for some forbidden object, a desire that we must necessarily repress. Rather, all life is positive desire – expansion, connection, creation. It is not that we must repress our desire for incest. Rather, the idea of incest – that we are inevitably familial and desire only the impossible maternal object – is itself repressive. What it represses is not a personal desire, but the impersonality of desire or the intense germinal influx. To imagine ourselves as rational individuals, engaged in negotiation and the management of our drives – this idea of ourselves as bourgeois, selfgoverning, commonsensical agents – represses the desire for non-familial, impersonal, chaotic and singular configurations of life. We are repressed, then, not by a social order that This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 231 10/08/2010 16:17 232 RETERRITORIALISATION prohibits the natural desire for incest, but by the image that our desires ‘naturally’ take the form of Oedipal and familial images. The late modern understanding of the self or subject as necessarily subjected to law is the outcome of a history of political development that has covered over the originally expansive, excessive and constructive movements of desire. A number of philosophical movements, including psychoanalysis, have explained life from the point of view of the already repressed subject, the bourgeois individual who has submitted his desires to the system of the polity and the market. Against this, Deleuze and Guattari aim to reveal the positive desire behind repression. In the case of Oedipal repression, it is the desire of the father – the desire of white, modern, bourgeois man – that lies at the heart of the idea of all selves as necessarily subjected to repressive power. Connectives Desire Foucault Freud Oedipalisation Psychoanalysis Woman RETERRITORIALISATION – refer to the entry on ‘deterritorialisation/ reterritorialisation’. RHIZOME Felicity J. Colman ‘Rhizome’ describes the connections that occur between the most disparate and the most similar of objects, places and people; the strange chains of events that link people: the feeling of ‘six degrees of separation’, the sense of ‘having been here before’ and assemblages of bodies. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome’ draws from its etymological meaning, where ‘rhizo’ means combining form and the biological term ‘rhizome’ describes a form of plant that can extend itself through its underground horizontal tuber-like root system and develop new plants. In Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term, the rhizome is a concept that ‘maps’ a process This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 232 10/08/2010 16:17 RHIZOME 233 of networked, relational and transversal thought, and a way of being without ‘tracing’ the construction of that map as a fixed entity (D&G 1987: 12). Ordered lineages of bodies and ideas that trace their originary and individual bases are considered as forms of ‘aborescent thought’, and this metaphor of a tree-like structure that orders epistemologies and forms historical frames and homogeneous schemata, is invoked by Deleuze and Guattari to describe everything that rhizomatic thought is not. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome as an action of many abstract entities in the world, including music, mathematics, economics, politics, science, art, the ecology and the cosmos. The rhizome conceives how every thing and every body – all aspects of concrete, abstract and virtual entities and activities – can be seen as multiple in their interrelational movements with other things and bodies. The nature of the rhizome is that of a moving matrix, composed of organic and non-organic parts forming symbiotic and aparallel connections, according to transitory and as yet undetermined routes (D & G 1987: 10). Such a reconceptualisation constitutes a revolutionary philosophy for the reassessment of any form of hierarchical thought, history or activity. In a world that builds structures from economic circuits of difference and desire, Deleuze responds by reconsidering how bodies are constructed. He and Guattari argue that such structures constrain creativity and position things and people into regulatory orders. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari staged the entire book as a series of networked rhizomatic ‘plateaus’ that operate to counter historical and philosophical positions pitched toward the system of representation that fix the flow of thought. Instead, through a virtuoso demonstration of the relational energies able to be configured through often disparate forms and systems of knowledge, they offer the reader an open system of thought. Rhizomatic formations can serve to overcome, overturn and transform structures of rigid, fixed or binary thought and judgement – the rhizome is ‘anti-genealogy’ (D&G 1987: 11). A rhizome contributes to the formation of a plateau through its lines of becoming, which form aggregate connections. There are no singular positions on the networked lines of a rhizome, only connected points which form connections between things. A rhizomatic plateau of thought, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, may be reached through the consideration of the potential of multiple and relational ideas and bodies. The rhizome is any network of things brought into contact with one another, functioning as an assemblage machine for new affects, new concepts, new bodies, new thoughts; the rhizomatic network is a mapping of the forces that move and/or immobilise bodies. Deleuze and Guattari insist bodies and things ceaselessly take on new dimensions through their contact with different and divergent entities This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 233 10/08/2010 16:17 234 RHIZOME over time; in this way the concept of the ‘rhizome’ marks a divergent way of conceptualising the world that is indicative of Deleuzian philosophy as a whole. Rather than reality being thought of and written as an ordered series of structural wholes, where semiotic connections or taxonomies can be compiled from complete root to tree-like structure, the story of the world and its components, Deleuze and Guattari propose, can be communicated through the rhizomatic operations of things – movements, intensities and polymorphous formations. In opposition to descendent evolutionary models of classification, rhizomes have no hierarchical order to their compounding networks. Instead, Deleuzian rhizomatic thinking functions as an open-ended productive configuration, where random associations and connections propel, sidetrack and abstract relations between components. Any part within a rhizome may be connected to another part, forming a milieu that is decentred, with no distinctive end or entry point. Deleuze’s apparatus for describing affective change is the ‘rhizome’. Deleuze viewed every operation in the world as the affective exchange of rhizomatically-produced intensities that create bodies: systems, economies, machines and thoughts. Each and every body is propelled and perpetuated by innumerable levels of the affective forces of desire and its resonating materialisations. Variations to any given system can occur because of interventions within cyclical, systematic repetition. As the rhizome may be constituted with an existing body – including existing thoughts one might bring to bear upon another body – the rhizome is necessarily subject to the principles of diversity and difference through repetition, which Deleuze discussed in his books Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition. Deleuze acknowledges Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return as the constitution of things through repeated elements (existing bodies, modes of thought) that form a ‘synthesis’ of difference through the repetition of elements (D 1983: 46). ‘Synthesis’ is also described by Deleuze and Guattari as an assemblage of variable relations produced by the movement, surfaces, elusions and relations of rhizomes that form bodies (desiring machines) through composite chains of previously unattached links (D&G 1983: 39, 327). As a non-homogeneous sequence, then, the rhizome describes a series that may be composed of causal, chance, and/or random links. Rhizomatic connections between bodies and forces produce an affective energy or entropy. As Deleuze describes in his work on David Hume, the interaction of a socially, politically, or culturally determined force and any given body both produces and uses associations of ideas (D 1991: ix, 103). The discontinuous chain is the medium for the rhizome’s expanding network, just as it is also the contextual circumstance for the chain’s production. This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 234 10/08/2010 16:17 RHIZOME + ARCHITECTURE 235 Rhizomatic writing, being, and/or becoming is not simply a process that assimilates things, rather it is a milieu of perpetual transformation. The relational milieu that the rhizome creates gives form to evolutionary environments where relations alter the course of how flows and collective desire develop. There is no stabilising function produced by the rhizomatic medium; there is no creation of a whole out of virtual and dispersed parts. Rather, through the rhizome, points form assemblages, multiple journey systems associate into possibly disconnected or broken topologies; in turn, such assemblages and typologies change, divide, and multiply through disparate and complex encounters and gestures. The rhizome is a powerful way of thinking without recourse to analogy or binary constructions. To think in terms of the rhizome is to reveal the multiple ways that you might approach any thought, activity, or a concept – what you always bring with you are the many and various ways of entering any body, of assembling thought and action through the world. Connectives Affect Becoming Desire Hume Intensity Lines of Flight RHIZOME + ARCHITECTURE Graham Livesey Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as a continuously reorganising network, or web, has application to both architecture and urbanism. Deleuze and Guattari describe the principles of rhizomatic structures as involving connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania. Applying Deleuze and Guattari is always challenging, nevertheless rhizomatics provides a useful model for examining the internal relationships within buildings, the inter-connections between buildings and their surroundings, and most specifically the structure of cities. In fact Deleuze and Guattari describe Amsterdam as a ‘rhizome-city’ (D&G 1987: 15). Elsewhere, Deleuze describes the city as a labyrinth in terms that strongly invoke the rhizome (D 1993a: 24). The notion that a point or site (building, space, location, etc.) is This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 235 10/08/2010 16:17 236 RHIZOME + ARCHITECTURE connected to an infinitude of other points or sites is a productive concept. This results in structures and relationships that are ‘acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying’ (D&G 1987: 21). The concentration on the line inherent to the rhizome places emphasis on connectivity and movement. This invokes both communication systems and the movement of people, goods, and services; architecture and cities are widely engaged in these functions. Various examples can be cited for a rhizomatic architecture and urbanism. Drawing from the plant and animal derivation of the term, the concept of architecture behaving like a rhizomatic weed was invoked by R.E. Somol when describing architect Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Ohio. Somol suggests that the building rises up in-between other structures, much like a weed, and that it makes rhizomatic connections to various existing structures and conditions (S 1989: 48-51). Another example of a rhizomatic architecture draws from the work of the post-war Team 10 movement, which generally invoked arborescent structures in their design of buildings and city. However, they also developed the ‘mat-building’ typology, derived from open-ended urban structures. Mat-buildings such as the Berlin Free University project, by the architects Candilis-JosicWoods, employed a web and matrix of spaces and movement systems. Describing mat-buildings, the British architect, and Team 10 member, Alison Smithson writes: ‘. . .the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the individual gains new freedoms of action through a new and shuffled order, based on interconnection, close-knit patterns of association, and possibilities of growth, diminution, and change’ (S 1974: 573). The emphasis placed by Deleuze and Guattari on cartography, in their definition of the rhizome, also resonates with architectural and urban practices. However, the mapping they describe, and it is a powerful formulation, ‘pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight’ (D&G 1987: 21). This implies that cartography is most productive when it captures complexity and temporality; the mapping of non-conventional qualities and quantities has become an important aspect of architecture and urbanism influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. Architecture tends to focus on the material and formal aspects of buildings, however buildings are spatial, functional, and social environments. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome is a vital concept for shifting the emphasis of architecture to the complex networks of movement, social connections, and communications that buildings and urban environments encompass. This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 236 10/08/2010 16:17 RHIZOME + TECHNOLOGY 237 RHIZOME + TECHNOLOGY Verena Conley The ‘rhizome’ replaces an arborescent structure that has been dominating the west and the world for centuries. The rhizome carries images of the natural world, of pliable grasses, of weightlessness, and of landscapes of the east. It is horizontal and flat, bearing what the mathematician in Deleuze calls ‘n-1 dimensions’. It is always a multiplicity; it has no genealogy; it could be taken from different contexts (including Freudian psychoanalysis); and is neither genesis nor childhood. The rhizome does away with hierarchies. It augments its valences through hybrid connections that consist by virtue of addition, of one thing ‘and’ another. The rhizome operates in a space without boundaries and defies established categories such as binaries or points that would mark-off and be used to fix positions in extensive space. It ceaselessly connects and reconnects over fissures and gaps, deterritorialising and reterritorialising itself at once. It works toward abstract machines and produces lines of flight. The rhizome does not imitate or represent, rather it connects through the middle and invents hybrids with viruses that become part of the cells that scramble the dominant lines of genealogical trees. The rhizome creates a web or a network; through capture of code, it increases its valences and is always in a state of becoming. It creates and recreates the world through connections. A rhizome has no structure or centre, no graph or regulation. Models are both in construction and collapse. In a rhizome, movement is more intensive than extensive. Unlike graphic arts, the rhizome makes a map and not a tracing of lines (that would belong to a representation of an object). It is a war machine: rhizomatic or nomadic writing operates as a mobile war machine that moves at top speed to form lines, making alliances that form a temporary plateau. The rhizome is in a constant process of making active, but always temporary, selections. The selections can be good or bad. Good or bad ideas, states Deleuze in consort with Gregory Bateson, can lead to good or bad connections. The proximity of the rhizome to digital technology and the computer is evident. The connection with Donna Haraway’s cyborg has often been made. Yet Deleuze and Guattari do not write much about computers. They derive some of their ideas on rhizomes from Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. They connect with the anthropologist’s pronouncements in which biology and information theory are conjoined. Bateson argues that a person is not limited to her or his visible body. Of importance is This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 237 10/08/2010 16:17 238 SACHER-MASOCH, LEOPOLD VON (1835–95) the person’s brain that transmits information as discrete differences. The brain fires electrons that move along circuits. Through the transmission of differences, the person connects and reconnects with other humans, animals and the world. Deleuze and Guattari see the potential in Bateson’s work for rhizomatic thinking. The nervous system is said to be a rhizome, web or network. The terminology is the same as for computers though it does not pertain to them exclusively. Clearly, computers do offer possibilities. Not only the brain, but humans and the world consist of circuits in which differences are transmitted along pathways. Through computerassisted subjectivity, humans can increase their valences. Deleuze and Guattari write about a ‘becoming-radio’ or ‘becoming-television’ that can yield good or bad connections; productive or nefarious becomings. Computers and the internet have great potential as rhizomatic war machines. The way they are being captured by capitalism, that deploys order-words, consumer codes, and their multifarious redundancies makes them too often become ends in and for themselves, in a sphere of what Deleuze calls a generalised ‘techno-narcissism’. The science of technology takes over with its order-words. Yet, in Deleuze’s practical utopia, just as every major language is worked through by minor languages, so the capitalist war machine is always being threatened by mobile nomadic war machines that use technologies to form new rhizomes and open up to becoming. S SACHER- MASOCH, LEOPOLD VON (1835–95) – refer to the entries on ‘art’, ‘Lacan’ and ‘psychoanalysis’. SARTRE, JEAN PAUL (1905–80) – refer to the entries on ‘Guattari’ and ‘phenomenology’. SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE (1857–1913) – refer to the entries on ‘semiotics’ and ‘signifier, signified’. This content downloaded from 203.220.159.251 on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:41:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd 238 10/08/2010 16:17