Affective Police Reform 1AC/1NC

Policy proposals guided by empirical analysis of the negative effects of policing

overlook the indirect and virtual harms of police encounters. These harms
produce negative health outcomes in highly policed communities that extend
far beyond direct police encounters. Affective analysis is the only way to grasp
this dimension of police brutality.

Philips 20 (Chas. Assistant Prof. of Political Science at Gettysburg College. “Human without
Image: Deleuzian Critique beyond the Neighbourhood Effect” in Deleuze and Guattari Studies
14.1 (2020): 152–176 DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2020.0395 © Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs) green = short

I. The Neighbourhood Effect of Policing According to recent studies, the impact of aggressive
policing tactics extends beyond the individual who experiences a direct encounter with police
officers. Unsurprisingly, the individual’s social and familial circles are also impacted by such an
encounter. Perhaps less intuitively, these studies also reveal how populations living in
proximity to the areas where these tactics are deployed experience measurable decreases in
health, many of which can be associated with stress and trauma. Such studies provide valuable
data for establishing the ways police practices have effects on communities rather than simply
individuals, and must therefore be analysed from a broader perspective. If populations who are
merely in the same neighbourhood as aggressive police practices suffer, then it is insufficient
to simply use police department statistics – usually stops, citations and arrests – to quantify
negative health outcomes. The neighbourhood effect of policing policy is an important
supplement to research at the individual scale. For example, Abigail Sewell and Kevin Jefferson
analyse data collected under the New York City Stop, Question and Frisk (SQF) policy between
2009 and 2012 (Sewell and Jefferson 2016). The data they collect and analyse suggests that
invasive pedestrian stops have a negative impact not only on those individuals who are
stopped, but also on populations who have not themselves been stopped, but merely live in
proximity to police stops. In neighbourhoods where stops are more likely , mental and physical
health outcomes are worse; populations in these neighbourhoods suffer disproportionately
high instances of diabetes, hypertension, insomnia and obesity. In places where there is a
higher likelihood that force will be used in the course of an encounter, negative health
disparities are more severe. The authors draw a correlation between this more aggressive and
invasive police tactic and the health outcomes suffered by populations who live in the targeted
area. While they invite additional study to confirm their findings, they conclude that their
evidence suggests that the consequences of the institutionalization of the carceral state are
far-reaching’ (Sewell and Jefferson 2016). Sewell et al.’s research extends previous studies that
suggest a strong association between psychological distress and neighbourhood-level use- of-
force and SQF rates, particularly as it pertains to males of colour. Because males are more
often subject to these encounters, the authors suggest that the stress (and related set of health
outcomes) is likely to be a result of the higher likelihood of SQF . The fact that these health
outcomes are found most acutely in male populations, where there is a higher likelihood of
being stopped by police officers and a higher likelihood of a violent encounter with police
officers, suggests that proximity alone is not the explanatory factor (Sewell et al. 2016). Thus,
Sewell and colleagues show that certain populations experience the effects of policing policy
even when they do not directly encounter police officers. Their research better outlines the
expanded impacts of policing policy in two important ways. First, there appear to be
discoverable effects from encounters that never take place . The neighbourhood effect reveals
the impacts of a non-event: the fact that an encounter does not occur does not occlude a real
impact of the non-encounter–an impact that is entangled with an actual encounter that does
not take place. The non-event and the event2 are entangled. The very risk of an aggressive
encounter is enough to yield measurable, observable results. Such research accounts for the
impacts of something that does not occur – but could and in other cases does occur – within a
given neighbourhood and as a result of a particular practice. Second, a specific subset of police
practices – SQF, surveillance, brutality, invasive searches, aggressive stopping practices,
profiling and others – appears to have an ever-widening ripple effect on populations who do
not directly experience such practices. Some of these ripples can be quantified and analysed
when we move from the individual to the neighbourhood and beyond. Thus, Sewell et al. make
a strong case for the benefits of including a larger set of criteria in the study of public and
policing policy. However, there are methodological limitations to the social scientific method s
used in this type of study that make it difficult (or perhaps impossible) to fully capture the
scale and intensity of such police practices .3 The confines of this scientific approach must
necessarily exclude elements that are not susceptible to calculable, repeatable, data- driven
analyses. The method must eliminate variables that interfere with significant results derived
from its data, and it must designate the boundaries of the data in order to calculate findings.
Each hypothesis must be testable (and perhaps replicable) if it is to be meaningful. Human
behaviour must be translated into discrete data points (for example, convert self-reported
emotions into a numerical scale), calculated using external proxies ( for example, aggregate
health outcomes or income levels in different spaces or over different periods of time), or
speculatively deduced through observation ( for example, measure micro- reactions to
simulated experiences in real time). Such analysis can and does yield important, meaningful
results to a wide variety of research questions, but it also excludes a realm of empirics that is
incompatible with these methods. Because no single view of empirical study is accepted as
comprehensively and universally objective, the next section analyses the theoretical and
methodological resources provided in Difference and Repetition to identify limitations in social
scientific methods and propose a complementary set of considerations that may yield a richer
account of policy effects. More broadly, I argue that basing research and policy on such a
narrow conception of empirics often fails to account for elements of the ‘real’ that have a
significant impact on its explanatory effectiveness. Such limitations are most acute in cases
where scientific research fails to recognise the fundamental limitations of its methodological
parameters. In the case of studies on the neighbourhood effect, there is a risk of interpreting
human behaviour and community relations as something less than the complicated, complex,
fluctuating fields of ideas that Deleuze indicates them to be. How much is lost when these
complicated fields are reduced to positivist analysis? The confluence of this approach to
research (and the urban policing policies often derived from it) runs counter to the normative
aspirations with which I conclude the essay. In contrast, a model of analysis that provides space
for the other to remain in a state of becoming–even on terrain that is outside the confines of
social scientific research methods–is more likely to foster and account for the creative process
of becoming while calling for a less invasive set of policing policies.

II. Transcending the Neighbourhood Effect A. The Problem of Scaling and Localisability

The world that social scientists observe and study is the realm of what Deleuze calls the actual:
the recognisable world experienced on a daily basis. However, the ‘actual’ is not nearly
sufficient for characterising the world in its emergent and creative complexity . For Deleuze,
the actual emerges from a far richer realm that cannot be directly accessed or recognised: the
realm of the virtual. The world as we experience it emerges from the virtual, but it bears no
relation to the realm of the actual. Prior to the actualised space of objects, concepts and bodies
is a realm of Ideas that is yet to be actualised. Following Kant, Deleuze argues that these Ideas
can be understood as ‘essentially problematic’ while ‘true problems are Ideas’ (Deleuze 1994:
168). Problems themselves ‘are the real objects of Idea’, even though those objects remain
‘outside experience’ and ‘represented only in problematic forms’ (Deleuze 1994: 169). True
problems are not safes to crack or codes to break; they bear no relation to solutions. Instead,
problems–and therefore Ideas–are multiplicities of non-reducible differential elements that
cannot be divided, subtracted from or resolved. (Deleuze 1994: 182) The various elements in
virtuality that constitute the Idea lack both a ‘sensible form’ (which would be found only in an
actualised form) and a ‘conceptual signification’ (which would be soluble or recognisable, and
therefore not a problem); Ideas are ‘on the way’ to being actualised as a result of an unknown
and dramatic triggering event or change of conditions (Deleuze 1994: 182–3). Actualisation is
the creative process of moving from the virtual to the actual. Deleuze argues that all objects
are the result of a movement from a realm of Ideas that exists in a pre-recognisable space of
completely differentiated elements; they exist only as pure potentialities. These elements are
intermittently drawn together into a series of points that constitute a structure, after which
something begins to come together. Although it may be sensed as an emergent formation, it
cannot yet be recognised as an object with extensity. At some trigger point, in a dramatic
moment of emergence, something coagulates into extensity. The emerging formation does
not resemble its previous stages, though it is a result of them (Deleuze 1994: 212). Instead,
what crystallises into the object we now encounter could not have been anticipated or
described in advance. Both the timing of the appearance and the qualities of the object are
surprising. The differential elements that came together in the realm of the virtual are now
‘cancelled out’ in the realm of actualisation; Deleuze argues that the object is now
‘differenciated’.4 It can be recognised, described, compared, identified, quantified and
categorised–it has now entered the realm of the actual. It may be tempting to consider only
the realm of the actual as ‘real’ because it is constituted by objects that are readily accessible,
but Deleuze insists that the virtual is equally ‘real’ (Deleuze 1994: 208). The virtual is the
genetic principle from which the actual derives ; the actual cannot exist without it. Although
the realm of the virtual is not contained by space or linear time, it does have an impact on both
space and time, and is thus real. The virtual is in oppositional relation to the actual – not the real
– because the actual realm and the virtual realm bear no relation to one another. Both the
actual and the virtual are real, however, because we experience the world only as a result of the
virtual actualising.5 In many social scientific studies, including the ones mentioned here, social
scientists identify and study a territorially bound space (or set of spaces) in order to gather a
discrete data set to analyse. Sewell et al., for example, gather data in a defined set of New York
City locations over a specific period of time. These boundaries are necessary to provide a finite
scope of analysis. If significant, their findings can then be extrapolated based on this specific
location or applied to other contexts based on the findings of the initial study. However, any
social scientific approach that is confined to a definable space over a specified period of time
must necessarily exclude the considerations of the virtual for reaching its conclusions. It must
rely instead on the realm of the already- actualised for its data and analysis. Such a limitation
is significant because the virtual–that rich terrain of potentiality from which all of extensity is
actualised–can be neither cordoned off geographically and chronologically, nor ignored.
Rather, it must be included and thought through. To illustrate how the virtual influences one’s
life, even while eluding localisability, consider an individual viewing a video of a police shooting.
The images of police officers unjustly shooting an unarmed individual may elicit an affectively
charged response regardless of whether the shooting took place in one’s neighbourhood or
across the world. Both the shooting and the observation of the shooting are examples of
complex processes of actualisation. The person viewing the video may experience an impact of
the image as they speculate an analogous possibility occurring to them, in their neighbourhood,
in an encounter with their local police force. Or, a viewer may simply bear witness to the
violence being carried out and experience a real impact from its observance, whether such an
encounter is likely to occur to the observer or not. One’s personal connection to the individuals
in the video is not necessary for one to incur a variety of real effects from having seen it, and the
nature of those impacts cannot be anticipated in advance. Policing policies may not be
consistent or generalisable from one neighbourhood to the next, but the effects of policing
activity in one area may reach into geographically distant spaces and have an effect
nonetheless. The intensities beneath the register of recognisability travel and expand,
regenerating their own force of impact. These intensities inhabit the relation between the
viewer, the video, their lived experiences and the milieu in which they find themselves.
Reactions to observed violence may not be consistent from one person to the next, or from
one population to the next; they may vary without apparent explanation. Because the world
is derived from the rich terrain of the virtual, experiences and milieus may coalesce to impel
an unexpected reaction to a particular video, news story, rumour, conversation, unrelated
source of frustration, policy, event, encounter, near-encounter or non-encounter. It is not
possible to anticipate in advance where the effects of an event will occur; one cannot pin
down the exact source of a particular reaction; one cannot draw a direct correlation or
causation between an event or policy and those who are impacted by it; one cannot say in
advance how acute or widespread a reaction to a stimulus will be. Because the process of
actualisation is creative and cannot be fully accessed, the scale of an actualised effect cannot
be calculated or predicted based on severity or frequency of occurrence. In most cases, a
determination of cause is speculatively identified after the fact, based on retroactive analysis.
Even in these cases, the complicated sprawl of contextual causes tends to be siphoned away
in order to make an analysis ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’. For example, it is impossible to
definitively determine why the deaths of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown caused widespread
political uprising, while the deaths of Terence Crutcher or Stephon Clark did not. Deleuze
writes that the expression of the other presents to us a potential reality in the process of
creatively coming to be. ‘Consider a terrified face’, Deleuze writes, when the observer of a
terrified face does not know the source of terror. ‘This face expresses a possible world: the
terrifying world.’ The world expressed may not resemble the actualised world of extensity.
Instead, it reflects ‘that state of the implicated or enveloped in its very heterogeneity with what
envelops it: the terrified face does not resemble what terrifies it, it envelops a state of the
terrifying world’ (Deleuze 1994: 260). When one encounters the terrified face of the other,
they are suddenly implicated in a heterogeneous system; the radical separation between the
subject and the other dissolves. The separation between the event and the reaction to the
event are no longer at odds with one another. They envelop one another – the reality of the
present becomes subsumed by the emergent possibility expressed by the other as it coalesces
to constitute a new present moment. The present moment is a complicated multiplicity of
possible worlds expressed by the other that now subsume my own world. A ‘virtual’
experience of the police shooting is real when it is experienced through its actual viewing, but
the virtual and the actual do not remain in discrete realms. Instead, the virtual reaches into the
actual and expresses a world in which both the event and the non-event are ‘real’. The world
in which there is no shooting is subsumed by the world in which there is a shooting, and this
subsumption constitutes the present moment for the viewer. Deleuze’s understanding of the
virtual’s relation to the actual is a resource for thinking through concepts and events involving
non- localisable, non-scalable processes. Again, the process of moving from the realm of
virtual to material realities that we can recognise is marked by creativity. The exact moment
and nature of an event cannot be reliably predicted in advance; a moment of crystallisation
may appear disproportionate to the conditions that led to it, and the result may not bear any
resemblance to the trajectory that preceded it. The realm of ideas that serve as the basis for
actualisation cannot be directly grasped, observed or measured (Deleuze 1994: 183). If the
cause is intensive rather than extensive, and the effect is the result of the virtual actualising,
then both the source and result of the event cannot be geographically pinpointed. The
conditions from which an event derives may not occupy a defined space, or they may not be
limited to that defined space. The scientific practice of defining a space, time and scale from
which to derive and analyse data fails to account for the creative process of actualisation as
described by Deleuze. Even if the scale or effect of an event makes itself known in the realm of
extensity, as is the case in Sewell’s study, that scale is not reducible to those observable,
actualised effects. Including Deleuze’s resources in an analysis of policing policy adds richness
to the way policing policies and their effects are understood, even though (and because) they
cannot be localised, and even though the scale of effects cannot be predicted or
comprehensively measured.

B. The Problem of Affect and Its Resistance to Social Scientific Interrogation

Henri Bergson’s conception of affect, from which Deleuze derives much of his own theory, is a
helpful supplement to the social scientific approach to studying aggressive police tactics.
However, it also poses a serious critique of it. Following Bergson, I take affect to be that which
precedes emotion–a disorganised, pre-emotional proto-feeling. 6 A discernible and identifiable
emotion is the actualised version of the affective sense that preceded it; affect is the virtual or
genetic component of emotion. An analysis of the affective side of policing helps elucidate the
empirical findings of Sewell et al. and others, but it also reveals how certain aspects of human
behaviour are less susceptible to social scientific study . For populations who live in
neighbourhoods targeted by more aggressive policing tactics–in particular, black males who
are more likely to be experience a police encounter (Sewell et al. 2016)–there is an affective
charge associated with the possibility of police contact . Speculatively, this charge may derive
from multiple sources, including the potential danger of brutality or lethal force used on black
males during police encounters; a sense of powerlessness in relation to police departments who
may appear to act with impunity; a sense of inequality based around the disparity between
targeted and non-targeted neighbourhoods or populations subject to such tactics; a perception
of lawlessness surrounding the rules governing police behaviour and the legal consequences
resulting from misconduct; the apparent racial disparity in legal accountability after an incident
of police misconduct; the perception of arbitrary or racially motivated selection for pedestrian
stops; the continual and often futile effort to avoid being perceived or portrayed as a dangerous
individual in the eyes of the police or society more generally. For Deleuzians, such a charge is
further complicated because the source and effect of the affective sensation are tangled up with
one another: affective forces inform these beliefs as they populate the cognitive portions of
our thought processes, but also are the result of these informed beliefs (Connolly 2007). Affect
cuts across the intellectual threshold; it precedes it, co-constitutes it and emerges from it . It is
not sufficient to say that one has an idea of what might occur in one of these encounters, or
even to say that one is scared of what might result from a police encounter–those thoughts
and emotions are imbricated with the affective sensations that precede them (and then
reorganise them). It would be more accurate to say one’s behaviour is pre-organised and
directed by an affective experience of the world. That experience is antecedent to the
cognitive sense-making of one’s experience that one undertakes . Additionally, the relationship
between the two cannot be clearly traced–they can be separated only in conceptual terms.
Affect and cognition are examples of the virtual and the actual; the cognitive component
emerges from an affective sense, even if it bears little resemblance to its virtual origin.
Because I take affect to be virtual rather than actual, social scientific methods struggle to
analyse it; approaches that are confined to a world of spatial extensity fail to account for the
way affect influences and constitutes the realm of the actual. Affect is real even though it is not
possible to locate or map its precise functioning. Again, the realm of extensity is constituted by
the intensive realm of virtuality: affect influences our behaviour, informs the way we
understand the world, and modifies how we react to external stimuli. And, it cannot be
isolated in an event, space, time or even the potential of an event in a particular space at a
particular time. It cannot be placed within the subject’s mind or body. However, affect cannot
be conceptualised without both the subject and the event(s). Affect is thus what Jairus Grove
(2016) calls ‘semi-autonomous’. It is constituted through a relation between a subject (or group
of subjects) and the potentiality of an event (a police encounter, in this case). Quantifying the
impacts of this semi- autonomous element offers a glimpse at the actualised effect of affect, but
does not – and cannot – offer a picture of affect as such. The observable world–the one that
can be scientifically broken into data sets – is merely the end of a creative process of
actualisation. We cannot access the realm of intensity directly; it can be sensed but not
measured. Even if it were possible to designate and quantify the magnitude of an affective
sensation, the relation between affect and its actualised result cannot be predicted. There is
not reliable correlation between particular affective responses and a consistent behaviour
that follows. Even if the considerable role affect plays is granted by positivists, the precise ways
that affect organises our behaviour cannot be methodologically identified. Affect is thus a
crucial and constitutive element of human behaviour, but cannot be located, observed,
measured, quantified or correlated with behaviour in any reliable way. The extensive world
that results from the virtuality of affect may be susceptible to social scientific study, but it
provides a severely limited glimpse of the complicated nature of its genesis. Sewell et al.’s
scope of analysis is and must be limited to the realm of the extensive and observable, and thus
cannot scientifically incorporate affect as a mathematical variable. For example, the visceral
experience of fear (or a less organised sensation that later coalesces into a recognisable
emotion of fear) may result in measurable consequences that can be sorted into a data set,
but the intensity and extent of these consequences are not reducible to discrete quantitative
analyses. Although we could develop qualitative data by asking populations to rate their fear of
a police encounter on a numerical scale, or gather quantitative data on the health outcomes of
populations who live in SQF neighbourhoods, this data does not capture the intensive power of
affect or even the myriad of untraceable impacts that can be connected with an affect-based
lived experience. To understand why an encounter with the police is real whether it takes
place in actuality or not requires the inclusion of a virtual world that is largely incompatible
with social scientific methodology . It is possible to theorise how the virtual – the non-material –
reaches into the world of the actual through an intensive relation and has an impact on
behaviour, but it cannot be reliably measured. Such an effect is real but not actual; quantifying
the observable results fails to capture the role of the virtual. Thus, Sewell et al.’s studies reflect
an important consequence of affective relations, but they do not (and probably cannot) capture
the way affect precedes, eludes and confounds empirical study. Put differently, Deleuze directs
our attention to a realm that is not yet present in any recognisable way. Philosophy, he argues,
cannot be interested solely in the already constituted world, because to do so is to exclude a
much richer and more dynamic realm of virtuality. Deleuze criticises the uprightness of thought
that emerges from the concordance of senses, in which all things are recognised and
representable7 (Deleuze 1994: 133). But, by the very nature of its methodology, social science
struggles with a world that cannot be made recognisable and analysable from a positivist
perspective. The world of extensity can be measured, but it does not ‘bear any resemblance’
to the world of the virtual. Aggressive policing, surveillance, mass incarceration, red-lining,
stop, question and frisk are all differenciated extensities. They are the inverted image of
difference.8 To understand how this constellation of concepts operates on their fundamental
scales, we must turn towards the virtual. In the case of Sewell’s studies, one can observe and
record recognisable effects on a population’s health as a result of particular policing practices.
However, a rich terrain of potentially unrecognisable or non-calculable impacts cannot be
analysed using these tools. Deleuze’s understanding of intensive affect provides a framework
for thinking through the less recognisable or more obscure aspects of an actualised practice.
The resolution’s call to enact criminal justice reform in the area of policing
betrays the debate community’s unconscious investment in a paranoiac
affective constellation. Paranoiac affective constellations are symptomatic of a
generalized fear of difference and an unreflective pursuit of social homogeneity
and predictability. This affective constellation is especially pronounced in the
case of police and ensures that police filter experience to confirm their own
fears. The tide of the sea of suspicion will continue to rise until everything is
seen as a threat – resulting in racialized, gendered, and heterosexist police
violence.

Watson 99 (Sean, Lecturer at the University of the West of England, “Policing the Affective Society: Beyond
Governmentality in the Theory of Social Control,” S OCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199906) 8:2 Copyright ©
1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 8(2), 227–251; 008043) green = short

Slavoj Žižek gets to the heart of what is at stake in the sociology of affect when he says that ‘beyond the
field of meaning but at the same time internal to it – an ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-
ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy’ (Žižek, 1989: 124). For the purposes of this essay ‘enjoyment’
in this strictly technical sense denotes the affective ‘loading’ of our attachment to certain beliefs,
institutions, forms of life, rituals, traditions, music, art, food, dress, manners and so on. We find ourselves
(some- times despite our ‘better judgement’, whatever that is) emotionally attached to certain forms of life,
and repelled, disgusted, frightened or angered by others. Indeed we may find ourselves so deeply
attached to nation, race, political prin- ciple or utopian ideal that we are willing to kill, be
killed, or bring about destruction – apparently for their own sake. Conversely we sometimes
find ourselves so deeply repelled or angered by the ‘other’ that we again find our- selves
hating and destroying. Identification with, or hatred of, communities, beliefs or political
abstrac- tions are not fully accounted for simply by describing the ideological and institutional
structures within which the subject is interpellated . Something more is required. Some
account of the investment of affective force within the ideological, cultural and institutional
field is necessary. This is bound to be a complex matter. It cannot simply be that social forms reflect pre-
given structures of feeling since it is clear that feelings can be, and often are, induced or reinforced by the
articulation of particular discourses, rituals and cultural forms. It is often the case that we are brought near
to tears, filled with joy, or enraged by rhetorical strategies of politicians, journalists, artists or those nearer
to us. It is equally clearly not the case, however, that social and cul- tural forms determine affective forms
in any straightforward way. It often seems that we search for an emotional outlet because we have
a prior need for such an outlet. We seem to desire certain kinds of cultural phenomena (be it art,
political speeches or tabloid newspapers) because they do things to us, affectively – things which we,
somehow, ‘enjoy’. A particular strength of Žižek’s work, that sets him ahead of the rest of the field of post-
Lacanian theorists, is the way in which he decentres the analy- sis of identification away from the
individual and into the field of collective social life. For Žižek ‘enjoyment’ is not something which we
experience indi- vidually, it is always something we share. Indeed it depends for its existence on this
sharedness. When communities share affective attachment to ideo- logical, cultural and institutional
phenomena Žižek writes about them sharing a ‘structure of enjoyment’ (Žižek, 1990). Very broadly
speaking, we can think of this as a heterogeneous collection of shared social means for channelling and
focusing affective bodily forces. In this article I will be drawing on some of my own research (conducted in
the late 1980s) into the ‘structures of enjoyment’ which make up police occupational culture. 1 I will be
arguing that clear patterns, or ‘affective reper- toires’, can be identified, and I will suggest that these
patterns could usefully be characterised as ‘paranoia’. I am not using the term here to refer to a kind of
psychopathology – I am using it to refer to a particular cultural patterning of affect in a social
context. The social characteristics I am referring to under the term ‘paranoid’ are the following:

1. A cultural milieu in which order, continuity, homogeneity and stasis are experienced
as particularly pleasing and desirable. This is linked with a fundamental suspicion of
difference, fluidity and change.
2. A cultural milieu which displays a tendency to split the world into good and bad parts
with very rigid boundaries. Positive feelings of love and idealisation are directed
towards the perceived good parts of the world whilst fear, hatred and loathing are
directed towards the bad parts. So there is, for example, a tendency to see people as either
good, decent and law abiding, or wicked and corrupt, with no grey area between. One might also
refer to this as a suspicion of ambivalence and ambiguity wherever it occurs.

3. A cultural milieu which displays a tendency to project negative qualities onto those
groups and individuals imagined to be ‘bad’ . So a paranoid position might involve
imagining and fearing that the ‘other’ has hostile intentions when in fact it is the
paranoid individual or group who has hostile intentions towards the ‘other’.
4. A milieu which strongly displays a collective desire to order, control or , sometimes,
attack outgroups into which bad qualities have been projected .

These characteristics are based on the concept of cultural paranoia as outlined by Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their analysis of anti-Semitism, by Slavoj Žižek in his analysis of ethnic
conflict, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their analysis of the libidinal dynamics of
modern capitalism. The last contrast this paranoid cultural pole with an opposite ‘schizophrenic’ pole. A
schizophrenic cultural milieu would tend to celebrate and cultivate cultural hybridity, fluidity,
difference, creativity and ambivalence – every- thing which is suspect in a paranoid
environment. Raves and music festivals represent good examples of milieu which tend
towards this schizophrenic end of the spectrum. Note that I am not referring to paranoid and schizo-
phrenic people but to paranoid and schizophrenic social milieus. Individual people move in and out of more
or less paranoid and schizophrenic milieus. We might talk about affective subject positions which
people can take up within particular milieus, positions which channel their feelings in
particular ways. Some of these subject positions, because of their place within paranoid
milieus, will have the effect of producing paranoid feelings and experiences of the world in the
individual. One such milieu, I am suggesting, is that inhabited by police officers.

THE POLICE SUBJECT IN TRADITIONAL POLICE STUDIES Very little empirical sociological research has
concerned itself explicitly with the question of affect .2 This is not to say that affect does not appear
in socio- logical research, however. It is simply that its presence tends not to be acknowledged as
such. An examination of police occupational culture in traditional police studies produces a
case in point. It is clear that what these studies actu- ally describe are constellations of affect ,
whilst calling them something more neutral like ‘attitudes’, ‘beliefs’ or even ‘discourses’ . We
might usefully distin- guish between the ‘symbolic content’ of such discourses (the specific objects of love,
hatred, suspicion) and the ‘affective forms’. To take just one example the actual object of suspicion may
vary from Irish immigrants in one context, to Polish immigrants in another, to Afro-Caribbean in another,
but the general tendency to invest feelings of suspicion (among other feelings) in socially and economically
marginalised ethnic minority communities remains fairly con- stant. So the ‘symbolic content’ may
vary to some extent, while the ‘affective forms’ stay relatively constant. I am particularly
interested in these ‘affective forms’ and why they seem to be so regular. It is important at the outset to fend
off the potential charge that I am myself objectifying the police and their supposed affective forms in a
paranoid manner. Do I view the police as a ‘bad them’ who have quite alien and objectionable ways of
feeling about the world, compared to a ‘good us’? Malcolm Young makes the following comment about the
very popular dramatisations of police work which populate TV and cinema screens: In nightly TV rituals of
social order and chaos, a stream of hero policeman stand at the symbolic crossroads between peace and mayhem, and
the detective and chief officer now operate at the point where once the church and its priests declaimed on apocalyptic
threat, and categories of good and evil. (Young, 1991: 14) This fascination that the police hold for many
exists not because they are absolutely alien but precisely because they display affective forms with
which we identify at an unconscious level – their story is an allegory of our own affective
predicament in many ways. There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’ in this account. We could all be (and often
are) police-like in our affective prefer- ences – and placed in the same position, most of us
would feel and act just as other police men and women do. That is not of course to say that the
police themselves do not construct the world in terms of a ‘them’ and ‘us’; they clearly do. We will see that
many groups are defined as being outside the parameters of what can really count as ‘us’, by
the police. This would include women, ethnic minorities, people with ‘dubious’ political
opinions and so on. And many groups are simply defined outside of the boundary of what can
be understood even as ‘respectable and law-abiding’. Indeed this propensity for rigidly
splitting the world is highly characteristic of the police occupational milieu. They do split the
world, they do construct an ‘other’ onto which their fears and loathings are projected to a
great extent but this process is not unique to police officers, it is just particularly pronounced
in their case. And my argument is that it is pronounced in their case not because they are
somehow inherently different from the rest of us but because of the specific nature of policing
as a form of social organisation.3 To what extent then do previous findings support the claims I am
making regarding the existence of distinct affective patterns? It is arguable that the overwhelming
majority of the evidence points towards an affective antagonism towards plurality, difference,
complexity, ambiguity, change, hybridity, which are felt as a threat to the social world – what
we might broadly refer to as forces of ‘flux’. This goes hand in hand with a positive affective
‘enjoy- ment’ of homogeneity, order, predictability, hierarchy, deference to authority, broadly
speaking the forces of ‘stasis’. In other words, it describes the kind of paranoid cultural milieu
which I set out above. Police studies research evidence over the past 35 years shows a
remarkable degree of consistency through time, and across national boundaries, in these
respects. Here are just a few examples.

We can find this suspicion of difference

RACE, SYMBOLIC ASSAILANTS AND POLICE RELEVANT CATEGORIES
in, for example, the overwhelming accumulation of evidence of racial prejudice. The picture has
built up from Westley’s early evidence of racist language and beliefs among police officers in the United
States, to the findings of Reiner, Fielding and Fielding, Graef, Cain and a whole host of others in this
country (Cain, 1973; Fielding and Fielding, 1991; Graef, 1989; Reiner, 1978, 1992; Westley, 1970). In the
1980s, Smith and Gray famously produced highly disturbing evi- dence of prejudiced attitudes amongst the
Metropolitan Police (Smith and Gray, 1985). They claimed, however, that these prejudices must be distin-
guished from the actual relationships police officers had with black people in the context of policing their
communities. Prejudice does not necessarily lead to discrimination, they suggested. Simon Holdaway,
however, has rightly argued that such a separation is not really defensible. Instead these attitudes must
be understood in the context of a process of ‘racialisation’ of the relationship between the
police and certain minority communities (Hold- away, 1996: 72–105). The police/black-
community relationship, instead of simply being a police/community relationship like any
other, has historically been con- structed around an ideology which sees it as involving a ‘race
problem’ or a ‘black problem’ or a ‘black youth problem’. This has been constructed over a
number of decades. Paul Gilroy, for example, has shown the way in which, since the 1960s, an ideology
has been developed, among politicians, the courts, the police and the media, which suggests
that black people (particu- larly young black people) have more of a propensity to commit
crime than the rest of the population; particularly certain types of street crime. This has been
elaborated into a broader official ideology in which black people are perceived to be
particularly susceptible to certain kinds of family pathology, an unwillingness to work, and a
tendency to act as a mob (Gilroy, 1987: 72–113). John Solomos has argued that these themes were
further intensified when the public confrontations and hostilities of the 1970s turned into the full-scale riots
of the 1980s (Solomos, 1991: 88–118, 1989: 99–121). Both Gilroy and Solomos suggest that black youth
came to stand as a symbol of more widespread fears about the breakdown of social cohesion
and an increasingly violent society. Black youth were the collective image of violence on the
streets, whether as the shadowy figure of the mugger or as the brick throwing, looting, rioter. The
complete breakdown of police/black-community relations was entirely blamed on the black community: on
their supposed problems with authority; their cultural difficulties with the ‘British way of life’; and their
inability to identify with the police. This was perhaps most clearly reflected in the policy of
appointing so-called ‘community liaison officers’ in an attempt to deal with the problem. Such
an approach reflected an inability to see that the problem may involve police racism, and
therefore an inability on the part of the police to identify with the black community, rather
than the other way around . It also absolved all police officers (other than community liaison
officers) from having to reflect on the relationship problem (Institute of Race Relations, 1978: 65–
8). By the time I found myself interviewing police in the late 1980s all of this was in place – the
relationship between the officers I spoke to and the ethnic minority communities they policed was
thoroughly racialised. They under- stood their task as dealing with a special black crime problem, they
experi- enced the relationship on the streets with black youngsters as a battleground, they saw the
community as hostile, and at all times as a potential mob . Con- tainment and the control of territory
was seen as the priority for a community that was so inherently different and problematic. In
simply cataloguing the history of an ideological construction, however, we are in danger of making the
mistake that Žižek warns against. We need to ask what is the nature of the police officer’s emotional
attachment to these ideas? In other words we can see very well the discursive and institutional elements of
such a ‘racialised’ relationship, but what does such ‘racialisation’ mean in affective terms? As Solomos and
Gilroy suggest, black youth came to symbolise certain fears collectively held, and played upon
by politicians, the media and others. One might go as far as to say that t hese collective fears
(about a changing, strange, fragmenting and increasingly violent society) were (and still are)
projected onto black youth. Police officers seem to be particularly susceptible to such fears.
My experience is that police officers do not just make up ideas about impending disorder and
crisis for fun or to get a wage rise, they really feel those fears and anxieties intensely . So is
there any reason why police officers should experience such fears of change and social fluidity even more
intensely than the rest of us? It is noteworthy that all the studies so far mentioned suggest that this
‘racialised’ ideology invariably focuses on certain themes – willingness to work, family pathology,
behaviour on the streets, sexuality, recreational activities (party-going, drugs use, music etc.), and, of
course, crime. These all link to ways in which the supposedly ‘problem’ community is perceived to differ
from the ‘respectable’ com- munity. They are, ultimately, ways in which the population becomes fluid and
threatens to evade the control of the police. Such concerns always arise among police officers,
regardless of who the ‘problem’ ethnic minority com- munity are. There is a pattern here. This
hostility to racial minorities can be seen within a broader picture of suspicion and hostility
towards difference. This is an integral part of the police officer’s cognitive mapping of his/her
locality. The strange, unexpected, differ- ent, stands out against a background of everyday
normality. Jerome Skolnick writes of the ‘symbolic assailant’, the individual who gives clues in his
unusual dress, attitude, behaviour or mannerisms to his (for the police) deviant and dangerous identity
(Skolnick, 1966: Ch. 3). Such difference, and change in the social environment arouses feelings
of threat. In Egon Bittner’s and Allan Silver’s work we see the further development of the notion that the
police are in fact committed to an all-embracing social pacification function – to order and stasis on a grand
scale. They are there to deal, quite simply, with ‘something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-
which-someone- had-better-do-something-now’ (Bittner, 1974, 1975). When everything is ‘as it should
be’ – stable, predictable, orderly, familiar – the police officer feels at ease; he is happy and
comfortable. The appearance of the ‘symbolic assailant’ against this background of the
familiar and normal arouses feelings of sus- picion, threat, anxiety and so on. The police
officer’s ‘cognitive maps’ are in fact affective maps. In Robert Reiner’s summary of ‘police relevant
categories’ we can see further evidence of how police officers’ feelings traverse the social body in
complex ways. Some criminals are associated with positive feelings. These are the ‘good class villains’
who themselves identify with the same ‘cult of mascu- linity’ (Smith and Gray use this latter phrase) as the
police (Reiner, 1992: 118–21; Smith and Gray, 1985). They play the same cultural ‘game’ as the police;
they provide the source of what the police themselves regard as ‘real police work’, they are therefore the
key source of self-esteem and confir- mation of identity for the police. They may break the law but that
does not make them a threat – quite the contrary. Dick Hobbs’ work has demonstrated the deeply symbiotic
relationship between CID officers and such ‘entrepre- neurial’ criminals while Smith and Gray point to
similar feelings and percep- tions amongst uniformed officers (Hobbs, 1989: 213; Smith and Gray, 1985:
213). As Foucault rightly points out, such ‘delinquency’ is a part of the system itself, it is a managed
deviance which remains on the ‘inside’ (Foucault, 1987: 257–92). In contrast to ‘good class villains’, there
is so-called ‘police property’ (Reiner, 1992: 118–21; Smith and Gray, 1985: 347–8). These are Skolnick’s
‘symbolic assailants’ – the marginalised social groups who create a real sense of threat,
impending chaos, feelings of loathing and anger among police officers. They are the real threat
to order in that they are not disciplined, they behave in unpredictable ways , their language
cannot be understood, they will not be deferential to the authority of the police officer and
they will not live and work in the ‘customary’ way. Policemen feel bad about these people and
want to control them – despite the fact that they do not consider dealing with them to be
proper police work (the most common term for such work, among police officers, is ‘rubbish’). The
‘hypocritical’ professional middle classes, in some circumstances, actu- ally try to undermine the police
officer’s control over ‘police property’. ‘Chal- lengers’ and ‘do-gooders’ in the form of the doctor, the
social worker, the lawyer, or the civil rights organisation, challenge (already inadequate) police powers and
invade the sacred space of the police station. Reiner concludes that: Running through the perception of the
social structure is a distinction between the powerless groups at the bottom of the social hierarchy who provide the
‘rubbish’ and the ‘police property’, and the respectable strata, with distinct seg- ments which in different ways threaten
police interests. (Reiner, 1992: 121) This last phrase gets to the heart of the matter. While initially splitting
the world into good and bad parts – the ‘respectable’ versus the rest – the good begins to
vanish as one examines police categories. Ultimately one suspects that only the police
themselves are really ‘good’, but then police officers are actually suspicious of other police
officers.4 Eventually we begin to see that in fact perceived threat emanates from almost
everywhere in the police officer’s experience of the world. The ‘other’ onto which bad
qualities are projected expands, and the little island of safety and order diminishes.

MASCULINITY, APOCALYPSE AND VIOLENCE The police studies literature is replete with apocalyptic scenarios,
the ‘myth of police indispensability’, the ‘thin blue line’ between chaos and order. This firm
belief in impending chaos, constant decline, loss of standards, disrespect for authority, the
catastrophic threat to the ‘British way of life’, and so on, is reflected in popular images of
policing as well (as Malcolm Young points out in the earlier quotation). But for police officers
themselves the emotional charge of this apocalyptic splitting of the world is doubly powerful,
leading sometimes to violent fantasies: I had a dream about all of us, about the Section going round in a car.
We were in plain clothes and we were indiscriminately murdering everybody in the daytime that was causing trouble in
the night time. I’ve never enjoyed a dream so much in my life. (Graef, 1989: 58) Smith and Gray describe similar
expressions of violent emotion in their account of what they call the ‘cult of masculinity’ (Smith and Gray,
1985). They describe constant talk and boasting about violence, constant sexual boasting and
horseplay, and exaggerated tales of bravado. They claim that expressions of violent hostility are
often associated with police officers’ anxi- eties about the possibility of ‘losing face’. Here
violence is a ‘symbol of auth- ority and power’ . Now, Smith and Gray may be right or wrong in their
explanation of their data, what cannot be doubted, however, is that they are struggling to come to terms
with a complex affective phenomenon. They seem to suggest that at least some level of emotional
projection is at work. This projection is apparently associated with unbearable complexities
internal to police culture – on the one hand it sharply splits the world between the
‘respectable’ and the ‘degenerate’, but on the other hand police officers enjoy a symbiotic
relationship with self-proclaimed criminals and also find themselves engaging in violent sexual
fantasies.5 This notion that police culture, and therefore the police subject, is riven with
complexity, ambivalence and potential chaos while at the same time affectively valuing
simplicity, transparency and order, is a hypothesis worth pursuing. What would be the
consequences of such internal tensions? The suggestion that at least a certain kind of masculinity is
driven by anxiety about complexity and fluidity c an also be found in some recent feminist
writing in this area. Tony Jefferson makes the suggestion that ‘ the defense mechanisms of splitting
and projection are constantly implicated in the intersubjective management of anxiety’
(Jefferson, 1994: 26). He further claims (drawing on Wendy Hollway) that it is this anxiety that
provides the spur to negotiation of power relations: people want power to reduce their
anxiety. From where does this anxiety arise though? Anxiety is socially pro- duced within what
Jefferson calls ‘discursive relations’ – the everyday sym- bolic relations of language and social
practice, upon which we draw for our identities, meaning and rationales for action. Jefferson
gives no concrete examples of how this might be so; he says only that ‘heterosexual men often disown
their feelings of vulnerability and dependancy by saddling their partners with them’ . The
hypothesis is then that a certain kind of mascu- linity sustains itself by projecting unwanted
aspects of itself onto female partners . There is an obvious linked hypothesis which would
have been worth pursuing (particularly in the context of the book in which Jefferson’s paper was
published) that such dominant masculine discourses and subjec- tivities may project unwanted
elements onto a whole host of ‘other’ socially marginalised groups. The point, however, is to
show the fractures, antagon- isms and dislocations within masculine (and in this case
masculine-police) discourse in order that the origins of this motivational anxiety (if it truly
exists) can be understood . I shall be returning to the question of masculinity and the problem of fluidity
when I look at the analysis provided by Eliza- beth Grosz. From work as disparate as Carolyn Steedman’s
history of the forging of the Victorian police identity, to Van Maanan’s classic work on the occu-
pational socialisation of American police recruits, we see again and again the internal
antagonisms of the police cultural milieu laid bare, and the powerful affective currents which
swirl around those antagonisms (Steedman, 1984; Van Maanan, 1974). Conformity, fierce loyalty,
and a willingness to employ violence in defence of physical or symbolic threats to the integrity
and auth- ority of the uniform are absolute demands. It is within the ‘relief’, the basic unit of
professional uniformed policing, that the suffocating demands of this drive to conformity and
group thinking are most apparent. It is not uncom- mon within the relief to find marginalised
scapegoat figures.6 We begin to see, in the police studies literature, a picture of affective attachment
to certain cul- tural dispositions, but also a climate of low-level terror in which the new recruit
(and the old hand for that matter) can see for himself the potential consequences of
marginalisation. Persistent verbal abuse, psychological attacks (such as ignoring people for
long periods), spiteful and humiliating humour are all commonplace and more serious physical
dangers are a real possibility. The milieu of the relief contains a positive attachment to order
and certain idealised notions of respectability, but also anxiety, fear, sadistic and paranoid
affective currents. Most of all, one senses an absolute determi- nation to drive out complexity,
difference and ambiguity of any kind. One finds this perhaps most obviously in the insistence
on heterosexual identity (persistent jokes, miming of sexual acts, boasting, harassment of
women col- leagues etc.). This is combined with a virulent homophobia. But of course no
human community can be so homogeneous, simple, ordered or unambigu- ous . Perhaps, in
this sense, the most significant threat to the police officer’s sense of his authority , rightness
and dominance is the police officer himself.

The construction of subjects, communities, and humanity as closed and

coherent unities that must stave off all differential flux licenses claims of racial
superiority and human exceptionalism. If humanity is defined by the expulsion
of difference, human extinction is inevitable.
Colebrook 12. Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State
University, “Face Race,” Deleuze and Racism, online/google books green=short

The human race is facing extinction. One might even say that there is a race towards extinction,
precisely because humanity has constituted itself as a race . The idea of a single species,
seemingly different but ulti mately grounded on a humanity of right and reason, has enabled
human exceptionalism, and this (in turn) has precluded any questioning of humanity's right to
life. In actuality, humanity is not a race; it becomes a racial unity only via the virtual, or what
Deleuze and Guattari describe as a process of territorialisation, deferritorialisarion and
reterritori- alisation. In the beginning is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the 'intense
germinal influx', through which individuated bodies (both organic and social) emerge . Race or
racism is not the result of discrimination; on the contrary, it is only by repressing the highly
complex differentials that compose any being that something like the notion of 'a' race can
occur. This is why Deleuze and Guattari argue for a highly intimate relation between sex and
race: all life is sexual, for living bodies are composed of relations among differential powers
that produce new events: encounters of potentialities that intertwine to form stabilities . Race
and racism occur through such intersections of desire, whereby bodies assemble to form
territories. All bodies and identities are the result of territorialisa- rion, so that race (or kinds)
unfolds from sex, at the same rime that sexes (male or female) unfold from encounters of
generic differences. All couplings are of mixed race.It is through the formation of a relatively
stable set of relations that bodies are affected in common. A body becomes an individual
through gathering or assembling (enabling the formation of a territory). A social body, tribe or
collective begins with the formation of a common space or territory but is deterrirorialised when
the group is individuated by an external body - when a chieftain appears as the law or eminent
individual whose divine power comes from Lon high'. This marks the socius as this or that
specified group. Race occurs through reterritorialisation, when the social body is not organised
from without (or via some transcendent, external term) but appears to be the expression of the
ground; the people are an expression of a common ground or Volk. The most racially
determined group of all is that of 'man', for no other body affirms its unity with such shrill
insistence. 'Humanity' presents itself as a natural unified species, with man as biological ground
from which racism might then be seen as a differentiation. The problem with racism is not that it
discriminates, nor that it takes one natural humanity and then perverts it into separate groups.
On the contrary, racism does not discriminate enough; it does not recognise that 'humanity ,'
'Caucasian' and 'Asian’ are insufficiently distinguished. Humanity is a virtuality or majority of a
monstrous and racial sort. One body - the white man of reason - is taken as the figure for life in
general. A production of desire - the image of 'man' that was the effect of history and social
groupings - is now seen as the ground of desire. Ultimately, a metalepsis takes place: despite
seeming differences, it is imagined that, deep down, we are all the same. And because of this
monstrous production of 'man in general', who is then placed before difference as the unified
human ground from which different races appear, a trajectory of extinction appears to be
relentless. Man's self-evident unity, along with the belief in a historical unfolding that occurs as
a greater and greater recognition of identity (the supposed overcoming of tribalism towards the
recognition of one giant body of human reason), precludes any question of humanity's
composition, its emergence from difference and distinction and the further possibility of its un-
becoming. Humanity has been fabricated as the proper ground of all life - so much so that
threats to all life on earth are being dealt with today by focusing on how man may adapt,
mitigate and survive. Humanity has become so enamoured of the image it has painted of its
illusory beautiful life that it has not only come close to vanquishing all other life forms, and has
not only imagined itself as a single and self-evidenrlv valuable being with a right to life, it can
also only a imagine a future of living on rather than face the threat of living otherwise. Part of
the problem of humanity as a race lies in the ambivalent status of art, for art is the figure that
separates white man par excellence; humanity has no essence other than that of free self-
creation, and so all seemingly different peoples or others must come to recognise their
differences as merely cultural, as the effect of one great history of self-distinction. On the other
hand, if art were to be placed outside the human , as the persistence of sensations and matters
that cannot be reduced to human intentionality , then 'we' might begin to discern the pulsation
of differences in a time other than that of self-defining humanity. Far from extinction or human
annihilation being solely a twenty-first- century event (although it is that too), art is tied
essentially to the nonexistence of man. Art has often quite explicitly considered the relation between humanity and
extinction. For it is the nature of the art object to exist beyond its animating intention, both intimating a people not yet present
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 180), and yet also often presupposing a unified humanity or common 'lived'. Wordsworth - yes,
Wordsworth! - was at once aware that the sense of a poem or work could not be reduced to its material support, for humanity is
always more than any of the signs it uses to preserve its existence: Oh! why hath not the Mind Some element to stamp her image oil
In nature somewhat nearer to her own? Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?
(1850, The Prelude V 45-9: 109) If the archive were to be destroyed, would anything of 'man' remain? Art gives man the ability to
imagine himself as eternally present, beyond any particular epoch or text, and yet also places this eternity in the fragile tomb of a
material object: 'Even if the material lasts only for a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in
'Man' as a race (as a unified body
the eternity that coexists with this short duration' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 166).
imagining himself as a natural kind) is essentially tied to extinction: for man is at once an ex
post facto or metaleptic positing of that which must have been there all along, awaiting eternal
expression, at the same time that 'man' is also that being who hastens extinction in general by
imagining himself as a single tradition solely worthy of eternal life. This unified humanity that
has become intoxicated with its sense of self-positing privilege can only exist through the
delirium of Race, through the imagination of itself as a unified and eternal natural body: All
delirium is racial, which does not necessarily mean racist. It is not a matter of the regions of the
body without organs 'representing' races and cultures. The full body does not represent
anything at all. On rhe contrary, the races and cultures designate regions on this body - that is,
zones of intensities, fields of potentials. Phenomena of individualization and sexualization are
produced within these fields. We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we
never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing
becomes as easy as being born or dying. Along the way we struggle against other races, we
destroy civilizations, in the manner of the great migrants in whose wake nothing is left standing
once they have passed through. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 94) Racial delirium is not only a
passage through differential flux from which identity emerges; it also entails that 'we destroy
civilizations - affirming the potentiality of leaving any produced culture or tradition in ruins. If
racial delirium occurs as an affirmation of the possibility of anything becoming extinct, racism is
a neurotic grip on survival. Racism - including, and especially, the affirmation of 'man' - is a
repression of racial delirium; humanity is always a virtual production or fabrication that posits
itself as ultimate actuality, occluding the differentials from which it emerges.

We must replace the understanding of the subject and of the human as stable
and enclosed space with an understanding of the subject as a conjugation of
forces in constant becoming. This opens radical political potentialities by
uncovering a field of pre-individual intensities and avoids racialized
understandings of humanity and the war on difference. Such a critique of the
Self-Same-Subject is a prerequisite to police reform, learning about the topic,
and political activism.

Philips 20 (Chas. Assistant Prof. of Political Science at Gettysburg College. “Human without
Image: Deleuzian Critique beyond the Neighbourhood Effect” in Deleuze and Guattari Studies
14.1 (2020): 152–176 DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2020.0395 © Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs) green=short

Difference and Repetition does not conclude with any clear normative propositions for engaging
in the world it describes. As mentioned in the introduction, I read it as both a transgressive
critique of the Western philosophical canon and a set of resources drawn from that critique that
can be mobilised to engage in radical politics. In the spirit of that project, this section brings
Deleuze’s theoretical resources to bear on the study and navigation of oppressive spaces that
are subject to invasive policing policy. Although social scientists might take the empirical world
to be reducible to positivist, scientific determination and subjectivity distilled into identity-based
agents, Difference and Repetition uncovers a world marked by creative emergence and open to
radical political potentiality. First, a return to Leibniz’s idea of the sea as Deleuze reads it: 13 The
idea of the sea . . . is a system of liaisons or differential relations between particulars and singularities corresponding
to the degrees of variation among these relations–the totality of the system being incarnated in the real movement of
The sea is comprised of a near infinite number of indiscernible
the waves. (Deleuze 1994: 165)
elements interacting with one another, the aggregate of which constitutes the dynamic ‘body’ of
water we encounter. An observer does not have access to the precise way each element
contributes to the overall constitution of the sea, or even how each element is distinct from
other elements; and the complexity of the system of different elements makes predicting the
behaviour of its entirety difficult or impossible. But, one can see the real movements of the
waves, and experience the manifested actuality of the system as one observes or interacts with
it. A swim in the ocean introduces the body to the complexity of the system in physical terms:
one is pushed and pulled by the combined power of the differential elements constituting the
ocean, even as the body attempts to navigate its force. Even if there are discernible patterns and
rhythms, the system is always in a state of creative becoming . In rough waters, the body may be
overwhelmed and overcome by the power of the waves, the intensity of the current and the
vastness of its volume. The milieu of the ocean, which includes the swimming body, emerges as
its own problematic field of relations; one must attend, respond and adapt to its developing
conditions in order to persist as a body. The spaces that Sewell and colleagues study are akin to
these complex systems of interacting elements, experienced and observed as discernible space
to navigate. Like the sea, neighbourhoods and cities are constituted by (non-)events,
(non-)encounters, relations among differential elements, rapidly changing conditions as they
interact with overlapping milieu, persistent features that appear permanent, subsystems and
super-systems that reorganise local features, internal logics or rhythms below the level of
intelligibility, untimely actualisations of intensive structures, and problems without solutions.
One can observe and describe the actualised contours of a neighbourhood and empirically
analyse behaviour and health in a particular space without ever engaging with the genetic
principles that precede these actualities. The social scientific model for understanding the
impacts of aggressive policing is a valuable interpretation of this actualised world, but, like any
approach, it is limited by its methodological restrictions. A critical and diagnostic
interpretation that attends to the virtual–and thus offers a richer account of the process of
actualisation – may also reveal a more effective mode of orienting oneself or one’s community
to it. Bracketing the realm of potentiality yields (and must yield) a more limited range of
strategies for moving in an oppressive space . ‘To learn to swim’, Deleuze writes, ‘is to
conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in
order to form a problematic field’ (Deleuze 1994: 165). Again, like Leibniz’s sea, an individual
body is constituted by a unique constellation of elements and expresses ‘an Idea the
actualisation of which it determines’ (Deleuze 1994: 254). Although these individual elements
are common or indiscernible, they express a unique idea of that individual. Perhaps Deleuze is
inviting us to ‘conjugate’ these ‘distinctive points’ in the particular context in which we find
ourselves, and attempting to use this conjugation to problematise the structure and constitution
of our milieu. Perhaps Deleuze provides a strategy for navigating spaces of inequality–the
terrain of the problem–in a way that fosters newness. Conjugating oneself differently (anew)
in order to adapt to local (and non-local) conditions constitutes what Deleuze calls learning.
The body, the neighbourhood, the policy and the structure must all be understood as systems
in a state of becoming. The oppressive conditions endured by many populations are
exacerbated by the Image of Thought/Human because it constrains possibilities for change to
the recognisable realm of the already-actualised rather than the rich and creative realm of
potentiality. And, because the Image of the Human reflects and reaffirms a racialised world in
which oppression is not distributed equally , it seems likely that one’s relation to these
intersecting modes of oppression will modify the ways in which a body is (and can be)
conjugated among these elements. The Deleuzian call to problematise a field through one’s
help to inform such efforts. Each of us must learn to critically ‘swim’ in ways that will open
new terrain for thought and politics, and this creative potentiality is found by attending to the
intensive space of the virtual. Perhaps a degree of relief may be found through the emergence
of the new or the different that is expressed by the pre-individual subject; perhaps the
creative potentiality of the virtual provides a valuable normative addendum to the realm of
the actual. In the closing pages of chapter 5, Deleuze reiterates his understanding of the
individual as distinct from competing models. Descartes’s epiphany about the subject–that the I
sees the Self–fails to see the virtual derivation of the subject that precedes this encounter.
Deleuze explains that both the I and the Self exist only in extensity (as a form or the matter of a
form, respectively); the differences from which they develop in the realm of the virtual are
cancelled as they become actualised. Again, Descartes’s point of departure for deriving the
subject, it seems, is the already-actualised entity found in extensity. In contrast, Deleuze is
intent on theorising the pre-individual aspects of the individual. A primary problem is that
Descartes’s version of the subject is inseparable from identity (the actualised I who ‘thinks’) and
the Self who sees itself through a ‘continuity of resemblances’ (Deleuze 1994: 257). Thus,
identity emerges at the intersection of the thinking I who sees itself resembling a previous Self.
The Deleuzian subject is far more complicated and far less stable than the liberal subject. For
Deleuze, the resemblances that the I sees in relation to the self are the after-effects of a
process of actualisation that started in the realm of pure difference; those apparent
‘differences’ are merely the cancelled forms of difference that were lost in extensity. Contra
this version of the subject, every individuating factor is already difference and difference of
difference. It is constructed upon a fundamental disparity, and functions on the edges of that
disparity as such. That is why these factors endlessly communicate with one another across
fields of individuation, becoming enveloped in one another in a demesne which disrupts the
matter of the Self as well as the form of the I. Individuation is mobile, strangely supple,
fortuitous and endowed with fringes and margins; all because the intensities which contribute
to it communicate with each other, envelop other intensities and are in turn enveloped. The
individual is far from indivisible, never ceasing to divide and change its nature. (Deleuze 1994:
257) The ‘condensation of distinctive points’ or ‘open collection of intensities’ constituting the
subject are mistaken for evidence of the incompletion or interruption of the individual. The
error is to attempt to ‘complete’ the subject, or to pin it down into its finished, univocal stasis,
rather than an ‘indeterminate, floating, fluid, communicative and enveloping- enveloped’
individual (Deleuze 1994: 258). As Claire Colebrook writes, ‘it is only by repressing the highly
complex differentials that compose any being that something like the notion of “a” race can
occur’ (Colebrook 2013: 35). For Descartes (and Kant), the I is both a finished product and a
starting point for doing philosophy. But coercing the individual into a completed form of
identity stultifies its potential by denying the ongoing role virtuality plays. Thus, Deleuze
leaves behind identity as the foundational form of philosophy, and embraces the ‘full, positive
power of individual’ as completely incomplete (Deleuze 1994: 258). It is from this Deleuzian
subject that we find an accompanying normative warning. If the subject is constituted through
intensive differences of elements that precede the actualisation of the Self and I, then the
individual is always emerging from an ‘undifferenciated abyss’ of elements that remain in the
realm of the virtual. Thus, the condition of being is characterised not by a static and
purportedly ‘whole’ subject encountered in extensity, but by the ever-present potentiality of
being reconstituted by intensive differential elements. A form of the individual driven by
becoming, rather than identity, accounts for the rich terrain of the virtual that is always
refashioning the individual in creative ways . Thus, Deleuze urges us not to be explicated too much ...
not to explicate oneself too much with the other, not to explicate the other too much, but to maintain one’s implicit
values and multiply one’s own world by populating it with all those expressed that do not exist apart from their
expressions. For it is not the other which is another I, but the I which is an other, a fractured I.
There is no love which does not begin with the revelation of a possible world as such,
enwound in the other which expresses it. (Deleuze 1994: 261) To fully explicate oneself or the
other would be to (attempt to) eliminate this virtual remainder, and to cancel the very
generative force of becoming that drives newness. To avoid this catastrophic languishing,
Deleuze encourages us to foster the persistent alterity of the other in order to preserve its
intensity, just as we must allow the alterity of the self to persist as an intensive remainder to
our own individuality. The I that one encounters in extensity is a temporary and differenciated
being – a snapshot – on its way to becoming a new individual that draws from the intensive
components of its past. The I is thus an other – i n a state of alterity both to other individuals,
but also to its own form of becoming . If there is an objective here, it is to dedicate myself to
‘sensing’ intensities without cancelling them; to invite another world that is the actualisation
of intensity in this world. 14 Using Deleuze’s work to interrogate the limits of a positivist, data-
derived model points towards opportunities to critique the limits of the social scientific method,
as well as provide a supplementary set of considerations with which to engage. Much of the
social scientific research surrounding policing aspires to code behaviour in positivist terms,
statistically derive each predictive claim using data-driven probabilities and develop policing
models that reflect this explication. My argument is that both the study and any normative
claims that emerge from it are mired in the practice of explicating the other as fully as
possible–eliminating vital space for virtuality along with those variables that inhibit
meaningful scientific results. The process of extrapolating scientific conclusions based on
observational health outcomes, for instance, attempts to translate the complexity of humans
into observable, static, extensity-based organisms. By design, it also simplifies the complexity
of the milieu in question by ‘controlling’ for intervening variables. The realm of the intensive is
off-limits for this type of study if it involves the non-observable. The resulting strategy of
analysis inadvertently imposes being on intensive becoming. If the assumptive framework
undergirding all studies of human behaviour informs what range of normative strategies are
available in response, then a complementary diagnostic approach that includes space for
intensive potentiality can also clear terrain for new prognostic strategies that are more
compatible with a Deleuzian approach. Its inclusion may also explain why existing policing
strategies that rely on a purely observable and data-driven model may not be as effective as a
more inclusive enquiry. The process and result of learning in a complex multiplicity is a violent
and unpredictable set of potentialities. Learning takes the form of undetermined
experimentation without specific expectations. I take the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in
2014 and in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015 to be [are] examples of experimental learning. In
both cases, the police killings of black males were not unprecedented or even atypical.
However, the reaction to them was unique and reflected something natal: repetition, with a
difference. A certain set of conditions coalesced to cross a tipping point; populations
responded to actualised experiences of a virtual Idea of racial injustice and police violence .
Although they could not have been predicted, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray became the
encounters that force us to think. Suddenly, a violent process of learning is underway.
Activists, local citizens, politicians and police departments began to react to the multiplicity of
circumstances that were suddenly in flux. The uprisings in both cities represent a collective
conjugation of bodies, in which populations who experience long-term effects of racism react
to the relations that make up those conditions . Like the circumstances that constituted the
genetic conditions for the uprising, the ongoing results of this collective conjugation cannot be
described in advance and are yet to be realised . However, they reflect the intensive processes
that mark the realm of the virtual, and cannot be understood apart from them.

Solution-oriented approaches replicate the status quo. Instead of ‘solving,’ our

affirmative allows problems with affective policing to disrupt thought. This is a
pre-requisite to topic education and is necessary to avoid replicating status quo
modes of subject formation.

Philips 20 (Chas. Assistant Prof. of Political Science at Gettysburg College. “Human without
Image: Deleuzian Critique beyond the Neighbourhood Effect” in Deleuze and Guattari Studies
14.1 (2020): 152–176 DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2020.0395 © Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs) green=short

According to Deleuze, Kant evaluates problems first on the pre- existent propositions from
which they are formed, and second, on their solvability 10 (Deleuze 1994: 161). As described
above, Ideas are sets of differential relations from which material objects and bodies actualise,
and problematic fields are sets of differential elements that are not resolvable through the
actualisation of objects deriving from that field (Deleuze 1994: 168, 178–9). Kant’s approach to
problems misunderstands and then end-routes what Deleuze finds valuable about problems:
What is missed [by Kant and others] is the internal character of the problem as such, the imperative internal element
which decides in the first place its truth or falsity and measures its intrinsic genetic power: that is, the very object of
the dialectic or combinatory, the ‘differential’. Problems are tests and selections. What is essential is that there occurs
at the heart of problems a genesis of truth, a production of the true in thought .
Problems are the differential
elements in thought, the genetic elements in the true . . . The only way to talk of ‘true and
false problems’ seriously is in terms of a production of the true and the false by means of
problems, and in proportion to their sense. ( Deleuze 1994: 161–2) When problems are defined and
pursued based on their solvability, they cannot be considered true problems. Their solvability
is ‘determined by the conditions of the problem engendered in and by the problem along with
the real solution’ (Deleuze 1994: 162). A problem with a solution is directly tied to and defined
by its solution, and is not a problem, in the Deleuzian sense. It fails to compel the disruptive
experience of thinking, in which the subject and the surrounding system that constitutes a
multiplicity is transformed. The shift in the multiplicity produces more conditions from which
other alterations occur, each reflecting a version of the idea that was its genesis. Learning is the
process of confronting these conditions of the problem and being forced to develop
something new; one’s adaptation and reorientation to a new set of conditions cannot occur if
the problem can simply be resolved through a solution . Instead, ‘learning evolves entirely in
the comprehension of problems as such, in the apprehension and condensation of
singularities and in the composition of ideal events and bodies ’. The process of the problem
does not conclude with the transformation, ‘which tears us apart but also propels us into a
hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems’ (Deleuze 1994: 192). The process occurs
again and again. To decisively ‘answer’ the question or resolve the problem with a solution is
to avoid the problem in the first place and prevent the process of learning in the second.
 Criminal Control 1AC/1NC
The resolution’s call for criminal justice reform assumes a disciplinary
understanding of power, whereby subjects are enclosed within confined spaces
and normalized through disciplinary technologies. Reforming criminal justice is
a waste of time because disciplinary power is dead. Today, power operates
through control. The call for discipline and confinement has been replaced by a
compulsion for free movement. Networks of control enable ever more intricate,
ever more dense, and ever more diffuse practices of domination.
Deleuze 90
(Gilles Deleuze. French Philosopher. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. The MIT
Press,  59, 3-7. Retrieved June 27, 2017, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828) green = short
* we don’t endorse problematic language

Foucault located thedisciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the
outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual
never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first
the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the
factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the
prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51
could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts." Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of
enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a
productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But
what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the
societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to
organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed
in their turn the disciplines underwent a
to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But
crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after
World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had
ceased to be. We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--
prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly,
professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary
reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows
that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only
a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the
installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which
are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term
for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the
ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the
time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the
molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need
to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and
enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure,
neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in
mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements . There is no need to
fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. 2. Logic The different internments of spaces of
enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one is
supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it
is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations,
forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't
necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation , like a
self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute
from point to point.
This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the
the corporation
highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control,
has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar
with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each
salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and
highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the
corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double
advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the
corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an
excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through
each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to
tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends
to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination . Which is the
surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation. In the disciplinary societies one
was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the
societies of control one is never finished with anything- -the corporation, the educational
system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same
modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal
point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the
disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of
control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's
because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the
signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that
indicates his or her [their] position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility
between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is,
constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of
each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the
flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the
societies of control , on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a
number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are
regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The
numerical language of control is made of codes  that mark access to information, or reject it.
We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair.  Individuals have become
"dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks."  Perhaps it is money that expresses the
distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that
locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange,
modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.  The old monetary mole
is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control.  We have passed from one animal to
the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations
with others. The disciplinary man [person] was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man
[person] of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network . Everywhere surfing has
already replaced the older sports. Types of machines are easily matched with each type of
society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of
generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys,
clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy,
with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of
control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming
and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution
must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be
summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production
and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the
owner of the means of production but also , progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived
through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes
by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of
production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production,
which it often relegates to the Third World , even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil
production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no
longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it
wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but
for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the
factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no
longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner --state or private power--but
coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only
stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The
conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary
training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation
of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new
power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation.   We are taught that
corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of
markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters.
Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit,
while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous.  Man is no longer man enclosed, but
man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-
quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not
only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or
ghettos. 3. Program The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element
within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as
with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one
would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises
what counts is not
a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours;
the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a
universal modulation. The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control , grasped at
their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of
substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It
may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to
the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of
something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of
electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system:
Continuous forms of control , and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the
corresponding abandonment of all university research,  the introduction of the
"corporation" at all levels of schooling.  For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient"
that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes
for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of
handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but
ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the
progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.  One of the most important
questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or
within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against
the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of
marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent
training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the
telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

The breakdown of the criminal justice system in general and of prisons in

particular is not a bug – it’s a feature. As institutions collapse, the lines between
inside and outside blur. This allows previously domain-specific modes of
subjectification to permeate society. Calls to reform prisons and the judicial
system are hopelessly naïve because the prison now extends throughout the
social terrain. We are in a state of omni-crisis where all institutions break down
by design to justify the extension of technologies of domination outside of their
original domain. This omni-crisis is exported globally, paving the way for new
forms of colonialism and imperialism on the grounds that collapsed institutions
must be reformed to their previous grandeur.
Hardt 98
[Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher, “The Global Society of Control” Discourse ,
Fall 1998, Vol. 20, No. 3 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389503] green = short

The passage from disciplinary society to the society of control is characterized first of all by the
collapse of the walls that defined the institutions. There is progressively less distinction , in other
words, between inside and outside . This is really part of a general change in the way that power
marks space in the passage from modernity to postmodernity. Modern sovereignty has always
been conceived in terms of a (real or imagined) territory and the relation of that territory to its
outside. Early modern social theorists, for example, from Hobbes to Rousseau, understood the
civil order as a limited and interior space that is opposed or contrasted to the external order of
nature. The bounded space of civil order, its place, is defined by its separation from the external
spaces of nature. In an analogous fashion, the theorists of modern psychology understood
drives, passions, instincts, and the unconscious metaphorically in spatial terms as an outside
within the human mind, a continuation of nature deep within us. Here the sovereignty of the
Self rests on a dialectical relation between the natural order of drives and the civil order of
reason or consciousness. Finally, modern anthropol- ogy's various discourses on primitive
societies often function as the outside that defines the bounds of the civil world. The process of
modernization, then, in all these varied contexts, is the internaliza- tion of the outside, that is,
the civilization of nature.

In the postmodern world, however, this dialectic between inside and outside, between the civil
order and the natural order, has come to an end. This is one precise sense in which the
contemporary world is postmodern. "Postmodernism," Fredric Jameson tells us, "is what you
have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good."3 Certainly we
continue to have forests and crickets and thunderstorms in our world, and we continue to
understand our psyches as driven by natural instincts and passions, but we have no nature in
the sense that these forces and phenomena are no longer understood as outside, that is, they
are not seen as original and independent of the artifice of the civil order. In a postmodern world
all phenomena and forces are artificial, or as some might say, part of history. The modern
dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of
hybridity and artificiality.

Secondly, the outside has also declined in terms of a rather different modern dialectic that
defined the relation between pub- lic and private in liberal political theory. The public spaces of
modern society, which constitute the place of liberal politics, tend to disappear in the
postmodern world. According to the liberal tradition, the modern individual, at home in its
private spaces, regards the public as its outside. The outside is the place proper to politics,
where the action of the individual is exposed in the presence of others and there seeks
recognition. In the process of postmodernization, however, such public spaces are increasingly
becoming privatized. The urban landscape is shifting from the modern focus on the common
square and the public encounter to the closed spaces of malls, freeways, and gated
communities. The architecture and urban planning of megalopolises such as Los Angeles and Sao
Paulo have tended to limit public access and interaction as well as limited chance encounters of
different social subjects, creating rather a series of protected interior and isolated spaces.
Alternatively, consider how the banlieu of Paris has become a series of amorphous and
indefinite spaces that promote isolation rather than any interaction or communication. Public
space has been privatized to such an extent that i t no longer makes sense to understand social
organization in terms of a dialectic be- tween private and public spaces, between inside and
outside. The place of modern liberal politics has disappeared and thus from this optic our
postmodern and imperial society is characterized by a deficit of the political. In effect, the place
of politics has been de- actualized.
In this regard, Guy Debord's analysis of the society of the spectacle, thirty years after its composition, seems ever
more apt and urgent.4 In postmodern society the spectacle is a virtual place, or more accurately, a non-place of
politics. The spectacle is at once unified and diffuse in such a way that it is impossible to distinguish any inside from
outside - the natural from the social, the private from the public. The liberal notion of the public, the place outside
where we act in the presence of others, has been both universalized (because we are always now under the gaze of
others, monitored by safety cameras) and sublimated or de-actualized in the virtual spaces of the spectacle. The end
of the outside is the end of liberal politics

Finally, from the perspective of Empire, or rather from that of the contemporary world order,
there is no longer an outside also in a third sense, a properly military sense. When Francis
Fukuyama claims that the contemporary historical passage is defined by the end of history, he
means that the era of major conflicts has come to an end: in other words, sovereign power will
no longer con- front its Other, it will no longer face its outside, but rather pro- gressively
expand its boundaries to envelop the entire globe as its proper domain.5 The history of
imperialist, interimperialist, and anti-imperialist wars is over. The end of that history has
ushered in the reign of peace. Or really, we have entered the era of minor and internal
conflicts. Every imperial war is a civil war, a police action - from Los Angeles and Granada to
Mogadishu and Sarajevo. In fact, the separation of tasks between the external and internal
arms of power (between the army and the police, the CIA and the FBI ) is increasingly vague and
indeterminate
In our terms the end of history that Fukuyama refers to is the end of the crisis at the center of
modernity, the coherent and defin- ing conflict that was the foundation and raison d’etre for
modern sovereignty. History has ended precisely and only to the extent that it is conceived in
Hegelian terms- as the movement of a dialectic of contradictions, a play of absolute negations
and subsumption. The binaries that defined modern conflict have become blurred. The Other
that might delimit a sovereign Self has become fractured and indistinct, and there is no longer
an outside that can bound the place of sovereignty. At one point in the Cold War, in an
exaggerated version of the crisis of modernity, every enemy imaginable (from women's garden
clubs and Hollywood films to national liberation movements) could be identified as communist,
that is, part of the unified enemy. The outside is what gave the crisis of the modern and
imperialist world its coherence. Today it is increasingly difficult for the ideologues of the United
States to name the enemy, or rather there seem to be minor and elusive enemies everywhere.6
The end of the crisis of modernity has given rise to a proliferation of minor and indefinite
crises in the imperial society of control, or as we prefer, to an omni-crisis
It is useful to remember here that the capitalist market is one machine that has always run counter to any division
between inside and outside. The capitalist market is thwarted by exclusions and it thrives by including always
increasing numbers within its sphere. Profit can only be generated through contact, engagement, interchange, and
commerce. The realization of the world market would constitute the point of arrival of this tendency. In its ideal form
there is no outside to the world market: the entire globe is its domain.7 We might use the form of the world market
as a model for understanding the form of imperial sovereignty in its entirety. Perhaps, just as Foucault recognized the
panopticon as the diagram of modern power and disciplinary society, the world market might serve adequately (even
though it is not an architecture; it is really an anti-architecture) as the diagram of imperial power and the society of
control

The striated space of modernity constructs places that are con- tinually engaged in and founded
on a dialectical play with their outsides. The space of imperial sovereignty, in contrast, is
smooth. It might appear that it is free of the binary divisions of modern boundaries, or striation,
but really it is criss-crossed by so many fault lines that it only appears as a continuous, uniform
space. In this sense, the clearly defined crisis of modernity gives way to an omni- crisis in the
imperial framework. In this smooth space of empire, there is no place of power- it is both
everywhere and nowhere. The empire is an u-topos , or rather a non-place.

[…]

The progressive lack of distinction between inside and outside in the passage from disciplinary
society to the society of control, has important implications for the form of the social
production of subjectivity. One of the central and most common theses of the institutional
analyses of modern social theory is that subjectivity is not pre-given and original but at least to
some degree formed in the field of social forces. The subjectivities that interact on the social
plane are themselves substantially created by society. In this sense, these institutional analyses
have progressively emptied out any notion of a presocial subjectivity; rather the production of
subjectivity is rooted firmly in the functioning of the major social institutions, such as the
prison, the family, the factory, and the school. Two aspects of this production process should be
high-lighted. First, subjectivity is not regarded as something fixed or given. It is a constant
process of generation. When the boss hails you on the shopfloor, or the gradeschool principle
hails you in the school corridor a subjectivity is formed. The material practices set out for the
subject in the context of the institution (be they kneeling down to pray or changing hundreds of
diapers) are the production process of its own subjectivity. In a reflexive way, then, through its
own actions the subject is acted on, generated. Second, the institutions provide above all a
discrete place (the home, the chapel, the classroom, the shopfloor) where the production of
subjectivity is enacted. The various institutions of modern society should be viewed as an
archipelago of factories of subjectivity. In the course of a life, an individual passes linearly into
and out of these various institutions (from the school to the barracks to the factory) and is
formed by them. Each institution has its own rules and logics of subjectivation: "School tells us:
'You're not at home anymore'; the army tells us: 'You're not in school anymore.' "12 On the
other hand, within the walls of each institution the individual is at least partially shielded from
the forces of the other institutions- in the convent one is normally safe from the apparatus of
the family, at home one is normally out of reach of factory discipline. The relation between
inside and outside is central to the functioning of the modern institutions. In effect, the clearly
delimited place of the institutions is reflected in the regular and fixed form of the subjectivities
produced

In the passage to the society of control, the first aspect of the modern disciplinary condition is
certainly still the case, that is, subjectivities are still produced in the social factory. In fact, the
social institutions produce subjectivity in an ever more intense way . We might say that
postmodernism is what you have when the modern theory of social constructivism is taken to its
extreme and all subjectivity is recognized as artificial. The passage, then, is not one of opposition
but rather of intensification. As we said earlier, the contemporary crisis of the institutions means
that the enclosures that used to define the limited space of the institutions have broken down
so that the logic that once functioned primarily within the institutional walls now spreads across
the entire social terrain. We should note, however, that this omni-crisis of the institutions looks
very different in different cases. In the United States, for example, there are continually
decreasing proportions of the population involved in the nuclear family while steadily increasing
proportions are confined to prisons. Both institutions, though, the nuclear family and the prison,
can be said to be equally everywhere in crisis, in the sense that the place of their effectivity is
increasingly undefined. The walls of the institutions are breaking down so that inside and
outside become indistinguishable. One should not think that the crisis of the nuclear family has
brought a decline in the forces of patriarchy- on the contrary, discourses and practices of
"family values" seem to be everywhere across the social field. The old feminist slogan "the
personal is political" has been reversed in such a way that the boundaries between public and
private have been fractured, unleashing circuits of control throughout the "intimate public
sphere."13 The crisis of the prison too means that carceral logics and techniques have
increasingly spread to other domains of society . The production of subjectivity in the imperial
society of control tends to be not limited to any specific places. One is always still in the family,
always still in school, always still in prison, and so forth. In the general breakdown, then, the
functioning of the institutions is both more intensive and more extensive. The institutions work
even though they break down - and perhaps they work all the better the more they break
down. Their logics pass in waves of intensity across undulating social surfaces. The indefinacy of
the place of the production corresponds to the indeterminacy of the form of the subjectivities
produced. The imperial social institutions of control might be seen then in a fluid process of the
generation and corruption of subjectivity
Control is thus an intensification and generalization of discipline, when the boundaries of the
institutions have been breached, corrupted, so that there is no longer a distinction between
inside and outside. The Ideological State Apparatusses should also be recognized as operating in
the society of control, perhaps with more intensity and flexibility that Althusser ever imagined

This passage is not isolated to the most economically advanced and powerful countries, but
tends to be generalized to different degrees across the world. The apologia of colonial
administration always involved its establishment of social and political institutions in the
colonies. Today's noncolonial forms of domination equally involve the export of institutions. The
project of political modern- ization in underdeveloped or subordinated countries is concerned
centrally with the establishment of a stable set of institutions that constitute the backbone of a
new civil society. The disciplinary regimes necessary to establish the global Fordist system of
production, for example, required that a whole array of social and political institutions be in
place. We can even point to examples of this exportation in direct and individual terms (which
are only indicative of a more general and diffuse process) in which primary institutions in Europe
and the United States adopt and foster fledgling institutions: official unions such as the AFL form
and encourage foreign offspring, First World economists help create financial institutions and
teach fiscal responsibility, and even par- liaments and the U.S. Congress teach forms and
procedures of rule. Well, whereas in the process of modernization the most powerful countries
export institutional forms to the subordinated ones, in the present process of
postmodernization what is exported is the general crisis of the institutions. The Empire's
institutional structure is like a software program that carries a virus along with it, so that it is
continually modulating and corrupting the institutional forms around it. We have to forget any
notion of a linear sequence of forms that each society must pass through- from so-called "prim-
itiveness" to "civilization"- as if Latin American or African societies today could take the form
that European society had 100 years ago. Each contemporary social formation is linked together
as part of the imperial design. Those who are clamoring today for a new constitution of civil
society as the vehicle for the transition from either socialist States or dictatorial regimes are
merely nostalgic for a previous stage of capitalist society and stuck in a dream of political
modernization that was not really so rosy even when it had a certain effectivity . Imperial
postmodernization, in any case, makes all that irrevocably a thing of the past. The society of
control is tendentially everywhere the order of the day.

Internalization of the rule of law is self-imposed terrorism and despotism.

Faced with the realization that we are the police and the criminal, we evacuate
ourselves and society in general of all value in favor of endless structural
negativity. Whatever you’ve done, rest assured, you deserve worse.
Colebrook 9
[Claire, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and cultural
theorist, “Legal Theory after Deleuze” ch. 2 in Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures, 2009 Palgrave
Macmillan, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230244771] green = short
It is true, they acknowledge, that we are currently suffering from an Oedipal structure, which is
tied directly to capitalism and a certain notion of the law. Here they draw directly on the
structural psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, who insisted that one could only be a subject
through subjection to law, and that this subjection was Oedipal in its imaginary dimension.
Deleuze and Guattari oppose this thesis by insisting on the reality of desire. Social machines or
the network of law and relations are not primary, for social machines and law work upon and
require flows of desire. Desire is not some imagined effect of the law. It is not the case that one
requires an original prohibition to create a desire that must have been. It is the case, they
concede, that Oedipal desire is an effect of the law, for it is the prohibition on incest that leads
us to assume that incest is what we must have desired. This prohibition distorts a real and
revolutionary desire, a desire that is beyond the law insofar as it is not yet a desire for
recognition or social production. It is an intensive desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 114).

As an example we might return to the Mabo case. One way to read the legal claim of Aboriginal
peoples for native title is through recognition. A claim for land would be a claim for inclusion,
given that selfhood today is largely conferred through capacities for ownership. On such a
reading the desire of any claim is derived from the social machine of legitimation. Another,
intensive, reading of such claims is that there is a directly revolutionary desire that takes the
form of an attachment to the spirit of a space that is not yet subjected to the social machine of c
apital. This desire for land might enable the formation of another social machine that would also
be a coding of desire. However, as it functions in the Mabo v Queensland judgements, we could
see the desire for land as an opening up of the ‘war machine’, where the terms of a body politic
are not yet decided (Ivison, Patton and Sanders, 2000).

Deleuze and Guattari create a positive concept of desire that provides a radical overturning of
the structurally constitutive understanding of law. It is not the case that in the beginning is law,
system and relation, with the non-relation or ‘in itself’ being imagined after the event . Instead,
they posit desire as a potentiality for creating relation: for example desires for land, for body
parts, for sounds, for attachments. There can only be social machines, systems of law or
lawfulness in general because of this potentiality for relations. We can give this potentiality a
number of names, including the Body without Organs, desire, difference in itself, or the virtual.
In all cases what Deleuze and Guattari reject is the primacy of ‘a’ relational system or even
systematicity in general. There can only be systems, differences or laws if there are virtual
potentials to differ, to enter into relation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 111).

Without setting up an overly dichotomous relation between Deleuze and Derrida we might
suggest that the great contribution of Deleuze’s theory is that while he, like Derrida, insists that
any presented being is the effect of some process of genesis, he also insists that it is possible to
enquire into the virtual potentials from which such genetic potentials unfold. Derrida continually
insisted that we only know genesis through the structures it has enabled, even if those
structures never exhaust those potentials. This is made clear in Derrida’s very early essays on
culture and the emergence of social relations. In response to Levi-Strauss, who argues that
culture emerges with the prohibition of incest or the subjection of natural bodies to an order of
exchange, Derrida notes that this distinction between pre-cultural desires and social structures
must itself rely on a system of distinctions (Derrida, 1978). We are always already within
difference, system and relations. To posit some naively utopian moment prior to prohibition is
always to look back from instituted relations to some imaginary and illusory origin. The pre-
systemic origin is effected from the system itself.

When Deleuze and Guattari direct their arguments against Oedipus they do so in direct criticism
of this assumption of the necessary imposition of law. It is not the case, they insist, that desiring
bodies are constituted through law. It is not through prohibition or subjection that something
like a self who is ‘before the law’ can take existence (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 161).
Whereas bodies and their relations were once dominated or ‘overcoded’ through the imposition
of terror by despots, it is now the ‘signifier’ that reigns despotically, internalising terror in the
form of the Oedipus complex. To explain this they make a comparison between a ‘surplus value
of code’, enjoyed by the despots, and the general process of ‘decoding’ in capitalism. A social
body produces material for consumption through its interactions and technical processes. A
certain excess can be enjoyed by the despot (in the form of sumptuous displays, wasteful
expenditure or even the enjoyment of bodies denied to others). It is in this excessive
consumption that the body of the despot turns the circulation of goods into a means for
establishing his precedence. In this manoeuvre one body is set above the social body to define
its point of order, the point from which it can be terrorised. Deleuze and Guattari describe the
despot as one who subjects social alliance (relations among tribes and bodies) to filiation. The
despot will claim to be descended directly from the gods. The despot’s body is therefore set
outside the territory of producing bodies, as a point of anti-production. It is this point of
immobility that subjects relations and flows of production to a seemingly transcendent or
abstract point of consumption. The goods consumed by the despot in displays of excess are
therefore productive of a surplus value of code, allowing the social machine to be explained by a
body that is not part of the machine of production.

Deleuze and Guattari make a series of points regarding what they refer to as this historical stage
of despotism. First, social machines (or the productive relations among bodies) are always
repressions of desiring machines. Deleuze and Guattari’s project in Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A
Thousand Plateaus (1987) is one of writing a history of varying relations between social
machines and desiring machines. Desiring machines are relations that are not yet organised
according to named bodies (such as mother–father–child, master–slave or worker–labourer). A
desiring machine is a flow of milk connecting lips and breast, a flow of blood connecting scarring
hand and enjoying eye, a flow of food from hand to mouth or flows of sound connecting
birdsong to attending ears. When such flows become stabilised, through regularised practices of
child-rearing, tattooing, hunting or collective eating, then a social machine forms organised
bodies from flows of desire. Their important point is that one should not see social machines as
collections of human subjects, for there can only be discernible human forms (mother–father,
male–female, or hunter–consumer) after desiring flows have been assembled into some
minimally stable body of relations. This allows them to see law and terror as a form of
deterritorialisation.

Social machines commence as territories, or relatively stable systems of relation that enable
production. As soon as one body appears as a point of law or order for a territory then one has
moved from the primitive to the despotic social machine, to a body of law that overcodes the
whole. The modern notion that we can only be subjects insofar as we are submitted to a system
of signification – and that outside the law there is only the chaos and the terror of the
undifferentiated – merely substitutes the abstract terror of the signifier for the concrete terror
of the despot (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 73). The idea that we are necessarily mediated by
transcendence is, Deleuze and Guattari insist, an ‘archaism’ that allows despotism to continue in
an abstract and internalised form. The notion, then, of justice as some absent, unattainable,
ever-deferred but always admonishing ideal is profoundly oedipal. We no longer regard
ourselves as terrorised by some actual body who threatens to punish us for inflicting disorder on
the social machine. Instead, we imagine that there is no self outside its submission to systems .
Beyond our submission there is only the nightmarish chaos of the undifferentiated . When we
subject our desire to deferral and lack we are really only obeying a structural law of civilised
humanity. They describe this ‘paralogism’ of the law as, ‘The extraction of a transcendent
complete object from the signifying chain, which served as a despotic signifier on which the
entire chain thereafter seemed to depend, assigning an element of lack to each position of
desire, fusing desire to a law, and engendering the illusion that this loosened up and freed the
elements of the chain’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 110). We should not, according to
Deleuze and Guattari, simply accept this miserable and Oedipal fiction of necessary subjection. It
matters little whether this is a literal abandonment of the mother in the face of paternal threat,
or the structural resignation to system and signification in the face of a fall into psychotic or
meaningless disorder. What occurs with the modern conception of law and desire is an
increasing internalisation of terror and despotism, and an increasingly miserable distance from
law. One is a subject only through subjection of desires to the law, while law can only be given ,
not as any actual or positive body, but as that which will always be above and beyond any
achievable end (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 215).

It is all too easy to see the practical consequences of what Deleuze and Guattari describe. We
can see the ways in which the subject of law in modernity suffers from this internalised,
abstract, deferred and negative terror of structural negation. Humanity has become nothing
other than a structure of subjection. In liberal democracies the self has no positive quality
other than its submission to regulation. The social order, ideally, has no positive quality other
than its prohibition of the intrusion of positive content from the network of social circulation.
Human rights mark an interesting point within the discourse of liberalism that would define the
self as properly autonomous, self-constituting and distinct from the imposition of any positive
norms. Originally defined through notions of non-interference, rights have become ways of
maintaining minimal forms of normative content. The right to free speech, for example, is
thoroughly in accord with an internalisation of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as
capitalism’s decoded axiomatic; one is no longer governed by a tyrannical body, but is self-
governing precisely through the absence of any specific norm or quality. The order of law as it
appears in the imperial formation, and as it will evolve later, indeed will have something in
common: the indifference to designation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 214). If there is no law
other than the law of self-regulation, then the only truth or right of humanity lies in its quality of
self-making. This allows us to protect, defend and define rights to free speech and conscience,
but also explains those odd intrusions such as the right to ‘bear arms’. In the absence of any
norm or law other than individuals’ capacities to enter into relation, one must also begin to
acknowledge the rights of those bodies to preclude undue intrusion, possibly justifying a right to
defence.
Self-policing is symptomatic of a paranoiac affective constellation that fears all
difference and pursues homogeneity and predictability. The paranoiac filters
experience to confirm fear – but the rising tide of suspicion won’t stop short of
anything than a totalizing war on difference that ensures racial, gendered, and
heterosexist violence.

Watson 99 (Sean, Lecturer at the University of the West of England, “Policing the Affective Society: Beyond
Governmentality in the Theory of Social Control,” S OCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199906) 8:2 Copyright ©
1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 8(2), 227–251; 008043) green = short

Slavoj Žižek gets to the heart of what is at stake in the sociology of affect when he says that ‘beyond the
field of meaning but at the same time internal to it – an ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-
ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy’ (Žižek, 1989: 124). For the purposes of this essay ‘enjoyment’
in this strictly technical sense denotes the affective ‘loading’ of our attachment to certain beliefs,
institutions, forms of life, rituals, traditions, music, art, food, dress, manners and so on. We find ourselves
(some- times despite our ‘better judgement’, whatever that is) emotionally attached to certain forms of life,
and repelled, disgusted, frightened or angered by others. Indeed we may find ourselves so deeply
attached to nation, race, political prin- ciple or utopian ideal that we are willing to kill, be
killed, or bring about destruction – apparently for their own sake. Conversely we sometimes
find ourselves so deeply repelled or angered by the ‘other’ that we again find our- selves
hating and destroying. Identification with, or hatred of, communities, beliefs or political
abstrac- tions are not fully accounted for simply by describing the ideological and institutional
structures within which the subject is interpellated . Something more is required. Some
account of the investment of affective force within the ideological, cultural and institutional
field is necessary. This is bound to be a complex matter. It cannot simply be that social forms reflect pre-
given structures of feeling since it is clear that feelings can be, and often are, induced or reinforced by the
articulation of particular discourses, rituals and cultural forms. It is often the case that we are brought near
to tears, filled with joy, or enraged by rhetorical strategies of politicians, journalists, artists or those nearer
to us. It is equally clearly not the case, however, that social and cul- tural forms determine affective forms
in any straightforward way. It often seems that we search for an emotional outlet because we have
a prior need for such an outlet. We seem to desire certain kinds of cultural phenomena (be it art,
political speeches or tabloid newspapers) because they do things to us, affectively – things which we,
somehow, ‘enjoy’. A particular strength of Žižek’s work, that sets him ahead of the rest of the field of post-
Lacanian theorists, is the way in which he decentres the analy- sis of identification away from the
individual and into the field of collective social life. For Žižek ‘enjoyment’ is not something which we
experience indi- vidually, it is always something we share. Indeed it depends for its existence on this
sharedness. When communities share affective attachment to ideo- logical, cultural and institutional
phenomena Žižek writes about them sharing a ‘structure of enjoyment’ (Žižek, 1990). Very broadly
speaking, we can think of this as a heterogeneous collection of shared social means for channelling and
focusing affective bodily forces. In this article I will be drawing on some of my own research (conducted in
the late 1980s) into the ‘structures of enjoyment’ which make up police occupational culture. 1 I will be
arguing that clear patterns, or ‘affective reper- toires’, can be identified, and I will suggest that these
patterns could usefully be characterised as ‘paranoia’. I am not using the term here to refer to a kind of
psychopathology – I am using it to refer to a particular cultural patterning of affect in a social
context. The social characteristics I am referring to under the term ‘paranoid’ are the following:

3. A cultural milieu in which order, continuity, homogeneity and stasis are experienced
as particularly pleasing and desirable. This is linked with a fundamental suspicion of
difference, fluidity and change.
 4. A cultural milieu which displays a tendency to split the world into good and bad parts
with very rigid boundaries. Positive feelings of love and idealisation are directed
towards the perceived good parts of the world whilst fear, hatred and loathing are
directed towards the bad parts. So there is, for example, a tendency to see people as either
good, decent and law abiding, or wicked and corrupt, with no grey area between. One might also
refer to this as a suspicion of ambivalence and ambiguity wherever it occurs.

5. A cultural milieu which displays a tendency to project negative qualities onto those
groups and individuals imagined to be ‘bad’ . So a paranoid position might involve
imagining and fearing that the ‘other’ has hostile intentions when in fact it is the
paranoid individual or group who has hostile intentions towards the ‘other’.
6. A milieu which strongly displays a collective desire to order, control or , sometimes,
attack outgroups into which bad qualities have been projected .

These characteristics are based on the concept of cultural paranoia as outlined by Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their analysis of anti-Semitism, by Slavoj Žižek in his analysis of ethnic
conflict, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their analysis of the libidinal dynamics of
modern capitalism. The last contrast this paranoid cultural pole with an opposite ‘schizophrenic’ pole. A
schizophrenic cultural milieu would tend to celebrate and cultivate cultural hybridity, fluidity,
difference, creativity and ambivalence – every- thing which is suspect in a paranoid
environment. Raves and music festivals represent good examples of milieu which tend
towards this schizophrenic end of the spectrum. Note that I am not referring to paranoid and schizo-
phrenic people but to paranoid and schizophrenic social milieus. Individual people move in and out of more
or less paranoid and schizophrenic milieus. We might talk about affective subject positions which
people can take up within particular milieus, positions which channel their feelings in
particular ways. Some of these subject positions, because of their place within paranoid
milieus, will have the effect of producing paranoid feelings and experiences of the world in the
individual. One such milieu, I am suggesting, is that inhabited by police officers.

THE POLICE SUBJECT IN TRADITIONAL POLICE STUDIES Very little empirical sociological research has
concerned itself explicitly with the question of affect .2 This is not to say that affect does not appear
in socio- logical research, however. It is simply that its presence tends not to be acknowledged as
such. An examination of police occupational culture in traditional police studies produces a
case in point. It is clear that what these studies actu- ally describe are constellations of affect ,
whilst calling them something more neutral like ‘attitudes’, ‘beliefs’ or even ‘discourses’ . We
might usefully distin- guish between the ‘symbolic content’ of such discourses (the specific objects of love,
hatred, suspicion) and the ‘affective forms’. To take just one example the actual object of suspicion may
vary from Irish immigrants in one context, to Polish immigrants in another, to Afro-Caribbean in another,
but the general tendency to invest feelings of suspicion (among other feelings) in socially and economically
marginalised ethnic minority communities remains fairly con- stant. So the ‘symbolic content’ may
vary to some extent, while the ‘affective forms’ stay relatively constant. I am particularly
interested in these ‘affective forms’ and why they seem to be so regular. It is important at the outset to fend
off the potential charge that I am myself objectifying the police and their supposed affective forms in a
paranoid manner. Do I view the police as a ‘bad them’ who have quite alien and objectionable ways of
feeling about the world, compared to a ‘good us’? Malcolm Young makes the following comment about the
very popular dramatisations of police work which populate TV and cinema screens: In nightly TV rituals of
social order and chaos, a stream of hero policeman stand at the symbolic crossroads between peace and mayhem, and
the detective and chief officer now operate at the point where once the church and its priests declaimed on apocalyptic
threat, and categories of good and evil. (Young, 1991: 14) This fascination that the police hold for many
exists not because they are absolutely alien but precisely because they display affective forms with
which we identify at an unconscious level – their story is an allegory of our own affective
predicament in many ways. There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’ in this account. We could all be (and often
are) police-like in our affective prefer- ences – and placed in the same position, most of us
would feel and act just as other police men and women do. That is not of course to say that the
police themselves do not construct the world in terms of a ‘them’ and ‘us’; they clearly do. We will see that
many groups are defined as being outside the parameters of what can really count as ‘us’, by
the police. This would include women, ethnic minorities, people with ‘dubious’ political
opinions and so on. And many groups are simply defined outside of the boundary of what can
be understood even as ‘respectable and law-abiding’. Indeed this propensity for rigidly
splitting the world is highly characteristic of the police occupational milieu. They do split the
world, they do construct an ‘other’ onto which their fears and loathings are projected to a
great extent but this process is not unique to police officers, it is just particularly pronounced
in their case. And my argument is that it is pronounced in their case not because they are
somehow inherently different from the rest of us but because of the specific nature of policing
as a form of social organisation.3 To what extent then do previous findings support the claims I am
making regarding the existence of distinct affective patterns? It is arguable that the overwhelming
majority of the evidence points towards an affective antagonism towards plurality, difference,
complexity, ambiguity, change, hybridity, which are felt as a threat to the social world – what
we might broadly refer to as forces of ‘flux’. This goes hand in hand with a positive affective
‘enjoy- ment’ of homogeneity, order, predictability, hierarchy, deference to authority, broadly
speaking the forces of ‘stasis’. In other words, it describes the kind of paranoid cultural milieu
which I set out above. Police studies research evidence over the past 35 years shows a
remarkable degree of consistency through time, and across national boundaries, in these
respects. Here are just a few examples.

We can find this suspicion of difference

RACE, SYMBOLIC ASSAILANTS AND POLICE RELEVANT CATEGORIES
in, for example, the overwhelming accumulation of evidence of racial prejudice. The picture has
built up from Westley’s early evidence of racist language and beliefs among police officers in the United
States, to the findings of Reiner, Fielding and Fielding, Graef, Cain and a whole host of others in this
country (Cain, 1973; Fielding and Fielding, 1991; Graef, 1989; Reiner, 1978, 1992; Westley, 1970). In the
1980s, Smith and Gray famously produced highly disturbing evi- dence of prejudiced attitudes amongst the
Metropolitan Police (Smith and Gray, 1985). They claimed, however, that these prejudices must be distin-
guished from the actual relationships police officers had with black people in the context of policing their
communities. Prejudice does not necessarily lead to discrimination, they suggested. Simon Holdaway,
however, has rightly argued that such a separation is not really defensible. Instead these attitudes must
be understood in the context of a process of ‘racialisation’ of the relationship between the
police and certain minority communities (Hold- away, 1996: 72–105). The police/black-
community relationship, instead of simply being a police/community relationship like any
other, has historically been con- structed around an ideology which sees it as involving a ‘race
problem’ or a ‘black problem’ or a ‘black youth problem’. This has been constructed over a
number of decades. Paul Gilroy, for example, has shown the way in which, since the 1960s, an ideology
has been developed, among politicians, the courts, the police and the media, which suggests
that black people (particu- larly young black people) have more of a propensity to commit
crime than the rest of the population; particularly certain types of street crime. This has been
elaborated into a broader official ideology in which black people are perceived to be
particularly susceptible to certain kinds of family pathology, an unwillingness to work, and a
tendency to act as a mob (Gilroy, 1987: 72–113). John Solomos has argued that these themes were
further intensified when the public confrontations and hostilities of the 1970s turned into the full-scale riots
of the 1980s (Solomos, 1991: 88–118, 1989: 99–121). Both Gilroy and Solomos suggest that black youth
came to stand as a symbol of more widespread fears about the breakdown of social cohesion
and an increasingly violent society. Black youth were the collective image of violence on the
streets, whether as the shadowy figure of the mugger or as the brick throwing, looting, rioter. The
complete breakdown of police/black-community relations was entirely blamed on the black community: on
their supposed problems with authority; their cultural difficulties with the ‘British way of life’; and their
inability to identify with the police. This was perhaps most clearly reflected in the policy of
appointing so-called ‘community liaison officers’ in an attempt to deal with the problem. Such
an approach reflected an inability to see that the problem may involve police racism, and
therefore an inability on the part of the police to identify with the black community, rather
than the other way around . It also absolved all police officers (other than community liaison
officers) from having to reflect on the relationship problem (Institute of Race Relations, 1978: 65–
8). By the time I found myself interviewing police in the late 1980s all of this was in place – the
relationship between the officers I spoke to and the ethnic minority communities they policed was
thoroughly racialised. They under- stood their task as dealing with a special black crime problem, they
experi- enced the relationship on the streets with black youngsters as a battleground, they saw the
community as hostile, and at all times as a potential mob . Con- tainment and the control of territory
was seen as the priority for a community that was so inherently different and problematic. In
simply cataloguing the history of an ideological construction, however, we are in danger of making the
mistake that Žižek warns against. We need to ask what is the nature of the police officer’s emotional
attachment to these ideas? In other words we can see very well the discursive and institutional elements of
such a ‘racialised’ relationship, but what does such ‘racialisation’ mean in affective terms? As Solomos and
Gilroy suggest, black youth came to symbolise certain fears collectively held, and played upon
by politicians, the media and others. One might go as far as to say that t hese collective fears
(about a changing, strange, fragmenting and increasingly violent society) were (and still are)
projected onto black youth. Police officers seem to be particularly susceptible to such fears.
My experience is that police officers do not just make up ideas about impending disorder and
crisis for fun or to get a wage rise, they really feel those fears and anxieties intensely . So is
there any reason why police officers should experience such fears of change and social fluidity even more
intensely than the rest of us? It is noteworthy that all the studies so far mentioned suggest that this
‘racialised’ ideology invariably focuses on certain themes – willingness to work, family pathology,
behaviour on the streets, sexuality, recreational activities (party-going, drugs use, music etc.), and, of
course, crime. These all link to ways in which the supposedly ‘problem’ community is perceived to differ
from the ‘respectable’ com- munity. They are, ultimately, ways in which the population becomes fluid and
threatens to evade the control of the police. Such concerns always arise among police officers,
regardless of who the ‘problem’ ethnic minority com- munity are. There is a pattern here. This
hostility to racial minorities can be seen within a broader picture of suspicion and hostility
towards difference. This is an integral part of the police officer’s cognitive mapping of his/her
locality. The strange, unexpected, differ- ent, stands out against a background of everyday
normality. Jerome Skolnick writes of the ‘symbolic assailant’, the individual who gives clues in his
unusual dress, attitude, behaviour or mannerisms to his (for the police) deviant and dangerous identity
(Skolnick, 1966: Ch. 3). Such difference, and change in the social environment arouses feelings
of threat. In Egon Bittner’s and Allan Silver’s work we see the further development of the notion that the
police are in fact committed to an all-embracing social pacification function – to order and stasis on a grand
scale. They are there to deal, quite simply, with ‘something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-
which-someone- had-better-do-something-now’ (Bittner, 1974, 1975). When everything is ‘as it should
be’ – stable, predictable, orderly, familiar – the police officer feels at ease; he is happy and
comfortable. The appearance of the ‘symbolic assailant’ against this background of the
familiar and normal arouses feelings of sus- picion, threat, anxiety and so on. The police
officer’s ‘cognitive maps’ are in fact affective maps. In Robert Reiner’s summary of ‘police relevant
categories’ we can see further evidence of how police officers’ feelings traverse the social body in
complex ways. Some criminals are associated with positive feelings. These are the ‘good class villains’
who themselves identify with the same ‘cult of mascu- linity’ (Smith and Gray use this latter phrase) as the
police (Reiner, 1992: 118–21; Smith and Gray, 1985). They play the same cultural ‘game’ as the police;
they provide the source of what the police themselves regard as ‘real police work’, they are therefore the
key source of self-esteem and confir- mation of identity for the police. They may break the law but that
does not make them a threat – quite the contrary. Dick Hobbs’ work has demonstrated the deeply symbiotic
relationship between CID officers and such ‘entrepre- neurial’ criminals while Smith and Gray point to
similar feelings and percep- tions amongst uniformed officers (Hobbs, 1989: 213; Smith and Gray, 1985:
213). As Foucault rightly points out, such ‘delinquency’ is a part of the system itself, it is a managed
deviance which remains on the ‘inside’ (Foucault, 1987: 257–92). In contrast to ‘good class villains’, there
is so-called ‘police property’ (Reiner, 1992: 118–21; Smith and Gray, 1985: 347–8). These are Skolnick’s
‘symbolic assailants’ – the marginalised social groups who create a real sense of threat,
impending chaos, feelings of loathing and anger among police officers. They are the real threat
to order in that they are not disciplined, they behave in unpredictable ways , their language
cannot be understood, they will not be deferential to the authority of the police officer and
they will not live and work in the ‘customary’ way. Policemen feel bad about these people and
want to control them – despite the fact that they do not consider dealing with them to be
proper police work (the most common term for such work, among police officers, is ‘rubbish’). The
‘hypocritical’ professional middle classes, in some circumstances, actu- ally try to undermine the police
officer’s control over ‘police property’. ‘Chal- lengers’ and ‘do-gooders’ in the form of the doctor, the
social worker, the lawyer, or the civil rights organisation, challenge (already inadequate) police powers and
invade the sacred space of the police station. Reiner concludes that: Running through the perception of the
social structure is a distinction between the powerless groups at the bottom of the social hierarchy who provide the
‘rubbish’ and the ‘police property’, and the respectable strata, with distinct seg- ments which in different ways threaten
police interests. (Reiner, 1992: 121) This last phrase gets to the heart of the matter. While initially splitting
the world into good and bad parts – the ‘respectable’ versus the rest – the good begins to
vanish as one examines police categories. Ultimately one suspects that only the police
themselves are really ‘good’, but then police officers are actually suspicious of other police
officers.4 Eventually we begin to see that in fact perceived threat emanates from almost
everywhere in the police officer’s experience of the world. The ‘other’ onto which bad
qualities are projected expands, and the little island of safety and order diminishes.

The breakdown of institutions like the prison and the criminal justice system
tempt us to replicate the subject-forms of police and criminals in spaces like
debate – but all ships have leaks, all pipes eventually burst. Our argument was
scheduled for execution by the debate-police, but we’ve received a pardon
from the Authorities-at-Large. We remain joyfully innocent. Resist the logic of
control. Come with us if you want to live.
Deleuze and Guattari ’80. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1874:
THREE NOVELLAS, OR “WHAT HAPPENED?” p. 204 green = short

As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean nothing. It is an affair of
cartography. They compose us, as they compose our map. They transform themselves and
may even cross over into one another. Rhizome. It is certain that they have nothing to do
with language; it is, on the contrary, language that must follow them, it is writing that must
take sustenance from them, between its own lines. It is certain that they have nothing to do
with a signifier, the determination of a subject by the signifier; instead, the signifier arises at
the most rigidified level of one of the lines, and the subject is spawned at the lowest level . It
is certain that they have nothing to do with a structure , which is never occupied by any-
thing more than points and positions, by arborescences, and which always forms a closed
system, precisely in order to prevent escape . Deligny invokes a common Body upon which
these lines are inscribed as so many segments, thresholds, or quanta, territorialities,
deterritorializations, or reterritorializations. The lines are inscribed on a Body without
Organs, upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract line with
neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: the real of the BwO. This body is the only
practical object of schizoanalysis: What is your body without organs? What are your lines?
What map are you in the process of making or rearranging? What abstract line will you
draw, and at what price, for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? What is your
BwO, merged with that line? Are you cracking up? Are you going to crack up? Are you
deterritorializing? Which lines are you severing, and which are you extending or resuming?
Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or
structures. It pertains only to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals.
Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is
a question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being. Practice does not
come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the
drawing of the lines; it confronts the same dangers and the same variations as the
emplacement does. Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new. Or rather, there is no problem
of application: the lines it brings out could equally be the lines of a life, a work of literature
or art, or a society, depending on which system of coordinates is chosen.
Line of molar or rigid segmentarity, line of molecular or supple seg- mentation, line of flight
—many problems arise. The first concerns the particular character of each line. It might be
thought that rigid segments are socially determined, predetermined, overcoded by the
State; there may be a tendency to construe supple segmentarity as an interior activity,
something imaginary or phantasmic. As for the line of flight, would it not be entirely
personal, the way in which an individual escapes on his or her own account, escapes
"responsibilities," escapes the world, takes refuge in the desert, or else in art... ? False
impression. Supple segmentarity has nothing to do with the imaginary, and micropolitics is
no less extensive or real than macropolitics. Politics on the grand scale can never administer
its molar segments without also dealing with the micro- injections or infiltrations that work
in its favor or present an obstacle to it ; indeed, the larger the molar aggregates, the greater
the molecularization of the agencies they put into play. Lines of flight, for their part, never
consist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when you drill a
hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all directions, even if it
makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight. There is nothing
imaginary, nothing symbolic, about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line
of flight, among animals or humans.13 Even History is forced to take that route rather than
proceeding by "signifying breaks." What is escaping in a soci- ety at a given moment? It is on
lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the
State. "I may be running, but I'm looking for a gun as I go" (George Jackson). It was along
lines of flight that the nomads swept away everything in their path and found new weapons,
leaving the Pharaoh thunderstruck. It is possible for a single group, or a single individual
even, to exhibit all the lines we have been discussing simultaneously . But it is most
frequently the case that a single group or individual functions as a line of flight; that group
or individual creates the line rather than following it, is itself the living weapon it forges
rather than stealing one. Lines of flight are realities; they are very dangerous for societies,
although they can get by without them, and sometimes manage to keep them to a minimum.

Our research method might be odd, but that’s the point. We must resist control
if politics is to become possible again.
Svirsky 10. Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK),
“Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics,” Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 2

As Deleuze and Guattari have explained, this characteristic ‘royal’ science of politics ‘continually
appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science’–those forms of political investigation
looking ‘to understand both the repression it encounters and the interaction ‘ “containing” it’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367–8). One major task of new activist war machines is, then, to
escape entrapment within the black hole of the majoritarian discourse on civil society,
captured and defined by pervasive notions of ‘representative participation’. Although the
‘NGOisation’ of the public sphere since the 1980s (see Yacobi 2007), together with other forms
of political proliferation, have broadened the visible political field, the potential of non-
institutional forms of action has been weakened ideologically by a whole state apparatus
comprised of research centres and budgets, instrumental teaching, and a parliamentary
politics that has incorporated the discourse of civil society – all of which have effected a
sectorisation of society and political life. The epistemological aspirations of the three ‘ideal
circles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367) of the state, economy and civil society are commonly
used to categorise political eruptions as forms of participation in the official, representative
state politics. It is in this light that we must interpret the failure of academia to come to terms
with the division of labour lately being imposed by the transversal relations between
intellectual investigation and political situatedness embodied in militant research. As Deleuze
and Guattari suggest, ‘we know of the problems States have always had with journey-men’s
associations or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies . . . ’ (368).

It is clear that a Jamesonian ‘strategy of containment’ is at work in the narrative tradition of

royal political science. It is in the notion of ‘ representative participation’ that a function of
formal unity or a strategy of containment has been founded, which, as Jameson puts it, ‘ allows
what can be thought to seem internally coherent in its own terms, while repressing the
unthinkable . . . which lies beyond its boundaries’ (Jameson 1981: 38). By tying official politics
together with every form of political participation it can ensnare, what royal political science
does is ‘radically impoverish . . . the data of one narrative line’ – namely, that of the new
activisms–‘by their rewriting according to the paradigm of another narrative...’–namely, that of
representative participatory politics (Jameson 1981: 22). The subversive power of political
potentia is thus contained by this reductive strategy; civil society becomes the main territory of
this imprisonment, assisted by a false equation of official participation with challenging
politics.
Extensions
 Affect First
Education + Politics

We infuse pedagogy with affective to resists the move to police our encounters
with others. This is crucial for the possibility of education and politics-to-come.
Rotas and Springgay 13 (Nikki, PhD student at OISE, University of Toronto, part of the Department of Curriculum,
Teaching and Learning, specializing in Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development. AND Stephanie, Associate Professor in the
Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. ““You Go
to My Head”: Art, Pedagogy and a “Politics-to-Come” 2013 Pedagogies: An International Journal Pages 287-288
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/32724029/Pedagogies.pdf?
AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1498859137&Signature=hJNE56FmOBRNETV6%2B1KKjHkGiXY
%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRotas_N._and_Springgay_S._2013_._You_Go.pdf // LP)

Considering Guattari’s (1995) proposition of “how to make a class operate like a work of
art?” we want to speculate on the potential to imagine a classroom – or pedagogy –
becoming infused with movement and affect. If classrooms were to become a diagrammatic
space, an elastic touching and sensing fold, then could we envision a more “fleshy”
understanding of pedagogy? Just as the figurative and the figural arise out of the same stuff
and are scrambled and re-assembled by the diagram continuously, there is a risk that these
new emergences can become quickly systematized and enter into reproductive cycles. In
the cycle of capture and containment where rules are codified and applied, bodies become
regulated and standardized. This is something we see continuously in education in which, as
Massumi (2002a) writes, “becoming becomes history” (p. 77). Using a football metaphor,
Massumi describes the ways that variation and the diagrammatic add to a players’ mastery
of technique. If we play within the strict rules of the game, there is no change. If we break
the rules completely, we receive a red card and our intervention is no longer of any value.
So the diagrammatic – composed of the figurative and the figural – is a manner of creatively
working within the gaps, in order to push their limits. Thus, if change is to occur in
education, then there might be value in teasing out the idea of making a class operate like a
work of art, where a work of art is understood through movement and the diagram – as a
politics-to-come. From a deleuzian perspective, art means rethinking what we know is
possible and (re)opening our bodies to processes that make us encounter many
possibilities. Grosz argues that art is “that which impacts on the body most directly, that
which intensifies and affects most viscerally” (2008, p. 24). And so, there is of course this
materiality to artmaking, the qualified intensity that we make note of. However, through the
work of Borsato, we highlight the unqualified intensities of the encounter, a politics-to-
come. Massey (2005) argues that this kind of politics pops up in-between spaces. She says,
‘politics’ in part precisely lies in not being able to reach for that kind of rule; a world which
demands the ethics and the responsibility of facing up to the event; where the situation is
unprecedented and the future is open. (p. 141) If there is any possibility for imagining a
class like a work of art, then this struggle, of re-thinking politics as movement, as yet-to-
come seems crucial. The class operating as art is an incredibly important diagrammatic site,
where bodies touch and the potential for new growth and creation emerges . This is an
education far too important to surrender to the stultifying forces of a pedagogy that “is.”
Yet, thinking about this question in an experimental and exploratory way also takes us
beyond simply rethinking the dominance of vision and reason in the arts and education.
Rather than see the body and its theories of embodiment as providing relief from male-
centred, rational, hierarchical or normative accounts of knowing and being, a
deleuzeguattarian approach to movement and politics inhabits the insides of the flesh and
engenders other ways of living differently. Moreover, the question of how to imagine a class
as art is not an argument to favour non-traditional materials, collaborative art making or
relational aesthetics. In fact, in shifting ones sensibility of “a” class to that of art is definitely
not a call to all of a sudden move snowbanks with one’s students! Rather, the implications of
a call to movement, where we are forced to thought, is to “form strange new becomings,
new polyvocalities” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 191). In an era of standardization and
representation, the diagram becomes “a rhythm emerging from chaos, the manipulation of
change to suggest the emergence of another world” (O’Sullivan, 2009, p. 255), a politics that
resides between the known and the yet-to-come.
Policing

Without addressing the affective tendencies of paranoia, police will continue to

view emerging technological and social developments as a threatening
breakdown of all society. Affective analysis must come first.

Watson 99 (Sean, Lecturer at the University of the West of England, “Policing the Affective Society: Beyond
Governmentality in the Theory of Social Control,” S OCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199906) 8:2 Copyright ©
1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 8(2), 227–251; 008043)

THE AFFECTIVE SOCIETY

We need a social theory which reflects this affective spectrum within the organic
infrastructure of the human. We actually find this in the Deleuz- ian/Foucauldian paradigm.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalist societies themselves are divided. On the one hand they have
‘schizophrenic’ tendencies associated with the market – tendencies which tend to decode and
recode human bodies through signs, images and objects. These can be combined with every
other sign, image and object, articulated through the accelerating assem- blages of
communications technology and global capitalism, powered by elec- tricity and human desire
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1977; 1992). These schizophrenic effects of the post/late-modern marketplace have
of course been much commented upon by Jean Baudrillard and Frederick Jameson, among others, since
Deleuze and Guattari’s ground-breaking work. So why are we not culturally ‘deterritorialised’ – why
are we not all ‘schizo’s’?9 Because capitalism contains powerful paranoid forces of
‘reterritorialisation’. These include, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the Oedipalising effects
of the nuclear family which implants a minimal level of stability into our bodily coding, or
‘striation’, and the institutions of the state which mop up some of the worst effects of
deterritorialisation by engaging in massive disciplinary and normalising projects (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1977). We see, then, that as the schizophrenic effects of the market have become ever
more potent, so the governmental institutions of the state have expanded to immense
proportions. Lacan’s and Foucault’s work charts two different aspects of the social Imagin- ary in its
efforts to assert some order upon human desires. Lacan’s work is an account of the processes which attempt
to fix desire through Symbolic Oedi- palisation, and Foucault’s work is a catalogue of the paranoid
forces of the state and other institutions of reterritorialisation as they have progressed in
response to the schizophrenic effects of capitalism . Key among these disci- plinary institutions
is, of course, professional policing. CONCLUSION I have suggested that we could better understand
police culture if we analysed it from the point of view of the affective repertoires which struc-
ture it. I have then put forward the proposition that police occupational culture might, from the
point of view of affective repertoires, be charac- terised as culturally paranoid (and I have
clearly set out what I mean by cul- tural paranoia). I have shown that the mainstream police studies
literature strongly supports such an interpretation. I have then gone on to look at some findings
from my own research and asked how they might be theorised. I have proposed that policing is in fact a
function of what Michel Foucault has called ‘governmentality’, and I have then taken the novel step of
identifying governmentality with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Imaginary. This would imply then that the
police are the institutional embodiment of the Imagin- ary. I have then identified a performative
contradiction in which the police find themselves. They want to identify themselves with the rule of law,
but law is a creature of Lacan’s Symbolic order of language. Thus while they want to identify with the rule
of law, they always feel it to be inadequate, somehow lacking something – it can never live up to the
rigorous standards of order and stasis demanded by the Imaginary. I have suggested that such tensions
within their cultural identity push them into a hostile and defensive splitting of the world. Then there is the
order of the Real, the extreme flu- idity and difference of the material world which constantly threatens the
divisions and ordering which the Imaginary and Symbolic orders undertake in the construction of human
consciousness, identity and culture. I have sug- gested that the Deleuzian paradigm (including feminist
versions of this framework) may afford help in understanding affective processes at this more
basic material level, and in this case may also help to explain, at a his- torical level, why the
police have necessarily found themselves undertaking a social role which is fundamentally
paranoid in character. They may also give clues regarding what kinds of affective response we
can expect in the police community to further levels of deterritorialisation of human desires at
the social level. We can begin to see why the police must function as the institutional
embodiment of the Imaginary – they are at the heart of the paranoid pole of modernity , and when
we zoom back down to the perspective of the indi- vidual police officer we can see his/her
predicament. S/he cannot help but be suspicious of heterogeneity, s/he cannot help but be
repelled by the idiosyn- cratic, that is his/her affective role in the larger scheme of things. S/he
must personify that Imaginary desire for simplicity, order and stasis which is within us all. This perhaps
gives us some fresh insight into the recently resur- gent discussion of institutional racism
among the British police. From this perspective we can see clearly how an organisational mandate can be
directly linked not only to a certain range of institutional practices but to particular emotional orientations
to socially marginal groupings. These links are sys- temic – not just a question of a few emotional
‘bad apples’. Even more uncomfortably, it may even be that our own tolerance of differ- ence
and social heterogeneity is conditional upon us having the bearers of the social Imaginary
among us, in order to provide us with some sense of onto- logical security. It is only because
they are paranoid that we feel safe to celebrate difference – a sort of emotional division of
labour. One could perhaps speculate, then, that it is in times of the most extreme social
fragmentation, at times of crisis for the family and the governmental disciplines, that police
officers feel themselves most repelled by the society in which they work, and gravitate
towards ‘despising’ positions. In my own interviews with them they did express such sentiments
regarding perceived social fragmentation. They expressed similar concerns about the effects of the
mass media and other communication technologies. Why? Because, they said, they make
people desire things that are not appropriate for them, they combine things which do not
belong together, they constantly create new hybrids. Human desires are deterritorialised, our
images of ourselves, our communities and our history are thrown into turmoil. The
‘hyperreality’ of these new information spaces is unpredictable, uncontrollable, unregulat-
able. It is a massive flow of images and energies – nothing is fixed. In truth the post-modern
fascination with the hyperreal may turn out to be an even more subtle means of social control than the
disciplines of modernity. However, that is not how it looks from the point of view of the (very
modern) policing Imaginary. From their point of view it looks as if all hell has broken loose and
they are repelled by what they see. Down on the ground we know that ‘re-moralising’ is failing –
because there are no longer any easily locatable fixed communities to re-moralise – nothing to identify with
as an object of salvation. Does this mean that we will see an inevitable slide towards the
predominance of more aggressive, and cynical, affective orientations within police culture ? As
Žižek says, ‘ “Real” violence is a kind of acting out that emerges when the symbolic fiction that
guarantees the life of a community is in danger’ (Žižek, 1996). Such questions regarding the
affective currents dominating our cultural landscape are of the utmost importance, yet until
we have a comprehensive theory of the affective society, together with appropriate research
programmes, we have no hope of answering them.
Root Cause

Affective Relation to the Body Must Come First- Anxiety about the body
produces a paranoid fear that is then projected onto racialized, gendered, and
criminal subjects. We control the root cause.

Watson 99 (Sean, Lecturer at the University of the West of England, “Policing the Affective Society: Beyond
Governmentality in the Theory of Social Control,” S OCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199906) 8:2 Copyright ©
1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 8(2), 227–251; 008043)

This is a convenient point to return briefly to the general question of masculinity. Elizabeth Grosz
suggests that masculinity is the product of a process of alienation – the alienation through
which men have been identi- fied with mind, and women with body ; an alienation which
indeed is the basis upon which the whole Cartesian dualist illusion is constructed – the purity
of the rational mind separated out from the chaotic fluid complexities of the corporeal (Grosz,
1994: Ch. 8). Grosz discusses Julia Kristeva’s and Mary Douglas’ work on the way in which body fluids
can evoke feelings of desire, disgust and revulsion due to their designation as dirt. This
designation as dirt in turn is a consequence of the ambivalent status of body fluids with regard
to the body – part of it but not part of it, inside it and outside it, controlled by it but ultimately
uncontrollable. The body fluids are a source of moral concern in their own right – but they
point to a more general (but less mani- fest) concern with the complexity and
unmanageability of the body and its desires. Grosz asks: could the reduction of men’s body fluids to the
by-products of pleasure and the raw materials of reproduction, along with men’s refusal to acknowledge the effects of
flows that move through various parts of the body and from the inside out, have to do with men’s attempt to distance
themselves from the very kind of corporeality – uncontrollable, excessive, expansive, disruptive, irrational – that they
have attributed to women? (Grosz, 1994: 200) Through this alienation, then, ‘women are attributed the
very powers and capacities that men fear in themselves’ (Grosz, 1994: 200). This is why men
often experience their own bodies as the source of unmanageable impulses which can
overwhelm them, but at the same time are not really a part of them. So Grosz argues that
women come to stand in for the difference and com- plexity of the body that men cut out of
their own self-representations. But why should it be only women who are vessels for this loathed and
feared ambiva- lence of the body? Grosz argues that this kind of masculinity is so unable to tolerate
difference that the fundamental and irreducible corporeal difference between the sexes is
denied, and the different (in this case women) are con- structed instead as a ‘lesser version of
the same’ (Grosz, 1994: 208). But could not this be applied to all of the various constructions of
difference encountered in this article? ‘It is only through the attempted expulsion of the
improper, the disarranged, the unclean (an attempt, as Kristeva observes, that is always pro- visional
and ultimately impossible), that the representation of order can con- tinue’ says Grosz, and this is
what we have seen throughout this paper, but in relation not only (or even primarily) to women,
but to racial minorities, the unemployed, young people, lifestyle minorities and so on (Grosz,
1994: 201). Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their analysis of the affective infrastructure of anti-
Semitism, made similar claims to those put forward by Grosz. They argued that there is a consistent
tendency of human communi- ties to scapegoat difference . They use the term ‘idiosyncrasy’. What
they refer to here is the experience of unease, even revulsion, inspired by an encounter with an
individual or group whose cultural ‘programming’ is deeply alien (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1992:
168–204). To take a simple example , all human communities seem to have conventions regarding
the regulation of space immediately around the body. Normal encounters between strangers
would exclude invasion of this space except under carefully regulated rules (such as the rules
regarding shaking hands, for example). Any other kind of invasion would be inappropriate. The
rules are slightly different for encoun- ters between friends, family, lovers and so on.
Generally we do not even notice that we are following such rules, they remain invisible until
they are broken. As Harold Garfinkel noted, the breaking of these rules not only fore- grounds the
existence of the rule, but brings about powerful affective responses – anger, revulsion, disgust (Garfinkel,
1967: 46–50). So when two deeply different cultural systems encounter one another, such
responses are built into the encounter, simply because their deep cultural rules are differ- ent .
This indeed is Žižek’s explanation for ethnic conflict in general: What really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the
peculiar way it organizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to it – the smell of their food,
their ‘noisy’ songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work. . . . The ground of incompatibility
between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of
their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalisation is rather the particu-
lar structure of their relationship towards enjoyment. (Žižek, 1990: 54) But why do transgressions
of these deep rules disturb us? According to Adorno and Horkheimer they do so because they break
the spell of con- sciousness, they bring us back face to face with the unassimilable reality of
‘circumambient nature’ – of its flux, complexity, fluidity – and of the mute, meaningless fact of
material reality, and in particular the body (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1992: 180). This is Lacan’s
‘return of the Real’. We attempt to master it, simplify, contract, make transparent but ultimately
the brute het- erogeneity of Becoming escapes us . We are ourselves a part of the Real below the
level of consciousness. The organism is itself a torrent of complexity. For Deleuze and Guattari
this flux of Becoming, the ‘virtual’, at the non-human levels of the organism is the real, vital
spark. It is actually here below the level of conscious experience that ‘the new’ emerges
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1992, 1994). So we are at war with ourselves : as organisms we oscillate
within an affective spectrum, with an ecstacy of chaos and potential creativity at one end and
the paranoid enjoyment of stasis and repetition at the other. Encoun- ters with transgression
always evoke a flood of virtual affect in us but whether this contracts into a positive or
negative emotion is very difficult to predict. Art is often appreciated for its transgressive
effects but it is also often loathed. We can find ourselves quite genuinely not knowing
whether to feel attracted or repelled by an image. Very similar things happen in encounters
with idio- syncratic people and (for us) idiosyncratic cultures. What makes the flood of virtual
affect turn sometimes into celebration, and sometimes into contempt, hatred and destructiveness?
Impact Framing

Affective responses to the world shape ‘rational’ assessments of threats. This is

why debaters are more concerned with terrorist plots than with slipping in the
shower, even though the latter is more likely than the former. Analysis of
affective investments is a prior question to risk assessment regarding police
policy.

Philips 20 (Chas. Assistant Prof. of Political Science at Gettysburg College. “Human without
Image: Deleuzian Critique beyond the Neighbourhood Effect” in Deleuze and Guattari Studies
14.1 (2020): 152–176 DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2020.0395 © Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs)

C. The Problem of Statistical Probability and Rational Evaluation

Relatedly, the realm of the affective is not constituted through statistical probability or
rational evaluation – a point on which most social scientists would readily agree. One’s
reactions are not always the result of a reasoned determination, even if each of us has the
capacity to reason. And one’s reactions to experiences are not informed exclusively through
rationality. To see the how affect organises reactions irrespective of data to the contrary,
consider why the thought of slipping in the shower, being diagnosed with heart disease or
commuting to work does not elicit the same visceral fear-response as the possibility of terrorist
plots, school shootings and shark attacks. 9 Explaining to someone who is afraid of terrorists that
the likelihood of an attack is very low in most parts of the world is unlikely to allay their fears. As
a corollary, explaining to someone that they should be concerned about threats that do not
elicit an affective charge is equally unlikely to modify their response to that potentiality. Our
affective responses do not derive from rational faculties; rather, our affective capacities
organise, reconstitute or ignore the rational assurances that stem from statistical
probabilities. Our conscious selves must make sense of our affective selves, already in motion.
An affective response to a risk cannot be easily expelled or assuaged through rational
persuasion. Becoming aware of the statistical improbability of a shark attack is unlikely to entice
a wary beachgoer who has just watched Jaws into the ocean. The power of affect to shape our
behaviour and its resistance to intellectual interrogation can help inform our understanding of
police policy. Small statistical changes in rates of probabilities or risk of harm in a stop are
unlikely to rework the affective self. Thus, the laudable statistical objectives of police
departments, public health organisations and city administrations are important, but we must
also recognise their insufficiency for modifying behaviour in many cases. Attending to the
affective self – as some social scientists are increasingly doing – may provide a crucial
complement to statistically driven strategies.

D. The Problem of Potentiality As described above, the virtual is always constituting and
reworking the actual in ways that are difficult to sense or define. Although the actual is a
product of the virtual, the realm of differentiation can actualise in a wide variety of ways. For
instance, the potentiality of an event actualising influences the world of extensity whether the
event transpires or not. Actuality alone cannot adequately or comprehensively characterise
experience. It is at least in part the potential that modifies our behaviour , and because our
grasp of potentiality is affectively constituted rather than consciously evaluated, it is difficult
to account for the myriad ways virtuality is extruding actuality . Each object of an Idea that has
yet to be actualised remains a potentiality, and that potentiality cannot be accessed directly
(Deleuze 1994: 169). Whether it actualises or not, the potentiality is real and has an impact.
Social scientists’ focus on the world that is actualised rather than the potentiality that
precedes this actualisation thus fails to account for the real effect of potentiality. Metrics
measure whether an event occurred or not–two (or more) possibilities determined by
probability. But the potentiality of something happening is not tantamount to two worlds: a
world in which an event transpires and a world in which it does not. Potentiality is more than
and different from either of these possible worlds. The possibility of something happening is not
the same as the potentiality of something happening, for Deleuze. The possibility of something
happening is derived only from an actualised realm of representation rather than the realm of
virtuality: ‘The virtuality of the Idea has nothing to do with possibility’ (Deleuze 1994: 191). It is
the virtual rather than the possible that is real, Deleuze argues, because the virtual is the
genetic principle for the process of becoming that we encounter in actualisation. Thus,
Deleuze writes that ‘[t]he possible is opposed to the real’ (Deleuze 1994: 211). In contrast with
possibility, potentiality involves intensive anticipation that has real effects regardless of
whether the event comes to pass. If a methodology relies on a model of empirics that is
constituted by the actualised alone, something critical is left out . It is thus possible for the
scientist to study the impact of police encounters on a population ; it is possible to study the
frequency and likelihood of those types of stops on a population; it is even possible t o study
how that probability impacts populations without any direct encounters with the police. But it
is difficult for social science to uncover how a potential encounter has an actual impact on
populations across space and time.
 Politics
There’s no space for activism in the status quo. State based modes of
repression capture all resistance. Our militant research approach is the only
way for politics to become possible again.
Svirsky 10. Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK),
“Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics,” Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 2

As Deleuze and Guattari have explained, this characteristic ‘royal’ science of politics ‘continually
appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science’–those forms of political investigation
looking ‘to understand both the repression it encounters and the interaction ‘ “containing” it’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367–8). One major task of new activist war machines is, then, to
escape entrapment within the black hole of the majoritarian discourse on civil society,
captured and defined by pervasive notions of ‘representative participation’. Although the
‘NGOisation’ of the public sphere since the 1980s (see Yacobi 2007), together with other forms
of political proliferation, have broadened the visible political field, the potential of non-
institutional forms of action has been weakened ideologically by a whole state apparatus
comprised of research centres and budgets, instrumental teaching, and a parliamentary
politics that has incorporated the discourse of civil society – all of which have effected a
sectorisation of society and political life. The epistemological aspirations of the three ‘ideal
circles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367) of the state, economy and civil society are commonly
used to categorise political eruptions as forms of participation in the official, representative
state politics. It is in this light that we must interpret the failure of academia to come to terms
with the division of labour lately being imposed by the transversal relations between
intellectual investigation and political situatedness embodied in militant research. As Deleuze
and Guattari suggest, ‘we know of the problems States have always had with journey-men’s
associations or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies . . . ’ (368).

It is clear that a Jamesonian ‘strategy of containment’ is at work in the narrative tradition of

royal political science. It is in the notion of ‘ representative participation’ that a function of
formal unity or a strategy of containment has been founded, which, as Jameson puts it, ‘ allows
what can be thought to seem internally coherent in its own terms, while repressing the
unthinkable . . . which lies beyond its boundaries’ (Jameson 1981: 38). By tying official politics
together with every form of political participation it can ensnare, what royal political science
does is ‘radically impoverish . . . the data of one narrative line’ – namely, that of the new
activisms–‘by their rewriting according to the paradigm of another narrative...’–namely, that of
representative participatory politics (Jameson 1981: 22). The subversive power of political
potentia is thus contained by this reductive strategy; civil society becomes the main territory of
this imprisonment, assisted by a false equation of official participation with challenging
politics.
Traditional modes of politics must be replaced with joyous
micropolitical problematics.
Eloff 15. Aragorn Eloff, nomad in South Africa, “Children of the New Earth – Deleuze,
Guattari, and Anarchism,” July 31, 2015, http://meme.co.za/?p=152

Instead of programs for political action, let’s produce shared problematics. How do we
describe where we find ourselves? How did we get here? What are the intensive flows and
processes underlying the world as it is presented to us? What diagrams is all this the
effectuation of? Can we, via a practice of vice-diction, create new diagrams? We will
always get the solutions we deserve as a consequence of how we pose and incarnate
these problems.
Organisation is crucial, but let us not forget that for all their differences of instantiation,
any group can lapse into a mode of organisation that repeats the form of the Party and
hardens into a new dogma defined by unquestioning loyalty, ascetism and the crushing
or recuperation of desire turned against itself . We need “new micropolitical and
microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic
and new analytic practices.” This is not about creating agreement, because the more
we disagree “the more we create a field of vitality.”
Again, we should be wary of the subjugated groups and their repressed desires, the
groupuscules and their channelling of libidinal investments into hierarchies, reform
and inertia. What is the viscosity and consistency of our group forms? How do we come
together? What flows between us? What are our fluid dynamics? How quickly do we
congeal or dissipate?
Attentiveness to the new is crucial: the world now is not the world then and we are not
who we were. The new fascism – the Urstaat awakened and given new strength by
capitalism – produces a peace more terrifying than war and if we are not careful then “all
our petty fears will be organized in concert , all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to
make micro-fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle every little thing, every
suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets.” This does not mean that we
cannot, however, also act against our time in favour of a time to come.
Engagements on the level of discourse are important but limited. Control functions just as
much through machinic enslavement of the body – affects, percepts, imaginations,
desires, calories, flows of water and electricity – as it does through the social subjection
that produces, through the signifying systems that increasingly fill every corner of the
world, alienation and ideological hegemonies. The new signifying systems also operate in
a double movement, whereby they open up the flows of information whilst
simultaneously closing down collective enunciative capacity.
Ressentiment – revenge, resentment and reaction – impedes all revolutionary
becoming and will only lead to further oppression , of each other and of ourselves. Do
not trust those who spread ressentiment and call for the settling of accounts; they seek
only slaves as allies and always reproduce what they aim to destroy . “To have ressentiment
or not to have ressentiment – there is no greater difference, beyond psychology, beyond
history, beyond metaphysics. It is the true difference or transcendental typology – the
genealogical and hierarchical difference.”
This is especially true of identity politics. If we remained trapped in a Hegelian spirit
of revenge then our victories will always be written into the world as victories as
slaves. Identity, even intersectional identity, reifies molar categories in its production
of axes of differentiation. Instead of categories that always repeat the Same through
false appeals to identity, analogy, resemblance and opposition, we would do better to
think of our multiple and alway-shifting overlappings as events and encounters, not as
perennial attributes of interpellated subjects. If we’re seeking to hold on to established
identities, then what are we resisting? Our own transformation through association with
other bodies? Our capacity to expand joy? Is it not precisely the blockage of desiring-
production within sedimented identities that has resulted – and continues to result – in
relations of hierarchy and domination? Besides, “the forces of repression need always an
ascribable self and specifiable individuals to apply. When we become a little liquid, when
we evade the ascription of the self ” then perhaps we have a chance . Let us then become
liquid; let us fold and unfold and refold in the practice of what Edouard Glissant calls
‘relation-identity’. This way we can also begin to discover our “rigid segments,” our
“binary and overcoding machines,” and that “we are not simply divided up by binary
machines of class, sex, or age” but that there are “others which we constantly shift [and]
invent without realizing it.” Our true names are not “pure” but instead “bastard, lower,
anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor.”
At the same time, struggle on the level of axioms is not unimportant. The fight for
reforms – for service delivery, for jobs, for recognition, for a voice – can aid in minority
becomings. However, struggles on this level only facilitate such becomings and are not
always necessary. These molar politics are “the index of another coexistent combat,” a
micropolitics. At the very least, we must be done with the hegemony of hegemony. Our
“revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine .” We seek a nomadic
revolutionary science, not a Royal science of teleologies and base-superstructures and
counter-hegemonies and determinations in the last instance. We are multiple,
heterogeneous. There are always an infinity of peoples.
We must commit altrucide and suicide. For as long as we remain trapped in the infinite
demand of the Other, as long as our focus is on trauma, infinite justice, impossible
horizons and melancholia, we are separated from our capacity to act by a reimposed
transcendent dialectics of absolute responsibility. Instead, imbrication in movement,
reciprocal feedback loops, mutual enfoldings of affect and expression, exchange and
becoming-other-together.
They overdetermine what activist politics look like. Their claim that our
argument could be refined to be more overtly political is a smokescreen for
mass conformity that contributes to fascism.
Svirsky 10. Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK),
“Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics,” Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 3

Rather than problematising the political, this royal understanding of activism uses its ‘metric
power’ to axiomatise politics, while simultaneously repressing activist experiences that refuse
simply to align with ‘the given’ of formal politics. An example of this can be seen in the hostility
of western states towards organisations such as ‘Wikileaks’ or the ‘Animal rights movement’,
each of which are immersed in creative acts of citizenship that actualise ruptures. Such new
scenes and acts are constantly at risk of being appropriated by this royal science of politics,
which imposes upon them a model that channels civic participation according to established
rules and concepts. Activisms that seek only to guarantee the workings of representative
democracy are essentially slave activisms; they dwell in safety and their impact and potential is
expected to be absorbed without drawing the system into new structures of resonance.

The assumption that ‘mass participation is the lifeblood of representative democracy’ not only
imposes a particular model of the political, it also reinforces a pejorative way to conceive
activism. By positing representative democracy (or any other regime) as the reified model of
political process, theory necessarily idealises certain forms of involvement over others. For
example, classical participatory theory is often blind to [unable to comprehend] the creative
significance of the activist energies being unfolded in such events as critical teaching in schools,
revolutionary philosophical writing, the deconstructive effect of a critical assemblage that
confronts patriarchal power, or of civic homosexuality which disrupts heterosexism. In fact, the
assumptions underlying ‘representative’ participation are troublesome for at least two reasons.
Firstly, participation in the formal political process of ‘representative democracy’ does not in
itself necessarily implicate a critical attitude or action, seeking a less repressive and more
creative life. To evidence this, it is enough to keep in mind some fearful recent examples of
mass political support for ‘representative’ state violence, as occurred last May when thousands
of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and the streets of Jerusalem to back the killing by the Israeli
Defence Forces of nine activists from the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms
and Humanitarian Relief, as they boarded the Mavi Marmara ship sailing to Gaza as part of a
humanitarian flotilla. Similarly, we might remain mindful of other, no less electrifying, cases of
popular support for wars and genocides in South America, Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, or of
events such as the Holocaust. In these instances, mass participation more accurately falls within
the Reichian analysis of a popular ‘desire for fascism’–which lies worlds away from a
participatory liberalism that idealises the commitment of the public to activist citizenship (see
Isin 2009) and to the tolerant ‘good life’ that western democracy claims to represent. Secondly,
passivity is not necessarily a sign of political anaemia, but may be a cultural expression that
requires local explanation. Here, research at times confuses the visible with the political:
absence of visible mass participation might be a sign of unconscious and pre-conscious
compliance with ongoing forms of oppression, and can impact more energetically on the
perpetuation of a regime than can tangible acts of the body – these modes of active
abandonment produce the reign of daily microfascisms.

After Deleuze and Guattari, political activism may be approached in a fundamentally different
way: without an image, without a form. As Deleuze and Guattari make clear, the interaction
between royal and nomad science produces a ‘constantly shifting borderline’, meaning that
there is always some element that escapes containment by the ‘iron collars’ of representation
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367; see also Deleuze 1994). This occurs when the plane of
consistency is passionately thrown against the plane of organisation, when a nomad element
inserts itself in political struggles in which, for instance, the boundaries of citizenship are
challenged and reopened (as occurred in the struggle associated with the sans-papiers
movement, see Isin 2009), or barriers of ethnic segregation are challenged by new forms of
interculturalism (as occurs with bilingual forms of education). It is through these ‘smallest
deviations’ that smooth types of political activity dwell within the striated forms of state
politics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 371). Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s political
philosophies have created some of the conceptual tools which may be put to innovative use in
activism that seeks to break with repressive traditions. Their alien relation to the standards set
by the royal science of politics (see Patton 2000) – an alienation laid out in the philosophical
resources they draw on, in the issues and concepts that characterise their work and, principally,
in the incessant movement of their thought – points towards a richer philosophical weaponry
with which to confront and possibly overcome political inhibitions, in both knowledge and
practice.
Links
 Body Cameras

The use of body cameras because the incorporation of the police into the
surveillant assemblage through the increase in visibility and surveillance
facilitated by digital platforms. Their aff allows the police to maintain the
monopoly on truth that maximizes control and superiority.
Chapman 16 (Jessica Chapman holds a Master of Arts in Communication and a Bachelor’s
degree in Political Science from Carleton University, “Becoming the Camera: Body worn video
and shifting expectations of police work”, 2016, Pgs 1 -4)

body worn video (BWV) technologies

Following several very public instances of police misconduct in the United States,
have become a popular ‘solution’ to public cries for additional oversight and accountability in
policing.1 Having historically enjoyed a position outside of the scope of the surveillant gaze, police are now being
incorporated into the surveillant assemblage as a result of the visibility that results from
camera ubiquity and the viral sharing facilitated by digital platforms. Therefore, although BWV might be
part of a solution to misconduct, the adoption of these devices can also be considered a strategic move
by police organizations to regain a level of control over their own visibility as camera wielding
citizens continue to turn the surveillant gaze toward them. As a result of their positioning on the body and the
subsequent first person perspective, these devices allow police to document their experience during an encounter. However, the
bodies in question are police bodies, they represent the state; they are the official authority and the
video traces of their surveillance may become the official account. BWV offers police
organizations the opportunity to manage their visibility strategically by laying a foundation on
which to position their BWV footage as having a superior claim to truth and justice. The coupling of
these technological extensions with ongoing police militarization r epresents a shift toward a cyborg officer whose
body and capabilities are enhanced. Additionally, as these cyborg officers are being constructed
as a defensive strategy against a public that is perceived as malicious, they are politically
motivated making the transition past cyborg into RoboCop. By discrediting external footage and presenting
their own as unbiased, these RoboCops and the footage they produce are poised to control narratives in the event that misconduct
occurs.
In order to maintain the monopoly on truth necessary to achieve strategic visibility
within the assemblage, officers must produce quality footage – something fictional officer Reade is
obviously aware of. The result is that officers must have a deep understanding of the affordances and limitations of their devices and
they must be cognisant enough of their surroundings to ensure that any necessary details are documented. Goold’s (2003) work
officers who understand the limitations of recording technology often modify their
found that
behaviour in order to ensure that CCTV cameras get the ‘right shot’ ; becoming increasingly concerned
about the way that their actions will look and take the appropriate steps to ensure that the angles, lighting, framing, etc. are
favourable. It can be suggested that having the camera mounted on their bodies will exacerbate officers’ awareness of the gaze and
any anxiety that comes with it. As officers consciously modify their looking and recording behaviours in a manner that will produce
more flattering video footage, they adopt the perspective of the camera. They become the directors of their own
films, adopting what I describe in this study as a “cinematic logic” that requires an understanding of the technology and
consciously moving in a manner that leverages its affordances in an effort to both record the desired footage and ensure that it
the adoption of this logic can be considered both an
clearly reflects what the officer wants it to. In many ways,
example of officers being taken over by the surveillant assemblage and their opportunity
create resistance within it. On one hand, the police are more visible than ever before as increasing camera ubiquity forces
them into the assemblage. On the other hand, their adoption of cameras they control represents an attempt
to maximize control within the assemblage . By taking on the corporealized responsibility of recording video footage
that will likely serve as evidence, the practical job of policing changes significantly. Previously responsible for interpreting situations
after the fact in their notes, police must now ensure that the camera is interpreting the situation appropriately in the moment2 .
Policing no longer relies on the officer’s interpretation – full of experience, but limited by her or
his subjectivity – but on the ‘truth’ captured by the camera and the data that comes with it.
Shifting the focus of policing in this way raises significant questions about the role that police play in society and how that is changed
as they are forced to become videographers tasked with making sure the video tells the right story. This transition fundamentally
changes what police do and reshapes how we understand what police do and what they are. It is not my intention to make a
normative judgement about BWV, instead I seek to attend to the tensions emerging as a result of these devices and the practical
changes to policing that they demand.
 Climate Change
The threat of extinction posed by climate change operates as a new
transcendence – their attempts to forward the primacy of life presupposes a
static concept of “the human” whose life should be preserved – turns their
impact.
Colebrook 16
[Claire, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and cultural
theorist, “‘A Grandiose Time of Coexistence’: Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene” Deleuze
Studies, Vol 10 Iss 4, https://www-euppublishing-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.3366/dls.2016.0238]

Rather than think of tipping points, of game over, of closing windows, or of opportunities
(finally) for achieving justice and victory for all of us, now – we might think of those
potentialities that are not of this world, and are not of our history. There is the time and history
of the Anthropocene, a time and history of techno-science, human ‘progress’, globalism,
consumption, expansion and survival. There are other times and histories, including all those
that were vanquished by colonialism and capitalist imperialism . Now, it may be true that
appealing to those other planes of thought – where ‘the human’ does not operate as a silent
presupposed ‘we’, and where the future of ‘us’ as a species does not control the imaginary –
would do nothing to help ‘us’ survive. There have been, and still are, modes of existence that
are not marked by a sense of ‘the human’, and certainly not by a panic regarding the non-
existence of human intelligence. In this respect one might oppose those arguments today that
seek to sustain ‘man’ as pure intellect – either by fetishising the future or privileging
‘intelligence’ as the definitive human potentiality – with styles of living (such as Australian
Indigenous culture to name just one example) that see the past, time, space and the earth as
populated and given meaning and sense by way of nonhuman person s. The anthropos of the
Anthropocene is constituted through – among other things – a geological comportment to the
world, and a capacity to read human time and survival within a frame of deep time .
Anthropocene man is the man not only of universal history and species recognition, but also
the man of sustained self-identity and ecological concern, where such concern is framed by the
right to life. Today's discourses of climate change ethics and Anthropocene studies are
predominantly concerned with how ‘we’ would live on, including how ‘we’ might learn from
other cultures. They reflect upon, delimit, accuse and unify the human from the point of view of
the subject who surveys history and adopts the distance of critique and judgement . (Jacques
Derrida, in response to Foucault, suggested that this hyperbolic violence of reason was
unavoidable; any attempt to place Western reason within a broader history would itself be an
act of unifying, critical and elevated reason (Derrida 1978).) Anthropocene man, the man who
finds himself again as a geological agent , and then reflects upon his viability for ‘the’ future,
operates as yet one more transcendence that organises all other strata. What would it mean to
think as if such an inescapable, universalising horizon were one stratum among others? We
might ask whether ‘other’ cultures that do not have a sense of ‘the human’ might enable the
capacity to think of the world in a manner not divided between human and nonhuman, man and
his others, universal humanity and its differentiation. Here, I think, we encounter one of the
most difficult problems of Deleuze's œuvre, and (in a related manner) one of the most profound
questions opened by the concept of the Anthropocene. As I have already argued, Deleuze was
opposed to arguments that stayed within a certain distribution or orientation of thinking which
negotiated ‘both sides’ of the argument: ‘on the one hand … on the other hand …’. The
difficulty, therefore, is thinking beyond already constituted interior and exterior orientations of
thinking. One might say that nothing marks Western thought more than the ongoing history of
self-overcoming, of renewing oneself by way of an ‘outside’. Philosophy must purge itself of all
contingent, received, historically bounded and specific attachments, constantly erasing its own
presuppositions. One of the ways this has been achieved is by modern anti-foundationalism; if
there is nothing timeless, necessary, natural or essential about thinking, then thought finds itself
through a process of constant self-erasure. In practical form this often takes an anthropological
turn; one might imagine other cultures or times without ‘our’ sense of self, without binary
sexes, without concepts of ownership, without romantic love, without a sense of ‘art’ or ‘mind’
or ‘guilt’ (and so on). Nothing would be more internal to the West than emptying itself of its
own content by way of finding difference in ‘the other’. When ‘we’ ask if there might not be a
good Anthropocene, or whether climate change might not be the opportunity to find the justice
we have always imagined, we are thinking as if there were only one time and only one history .

Despite Deleuze's and Deleuze and Guattari's own work offering an outside to thought that
seems to repeat, yet again, a long tradition of though re-finding itself by way of its own self-
annihilation, I would suggest that something more provocative can be found in the stratigraphic
method. If one were to take stratigraphic time seriously, one might think of other worlds and
other forms of existence still existing in the present, regardless of their functionality or feasibility
for our future. What might it be like to live as if one were not defined and sustained by the
parochial desire for our own living on? Here is where the Deleuzian challenge to thought and its
outside truly opens another space: thought has its own outside, and in this case the
Anthropocene is predominantly the result of scaling ‘up’ or opening to a thought of deep time,
but it is always a deep time unfolded from the point of view of man. If one thinks of stratigraphy
beyond geology, one might not remain within the layers of time that are readable in the earth's
strata, but consider all those once-lived, no-longer-lived, possible and inhuman worlds that –
from the present – can appear only as unthinkable or monstrous. To take just two examples: it
appears that post-apocalyptic culture can only envisage our future as a wasteland in which we
yearn for the pleasures of the present. (One might think here of the film Oblivion, where the
central character, played by Tom Cruise, has retained records that he plays wistfully, fragile
books, a baseball cap and an astounding recollection of the last-played Superbowl.) Beyond the
popular imaginary and the ongoing discourse of what ‘we’ must do to be or become sustainable,
there is also the high-brow assumption that what defines itself as ‘the human’ (intelligence)
might be catastrophically risked and lost (Bostrom 2014). The more profound outside or radical
exterior would deface what seems most intimate and interior, ‘our’ right to life and the value of
life in what ‘we’ take to be its current form. What if living otherwise were something that
would be more destructive than the attrition of climate change? What if, rather than holding
on and eking out an existence as best we can, we were to act and think as if our world and our
time were one among others and not the only life with a right to survive ? Imagining those
worlds that are not our own – whether actual, past, or virtual – might do nothing to restore or
save the present, and might not offer anything for thought as it has defined itself so far. At a
quite banal level one might say that Western thought and its accompanying practices of
imperialism, colonisation, barbarism and enslavement have destroyed many worlds and
potential worlds that would not have generated what calls itself the Anthropocene. But even if
those worlds cannot provide any exit from the Anthropocene for us, they might intimate an
ethics that would be genuinely affirmative of stratigraphic time. Such an ethics would think and
act as if one's time were not one's own, as if a thousand other temporalities existed alongside
every now. Rather, then, than thinking about recycling, minimising one's carbon footprint,
purchasing a smaller car and buying local produce – all actions designed to sustain this present
into ‘our’ future – one might act and think as if this present with all its desires and interests
were not worthy of our care.
 Crime

Criminal justice reform leaves unexamined the way the concepts of ‘crime’ and
‘criminality’ are produced by particular modes of social organization. If we don’t
begin by asking why societies deem particular operations of desire deviant in
the first place, we will only replicate the demonization of difference that
characterizes the status quo.
Murray 2010. Jamie Murray, Liverpool John Moores University. Book Chapter: “Germinal
Deviance: Deleuze & Guattari and Criminology.” In New Directions for Criminolgy, pp 59-61.

Deleuze & Guattari’s theretical work is complex and involving, and does not specifically
address matters of crime in any depth. However, the question is nonetheless whether there
is a possible cross over between the world of criminology and the world of Deleuze &
Guattari (a transversal, as Guattari would theorise a cross over concept). In this paper the
theory of Deleuze & Guattari will be introduced, largely by way of a number of primer
sections, but within the framework of a cross over concept of germinal deviance, which it is
hoped allows a productive cross over of the worlds of criminology and Deleuze & Guattari.

Germinal deviance is deviance in itself: it is not deviance in relation to a departing transgression

of a norm. It is the swerve or clinamen, a deviance on a a fractal attractor, which is creative
in all processes in the cosmos, nature and social organisation. It is a concept that translates
and connects up to so many of the key working concepts within the work of Deleuze &
Guattari, and it is a concept designed to connect into criminology through the concept of
deviance (at the risk of marshalling a monstrous, hybrid, cross over concept of deviance). It
is in Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition that a concept of germinal deviance is first most
thoroughly worked through in terms of his discussion of difference and repetition. There
Deleuze sets out, in explicit contrast to the dominant approach in Western thought, the
thought of difference in itself as opposed to difference in identity, with difference in itself as
pre-representational and pre-propositional singularity. Difference in itself operates in
ontological processes of genesis that through repitions on the this difference in itself give
rise to our extensive – i.e. physical, perceptible, - world where difference in identity and
representation thought tend to accumulate and obscure the more profound and germinal
operations of a) difference in itself, b) repition, and c) the eternal return. Alternatively, in
the conceptual language of Deleuze & Gurattari’s Anti-Oedipus germinal deviance is desire,
desiring production, the body-without-organs, a schizz, becoming, desiring machines . Or, in the
terminology of A Thousand Plateaus, germinal deviance is the plane of immanence where
cosmic processes machine self-organising assemblages in cosmic, natural, and social registers,
moving through processes of deterritorialisation that prevail over territorialisation and
reterritorialisation to work to create new earth.

What could be the consequences of pouring all of this thinking into the concept of deviance
for a thinking through of the concerns of criminology? I think the consequences would be
that a Deleuze & Guattari approach to criminology would not ask a first question ‘What are the
causes of crime?’, and not a first question ‘What are the workings of the criminal justice
system?’, and not even a first abstract question of ‘What is crime?’. Rather the starting point
would be the further exploration of the profound and creative operation of germinal deviance in
terms of the problematic of social organisation. On the basis that germinal deviance comes
first, is primarily productive, and prevails, the problematic of social organization for
Deleuze & Guattari presents an inescapable and unresolvable tension between germinal
deviance on the one hand and the constitution of sociality on the other *field of immanence
of germinal deviance, field of transcendence for normative sociality). For any society to bring
itself into being a portion of the germinal flow must be blocked in order to constitute extensive
social structures. Societies take a portion of the germinal flow of deviance and code it as
prohibited, and it is the prohibited that takes up the inescapable and unresolvable tension in
sociality between the forces of immanence and the forces of transcendence. It is from the
coding of the prohibited that a society would constitute its concept of crime , and it is this social
coding, repression, and the regulation of the prohibited and allowed flow of germinal deviance
that becomes a criminal code and criminal system (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, 139-165)

Thus the starting point, the first question, for Deleuze & Guattari approach would be more
abstract than even ‘What is crime?’. Once the context of germinal deviance has been set out,
one can then ask the question: ‘What flow of germinal deviance needs to be blocked to
constitute that society?’. Different social machines will address the tension between
germinal flow and sociality differently, and so for a Deleuze & Guattari criminology the first
task is to understand a) the problem field of social organization that different social machines
self-organise as answers to, and b) the concept of crime that this social organisation produces. It
is in this setting that a next question about the nature and workings of any given criminal justice
system could be considered. Here for Deleuze & Guattari, I think the line of question would
run, just as it did with Foucault ,in the direction of how particular social machines and
accompanying social assemblages (dispositif) operate through (both trascendant and
immanent) power to produce crime – or ‘deviance from the norm’ – as the capture and
conversion of germinal deviance into normative deviance . Whereas germinal deviance is the
operation of creative forces in intensive (i.e. virtual; see later in this chapter) organisation,
the development of extensive (i.e. actual, located in time and space; see later) social
institutions of power (e.g. systems of criminal law and crime control) lead to the production
of deviance as ‘deviance from the norm.’ It is then in the context of this criminological
theorization that questions could then be asked as to the causes of crime, but already here
realizing that the causes of crime would involve an investigation of dynamic complex of
germinal deviance, social machines, desiring production by subjects, the operation of power
in social assemblages, and the production of ‘deviance from the norm.’
 Criminology and Policing
Criminology and policing assumes a neutral ontology of spatiality – when, in
fact, space is always emergent from the striation of bodies. This striation of
space is symptomatic of an attempt to arrest the flows of life.

Campbell 2016 (Elaine, Newcastle University, “Policing and its Spatial

Imaginaries,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 8: 71-89)

As an assemblage of heterogeneous security practices, policing is often mapped across a

number of spatial imaginaries. In common parlance, when we talk of the `thin blue line’, `crime
scenes’, `bobbies on the beat’, `accident hot-spots’, and `no-go areas’, a particular topography
of policing practices is implied, albeit one which is metaphorical and representational. Yet
such terms also function as heterotopias of control, danger, and exclusion, and invest `real’
places with meaning, value and significance, marking them out as spatially bounded,
territorialised sites of protection, investigation, risk-management, and surveillance. At the
same time, recent attention to global and transnational policing (Bowling and Sheptycki, 2012) -
and other scalar abstractions such as neighbourhood, local, national, regional and international
policing - imagines a vertical scale, or a `nested hierarchical ordering’ (Howitt, 2002: 305) of
policing terrains which, `etched from shadows cast from above’ (Marston et al, 2005: 420) move
upwards and onwards in terms of operational level, geographical scope and territorial size .
Moreover, the emergence of pluralised, nodal and networked policing (Jones and Newburn,
2006; Loader. 2000), which works across territorial, sectoral and organisational boundaries,
suggests a more spatially fluid and extensive policing terrain which not only has reach and
scope beyond the constricting enclosures of fixed, jurisdictional spaces, but which also
acknowledges that proximity and distance, the here and there of policing have been dissolved
within horizontal planes of cooperation and partnership. It seems reasonable, therefore, to
suggest that how we talk, write and think about policing and, importantly, how we do policing,
is cast within a distinctly spatial lexicon. For all that, the spatialized and spatializing relations of
policing remain, at best, under-theorised and, at worst, unexamined and left to speak for
themselves. Indeed, within criminology in general, and policing studies in particular, forms of
space - that is, spatialities such as territory, borders, scale and network – as much as the
phenomenon of space itself are seldom topics for discussion or theoretical rumination; as
Massey notes, `(it is) a debate which never surfaces; and it never surfaces because everyone
assumes we already know what these terms mean’ (1994: 250). Why should all this matter? At
one level, of course, to obsess about such commonly used, and culturally embedded spatial
expressions could be regarded as an exercise in pedantry. If, however, `everything, but
everything, is spatially distributed’ (Thrift, 2006: 140), then space is deeply social and emerges
from the continuous interplay of bodies, nature and things which encounter, interact and
connect with each other in more or less organised, and more or less continuous circulations
(Massey, 1994). Yet, when viewed through a criminological lens, space is consistently figured
as a neutral or abstract backdrop, or as an inert, empty container within which events unfold.
Even when, especially when policing is analytically foregrounded as a territorialised, bordered,
scaled and/or networked set of practices, forms of space are presented as conceptual givens,
as always-already ordered templates upon which the `real’ analysis can be superimposed. As a
result, criminology’s ontological commitments to, and political investments in different
spatialities remain unquestioned and unproblematised. In the next several sections, I unpack
the conventional wisdoms which pervade criminological approaches to territorial, bordered,
scaled and networked space. This sets the ground for opening up a conversation with
poststructuralist geography and its innovative work in thinking space relationally; in so doing, the
paper engages with topological frameworks of spatial analysis and goes on to delineate an
ontology of policing space centred on Schatzki’s (2002) concept of `the site’.

Territorial and bordered imaginaries

Criminological interest in the notion of territory has been a central concern for historians of
public policing. Read through theories of state formation (Giddens, 1985; Weber, 1966), as much
as through the political geographies of emergent industrial capitalism and processes of
urbanisation (Ogborn, 1993; Steedman, 1984), policing territory, as the spatial demarcation of
police jurisdiction and authority, is cast from the complex interplay of state administrative
power, nation and sovereignty. As Ogborn notes of the establishment of provincial policing in
19th century England, `the `new’ ... police force was a single body with the monopoly of policing
over a defined area... (which) involved .... constantly patrolling their territory’ (1993: 511).

The idea of territory as a delimited, bounded, spatially coherent, exclusive and calculable
space is a formulation which is repeated across disparate bodies of scholarship. We certainly
learn from administrative criminology and policing handbooks, how to map the organisational
structures and operational practices of public policing across territorialised (and scaled) spatial
framings – from local beats, to basic command units, area commands, force areas, through to
spaces of national jurisdiction(s) (HMIC, 2005; Loveday, 2006). Equally, seminal ethnographies
of urban policework, though they may discard formalised terms, nonetheless talk of territory as
`the ground’ – `(this) belongs to the police..... (t)hey possess it; it is their territory and
members of the force from adjoining stations have no right of entry into or patrol of the
ground’ (Holdaway, 1983: 36). More contemporary work, such as Zedner’s (2009) exploration
of the changing landscapes of security, notes that even with the proliferation of private
policing actors and the spatial fragmentation of jurisdiction, governance still involves the
regulation of delineated space leading to a territorial `patchwork’ of security `quilts’, `bubbles’
and `corridors’. While Palmer and Warren suggest the contemporary proliferation of
`governing territory through zonal controls’ (2013: 430), Miraftab (2012: 284) identifies
patterns of `zonification’, based on old-style colonial practices of `location creation’, in
strategies of urban regeneration in Cape Town. At the same time, Paasche and colleagues note
that non-state policing agents operating within these same City Improvement Districts, have
reterritorialized urban spaces by creating `invisible boundaries’ (2014: 1565) which displace
not only `undesirables’ from certain (improved) areas, but also the need for public policing
within them. Hayward talks of `container spaces’ and draws attention to the increasingly
prevalent public policing usage of `kettling’ as a means of `corralling.... protestors into a
demarcated, confined space .... designed to keep people inside a perimeter’ (2012: 453-454,
original emphasis). On these analyses, territory comprises the spatial conditions of possibility
for control over, access into, movement within, and exit from a particular space. This
ontological position is certainly reflected in emerging criminological research of borders and
border regimes (Aas, 2011; Loftus, 2015; Pickering and Ham, 2013). Borders encircle an
imagined and territorialised community; as Loftus reminds us, `borders are characterised by
their communicative function, signifying state control over territory and mobility’ (2015: 115);
or as Zureik and Salter put it, `the image of a controlled border allows for the construction of a
national space as smooth space, safe space, domestic space’ (2013: 4). Symbolically and
materially positioned at territory’s `edge’, the border is both the localised site of intensified
surveillance and control, and the frontier at which rights of entry and the identification (and
exclusion) of risk and danger are determined. On this reading, it would be fair to suggest that
territory has been taken as an assumed spatial category which provides the material backdrop
for a multifaceted and critical politics of control (and resistance), surveillance, exclusion,
partition and segregation. In other words, territory comes as a ready-made ontology, and as
the taken-for-granted spatial framing for politicised debates concerning injustices, rights
abuses and differential treatment at the borders (Pratt, 2005; Weber and Bowling, 2004). It
forms the cartographic stage for processes and practices of `social sorting’ which deploy a
myriad of surveillance technologies (ID cards, biometrics, CCTV, body- checks, scanners) to sift,
monitor, profile and discriminate who and what has right of entry and exit (Lyon, 2002).
Territory mobilises `geographies of citizenship’ for some, and consigns marginalised,
dispossessed and `undesirable’ groups to `geographies of nowhere’(England, 2008: 2880). It
partitions access to public space, and withholds what Lefebvre (1995) describes as `rights to the
city’. In short, territory constitutes a key spatial technology for particularly divisive,
pernicious, and demarcated modes of policing. Yet, despite the wide-ranging political
implications of territory, what we might mean by the term, how we trace its genealogy,
conceptual formation, discursive construction, and its usage in different times and contexts,
has been given little attention within the criminological literature.
 Criminal Justice

Criminal justice has turned into an “organic regime” dependent on a battle

metaphor that populates everyday acts of communication. Due process,
prosecutor vs. defendant, access to a lawyer all point back to a collection of
master signifiers that construct reality through values of stability, predictability,
and control. This regime of signs creates the very foundation for criminalization
through the placement of certain bodies into discursive subject positions,
categorically organizing life into a control society.
Milovanovic 7 (Dragan Milovanovic is a distinguished PhD research professor in the Justice
Studies Program at Northeastern Illinois University and also the editor of the International
Journal for the Semiotics of Law, “Diversity, law, and justice: A Deleuzian semiotic view of
‘criminal justice’” in The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, March 2007, Pgs 64-67)

Let us briefly look at five contemporary models of criminal justice

3. Organic regimes: criminal justice
practices. Each, I argue, is compatible with the logic of the ‘‘organic regime’’ of signs that Deleuze spells out in his two-book set
on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989). The organic regime is more
concerned with identity, linearity, unity, determinism, predictability, totality. Packer28 has provided
a convenient comparison of the due process model and the crime control model underlying existing criminal justice systems in the
U.S. The
due process model follows the logic of Max Weber’s formal rationality ideal type in law.
formality is of highest value: formal fact finding; opportunity to be heard, to confront
Here,
witnesses, to cross examine, to a neutral fact-finding body, to access to a lawyer, to appeal.
Adversarial fact-finding, with opposing lawyers clashing for the truth would assure that the ‘‘what happened?’’ will be established
beyond a reasonable doubt. The crime control model, however, has different values. It values
informalism in identifying as much crime in society as possible and in its prosecution. Efficiency
is its call. Efficiency depends on speed . Informality and stereotyped procedures in assembly line
forms of justice rendering best assure that a high conviction rate is obtained. The working presumption
is not innocence until proven guilty but its reverse: guilty until proven innocent. Its informality can be likened to Max
Weber’s29 substantive rational or substantive irrational ideal types of law. Plea bargaining is but one of its essential
instruments. In both these models, according to Griffith,30 a battle metaphor is being employed . There are
contestants, there are winners and losers, there is one truth, there is a clean separation of law breaker and
victim, there is no inherent mechanism for individual or social repair. These battle metaphors
are supportive of master signifiers that are in line with it. Thus we can see how Deleuze’s notion of regimes of
signs may reflect each approach, crime control and due process model, but ultimately, the battle metaphor is
productive of master signifiers which captures various sentiments by its participants . Said in another
way, master signifiers populate the arena of crime fighting in particular ways. Drawing from Lacan’s
discourse of the master and discourse of the university, we could argue that participants, whichever ‘‘side’’
they are on, are offered discursive subject positions within particular regimes of sign where by
some realities are constructed, others are not. A third model of responding to harm is the actuarial model. 31
Having affinities with the crime control model, its focus is on prediction and maximizing efficiency in
processing. It is risk management. It focuses on statistical analysis and probabilities. Thus it employs an accounting
model. We thereby have highly trained specialists statistically examining potential risk cases in the aggregate. No fault law and strict
liability are some of its derivatives. We also have predictive instruments for assessing dangerousness , for
preventive detention practices, profiling (formal and informal), and especially since ‘‘9–11’’
extensive forms of surveillance of ‘‘problem populations.’’ Again, we see that the regimes of signs that emerge
are clearly delineated. Master signifiers are reflective of actuarial practices . The actuarial metaphor
subsumes oppositional views to simply one of the variables in statistical analysis that can be
accounted for. A fourth model of responding to harm has been developed by Griffith32 in his family model. The family
metaphor envisions society as a family, and its citizenry, the children. Occasionally, in this metaphor, children
make mistakes and need to be held accountable for their actions. We punish them, but then bring them
back into the family with love and care. Never do we allow their standing of law breaker to reach the level
of a master status. Griffith attempted to break away from the narrow thought of those in the battle model. He wanted to
establish a more humane, more conciliatory model. The battle model was predicated on ‘‘disharmony ,
fundamentally irreconcilable interests, a state of war.’’33 A family model, Griffith tells us, needs a new
vocabulary, a new language. ‘‘Crime’’ and the ‘‘offender’’ are merely categories created by society,
invested with various commitments by those in law enforcement and outside of it. Griffith34
argues against the exile function of the battle model and advocates ‘‘cooperative, constructive, conciliatory’’ responses. Thus for
Griffith, master signifiers would follow the family metaphor. Again, a regime of signs would reach stability within which persons
would have discursive subject positions from which to speak in ongoingly creating a model that represents the family. Of course,
we could further our inquiry and ask about the basic paternalism being also incorporated, the
basic privileging of the father’s voice in dominant familial practices, subjecting the child to
minimal responsive discursive subject positions.35 The fifth, and final model is restorative justice. Its more formal
beginnings can be traced to the early 1990s. Much of its focus has been derived from indigenous ways of problem solving as well as
The basic model is the victim–
Quaker’s philosophy of social justice. The family model, too, has affinities with it.
offender mediation program. Here the five elements include: the meeting (those in conflict
meet); narrative (each presents her/his story); emotion (each has a forum within which to
express emotions); understanding (the emergence of empathy); and agreement (a resolution to
the conflict is established). Resolution includes: amends, apology, behavioral change, restitution, and generosity.36 The
focus is on restoring the person (victim and offender, or disputants) back into society . In this model,
the regime of signs includes master signifiers that diverge substantially from the crime control,
due process, and actuarial model. Realities created, arguably, are more reflective: there is
more participation by the disputants; a greater range of diversity is supposedly manifest; and studies indicate that
these programs are ‘‘working’’ as measured by such criteria as happiness with results. A few recent books37 and several recent
we merely focus on the regime of
articles have subject this perspective to highly critical analysis. For our purposes here,
signs that this practice creates, and within which particular discursive subject positions operate.
A key critique has been that restorative justice is but another form of a disciplinary mechanism , first
encouraging participants/disputants to use the language of mediation, and secondly, should
they diverge, subject them to punishment – a return to traditional practices.

Semiotics has preceded materiality. The content of a “prison” points towards

notion of “delinquency” as a way to direct the social sphere towards classifying
and punishing criminals. Molecular formations of power have stratified
subjects in accordance to language and signs as a way to mark bodies within an
expression that points back towards the “prison” as the organizing force of
justice and law.
Deleuze and Guattari 80 (“A Thousand Plateaus”, France’s hottest hip-hop duo and possibly
hung out with Baudrillard, pg. 66-68)
Signifier enthusiasts take an oversimplified situation as their implicit model: word and thing.
From the word they extract the signifier, and from the thing a signified in conformity with the
word, and therefore subjugated to the signifier. They operate in a sphere interior to and
homogeneous with language. Let us follow Foucault in his exemplary analysis, which, though it seems not to be, is eminently
concerned with linguistics. Take a thing like the prison: the prison is a form, the "prison-form"; it is a
form of content on a stratum and is related to other forms of content (school, barracks, hospital, factory).
This thing or form does not refer back to the word "prison" but to entirely different words and
concepts, such as "delinquent" and "delinquency," which express a new way of classifying,
stating, translating, and even committing criminal acts. "Delinquency" is the form of expres sion
in reciprocal presupposition with the form of content "prison." Delin quency is in no way a
signifier, even a juridical signifier, the signified of which would be the prison. That would flatten
the entire analysis. More over, the form of expression is reducible not to words but to a set of state -
ments arising in the social field considered as a stratum (that is what a regime of signs is). The
form of content is reducible not to a thing but to a complex state of things as a formation of
power (architecture, regimentation, etc.). We could say that there are two constantly intersecting multiplicities, "discursive multiplicities" of
expression and "nondiscursive multiplicities" of content. It is even more complex than that because the prison as a form of content
has a relative expression all its own; there are all kinds of statements specific to it that do not
necessarily coincide with the statements of delinquency. Conversely, delinquency as a form of
expression has an autonomous content all its own, since delinquency expresses not only a new
way of evaluating crimes but a new way of committing them. Form of content and form of expression, prison
and delinquency: each has its own history, microhistory, segments. At most, along with other
contents and expressions, they imply a shared state of the abstract Machine acting not at all as a
signifier but as a kind of diagram (a single abstract machine for the prison and the school and the barracks and the hospital and the
fac tory . . . ). Fitting the two types of forms together, segments of content and segments of expression, requires a whole double-pincered, or rather
double-headed, concrete assemblage taking their real distinction into account. It requires a whole
organization articulating formations of power and regimes of signs, and operating on the
molecular level (societies characterized by what Foucault calls disciplinary power).29 In short, we should never oppose
words to things that supposedly correspond to them, nor signifiers to signifieds that are
supposedly in conformity with them. What should be opposed are distinct formalizations, in a state of unstable equilibrium or
reciprocal presupposition. "It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we
say."30 As in school: there is not just one writing lesson, that of the great redundant Signifier for any and all signifieds. There are two distinct
formalizations in reciprocal presupposition and constituting a double-pincer: the formalization of expression in the reading and writing lesson (with its
own relative contents), and the formalization of content in the lesson of things (with their own relative expressions). We are never signifier
or signified. We are stratified. The preferred method would be severely restrictive, as opposed to the expansive method that places
there exist forms of expression
signs on all strata or signifier in all signs (although at the limit it may forgo signs entirely). First,
without signs (for example, the genetic code has nothing to do with a language). It is only under
certain conditions that strata can be said to include signs; signs cannot be equated with
language in general but are defined by regimes of statements that are so many real usages or
functions of language. Then why retain the word sign for these regimes, which formalize an expression without designating or signifying
the simultaneous con tents, which are formalized in a different way? Signs are not signs of a thing; they are signs of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a certain threshold crossed in the course
of these movements, and it is for this reason that the word should be retained (as we have seen, this applies even to animal "signs"). Next,
if we consider regimes of signs using this restrictive definition, we see that they are not, or not necessarily, signifiers. Just as signs designate only a
signifiance itself designates only one specific regime
certain formalization of expression in a determinate group of strata,
among a number of regimes existing in that particular formalization . Just as there are asemiotic expressions, or
expressions without signs, there are asemiological regimes of signs, asignifying signs, both on the strata and on the plane of consistency. The most that
can be said of signifiance is that it characterizes one regime, which is not even the most interesting or modern or contempo rary one, but is perhaps
only more pernicious, cancerous, and despotic than the others, and more steeped in illusion than they.
Images of thought based in law and justice populate the organic regime,
allowing for the belief in stable formation and subjectivity as a way to bring the
next harmonious free society. This linear view of truth and representation seen
through trials and investigations creates principles of coherence and stability
that label themselves as the bringer of peace and order in the face of chaos,
permeating every level of thought, action, and communication.
Milovanovic 7 (Dragan Milovanovic is a distinguished PhD research professor in the Justice
Studies Program at Northeastern Illinois University and also the editor of the International
Journal for the Semiotics of Law, “Diversity, law, and justice: A Deleuzian semiotic view of
‘criminal justice’” in The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, March 2007, Pgs 67-69)
Images of thought Let us look at these five models in terms of a Deleuzian analysis as we can tease out of his two-volume series on
We will argue that the issue of diversity and tolerance, particularly in law and justice
the cinema.
are connected with our images of thought during a particular epic. These images of thought are
constitutive of a particular form of regime of signs within which particular discursive subject
positions are offered and particular forms of signifiers attain stable form – together, from
which particular realities can be created. Deleuze’s complex typology of images and signs provide the elements for
understanding how shots are framed and what effect they have. Deleuze distinguishes between ‘‘organic regimes’’ and ‘‘crystalline
An image, following Deleuze, can be considered ‘‘an
regimes.’’ Each is concerned with an image of thought.
ensemble or set of logical relations that are in a state of continual transformation. ’’38 An image
of thought, for Deleuze, is often historically specific. 39 Thus, his two books on cinema explore two semiotics, one
focusing on time, one on movement. ‘‘Each era thinks itself,’’ says Rodowick,40 ‘‘by producing its particular image of thought.’’
Thought has a certain image by which it thinks. 41 Deleuze applies it to two eras of the movie industry: prior to
WW2 identified as the ‘‘classic’’ model which is preoccupied with the ‘‘movement image’’; and after WW2, called ‘‘modern,’’
We
focused on the ‘‘time-image.’’ He further calls the first the ‘‘organic’’, the second, ‘‘crystalline.’’ Let us briefly describe each.
will then show how the previous five models of criminal justice have affinities with the organic
regime, whereas the crystalline regime will be closely aligned with transformative justice (social
justice) we develop in a section below. The organic regime organizes vibratory flows in terms of
a ‘‘movement-image.’’ That is, truth is developed by rational divisions implicating universals or
totalities. In other words, actions are conceived in a linear way, in terms of the linkage of action to
reaction. Wilhelm Worringer,42 a German art historian, can be credited with the original characteristics of this regime. According
to Rodowick’s interpretation, ‘‘organic forms express a harmonious unit y where humanity feels at one
with the world. Here representations are based on natural forms and are sustained by the belief
that natural laws support and lend them truth.’’ Thus the organic regime is about determinism,
predictability, certainty, unity, totality, and identity. The past is connected with the present, the present with
determinable happenings in the future. Truth, in this view, is not problematic. It requires its negation of the false in order to be able
to actively negate it.43
It is based on a logos, a teleological principle of linear movement. It also has
implications for judgment. According to Rodowick,44 ‘‘in the course of an investigation, a trial , or a
conflict, we presume that one party will ultimately – finally and teleologically – represent the
side of the right and the true.’’ And ultimately, ‘‘along with protagonists, witnesses, and jurors, we
are put in the position not only of judging what is true or false, but also of knowing that we will
finally be right.’’45 Thus, in short, in the organic regime, truth can only be ‘‘found , discovered, or
described.’’ Deleuze’s view of signs in relation to imagery is a complex one. Deleuze follows Bergson, particularly his remarkable
book Matter and Memory, with the ontological assumption that the world is made up of images in movement acting much like
billiard balls.46 They obey the causal laws of physics. Living entities are distinguishable in so much as they may break the normal
stimulusresponse schema and in this pause are able to respond in novel ways. Accordingly, these are ‘‘centers of indetermination’’
which, through experience, organize themselves in various ‘‘sensory motor schemas’’ that coordinate actions, feelings, and
perceptions. Deleuze builds on Bergson to specify six kinds of images each of which can be represented by at least three signs. As
Bogue47 tells us, ‘‘the signs of the movement-image, which are the signs of the classic cinema [organic regime], ultimately conform
to the coordinates of that commonsense world.’’ Film directors, then, invoke various commonsense understandings in the viewer by
manipulating various signs representing these six images. But, again , reality construction by the viewer is linear
tending toward unity, coherence, and stability . In applying this analysis to our concerns, we
posit a seventh image operative in the criminal justice system,48 call it a juridic-image. It’s
‘‘composition’’ includes two diametrically apposed signs, one indicating disorder, the other
order. ‘‘Genetically,’’ it can be traced back to a mythical debate between Hobbes representing imagery of the ‘‘state of nature’’
where there is a perpetual ‘‘war of all against all’’ and Rousseau who posits a collectively and rationally developed social contract as
a peaceful, law-abiding alternative.
Thus we could identify an order-sign, disorder-sign, and a hobbsrouss-
sign. What remains an undercurrent in the various spheres of the criminal justice system is a
collective imagery of this conflict between Hobbes and Rousseau, disorder versus order. That is, signs of
disorder seem ubiquitous; but signs of order just as quickly emerge as the antidote. It
permeates every level. It is implicit in decisionmaking and is the background horizon of
thought and action. It permeates each of the six movement-images and the 18 signifiers (or more) offered by Deleuze. In
short, the hobbsrous-sign is much like a master signifier posited by Lacan. We only mention at this point that change in the
criminal justice system will be difficult to the degree that this underlying imagery and sign
system continues to inform thought and action at the various levels of the criminal justice
system. We need alternative images and signs.

Punitive regimes of signs condone the management of risk and repression in

the name of surveying, governing, and preserving the freedom of the law. This
inflexible code of politics lays the foundation for destruction and violence
against populations given the sign of “criminal”, pointing back towards the
prison as the necessary mode of capture.
Lippens 10 (Ronnie Lippens is a Professor at Keele University and has expertise in fields
related to crime and crime prevention, community safety, and organisational dynamics, “Law,
Code and Late Modern Governance in Prophetic Painting: Notes on Jackson Pollock, Mark
Rothko and Gilles Deleuze” in Prospects of Legal Semiotics, September 20 2010, https://doi-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1007/978-90-481-9343-1_6)

Late modern repression may however take a number of shapes and forms. In one, perceived threats to the
possibility of free circulation, or, to be more precise, to the possibility of choice in circulation (or
the choice of circulation), are considered as mere physical mass that needs to be shifted around,
managed, or destroyed. The real target of the intervention here is the physical, or mechanical rigidity which this mass is
alleged to carry within it. In criminal justice, for example, there has been talk for some time now about the move
to what Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon (1994) once termed actuarial justice. By that they meant the growing
inclination, in criminal justice practice and procedure, to ignore the import of the singularity of
individual defendants’ capacities and make-up, and to rely, instead, on the stochastic
processing of populations, of masses, or indeed, of mass. Feeley and Simon stressed the point that the “logic”
here is an actuarial one. But that may be only part of the story. The actuary makes his calculations in order to
insure against what is deemed to be unavoidable “risk”. But the trend in criminal justice practice
and, more broadly, governance, may already have moved beyond mere managerial “insurance”
against “risk”. In many cases the dominant logic in criminal justice and in governance is now provided by the precautionary
principle (e.g. Pieterman and Hanekamp 2002, Pieterman 2008). According to this principle governance should
not just aim to insure against risk, but should simply prevent all risk, by any means possible if
deemed necessary. Instruments such as Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (deployed against the perceived rigidity of disturbing
bio-mass), or a block on GM-foods (against the perceived rigidity of “unnatural” genetic codes), are only a few manifestations of the
precautionary principle. Repression can also take the form of punitive interventions whereby those
who threaten conditions of free circulation and choice (e.g. the robber, or the bank manager who refuses to
extend easy credit, and the manager who does extend easy credit easily, and so on) are made to feel, physically, how
their rigidity is obstructive and therefore unwanted. Here the offender is reduced to his biological substrate. He
is a mere biological organism. As with mere physical mass, there is no point in engaging in communication with mere organisms.
Mass one shoves around, neutralizes, or destroys. Biological organisms, one makes them feel. Authors such as Nicola Lacey ( 2007)
criminal justice procedure the emphasis is no longer on defendants’
have, recently, noticed how in
capacities (e.g. their capacity for change or self-transformation), but, rather, on their character.
Character, almost by definition, is fixed, unchangeable, indeed, almost biological. One does not
communicate with character. One makes it feel. Both forms of governance (i.e. the management
of rigid, inflexible, and unconstrained mass, and the taming of rigid, inflexible, and
unconstrained flesh) share some common ground. Both target unresponsiveness. Neither
presupposes or requires an interest in the inner self. Using existentialist words one could say that late modern governance has lost
at least some of the typically modern interest in the singularity of surveying, pondering,
deliberating, deciding and choosing selves. We will get back to this issue later. But a few words can be said here.
Where modern governance, on the whole, was interested in finding out about how selves survey their being-in-the-world,
how they ponder and deliberate upon this, how, in short, they choose, this interest is now
gradually crumbling away. There is now less a need to find out about the singularly particular
workings of inner selves, since the typically modern zeal to tap into their potential, to harness
their energy, to exploit them, to knead and mould them, to discipline them, to normalize them,
to guide and steer them towards predetermined goals and into projects, has nearly completely
dissipated. The age of construction, modern construction is over. Much in this picture might be underpinned, one could argue,
by a form of life—a Nietzschean concept—that emerged in what we now call the late modern era. This is the form of life of
a post-material generation whose main preoccupation it is to safeguard nomadic freedom of
choice and circulation, or better still: choice of circulation, much less the construction of new,
institutionalized futures. This is a form of life whereby, beaconless, one must constantly deal with, or attempt control over
“the emergency of [continuous, unrelenting, RL] emergence” (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2009, p. 17). It’s the very same
form of life whereby eagerly circulating nomads must deal with, or assert control over
anything that carries a rigid, inflexible code. The word “generation” is used loosely here; it refers to an
attitude and to practices which by no means are spread evenly across populations, although
elements in the culturally dominant demographic or segments in late modern consumer
societies may harbour or manifest more of such an attitude and practices than others . In this
form of life there is no need for communication, and even less for the transformation of self.
One does not communicate with mere mass or with mere biological organisms. There is nothing in them that could be transformed.
After the end of the age of construction, there is nothing to communicate about, there is nothing to transform to. Even the joint
consumption of commodity-image in what Michel Maffesoli (1996) has called “neo-tribes” does not require communication; only
experience. As we will argue later the embryonic phase of this form of life emerged, faintly, during the immediate post-war years,
say somewhere between 1945 and 1955. Fully-fledged, however, it only crystallized about two decades later. We will return to this
Much of the literature
embryonic phase later. Let us explore this post-material, post-constructive form of life a little more.
on current developments in criminal justice and governance focus on the management of “risk”
(and therefore also of opportunity) in “risk societies”, or on the prevention and near-total
blocking off of potential “risk” (and opportunity), in precautionary societies. But “risk” may not be the
core target of a post-material, non-constructive consumer generation. Indeed, it is this very same generation that has produced
what sociologists call edgework, i.e. the wilful seeking of, engagement in, and experimentation with all kinds of risk-taking and risk-
exploring behaviour. This includes e.g. base-jumping, sky-diving, hiking in the great outdoors, and so on, as well as -why not?- hedge-
fund investments, speculation on financial markets, sub-prime crediting, and so on. In all these activities, “risk” is not so much a
problem, as a resource. A few years ago Stephen Lyng (2004) showed how edgeworkers take themselves in a zone beyond all code.
Beyond the reach of rigid, unresponsive and external constraints embodied in legal and institutional codes, in social codes, in any
code actually, edgeworkers move into a free zone where in some cases only the mere law of nature—the physical law of mass and
the biological one of organism—is left to deal with. The control of nature, the control of mass and organism, is what edgeworkers
hope to achieve. It is this control, or at least sense of control, argues Lyng, that allows the edgeworker to regain a sense of self. If
Lyng’s analysis of edgework is anything to go by, then the post-material, non-constructive consumer generation, roaming and
swerving, as they tend to do, do not necessarily have a problem with risk per se. But they do seem to have a serious problem with a
Codes are by definition unresponsive, rigid, and threaten to curtail
lack of control over all kinds of codes.
or constrain the self’s potential for choice and circulation, or again: its potential to choose the
form of circulation, or the modalities of the form of circulation it might wish to engage in. That
is why edgeworkers tend to escape to an imaginary free zone of circulation, outside the reach of codes. In the face of the only code
that cannot be escaped—the law of nature, or sheer nature—the edgeworker becomes one with it, and in that moment, or in this
zone, he, and he alone (or at least that’s how he imagines it), chooses freely (that is: un-coded, or coded only by nature’s law itself)
how to respond to, indeed control mere mass and organism. This should provide him with a naturally skilful self that, once returned
to the human world, will know how to deal with all the rigid and unresponsive codes, indeed with the mass and organisms there. If
this applies to the extreme world of edgework, it may also colour the attitudes and practices within the broader post-material
generation more generally. There too nature, or the environment, often tends to be imagined as a free zone, as a zone of free
circulation, that needs to be protected from the codes of human intervention. Human intervention, in this imaginary, particularly if it
takes the shape of development and construction, cannot be anything but rigid and destructive of choice and circulation. Nature has
no need for development and construction. Nature is complete. Out of free circulation, nature magically produces harmony (or so it
is then believed). The name of this “magic” is responsiveness. The only thing that needs to be done is to keep at bay, or if necessary
to destroy everything that threatens to disrupt or block this magic of nature. Nothing needs to be constructed, and so there is
nothing to communicate about. Like nature itself, the post-material self’s imaginary world is a, nay the natural one. In this imaginary
world, harmony emerges spontaneously out of freely choosing and freely circulating natural selves. These selves choose and
circulate, and choose their form of circulation, responsively. That means they choose and circulate flexibly, with a certain measure of
self-constraint that comes naturally. These selves do not carry within them and do not operate according to a rigid, inflexible code
(responsive self-constraint could not exist if there were such rigidity within the self). This post-material imaginary world is one that
Anything that carries or operates according to a rigid
needs no further construction or reconstruction either.
code (a virus, a radical extremist, an “anti-social” element, and so on) should be kept at bay,
managed, neutralized or destroyed. That’s all. There’s no need to reason with such rigidity.
There’s no point in communicating with them. It makes no sense to try and transform their
operative code, their “inner self”. Rigid mass and organism, their “code” is unchangeable
anyway.
 Death Penalty

Abolishment of the death penalty is incomplete without addressing the larger

structure of neoliberal governmentality that can now exercise power through
the decision to let live or die within criminal practices.
Sitze 9 (Adam Sitze is assistant professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst
College, “Capital Punishment as a Problem for the Philosophy of Law”, The New Centennial
Review , fall 2009, Vol. 9, No. 2 (fall 2009), pp. 252-254 Published by: Michigan State University
Press)

Norberto Bobbio has argued that debate over the death penalty must be limited to "the question of
whether it is morally and/or juridically permis- sible for the state to kill in order to punish, even
with all the procedural guarantees of a constitutional state" (1996 [1990], 143-44). Yet if poena capi- talis is
the impossible but necessary paradigm with reference to which the modern theory of the death penalty struggles
to attain its coherence and integrity , then a limitation of Bobbios type will not only foreclose upon our understanding
of the genesis and basis of the death penalty itself, but will also foreclose upon our understanding of the way that abolitionism
carries within itself a silent affirmation of the very practice it wants to ban, thus enabling the
death penalty to survive its own elimination. Look again at Foucaulťs argument about the conditions under which
death penalty aboli- tionism emerged. Writing in 1976, Foucault argued that "[a] s soon as power gave itself the
function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise- and not the
awakening of humanitarian feelings- made it more and more difficult to apply the death penalty.
How could power exercise its highest prerogative by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure,
sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order ?" (1978 [1976], 136). Under these conditions, Foucault argued,
"the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to make live or to cast out
into death [de re- jeter dans la mort]" (1978 [1976], 138). As Esposito warns (2002, 162), it would be a mistake to adopt a
mechanical interpretation of Foucaulťs argument about the "various forms" of the state's right to kill in a mechanical way, as if
"taking life" and "letting die" were mutually exclusive (and, indeed, Foucault elsewhere argued that "letting die" did not "replace"
but "complemented" the right of the sword [2003 {1997}, 241]). But if we frame the debate over the death penalty in the way that
Bobbio recommends, we’re bound to make just this mistake, only in reverse. in reverse. We'll find ourselves in a position
where we owe our very ability to question and criticize the death penalty to the emergence
and even dominance of a biopolitical problematic, yet where we remain unable to speak to
the form of state killing (or "thanatopolitics") that is coeval with and specific to biopolitics (the
sovereign power to let die). It is unclear, however, why we would want abolitionism to remain silent
on this mode of state killing, this "indirect murder" (Foucault 2003 [1997], 256) that is so normal
a state of affairs within neoliberal governmentality. What would we gain by criticizing capital
punishment while also consenting, in and through our silence, to the practice of poena capitalis
that is specific to the biopolitical epoch? What would be the point of the weed only to leave its
root intact? Why would we want abolitionism, this plainly biopolitical discourse, to resist taking its own premises to their logical
conclusion?9 Against Bobbios framing of the debate, let us therefore maintain that poena capitalis is more than just an arcane and
abstract concept from Roman Law. Let us entertain the hypothesis that it is the very root of the state’s right to kill-
what we might call, varying Goodrich (2003, 212), its ju- ridical unconscious . On this read, poena
capitalis is not only the example that silently governs the way the state wants (but fails) to exercise to its power
to take life. It is also the paradigm according to which the state exercises (while also disavowing)
its power to let die.
The attempt to abolish the death penalty cedes justice and power to the prison
regime as the determiner of bodies. This creates a separation of humanity and
life that allows for the interpersonal thought of disposal and punishment.
Sitze 9 (Adam Sitze is assistant professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst
College, “Capital Punishment as a Problem for the Philosophy of Law”, The New Centennial
Review , fall 2009, Vol. 9, No. 2 (fall 2009), pp. 246-248 Published by: Michigan State University
Press)
If, however, we push this demonic reading just a bit further, we become capable of a much different way to understand "In the
Penal Colony," one that is no less paradoxical but far less tortuous. It emerges once we pose our very relation to Kafka's text- our
reading or, better, our inability to read- as a problem for the philosophy of law (as a chance, that is to say, to critical inquire into the
horizons of our own juridical experience). On these terms, it becomes possible to see that our relation to the
neutral narrative voice that emerges in the concluding passages of Kafka's text poses, in the
form of a hermeneutic predicament, the same question we will need to think through if we are
to undo, rather than repeat, the schism between person and liv- ing being that governs the two
exemplary modern theories of the death penalty. This is because the way in which the anonymous voice in Kafka's
text resists our reading is precisely the way in which "life" manifests itself when we attempt to render it
intelligible within the regime of the person , and because the attributes of our hermeneutic
experience at this instant - the impasses and enigmas that force themselves upon our reading, the collapse of disinterested
interest into an immanent relation of inter-esse , our desire to achieve hermeneutic certainty and security
within a textual space that seems specifically designed to exclude both- are the same
attributes of our biopolitical experience under conditions where, on the one hand, life is the
highest good, yet where, on the other, the rights of the person seem to be more
unquestionable than ever. Put simply, the "machine" in which we find ourselves when we read Kafka's text is the same
machine that informs and governs the debate over the death penalty today: the dispositif of the person. There are certainly in
Kafka's text a couple of bad ways to attempt the deactivation of this dispositif. The Officer personifies an attempt to deacti- vate the
machine by subjecting his life to a "correct" representation of the illegible imperative that governs it: he seeks "to do
justice" to life or "to get life right," and his equivocal death is the inescapable result of this
desire. The Traveler, by contrast, accepts the impossibility of "correctly" representing life, but only then in order to attempt to
secure himself against that impossibil- ity, to achieve freedom from the trap of constitutively unjust representation simply by casting
off from the space of literature once and for all (as if we could resolve the problem of unreadability simply by ceasing to read). But
there is also a third relation at work in "In the Penal Colony": Kafka's rede- ployment of the third person as the impersonal. This
the impersonal is coextensive with
redeployment is not, of course, a "merely" literary device. As Esposito has argued,
the field of biopolitics more generally, and even presents us with a mode of life in relation to
which we become able to think through an affirmative biopolitics (2010b, §5). This is because in Kafkas use
of the impersonal we find a way to think about the relation between person and living being that does not
presuppose, as its premise, the necessity of reca- pitulating the separation of person and living
being. The inescapable errancy that is forced upon us by Kafkas use of the neutral, anonymous narrator at the close of "In the
Penal Colony" is neither an "absence" of personality (a life lacking the mask of the person) nor a simple "failure" of representation- it
a problem that can be "solved" through better and better procedures of
is not, in other words,
accuracy, security, and certainty (or what Heidegger would call Sichereit). It is simply a form of life that coincides
completely with its own mode of expression. Because of this complete coincidence of essence and mode (which is not the same as
complete self-identity, because it is precisely the absence of any identity or self), the impersonal is constitutively
incapable of relating to part of itself as a "thing" that is at the disposal of another of its parts. And
this, in turn, has an important implication for the debate over the death penalty as it is today conducted. The impersonal is
that form of life in which there is no point of leverage for the depersonalization that is the
necessary condition for Kant's justification of the death penalty.
 Drugs
Their mobilization of fear about drugs is symptomatic of capital’s capturing
zones of becoming – reproduces their impacts
Fitzgerald 15
[John L Fitzgerald is an associate professor of criminology at Melbourne University, “Drugs and
Transitional Economies,” ch 10 in Framing Drug Use Bodies, Space, Economy and Crime, 2015,
Palgrave Macmillan, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137482242_10]

Massumi notes the problems with locating the production of the subject form in a discourse of
psychoanalytic abjection (1993, pp. 30–34). Traditional abjection rests on the notion of the
projection of individual fantasies and desires onto collective processes, where the boundaries
between self and other, although porous, are structurally intact. The self is substantively a
bounded space and boundaries, conceived of as founding, make the limitative constitutive. For
Massumi, the constitutive function of the boundary is at odds with contemporary renderings of
late capitalism. The promise of a cultural boundary transcendent through time is
incommensurate with a late capitalism that incorporates boundary in its process.

Negri proposes that global capitalism underwent substantial changes in the 1970s and 1980s
(1988). These changes centred on, first, the fluidification of labour force and capital; second, the
rapid displacement of capital and third, an intensification of life through the subsumption of
many social functions to productive capital. Following from Negri, Massumi posits how these
changes link to the function of becoming-other in modern global capitalism.

Massumi (1993) suggests that implicit in the changes to modern global capitalism is an
indeterminacy in relations between identity and the production of the subject-form in capitalist
production to the extent that identities themselves become isomorphic with capital . As capital
transforms so too does subjectivity. The modern subject form must possess the capacity to
become-generic. As Massumi suggests,

‘the generic itself mutates, from an empty container of being to a teeming site of
transformation’. The subject-form that fails to transform, or fails to be amenable to
capitalization through transformation, becomes unproductive and fails. Massumi denotes
becoming-generic as fabulation and becoming-specific as simulation. Both are mutually
supplementing aspects of becoming. One establishes form and boundary while the other
consumes boundary. For Massumi, fabulation is abjection:

To fabulate is throw off the very form of identity in the process of singularizing one’s specificity.
It is to gather up one’s ground. It is to become the free-fall one formerly bought into being. It is
pure fear, fear as such, uncontained by identity, unintersected by the axes of the capitalist
equation. (Massumi, 1993, p. 34)

Connecting to the matter of the world by becoming a model of the world is abjection. There is
no anxiety in this movement, only total fear as the individual becomes of the world. Fear itself is
the engine room for the productive and incorporative force of capitalism as it produces new
subject forms.
The derelict zones of drug use are the engines of late capitalism, not because they are abject,
but because they are moments of difference where desire seeks to escape bodily limitation .
Fear is the affect that announces the becoming-body. The movement of matter-energy into
affect fuels the excitement of city space. No wonder stories about city no-go zones are
newsworthy. The force of capital is such that derelict spaces are both incorporated, annihilated
and proliferated. Derelict zones are not fixed to spatio-temporal coordinates because they will
appear somewhere else in the city grid by virtue of the activities of the apparatuses of capture.
So long as late capitalism produces boundaries and captures space there will always by
derelict zones and a city-becoming-other.

Massumi suggests that we should cherish these derelict spaces as part of a resistance to the
molar machines that capture life (1993, p. 104). The strategy is to neither attempt to stop
people from injecting drugs nor encourage injecting drug use. Drug use is perhaps not the basis
of fear. The task is not to try and stop the immune responses of the city, as they are a central
feature of modern capitalism. Rather, the key objective is to minimize the force of violence
applied to bodies involved in the encounter.

What an encounter can do

How easily people engage with the pleasures of the city, knowing they too are plugging into the
city’s lifeblood in an effort to draw out some energy, to become-other. This highlights the
arbitrariness of the assemblage in which people participate. How clearly the chaos of the city, of
capitalism, of the mix of productive and non-productive bodies can overcome the city walker.
The chaos gets captured by machines and formed into bodies and affects. Media machines don’t
just mediate this capture. The capture brings together any number of self-reproducing systems
of business, governmental and para-governmental bodies that thrive on the threat of death
(Massumi, 1998).

Through maps of no-go zones media machines mobilize fear as affect, and thus value , from the
mix. It should be noted that fear is not synonymous with emotion, and is not simply an
interpretant. As an affect, fear inheres in bodies to establish a potential for acting in the world
(Thrift, 2004). Fear is a potential, a vitality, it tells us our bodies are in the world and in particular
relations to other bodies in the world. The actualization of affect involves machines that,
through locating fear in media narratives (either pictorial or textual), can derive surplus value
from the transformation of affect into a commodity form. Once in a commodity form a surplus
value of flow or ghost surplus value can be extracted from the commodity exchange (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987, p. 451)

Mass media circulation of violence-legitimating affect heightens drugwar paranoia. Death,

AIDS and military-like interventions by police become necessary to ward off the threat of
death (Massumi, 1993, p. 45). This capture and transformation is tantamount to the
subsumption of society to capital, when circulation and production become blurred, and when
becomings and deterritorializations create surplus value (Massumi, 1993, p. 57). Crime,
especially crime against the community such as street drug crime, stands as a limit case for the
threshold between command and normative control systems. Encounters are recaptured and
capitalism sucks value from these encounters through the production of fear as affect. State
function through command and control relies on the encounter for its legitimation and for the
alignment of boundaries between these two deployments of power. An encounter can do many
things, and all encounters involve and produce bodies in assemblages. While capitalism thrives
on derelict zones and those moments of becoming in assemblages, there is no guarantee of
what will emerge from an assemblage.

Drug markets are the incorporation of desire that spills beyond bodily
limitation into capital
Fitzgerald 15
[John L Fitzgerald is an associate professor of criminology at Melbourne University, “Drugs and
Transitional Economies,” ch 10 in Framing Drug Use Bodies, Space, Economy and Crime,
Palgrave Macmillan, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137482242_10]

New drug market theories are concerned with how subjectivity is linked to the processes of
modern capitalism. This concern involves two important deviations from orthodox social science
theories. The first is that subjectivity can change in relation to market activity, the second is that
modern capitalism is defined by capital having an internal logic of adaptation, mutation and self-
organization. Capital is commonly referred to as immanent.

Following from Deleuze and Guattari, Olkowski sees capital as a field of immanence, a process
that captures flows of desire and the production of changes in the form and shape of bodies
(1999, p. 112). Capital relies on the transformation of the world through different states and
forms, and generates itself through these transformations and modulations (referred to as
‘becoming-other’). Drug use facilitates becoming-other, and as such is a risky, but highly sought
after enterprise (Fitzgerald, 1998; Fitzgerald and Threadgold, 2004). The becoming-body is the
force of social change and a force for capital. The body-becomingother is both the site for
ruptures in the apparatus of capture and the site of re-capitalization. The body-becoming is a
most valuable site as it is at once both marginal and central to the production of capital
(Massumi, 1992).

Rose and others following from Deleuze (1995) note that immanent systems have arisen in late
capitalism to attempt to actualize identity and to control the marginal (Massumi, 1992; Haggerty
and Ericson, 2000; Rose, 2000). These apparatuses of capture attempt to control crime, drug
use, sexuality and other aspects of life through self-organizing systems . A feature of these
apparatuses is the lack of an over-arching logic to their concerns, epistemology or form of
capture. Crime prevention, pharmaceutical control and health promotion are in their attempts
to control the becoming-body, also fuelled by it. The becoming-body is at once both the site of
irruption and the site of great productivity in late capitalism.

Massumi makes the distinction between two forms of expansion under global capitalism,
extensive and intensive. Extensive expansion reflects other commentator’s observations that
capitalism pushes its geographical boundaries across previously undercapitalized domains. The
expansion of European and North American financial interests into Central Asia and following
the fall of communism in Eastern Europe is a classic example of extensive expansion. The
creation of foreign debt through international loans and structural adjustment processes are
primary points for managing national economies (Massumi, 1992). Intensive expansion reflects
the capacity of capitalism to dominate the ‘last oases of domestic space’, or, as Negri would
describe, the subsumption of undercapitalized aspects of everyday life to capital. It is to the
relationship between subjectivity and capitalism that I now turn to examine how subjectivity
itself has become a ‘ghost surplus value’ in global capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984, p.
451).

Subjectivity in global capitalism becomes isomorphic with capital. Subjectivity is disengaged with
the ‘human’ and becomes mobilized as a commodity, as a site for investment in and of itself .
Massumi links the disengagement of subjectivity from the subject to the disengagement of the
commodity from its Marxian labour relation:

The commodity has become a form of capital with its own motor of exchange (fashion, style,
‘self-improvement’) and cycle of realization (image accumulation/image shedding; Kruger’s
‘buying in order to be’). Its value is now defined more by the desire it arouses than by the
amount of labour that goes into it. (Massumi, 1992, p. 200)

Surplus value is created in the process of circulation itself. The value of commodity-images is
attached more to their exchange than to their material production. This Deleuze and Guattari
call the ‘surplus value of flow’. Whenever surplus value is extracted in an act of purchase an
‘evanescent double of what accrues to the capitalist is deposited in the hands of the consumer’.
This ghost surplus value is an ‘aura, style, cool, the glow of self-worth, personality’; it is an affect
trafficked in order to become-other (Massumi, 1992, p. 135).

According to Massumi, modern subjectivity has not simply been subordinated to the commodity
relation, it has become the product of consumer exchange (1992, p. 201). This does not mean
that everybody can – through the consumption of affects to become-other – transform their
living conditions. Although a body’s transformational potential is indexed to its buying power (p.
137), not all bodies are able to buy the affects necessary to become-other. A body’s relative
social position is defined more by how money flows through it, not how much money flows
through it.

More importantly, the poor are those who are in a position to only receive surplus value
predominately in the form of prestige value. Massumi notes the importance of style in the
ghetto to illustrate the cultural significance of how the surplus value of flow gets accumulated in
bodies.

People no longer define themselves primarily by what they do for a living, but by what they love,
what they eat or wear and where they go. Even though not every body is a capitalist every body
consumes and therefore every body accumulates surplus value, at least in its ghost form of
subjective ‘prestige’. The poor are neither those who do not receive surplus value, nor
necessarily those who have less money to spend – in one month more money passes through
the hands of a small-time drug dealer of the inner city underclass than many a bourgeois makes
in a year. (Massumi, 1992, p. 203)
Having more money is no guarantee of social capacity. Consumption of the affects to become-
other is a key mechanism for the production of subjectivity, through the accumulation of
prestige. This is most significant for those in transitional economies where the consumption of
Western commodities carries additional value as a sign of engaging with the trappings of
modernity. Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) note the cultural significance of making sense of the
magic of modernity in African transitional settings. The rise of occult economies or the
deployment of magical means for material ends is pronounced in ‘postrevolutionary’ societies.
Similarly, the internalization of Western consumerist imagery by dispossessed young people in
Almaty, Kazakhastan is central to the involvement of young people in drug dealing (Rigi, 2003).
Taussig’s complex account of the magic of cocaine and its impact on a coastal Columbian town
should also be noted as an illustration that postcolonial subjectivity is intimately linked to the
magic of consumption of illicit commodities (2004). When drug users inject in these
environments, they are not just injecting the drug, they are also accumulating surplus value
from the prestige of injecting drug use as a Western technology to become-other

This is a crucial link in understanding the cultural significance of the expansion of injecting drug
use in transitional economies and is an alternative to the social pathology posited in the
orthodox account of escalating injecting drug use. It should also come as no surprise that this
account may have some significance in understanding cultural trends in injecting drug use in
post-industrial environments. If consuming a drug is a site for the production of subjectivity
through an accumulation of prestige, drug consumers are implicated regardless of the
macroeconomic environment. Not all drug users are capitalists, but they are all consumers.

With subjectivity intimately linked to dangerous consumption, illegal drug markets do more than
provide flows of capital. Illegal drug markets are formative in developing new consumers . Illegal
drug markets mobilize a range of affects as they enable the formation of identity through the
prestige, vertigo and frisson of modern consumption. Modern consumption mobilizes many
affects, the most important of which is the promise of hope. The power of hope – for change,
for a better life and to be a Western consumer – should not be underestimated as an end in
itself. Making new consumers is not simply a behavioural achievement (that is, instilling new
forms of shopping) it involves the propagation of dreams for a good life through goods, tastes
and novel corporeal experiences. Illegal drugs can be thought of in the same terms as simple
commodities such as sugar, tea and coffee (UNODC, 2004, p. 61), but they do so much more in
providing pleasure and hope for change on so many levels. Drug markets are central to intensive
expansion as they effectively mobilize affects to become-other in many ways.
 Education
Their model of education assumes a model of knowledge and power that is
bound up with governance and discipline, neoliberalism and biopolitics. Their
deferral to experts ensures biopolitical normalization and micro-fascism. Only
by understanding education as a process of concept-creation can learning be
placed in the service of life and can politics emerge anew.
Colebrook 17
[Claire, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and cultural
theorist, “What Is This Thing Called Education?” Qualitative Inquiry, Vol 23 Iss 9, pgs 649 – 655,
September 1st 2017, https://journals-sagepub-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1177/1077800417725357?
utm_source=summon&utm_medium=discovery-provider]

For Stiegler, like Heidegger, the problem of education—its possibility of falling back into nothing
more than the manufacture of subjects—is distinctly opposed to mere animality; only Dasein for
Heidegger can be inauthentic (thinking of itself as a thing among things), while for Stiegler, only
a human can be stupid. I would suggest that there’s something salutary in this tradition of
thinking of education as something essentially distinct from a human science, and of tying
education to philosophy, where the latter is not a discipline (in the sense of a specific terrain of
know-how or expertise) but a not knowing. However, I would also suggest that as long as the
potentiality of philosophy/education is seen as a potentiality of humans/Dasein, it risks taking
on the form of magisterial pronouncement that allowed Heidegger to dismiss the world as it is
in favor of a radical futurity. This risk is dealt with in the work of Deleuze and Guattari in their
theorization of microfascism, and in Foucault for whom education is self-formation that is
necessarily bound up with both aspects of governance and discipline (political and personal).
Rather than see philosophy as born in a moment of Athenian glory, and then falling into the
noise and dispersal of empire, civics, and discipline, Foucault looks at a history of technologies
of the self in which processes of self-formation are inextricably intertwined with ways of
knowing, doing, and governing (both self-governance and the governance of social bodies).
What we know now as “philosophy” and (later) as the human sciences comes about through a
history of knowledge practices and forms of self-relation that will eventually lead to biopolitics
and neoliberalism. Rather than a series of practices that pose problems about living well for
bodies in relation to pleasures and others, “life” enables selves to be managed as parts of a
population. Foucault’s later work on biopolitics and neoliberalism stresses the extent to which
arts of the self, or problems of truth posed by self to self and among selves, give way to a
conception of economic life generating (without our knowing) the order of existence. Quite
unlike Heidegger, there is no grandiose diagnosis of the new relations among selfhood and
practices of truth; what is evident is that the conception of the human sciences is bound up with
a specific relation of knowledge and power that increasingly allows for governance to become
merely managerial. In Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? and Deleuze’s philosophy in
general, a philosophical potentiality in education and an educational power in philosophy are
directly related to their critique of (and contempt for) totalitarianism and fascism. More
importantly, they inflect the openness and potentiality of philosophy with the positive task of
creation and invention:

To know oneself, to learn to think, to act as if nothing were self-evident-wondering, “wondering

that there is being”-these, and many other determinations of philosophy create interesting
attitudes, however tiresome they may be in the long run, but even from a pedagogical point of
view they do not constitute a well-defined occupation or precise activity. On the other hand, the
following definition of philosophy can be taken as being decisive: knowledge through pure
concepts. But there is no reason to oppose knowledge through concepts and the construction of
concepts within possible experience on the one hand and through intuition on the other. For,
according to the Nietzschean verdict, you will know nothing through concepts unless you have
first created them-that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them : a field, a plane, and
a ground that must not be confused with them but that shelters their seeds and the personae
who cultivate them. Constructivism requires every creation to be a construction on a plane that
gives it an autonomous existence. To create concepts is, at the very least, to make something.
This alters the question of philosophy’s use or usefulness, or even of its harmfulness (to whom is
it harmful?). (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 7)

Key to the force of their work is their attribution of the power of problems to life. Foucault
argues that education becomes part of human sciences, with those “sciences” in turn allowing
for the possibility of population management and biopolitics precisely because of the positing of
“life.” But this life—the life of the human sciences—is a life of normalization. From Kant to
Foucault, there is a formal difference constantly stipulated between the form one gives to the
life one lives and any posited life in general that—insofar as it is an object of knowledge—
cannot give any law or foundation for how one ought to live. To separate what we know—the
formed objects of knowledge—from how we ought to live is essential as long as life is an object
of knowledge—something that we come to know and posit, and not something that can provide
a norm for how we ought to live and form our own lives. This separation between the objects of
knowledge and the knower means that while learning can have objects—the world we study,
posit and organize—there can be no legitimate education that focuses on knowing what we
ought to be. Education is not humanization, but this is because what has called itself human and
has formed the humanities is always in relation to life and can never know life itself. To be
human, to be a subject, to be a self is—essentially—to be in a relation of reading or composition
with regard to whatever is posited as life. In his book on Foucault, Deleuze criticizes Foucault for
not thinking beyond relations to the force from which relations emerge. For this reason, rather
than think in terms of power, or the relations through which anything is known, given,
constituted, or lived, Deleuze and Guattari begin with “desire.” Unlike the “life” that is rejected
as providing a normalizing foundation, a foundation that explains social systems and relations
and allows expert knowledge for governance, welfare, and education, Deleuze and Guattari’s
desire is counter-foundational and harbors the problem of education at its heart. There is no life
in general that provides a rule for systems, such that we might (as in neoliberalism) posit
something like the natural law of competition or markets as the way of the world, nor could life
operate as a way of forming an education system oriented to the production of citizens leading
healthy lives, attaining the right standards of numeracy and literacy for living well, or becoming
adept at life management and transferable skills. In short, for the critical tradition that runs from
Kant and generates Foucault’s critique of the human sciences, there is something distinctly
“human” or distinct from life that cuts education off from normalizing self-production.
Education is not something that can be legitimately governed by anything the natural sciences
might tell us about life; education is always self-formation, where our relation to what we
objectify, learn, and care about is one aspect of a social formation .

When we study human sciences, and when we think of education as a social science, we take
part in a particular formation of discipline where bodies are regulated by a grounding
conception of life. Foucault lists “educationalists” in the series of experts who will manage new
procedures of discipline that differ from the earlier distributions of punishment. Premodern
power was (to start thinking in Deleuzian terms) despotic, such that the possibility of inflicting
pain on a body (especially in public spectacle) allowed for an external body of authority to
maintain discipline. With knowledge practices, power effaces its explicit operations; discipline is
achieved by a series of practices that study and manage life, and this management is not so
much normative as normalizing—not what one decides to do based on a constituted ideal, but
what one ought to be on the basis of what man is properly known (by experts) to be:

And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision
that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical
prescription for a possible normalization. Today the judge—magistrate or juror—certainly does
more than “judge.”

And he is not alone in judging. Throughout the penal procedure and the implementation of the
sentence there swarms a whole series of subsidiary authorities. Small-scale legal systems and
parallel judges have multiplied around the principal judgement: psychiatric or psychological
experts, magistrates concerned with the implementation of sentences, educationalists,
members of the prison service, all fragment the legal power to punish; it might be objected that
none of them really shares the right to judge; that some, after sentence is passed, have no other
right than to implement the punishment laid down by the court and, above all, that others—the
experts—intervene before the sentence not to pass judgement, but to assist the judges in their
decision. (Foucault, 1977, pp. 20-21)

The twin tendencies of philosophy as master discipline (in the sense of giving norms and rules
for thinking) and education as discipline (in the history of disciplining and forming docile bodies)
operate in tension and tandem. Philosophy conceived as a capacity to break free from the
everyday affairs of the world has the potentiality—as we see in Heidegger—to make culturally
imperialist and destructive claims regarding the present : A magisterial quality of “thinking” is
posited as that which will call a fallen humanity back to task. And yet, without that distancing
sense that education is not management of life in terms of normal and healthy humanization,
education becomes nothing more than a quantitative data-producing and data-gathering
mechanism maintaining the same dull round. Many have lamented the quietism or acquiescent
tone of Foucault’s later work: From an early corpus that attributed a pernicious normalizing
force to modes of the human sciences that produced “man” by way of a putative knowledge of
“life,” it might seem that he offers no profound criticism of neoliberal and biopolitical
managerialism. As I have already mentioned, Deleuze posed the problem of Foucault’s
immanence, of remaining within constituted relations and not theorizing the life from which
relations emerge (Deleuze, 1988). It is in this thought of the outside that Deleuze radicalizes life
and education, or life as education.

Life is not something like a substrate that provides a foundation for knowledge; life in all its
modes—human and nonhuman—proceeds by way of the posing of problems. Such problems
are resolved not by grasping, representing, or assimilating information that lies in wait for the
knower. Problems are forces of composition, ongoing events of dynamic learning—again,
human and nonhuman. If Deleuze and Guattari offer a seemingly grandiose conception of
philosophy that is contemptuous of everyday opinion, this is nevertheless because philosophy is
an event that emerges from a life that is problematic . From the emergence of single-celled
organisms in relation to a milieu that itself has altered because of other mutations, to the
formation of central nervous systems, tools, social systems, bodily comportments, and archives:
Life is not a foundation, but better conceived of as desire. What something is is its self-formative
and self-transformative relation to the forces it encounters .

Learning takes place not in the relation between a representation and an action (reproduction
of the Same) but in the relation between a sign and a response (encounter with the Other).
Signs involve heterogeneity in at least three ways: first, in the object which bears or emits them,
and is necessarily on a different level, as though there were two orders of size or disparate
realities between which the sign flashes; secondly, in themselves, since a sign envelops another
“object” within the limits of the object which bears it, and incarnates a natural or spiritual
power (an Idea); finally, in the response they elicit, since the movement of the response does
not “resemble” that of the sign. The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the
wave, in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand
bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping
the former in practice as signs. That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns : there is
an innate or acquired practical familiarity with signs, which means that there is something
amorous—but also something fatal—about all education. We learn nothing from those who say:
“Do as I do.” Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me,” and are able to emit signs
to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. In other
words, there is no ideo-motivity, only sensory-motivity. When a body combines some of its own
distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no
longer that of the Same, but involves the Other—involves difference, from one wave and one
gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted.
To learn is indeed to constitute this space of an encounter with signs, in which the distinctive
points renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself.
(Deleuze, 1994, pp. 22-23)

To think of education as a part of the humanities may seem to at least have the virtue of freeing
it from the quantitative pressures of social scientific, neoliberal, and biopolitical managerialism.
And yet, it would be more radical again not to make claims for the ways in which threatened
aspects of education, such as art and music, form healthier happier humans, but to think of all
learning as inhuman. To tie education to philosophy—to open problems and transformative
encounters—would be as destructive to most of what counts as philosophy in its current form
as it would be to education policy.
For Michel Foucault, at least the Foucault of The Order of Things, there is something intrinsically
normalizing about a social science: The human or the social can only become an object of
knowledge—specialized knowledge blessed with some prior apparatus or logic—because the
mode of knowing the human presupposes some general prior ground of life. It is because “man”
speaks, labors, and lives in common that there can be systems (such as language and exchange);
and it is these systems that we study when we study the social as a science. This is why
“education” can be an enterprise with “data,” because the particular event can always be
referred back to some broader logic of which it is a general instance. For Foucault, the task of
thinking, after “man,” must destroy this notion of a general and generalizable life that might be
studied in the manner of a relatively stable object. There can be reflective and normative
practices, but not a mass normalization of human existence. For Foucault, this will proceed by
freeing language from the “man” of communication and efficiency, writing in an experimental
fashion.

Gilles Deleuze (1988), commenting on Foucault, suggests a different critical path: Life, he
suggests, need not be a grounding substance but could instead be understood as a differential
power. So, rather than begin with a distinction between hard sciences of matter and social
sciences (of minds and actions)—rather, that is than beginning with one life that can be studied
naturally or socially—Deleuze argues that life operates with distinct and inhuman tendencies. By
the time human thinking takes place, it draws upon such tendencies: when the human artist (for
example) paints a canvas this is because there is a prehuman, nonhuman, or extra-human
potential for something like color as such, line as such, or sensation as such. When the scientist
isolates a function, she is able to do so because what she is trying to grasp is a power or
tendency: what light would do, in the absence of any specific observer, for some created or
virtual ideal observer. Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari argue, creates concepts. In so doing, it
does not label or generalize: So, for example, the concept of justice neither summarizes nor
abstracts from what counts as justice in the actual world. Rather, concepts are intensive and
create orientations for thinking. It is in this respect we might begin to think of concepts as
methods, precisely because concepts are at once prehuman (emerging from the problems or
plane of thinking in which we find ourselves), but that also reconfigure or reorient the plane
precisely by being prompted by a problem. Concepts are methods precisely because they
emerge from problems rather than questions . Consider the difference between a question and
a problem: Questions are of a nature such that they already have a determined field of answers.
“Did x meet the target?” “Has x resulted in more or fewer instances of success ?” “Are boys
better at mathematics than girls?” “What practices would yield better outcomes?” “What
methods do you intend to use?” “What is your aim and objective?” Problems, by contrast,
require a reconfiguration of the lexicon within which questions are currently articulated.
Deleuze and Guattari’s example is that of Descartes’ cogito. Descartes does not ask a question—
what do I know with certainty?—but he does pose a problem: What would certain knowledge
be, and how might knowledge be absolutely certain? Once we pose problems, we need new
concepts that will open new questions, or orient new questions: The word “research” can be
extensive (something is research if it is published in a refereed journal, or falls under the
categories required by university metrics); but a new concept of research would require us to do
something that would reorient the distributions among thinking, doing, and futurity .
Their model of education is vacuous. Not only does it preclude genuine
encounters with becoming and the unknown, it promotes the production of
docile subjects that grease the wheels of totalitarianism.
Colebrook 17
[Claire, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and cultural
theorist, “What Is This Thing Called Education?” Qualitative Inquiry, Vol 23 Iss 9, pgs 649 – 655,
September 1st 2017, https://journals-sagepub-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1177/1077800417725357?
utm_source=summon&utm_medium=discovery-provider]

Deleuze and Guattari’s own privileging of philosophical problems—which are contrasted with
questions that simply have correct or incorrect answers —is at once an almost Heideggerian
valorization of a pre-mass–democratic Athenian conversational polity, and a radicalization of the
potentiality of education.

Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari inherit Heidegger’s genealogy of normalization, and—like

Heidegger—do not see education as something to which philosophy ought to be applied.
Education may either be thought of as the intensification of life’s (and not just human life’s)
necessary relational being. For Heidegger, notoriously, only humans have a world. Only humans
are more than mere life, and comport themselves toward a future in which the end is not given ,
and in which potentiality or the world’s own presencing opens from unconcealment. What this
means more concretely is that there is no actuality—no norm, no ideal or idea—that would
orient human existence. To say, as Heidegger does that philosophy lost its way when it became
humanizing rather than educating is to privilege what Heidegger locates in Dasein alone: a
becoming that is thrown toward a future that is not given, and always toward a world that is
not simply a fully given thing but an ongoing openness of potentiality. If, today, we defend forms
of education, such as the humanities, because they are conducive to producing good, well-
balanced, healthy, and well-rounded citizens, then we have already blunted what is essentially
potential and futural about education. And yet, if we privilege (as Heidegger did) something
uniquely distinct about Dasein’s being-in-the-world, then we are oddly left with education being
a trait or tendency that allows “humans” either to fall back into the inauthenticity of mere
training in civics, or to be thrown toward a world of potentiality, problems, and radical futurity .
This confinement of the tendency of education to Dasein goes some of the way to explaining
Heidegger’s fascism. If there are essential distinctions among worldless things, animals who are
poor in world, and then the being-in-the-world of Dasein, it becomes possible for Dasein to
abandon its potentiality and fall back into inauthentic actuality. Heidegger’s resistance to
education becoming humanization and to the production of subjects blessed with good logic
allows him to posit something beyond the human as education’s task. Education must not be
reduced to the production of rational individuals. Yet it is this resistance to the present, and the
call to sweep away all the chatter and noise of mere opinion, that allows for a violent dismissal
of all that is seen to be noise. As Hannah Arendt (1958) has pointed out, there is a temporality
in fascism’s mode of futurity: The purity of the future is of such great significance and force
that it sweeps away the present regardless of means:
Totalitarian propaganda raised ideological scientificality and its technique of making statements
in the form of predictions to a height of efficiency of method and absurdity of content
because, demagogically speaking, there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by
releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can
reveal its merits. (p. 346)

Education therefore exposes a conundrum that extends well beyond government policy and
beyond those working in education as a designated discipline. If education is nothing more than
a human science or the achievement of satisfactory outcomes by way of testing, then education
has no future. Education is the manufacture of docile subjects, and (as Bernard Stiegler has
argued) it will do little more than short-circuit attention. Stiegler does, however, point out that
education’s power to orient bodies beyond themselves toward a complex future relies
necessarily on the same technologies that contract and disorient individuals, becoming nothing
more than captivation by already actualized forms. Education is at once necessary to bring forth
a future distinct from what we already are, and yet that orientation toward a world of relations
that is not oneself comes with the essential risk of stupidity (Stiegler, 2015
 Empirical, Sociological Analysis

Traditional sociological analysis of crime, policing, and criminology only focuses

on molar aggregates like the state, society, social classes, races, sexes, and so
on. This approach represses the molecular social currents that serve as the
condition for the possibility for molar social categories’ emergence and
preserves the status quo. Not only is molecular analysis necessary to
understand molar social phenomena – it is necessary for the possibility of
political change.
Schuilenburg 12 (Marc, Lecturer in Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “Institutions and
Interactions: On the Problem of the Molecular and the Molar,” in Deleuze and Law Edinburgh
University Press)

The term ‘molar’ is used in physics, especially in the science of thermo- dynamics (the first science of complexity),
which studies the interactions between large collections of particles on a macroscopic level. The term refers to the
Avogadro Constant, a constant number of particles the value of which is 6.023 x 10 23 mol􏰀1 (like a dozen is 12 and a
score is 20). This number of particles defines the amount of substance called the ‘mole’. One mole of any substance is
6.023 x 1023 particles of it, which may be atoms, molecules, ions or electrons, depending on the substance. The
Avogadro Constant is named after the Italian chemist and physicist Amedeo Avogadro (1776–1856), a specialist in the
field of chemical gases, who discovered in 1811 that equal volumes of all gases under the same conditions contain the
same number of particles. In other words, a mole of any gas always takes the same volume at a certain pressure and
temperature. It is impossible to count such an enormous number of par- ticles, but it can be weighed. A mole of any
substance is that substance’s atomic or molecular mass expressed in grams, and this mass is called the ‘molar mass’.
The number of moles of any substance is the amount of it (Beavon and Jarvis 2003: 20–1).

It’s only a small step from Avogadro’s number, which indicates the absolute number of
molecules in one mole substance, to the approach taken in social scientific research to studying
what Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus call large ‘molar aggregates’ (ensembles molaires)
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 181, 183, 340). These molar aggregates (‘the state’, ‘society’, ‘the
market’, ‘social classes’, ‘sexes’) represent functional, stable entities or large-scale structures
and have a specific use in social theory. According to Deleuze and Guattari, they ‘presuppose
pre-established connections that are not explained by their functioning, since the latter results
from them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 181). Simplifying social reality like this, scientists divide
it into part–whole relations, which are presented as more or less homogeneous. This allows
them to isolate and control specific matters. As a consequence, research- ers study the parts in
terms of what they contribute to the whole or ‘any sort of original totality’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 42). In doing so, they make their object of research distinguishable from the rest
of the world. They draw boundaries around that which is to be researched or scrutinised. The
causes of what people do are then located in a system which is supposed to determine human
behaviour, e.g. economic dynam- ics, culture, values, mentality, and so on. They are supposed to
precede interaction and develop in a knowable and predictable way (Van Calster and
Schuilenburg 2011).

In sociology, this is reflected in the work of one of the founders of French sociology, Emile Durkheim. According to
Durkheim, a social fact, i.e. the description of what the social precisely entails or defines, is characterised by the power
of external coercion it exerts upon individual behaviour, and the influence it has on personal attitudes or needs. An
example of such a social fact is the language in which we speak and communicate. After all, the language we learn to
speak from birth is inescapably imposed upon us. It has a compelling and invisible force, so to speak, which no one can
escape. According to Durkheim, a social fact is not only identifiable because of its external influence on what indi-
viduals do and say, it additionally has a reality of its own that cannot be reduced to the qualities of separate individuals.
In other words, it is an independent entity that imposes certain views and ways of acting on the individual, which he or
she would not have displayed spontane- ously. From that perspective, a social fact is not only coercive and supra-
individual, it can also be understood as objective (in the meaning of a ‘thing’) (Laermans 1995).

The characteristics of a social fact feature most clearly in Durkheim’s thesis of a conscience collective, the largest
common denominator of the content of the consciousness of individuals in a society. This col- lective consciousness
manifests itself as a separate variable and forms the foundation for cohesion in a community. It not only generates
emotions that are qualitatively different than individual perceptions, it has specific characteristics as well (Durkheim
1973). If we apply those characteristics to society itself, then society will have a reality of its own, a philosophical point
of departure called ‘realism’. In ‘realism’ society has its own nature. The independence of society as a whole brings
forth convictions, norms, ideas and perceptions that are shared by the members of that society. 2 Although
psychological insights about associations of individuals can be of importance for understanding changes in solidarity in
a society, it is up to the science of sociology to subsequently study that solidarity as an independent social fact. This
can be accomplished through scientific methods and models, as Durkheim demonstrates, which can be used to objectify
and verify statistics about birth rates, marriage rates, suicide rates and criminality rates. It is possi- ble to analyse the
annual average of marriages, births, voluntary deaths and the degree of criminality, which expresses the collective
conscious- ness or morality of a society as a whole, without discussing the related individual circumstances.

But, according to Deleuze and Guattari, this kind of thinking is trapped in a representational
logic that does not acknowledge social reality as such. Behind the part/whole distinction lurks
the hypothesis that parts exist because of the whole (‘something that already exists’). Not only
are they part of the whole, they maintain the whole in exist- ence. Therefore, the problem of
the molar is a sociological problem ‘so long as the whole is considered as a totality derived
from the parts, or as an original totality from which the parts emanate, or as a dialectical
totalization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 44). In fact, there is no sort of evolution that will
cause parts to form an integrated whole, any more than there is an original totality from
which they can be derived. Instead of society being an organism or ‘collective self’, we must
understand that every society is ‘constantly escaping in all directions, never stops slipping
away’ and, Deleuze asserts in an interview with Paul Rabinow and Keith Gandal, is ‘flowing
everywhere’ (Deleuze 2006: 280). From this point of view, the main emphasis is no longer on
abstract quantities, but on the fluid character of social reality itself, what Deleuze and Guattari
call ‘the molecular’. This molecular medium (milieu) refers to ‘singularities, their interactions
and connections at a distance or between different orders’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 280).
With a reference to the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, they speak of subtle and supple (but no less
disquiet- ing) breaks, ‘which occur when things are going well on the other side’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 198).

The Molecular

The dominant position of molar thought in contemporary scientific research is not surprising.
Social scientists, like all researchers, tend to break down reality into wholes that consist of parts
in order to focus attention on ‘large numbers and statistical laws’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
280). It is a molar approach, ‘manifesting the statistical aggregate and state of equilibrium
existing on the macroscopic level’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 57). However, social reality is
much more complex than the molar approach can or will research. According to Deleuze and
Guattari, the molar cannot be understood without the molecular. What the molecular offers,
at a minimum, is ‘an entire world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine
segmentations that grasp or experience different things’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 213). As
such, the molecular approaches the fluid character of social reality, which is always incomplete
and cannot be made absolute in an all-encompassing whole.
If we again look at the way physics deals with the molecular, it first assumes that elements exist apart from each other
and are constantly in motion (Kubinga 2003: 65). Physicists and chemists therefore speak of interactions between
molecules (proteins, lipids, metabolites and so on). Although scientists consider the molecular as the most fundamental
level of interaction, they recognise that information in this area is still poor and incomplete. Specific knowledge as to
why interacting mol- ecules group into spontaneous order is lacking (Sijbesma 2007). Nature offers nice examples of
such ‘self-assemblage’ or ‘self-organisation’, by which molecules adopt a defined arrangement without guidance or
management from an outside source. However, controlling the shape and structure of self-assembling systems still
generates many questions.

From a philosophical point of view, it is clear that on the molecular level things are different
than on the level of the molar, where con- cepts of ‘control’ and ‘functionality’ are predominant.
This is impor- tant because the molecular composition is more concerned with flows (including
poles, mutations, connections, accelerations, singularities and quanta), while the molar is about
segmented lines, i.e. ‘the binary, circular, and linear’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 209). Alliez
(2009) is therefore right in stating that the molecular level revolves around ‘small complex
relations’, rather than ‘huge dialectic structures’ that direct the whole. In terms of the social, it
means that attention is turned to interac- tions that have no reference to a centre, standard or
norm. The focus lies on ‘becoming’, as Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, and
not on ‘being’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 275, 277). Unlike with the molar, inhabited by
unchanging essences or laws with a permanent identity, small changes can have huge and
unpredictable effects on the molecular.

In developing this idea, I would like to distinguish three characteristics of the molecular. It is
important to note that these characteristics do not present new abstract principles intended to
provide a new representa- tion of reality. Rather, they coincide separately with each ‘event’ or
each ‘case’. First, the molecular is about the immediate. It deals with ‘beliefs and desires’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 219) that represent the world ‘here and now’ and which transcend
actions from a rational- calculating portrayal of mankind, as represented in the classical judicial
works of Beccaria (2009) and Hobbes (1985). The latter assume that people prefer to choose an
action (for example obeying rules or violat- ing them) from which they think they will benefit.
The problem with this approach, Deleuze states in his book on Hume’s empiricism, is that
rationalism ‘expects ideas to stand for something which cannot be con- stituted within experience
or be given in an idea without contradiction: the generality of the idea, the existence of the object,
and the content of the terms “always,” “universal,” “necessary,” and “true”’ (Deleuze 1991: 30).
As is well known, another problem with such rationalism is its all too narrow time-frame. After
all, the effects of such a choice are spread over a long period of time. The immediate instead deals
with interactions (such as pride, frustration, pleasure, anger, shame and so on) which exist in real
time, that is here and now. From a molar perspective these interactions are seen as exceptional
and are largely kept outside ‘the order of the discourse’, to quote Foucault (1971). In fact, they
fall outside the structural frame of uniformity or a knowable goal (Schuilenburg 2008; 2009:
210).

Second, the molecular is characterised by heterogeneous series that produce difference.

Rather than representation by means of ‘identity, opposition, analogy and resemblance’ (Deleuze
1994: 137), a system of series is a differenciating of differences by means of the coupling of
heterogeneous series (whose elements are already heterogeneous). This actualisation is not a
unilateral process, but rather the result of a whole series of mutually reinforcing effects, e.g.
non-linear relationships, series of events and affairs, non-intentional acts and open series of
interactions that lead in directions not previously agreed or established. As such, molecular
relations are made possible by other acts making other acts possible in turn. They are in a
constant state of flux and permit an infi- nite number of connections, creating with every
connection something new. This means that – against the laws of classic causality – coincidence
must be seen as a cause of social change(s).

Third, the molecular is about perspectivism, i.e. accepting that all truth can only be known in
the context of one’s own perspective. Perspectivism, which takes root in Hume’s empiricism
and Kant’s idealism and was further developed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, rejects the idea
of a specific interpretation of social reality that would be ‘complete’ or ‘total’. Perspectivism
claims that all knowledge is perspectival. Concrete circumstances and behaviour will always been
seen from different viewpoints. Or, as Nietzsche points out in The Will To Power: ‘In so far as the
word “knowledge” has any meaning, . . . it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings –
“perspectivism”’ (Nietzsche 1967: §421). Yet perspectivism has nothing to do with rela- tivism.
Perspectivism may develop sensitivity for different points of view or interpretations. It compels
people to see the conditions and actual circumstances under which a certain view may appear.

In short, contrary to the molar, the molecular knows neither univo- cal definition nor
individual boundaries. It is fundamentally ambiguous and paradoxical. Perhaps it is this
intangibility that raises suspicion and mistrust among social researchers towards the idea of
researching the molecular. Researchers in sociology and economics, for instance, tend to
categorise interactions in terms of ‘usefulness’ and ‘interest’ for the larger whole (profit, sales,
and so on). By so doing they focus their attention on the molar. Even criminologists who
research group proc- esses actually focus on the characteristics of a group, such as rivalry,
structure or leadership, which underline the static and therefore spot- light the molar. Hence
instead of limiting sociology to molar structures, at least implicitly always based on a juridical
model,3 Deleuze wants to focus on the question of genesis or the emergence of relations
through which existing structures are themselves constituted. For Deleuze, the work of Tarde
bears witness to how the molecular, as opposed to molar aggregates, could lead to an
understanding of the emergence of new social phenomena or new stratifications (see also van
Tuinen 2009). What does this mean in terms of interactions between people of flesh and blood?
 Forensic Evidence

Forensic evidence compiles fragments and traces. It is only when these fragments are
interpreted in accord with social norms that the material body of the criminal and the act of
the crime are produced. This means that status quo biases constrain and circumscribe the
effectiveness of forensic evidence – the critique is a prior question.
Krus 10 (Corinna, Professor of Thematic Studies, Technology, and Social Change at Linköping
University, “Forensic evidence: Materializing bodies, materializing crimes” European Journal of
Women’s Studies 17(4): 363-377)

Materializing bodies and persons Analogous to analysing ‘what gender does rather than what it
is’ (Franklin et al., 2000: 7; italics in original), it is useful to ask what forensic evidence does
rather than what it is. Its most evident effect is materializing criminal bodies through being
used as stand-ins for bodies that are part of criminal persons. Parts of bodies – in forensic
science DNA profiles or fingerprints, in other contexts, body parts, cell counts (see Martin,
1990), chromosomes, or hormones (see Oudshoorn, 1994), on the other – are placed in a
synecdochical relationship as stand-ins for complete bodies. A match with a DNA sample from
a crime scene indicates a possibly criminal body whose owner will be asked for an
explanation. More than that, the body is materialized in line with the law – through, for
example, the definition of which parts of the genome are included into a DNA profile and which
are not. The forensic apparatus does not materialize whole bodies through making forensic
evidence, but particular bodily constellations – for example, fingerprints or DNA profiles – that
are regarded as relevant to solving crimes. A fingerprint or DNA profile becomes a stand-in for a
complete body and, in extension, a whole person; it is not an uncommon wording to refer to
people (and not their profiles or fingerprints) as being in a database. In other words, persons
become matter becomes data (see Waldby, 2000). Instead of (biological) reductionism of a
person to a sexed body, forensic evidence reduces the person to a body that leaves traces. It is
the body with its treacherous materiality that can be put under surveillance and that thus can
betray the person. Materializations of bodies are widely connected to very different parts of
society. That is, a criminal or sexed (or racialized or classed) body does not become so by
virtue of a laboratory result alone, but by the meanings intertwined with it . For example, a
chromosome test materializes not only the chromosome itself, but simultaneously a sexed (or
ambiguous) person; a fingerprint match may materialize a suspect. Both can with Butler be
called ‘forcibly materialized’ through ‘highly regulated practices’ (Butler, 1993: 1). In this, both
materializations bring about repercussions for the respective bodies’ inhabitants, mandating,
instigating, inhibiting, or prohibiting actions and, with them, particular subject positions.

Co-materializations Producing forensic evidence does not only materialize criminal bodies,
however. At the same time, the forensic apparatus also materializes the crime and, with it, the
victim. In accordance with the presumption of innocence – a suspect or defendant is considered
innocent until proven guilty – an action cannot be called a crime before a conviction ; and
without a crime, there cannot be a victim. This does not mean, of course, that not yet
convicted (or, for that part, acquitted) suspects are never called criminals or that people cannot
feel like crime victims without someone being convicted. However, legally, an action is not a
crime until and unless a court has pronounced a conviction. Hence, there can be no legal
repercussions, such as a sentence for the offender or damages paid to the victim, without a
conviction. Thus, a crime is materialized alongside a criminal body 13 through an apparatus of
technology, technoscientific and legal practices as well as other sociocultural practices of
creating meaning. This materialization is, of course, not always successful. It may be impossible
to recover or analyse traces, the evidence that is produced may be deemed by the court to
allow for reasonable doubt, or the police investigation may lead to the conclusion that, contrary
to first impressions, no crime has been committed. Failure to materialize does not, however,
mean that the legal system malfunctions; on the contrary, the possibility of failure is an essential
part of the legal system. After all, a legal system that equates suspicion with conviction, thereby
eliminating the requirement of evidence and its examination by the courts, would not make for
a very just criminal justice. The forensic apparatus has effects that spread beyond the immediate
case, as well. Wider organized practices of accumulating fingerprints and DNA profiles in
databases also create a mass of potentially criminal bodies when convicts’ fingerprints and
DNA profiles are stored in databases and suspects’ DNA profiles are run against DNA traces
recovered from other crime scenes. These digitalized and fragmented bodies are thus part of a
larger biopolitical apparatus of a form of governmental surveillance of fluid populations based
on the material-semiotics of DNA databases (e.g. Braidotti et al., 2009). Discussions of such
biopolitics, inspired by Michel Foucault’s conceptualization, often draw attention to the
imbalance of power between the state and the individual – whose body, furthermore, may be
made to betray her or him to the state. When it comes to forensic evidence, especially DNA
evidence, there is considerable concern that this imbalance leads to social inequalities being
reinforced as already marginalized groups may be subject to power to a larger extent than
others (Duster, 2006). There are also concerns about loss of (genetic) privacy (Dahl and Sætnan,
2009; Noble, 2006; Rothstein and Talbott, 2006), for example in the possibility of so-called
familial searches, that is, searching DNA databases for profiles that, as partial matches, indicate
a genetic relationship to the DNA found at a crime scene.14 In this way, surveillance can be
extended to persons outside the databas e – and the stored DNA profiles be made to stand in
for an even wider bodily materiality, creating more potential criminal bodies. That DNA
profiles can very easily be stored in databases and thus accessed and compared automatically
(on a scale that is currently not possible with, for example, fingerprints) augments the
imbalance between the person and the state. In other words, bodies forensically materialized
as fragmented entities where the part stands for the whole can be part of what Nikolas Rose
and Carlos Novas have theorized as ‘biological citizenship’, that is, conceptualizing citizens in
biological terms (Rose and Novas, 2005; see further Åsberg and Lum, 2009). These biopolitics
have advantages as well as disadvantages, such as contributing to solving crimes on the one
hand and reinforcing inequalities on the other, issues that must be (and are) discussed. Still,
forensic evidence, with the concerns and expectations it arouses, also points to society’s
giving precedence to matter over meaning. However, this understanding of forensic evidence
neglects and underestimates its discursive dimension and with it the mutability of meaning of,
for example, the expert statements that are transformed into this evidence. Regarding
forensic evidence as solidly rooted in matter may lead to overconfidence in its immutability
and its ability to provide impartial and certain knowledge. The concerns voiced about forensic
evidence are indeed relevant, but it should be as relevant to pay attention to how and through
which apparatus forensic evidence is produced, that is, within which judicial and political
system and through which practices, and what is co-produced in the process, that is, which
bodies, crimes and societies. For example, kinship may be reduced to genetic kinship at the
expense of other forms of affinity. Similarly, treating citizens as a gene pool (Rose and Novas,
2005) may impede or even exclude other understandings. This is especially salient as forensic
evidence, not least through popular fictional television shows, has become part of what Sarah
Franklin calls ‘the genetic imaginary’ (Franklin, 2000: 198), a realm of imagining and thinking
about life itself in its genetic articulations. Franklin argues that is impossible to extricate life
itself from the stories we tell about it. Thus, the stories we tell about bodies and, in extension,
persons through the production and use of forensic evidence are part of the apparatus that
produces bodies and personhoods, a forensic imaginary so to speak.
Forensic evidence often overlooks the inseparability of the material and discursive. This allows
discursive assumptions about subject positions to distort forensic evidence.
Krus 10 (Corinna, Professor of Thematic Studies, Technology, and Social Change at Linköping
University, “Forensic evidence: Materializing bodies, materializing crimes” European Journal of
Women’s Studies 17(4): 363-377)

Entanglements Apart from the forensic imaginary, the forensic apparatus can also contribute to
feminist materialist understandings of bodies. Forensic evidence, taken seriously, points to the
inseparable entanglements (see Barad, 2007) of the material and the discursive in its everyday
practices. Thus, analysing the forensic apparatus can contribute to understandings of the
inseparability of, for example, sex and gender. This contribution is largely indirect. Although
DNA evidence materializes sex as essentially an additional distinguishing marker (fingerprints
are ‘sexless’), sex is determined and may be remarked upon when DNA indicates a different
sex than that expected from the type of crime. In this, particular notions of sex and gender are
set in relation to each other: DNA evidence materializes genetic sex, not sex through
hormones, body parts, or brain structure (see Åsberg, 2009). This genetic sex seems to be
strongly connected to gender in terms of notions that, for example, violent crimes are
predominantly committed by men, who are discursively constructed as carriers of particular
genetic markers and of less inhibitions in terms of acting violently vis-a-vis others . Such
connections between men and certain crimes appear to be taken for granted; thus,
unexpected female profiles are explicitly commented on, but not (expected) male ones. It is
also interesting to note that these connections appear to be attributed to gender rather than
sex. The comments are often accompanied by remarks that more and more women are
committing ‘masculine’ crimes. The material-discursive parts entangled in ‘forensic sex’ –
genetic markers, understandings of violence, crime and gender, crime statistics, society’s
understandings and treatment of male and female suspects and offenders – might possibly be
disentangled, at least partly. However, when it comes to forensic evidence itself, the material
and the discursive are entangled more tightly. DNA evidence (and perhaps in the future also
fingerprint evidence) is probabilistic and forensic scientists emphasize that they cannot deliver
a definite answer as to whose DNA was found at a crime scene . Whether a match indicates
that (for example) a bloodstain at a crime scene was left by a suspect and whether this,
furthermore, has implications for her or his culpability, is consciously left for the court to decide.
Forensic science, by calculating probabilities, delivers only a base for the court’s decision. In
other words, a close look at the forensic apparatus makes it transparent how matter and
meaning together produce a tangible, solid phenomenon such as forensic evidence. The
traces’ path from crime scenes through the legal chain, where the phenomenon is produced
gradually and in different places with different parts of the apparatus, makes it possible to see
the entanglements that materialize forensic evidence as both material and discursive, o utside
the reach of the nature/culture dichotomy (Åsberg, 2009). In similar, although perhaps not as
ordered and transparent fashion, it should be possible to track how sex and sexed bodies are
produced as inextricably material-discursive.

Conclusions I have argued that, rather than granting access to a purely material world, the
forensic apparatus materializes forensic evidence which in turn materializes bodies and persons,
both by standing in for particular bodies and by contributing to the forensic imaginary. In other
words, the making and maintaining of material-discursives is an ongoing, active process,
oscillating between entities and ‘bits of life’ (see Smelik and Lykke, 2008). Thus, discussions of
materialities should rather be discussions of materializations, and materiality should be
considered an activity rather than a quality. With the help of Barad’s agential realism, it is
possible to discuss the inseparability of matter and meaning, culture and nature, or mind and
body without evoking determinism. On the contrary, abandoning a presupposed dichotomy of
the material and the cultural and instead examining in which ways they, together with
technology, materialize into – for example – forensic evidence, makes it possible to understand
materialities, their production and, consequently, their role in society without surrendering to
either cultural or biological determinism. This also suggests an expanded view of bodies as
inseparably material-technoscientific cultural – they can include a laboratory across the
country or the globe, as well as cultural understandings about genes, bodies and personhood
and how they are related. Not only are material(ized) bodies materialized through fragments
that are made to represent a whole – for example, as criminal bodies through DNA evidence or
as sexed bodies through chromosomes, body parts, or hormones – but they are also
materialized as inseparably material, technological and cultural phenomena in a particular
society by an extensive and intricate apparatus. It will be relevant to analyse everyday
material-technoscientific-cultural practices of materializing, for example, sexed, classed, or
racialized bodies in order to understand both the concrete apparatuses that materialize these
bodies and the phenomena that they co-materialize. I hope that the approach I have explored
here, which merges feminist materialist theoretizations of bodies, in particular Karen Barad’s
agential realism, with an STS-informed analysis of technoscientific practices in crime
investigation, can inspire further work along these lines.
Forensic science is not a passive or objective reading of information from a crime scene. It is
part of a larger project of using norms and technology to produce the criminal body.
Krus 10 (Corinna, Professor of Thematic Studies, Technology, and Social Change at Linköping
University, “Forensic evidence: Materializing bodies, materializing crimes” European Journal of
Women’s Studies 17(4): 363-377)

Taking forensic evidence as its point of departure, this article aims to contribute to discussions
of materiality, especially the body’s materiality. I intend to propel practices of producing
forensic evidence, so far predominantly discussed within science and technology studies (STS),
into the arena of material feminism. As Ruth Hubbard argues, ‘science has had a significant part
in the making of women’ (Hubbard, 1990: 17) through defining ‘normal’ bodies. I aim to discuss,
using the example of forensic evidence, how technoscience makes bodies. I want to bring STS’
focus on everyday technoscientific practices of producing knowledge into conversation with
material feminism’s focus on sexed embodiment. Analysing the production of forensic evidence,
I maintain, can contribute to understanding how sex (and sexed bodies) are materialized as
inextricably material-discursive. Forensic science, and the evidence it delivers to the criminal
justice system, is receiving keen interest from the media and popular cultures, where a
prevailing theme seems to be the reliability with which forensic science can connect suspect
bodies to crime scenes. Scholarly interest tends to focus on issues of risk (McCartney, 2006),
expertise and expert systems (e.g. Bal, 2005; Cole, 2001; Haack, 2003; Halfon, 1998; Lynch et al.,
2008; Prainsack and Kitzberger, 2009) and civil liberties and ethics (Noble, 2006; Rothstein and
Talbott, 2006). There seems to be a common focus on – and sometimes concern about – the
solidity that forensic evidence is perceived to possess. It seems to be understood as firmly
rooted in the material world and thus more tangible and reliable than, for example, witness
testimony. This article examines forensic evidence’s affiliation with materiality, analysing the
connection between the crime scene and the suspect body that it produces. It draws on
ethnographic material from the Swedish judicial system. I have interviewed and followed crime
scene officers, forensic laboratory staff, police detectives and prosecutors working with forensic
evidence. As all ethnographic material, the data collected in this study are local, contingent on
particular circumstances and a particular judicial system. However, the questions and thoughts
that can be raised based on this local material are relevant in a wider context. Through
fingerprint and DNA evidence , I argue that, rather than making use of the body’s materiality,
forensic science, together with law enforcement and legal practices, materializes the
(criminal) body at the same time as it establishes the connection between a particular body
and a particular crime scene. Consequently, I argue, materiality is an activity rather than an
intrinsic quality. More than that, it is an activity that involves not only matter but also
technology, as well as both technoscientific and other cultural practices, resulting in forensic
evidence that is inseparably material, technological and cultural. I argue that bodies can be
understood as continuously materialized through material-technoscientific-cultural practices,
co-materialized with subject positions and social contexts. Through my analysis of materializing
bodies in forensics, I suggest that current feminist materialist endeavours to conceptualize
sexed embodiment as non-deterministic processes could be enriched by reflecting on
analogies to the material-technoscientificcultural practices involved in the production of
forensic evidence. Taking my theoretical point of departure not only in an STS-informed
approach, but also in material feminist theorizations (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Barad, 1996,
1998, 2007; Birke, 1999; Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994), I underline, moreover, that the theoretical
conversations across borders of feminist theory and STS that I suggest here should be
understood as a two-way communication where the two fields contribute mutually to each
other. Thinking about bodies Feminist discussions of the body often point to how biological
bodies have been used as a justification for social and cultural ordering, for example through: .
. . the fragility, unreliability, or biological closeness to nature attributed to the female body
and the subordinate character attributed to women on account of the close connections
between female psychology and biology. Women have been objectified and alienated as
social subjects partly through the denigration and containment of the female body . (Grosz,
1994: xiv) In other words, bodies – ostensibly imperturbable ‘facts’ of ‘nature’ – are being set
in direct correlation to social relationships, be they between sexes, classes, or races. Hence, it
is not surprising that discussions of materiality have been avoided as carrying the ‘taint’ of
biological determinism in favour of focusing on how concepts of bodies are socially and
culturally constructed (see Alaimo and Hekman, 2008). However, as Lynda Birke argues, since
bodies ‘become categorised through the language of biomedicine’, biology should be taken
‘more seriously’ (Birke, 1999: 20); and several scholars point to the inseparability of the
discursive and the material (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994), emphasizing that ‘different
procedures of corporeal inscription do not simply adorn or add to a body that is basically given
through biology; they help constitute the very biological organization of the subject’ (Grosz,
1994: 142). One way of taking bodies seriously without succumbing to either radical
constructionism or determinism is to analyse how bodies are made, that is, shaped and
known. Diets (e.g. Popenoe, 2004) and plastic surgery (e.g. Brush, 1998; Kaw, 1993), for
example, quite tangibly shape material – as well as gendered, racialized and classed, to name
but a few – bodies. To use Judith Butler’s terms, the body, and in particular the sexed body, can
be seen as a materialization of cultural norms (Butler, 1993: 2). She argues: . . . ‘sex’ is an ideal
construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of
a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this
materialization through a forcible iteration of those norms. (Butler, 1993: 1–2) Butler posits that
it is impossible to separate the material body from cultural norms. Her argument is that the
body is a materialization of cultural norms, thus ‘to invoke matter is to invoke a sedimented
history of sexual hierarchy and sexual erasures’ (Butler, 1993: 49). However, Butler’s
materialization goes further than reshaping already existing bodies into better accordance with
cultural norms. Rather, she argues, it is through these norms that bodies are moulded into
their material shape. Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism (Barad, 1996, 1998, 2007) is a
way of thinking about this inseparability of the material and the sociocultural. Barad argues that
it is impossible to separate epistemology and ontology, or the observer and the observed.
Instead of an observer gazing at ‘nature’ (for example bodies) Barad sees an apparatus –
consisting of bodies, technologies, norms, ideas – that produces a phenomenon: ‘the place
where matter and meaning meet’ (Barad, 1996: 185). In this, the parts of the apparatus do not
pre-exist but are produced during the process, intra-action in Barad’s words, a term that draws
attention to the inseparability of the parts of the apparatus (Barad, 2007: 132ff.). In other
words, knowledge, observers, instruments and observed are enacted and shaped through
practices in intra-action, as parts of phenomena. This does not mean that relationships between
those forms of agency inevitably have to be symmetrical and harmonious (Barad, 1996: 188).
Since, for example, humans ‘do the representing’ (Barad, 1996: 181), that is, tell the stories
about nature, these relationships can and do contain considerable asymmetry. In the case of
forensic evidence, it is also humans who decide which forms of materialization are desirable
and acceptable.2 Consequently, bodies do not exist as a given, but are continuously
materialized in: . . . an iteratively intra-active process whereby material-discursive bodies are
sedimented out of the intra-action of multiple material-discursive apparatuses through which
these phenomena (bodies) become intelligible. (Barad, 1998: 108; italics in original)3 Thinking
about bodies in these terms means that it is impossible to separate bodies into a material
template and its sociocultural (or discursive) inscriptions – they are one and the same. It also
implies a different relationship between material bodies and society. Rather than regarding
biological bodies as a justification for social order and norms, these norms then are part of
materializing the very bodies that are used to justify them. Bodies in criminal justice are also
both material and sociocultural at the same time. They leave behind traces which can be used
by law enforcement and the courts to determine who has committed a particular crime , but,
contrary to popular portrayals,4 traces at crime scenes do not speak for themselves. In order to
be usable as evidence with which to achieve criminal convictions, they traces have to be
processed in a number of different ways through specific specializations, competencies and
practices. Thus, forensic evidence can be understood as a phenomenon in Barad’s sense of the
term. It is produced by an apparatus that involves traces, bodies (and not only criminal ones),
forensic technologies and practices, law and legal practices, as well as less specialized cultural
understandings. Instead of speaking about the body’s materiality, it appears more appropriate
to speak about its materialization. In her words, ‘materialization is not only a matter of how
discourse comes to matter but also of how matter comes to matter’ (Barad, 1998: 108). It is thus
through the (forensic) apparatus that forensic evidence is produced and, thus, bodies are
materialized. I will now look at my ethnographic material from the Swedish judicial system
through the lens of these feminist theories of materialization.
Forensic evidence-gathering is not a neutral or scientific process. It is irreducibly shot through
with interpretation and narrative that contributes to the material construction of the criminal
body.
Krus 10 (Corinna, Professor of Thematic Studies, Technology, and Social Change at Linköping
University, “Forensic evidence: Materializing bodies, materializing crimes” European Journal of
Women’s Studies 17(4): 363-377)

Producing forensic evidence: A chain of transformations In Sweden, the path which traces follow
through the judicial system is called ‘the legal chain’, evoking (perhaps unintentionally)
associations of a cast-iron linkage between crime scene and conviction. This legal chain, in its
ideal form, begins with a police patrol arriving at the scene of the reported crime, and it ends
with the final verdict. In everyday practice, there are variations to this model. Not all crime
reports lead to a criminal investigation, some investigations never lead to an indictment, and not
all verdicts are appealed against. In addition, the involved actors may vary with the crime; for
example, in serious crimes, the crime scene is examined by specialized crime scene officers,
whereas this task may be performed by a police patrol in common crimes, so-called volume
crimes. This article does not discuss details of these variations but focuses on forensic evidence
under ideal circumstances, that is, ‘successful’ materializations. What is typically emphasized
about the legal chain is the linkage between ‘the first police officer on the spot’ and ‘the final
verdict’, a bond that, on closer inspection , is made up by a number of links or agents. As traces
from crime scenes are moved through this chain, they undergo multiple transformations. The
crime scene is reduced to traces, whose matter then is transformed into information. This
information is compared to other information , and the result reported in standardized expert
statements – the forensic evidence. Together with other pieces of evidence, for example
witness accounts, this evidence is then fashioned into narratives about a course of events and
translated into legal categories of culpability. These transformations are accomplished by an
apparatus of actors, instruments and understandings that produce the phenomenon of
forensic evidence and thus actively materialize (criminal) bodies as well as crimes, establishing
rather than discovering the connection between a particular body and a particular crime. The
following analysis focuses on the chain of transformations for fingerprint and DNA evidence.
Both are widely known and practised technologies and, more importantly, both are used to
connect particular bodies to particular crime scenes.

Traces The first step of producing forensic evidence is to find and collect relevant and promising
traces from the crime scene. This assumes that there are traces to be found and collected;
however, traces that can be turned into evidence are not a matter of course. Criminals can (and
often do) wear gloves, which prevent leaving fingerprints; not everyone’s touch leaves equally
distinct traces; nor do all surfaces receive and retain fingerprints, and sufficiently clear
fingerprints at that, equally well. Conversely, traces that contain DNA are not rare . Expelling tiny
droplets of saliva when speaking, or shedding skin cells leave traces that contain DNA. The
difficulty is finding these traces and avoiding their contamination with other DNA. In order to
work reasonably efficiently, the crime scene officers must assess which surfaces or objects are
likely to carry and retain traces from the crime, and ideally only from the crime. Finding these
traces is not always easy, as they often are invisible to the unaided eye; technologies such as
ultraviolet light which causes body fluids (which typically contain a lot of DNA) to fluoresce or
fingerprint powders are an integral part of crime scene examinations. The traces do not only
have to be left and found to become evidence, they also have to be collected in a way that
renders them analysable: fingerprints must not be smudged or obscured, body fluids must not
be contaminated.5 The collected traces must also be documented and packaged in a way that
allows them to be transported to the laboratory without putting them at risk of deterioration,
cross-contamination, or mix-ups. This requires skill as well as experience, in addition to the
appropriate equipment. In other words, while traces from a presumptive crime scene may be
material traces, it requires human skill, experience and interpretation as well as technological
equipment to find and collect them. They must be actively and correctly entered into the legal
chain in order to be able to become evidence. Material bodies both enable producing the
phenomenon and offer resistance to it, for example in leaving or not leaving usable fingerprints
or threatening contamination.

Results The laboratory analysis6 then transforms these traces into information . Apart from
laboratory protocols designed to prevent deterioration, contamination, cross-contamination
and mix-ups, this transformation differs between DNA and fingerprint traces. DNA analysis is
quite automated – the laboratory routinely handles large numbers of traces, extracting DNA
from them and creating profiles of this DNA, a large part of which is done by instruments and
computers. A DNA profile does not contain information from the entire genome; in Sweden, it
(currently) contains information from 10 so-called loci as well as information about genetic sex.
These loci are ‘sections’ of the genome that are not assumed to code for any proteins, so-called
‘junk DNA’ without any discernible function in which mutations, and thus genetic diversity,
accumulate. This diversity consists of varying numbers of short, repeated sequences. The
laboratory can ‘measure’ the number of these repetitions. As every person inherits each locus
twice (one from each parent), such a DNA profile thus consists of a string of 20 figures and a sex
marker.7 This profile can then easily be stored and compared to other profiles in databases,
either from DNA collected from suspects or from other crime scenes. Fingerprint analysis is
much less automated. Specialized fingerprint examiners compare the fingerprints from the
crime scene with fingerprints from suspects. They scrutinize enlarged images of the fingerprints
on a computer screen, looking for and marking out so-called details in the lines, such as lines
that stop or bifurcate. When there is no suspect, the fingerprints from the crime scene are run
against the police’s fingerprint database, which returns a number of suggestions. These
suggestions – or, in the case of a known suspect, their fingerprints – are then manually
compared with the fingerprints from the crime scene one by one.8 What makes this comparison
demanding is, according to the examiners, that fingers are soft and pliable, and thus no two
prints made by the same finger are ever exactly identical. Based on the premise that every
fingerprint is unique (see Cole [2001, 2009] for a critical discussion), in fingerprint evidence a
match between a fingerprint from a crime scene and that from a suspect is taken to indicate
that the suspect left the fingerprint at the crime scene. A DNA match, however, does, contrary
to popular narrative, not mean that the suspect is the only possible source of the trace at the
crime scene. As DNA profiles do not cover all genes but only a limited number of loci, there is
the – albeit very small – possibility that several individuals might share the same DNA profile.
Consequently, a match between two DNA samples is extremely probable when both come from
the same source and very unlikely when they do not. Accordingly, the Swedish National
Laboratory of Forensic Science, like many international counterparts (see, for example, Halfon,
1998: 808–11; Lynch et al., 2008: Ch 5; M’charek, 2000: 131–5), not only reports DNA analysis
results as a match (or a mismatch), but also reports how ‘valuable’ Kruse 369 a match is. A full
profile match, for example, is reported as ‘practically impossible’ to obtain if the trace was left
by someone else than the suspect, usually termed a random member of the population.9 In
other words, the laboratory’s statement is solely about the analysis result; what the result
implies about whether or not the suspect can reasonably be concluded to be the source of the
DNA recovered from the crime scene is left for the court to decide. These results are reported in
expert statements that move on through the legal chain, that is, to the police and from there to
the prosecution, the defence and the courts, where they will be combined with other evidence
in the case. Thus, forensic evidence is not only dependent on procedures of collecting and
preserving. Fingerprints or DNA recovered from crime scenes are useless on their own, they
require samples from suspects that they can be compared to. These samples are contingent on
practices of finding these (potential) suspects. Furthermore, the transformation of traces into
information involves different interpretations, made through the intraaction of forensic
scientists, instruments, implements and concepts of human bodies.

Evidence An expert statement, however, does not make a conviction. Laboratory results must
be assessed, evaluated and, together with the other evidence, transformed into a verdict by the
courts. In this, the results’ validity itself is usually uncontested in Swedish courts. Both
fingerprint and DNA evidence are usually invoked in the form of the laboratory’s written expert
statement – perhaps at least in part because Sweden does not employ juries, and thus the
judges and lay assessors who return the verdict have accumulated a professional attitude to the
kinds of forensic evidence that are routinely used. In addition, prosecution, defence, and court
all assume that the laboratory has done its job well and produced reliable results. What is,
however, frequently contested and disputed is what the expert statement means for the
defendant’s culpability in the alleged crime. A fingerprint, for example, may have ended up at
the crime scene without connection to the crime; cigarette ends and beverage containers that
carry DNA can be planted at a crime scene. Furthermore, what a fingerprint or DNA match can
be concluded to confirm is a defendant’s presence at a crime scene, not what they were doing
there and whether these actions can be categorized as a crime.10 Thus, at least in Sweden,
forensic evidence by itself cannot bring about a conviction, it needs a context – typically
provided by witness and other accounts. Accordingly, trial proceedings revolve around which
conclusions can be drawn or, in legal terms, whether or not the prosecution can prove beyond
a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of a particular crime. In this, narratives – from
defendants, plaintiffs and witnesses – usually make up the main evidence. Forensic evidence is
supporting evidence, used as a tool to assess its reliability and thus to strengthen or weaken
an account. Both prosecution and defence present their own and contest the other side’s
versions, offering the court their set of conclusions about the defendant’s culpability . In similar
fashion to that described by Anthony Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner (2000) for courts in the US,
they engage in the telling of stories and counter-stories when presenting their cases. These
stories can be very different, drawing on distinct, well-known types of explanations and thus
creating different understandings of the defendants’ actions. For example, a violent death can
be rendered as cold-blooded murder, a madperson’s act under hallucinations, a robbery gone
wrong, self-defence, or a tragic accident – all of them culturally recognizable understandings
with which to attribute meaning to a death. They also have corresponding legal meanings of
culpability; madpersons cannot be held responsible for their actions, and killing in self-defence
may be lawful, but a cold-blooded murder or a robbery gone wrong are crimes – albeit different
ones – for which a defendant will be held responsible. While legal experts are aware that people
do not always behave reasonably or even similarly, notions of how a robber, murderer, or
accident victim reasonably11 behaves and which conclusions can thus reasonably be drawn are
one resource in assessing evidence – after all, the court cannot know what ‘really happened’,
what is put before them is all there is. What makes forensic evidence valuable to the judicial
system is not that it can prove culpability – as discussed, it cannot – but that it can be used as a
tool with which to assess other evidence in a case and to thus navigate the uncertainty of
being unable to know what ‘really happened’. In other words, in order for traces from crime
scenes to be transformed into forensic evidence, that is, something that contributes to
determining culpability, laboratory results must be interpreted. This implies that forensic
laboratory results may not be as immutable as they are popularly described. They do not
transport ready-made meaning from the crime scene to the laboratory to the courtroom but
are infused with (legal) meaning upon their arrival. It is only through interpretation with the
help of both specifically legal and more general cultural categories and concepts of behaviour,
that traces from crime scenes are transformed from laboratory results into forensic evidence.
The transformations that the traces undergo illustrate that the seemingly simple connection
between a body at a crime scene and the evidence that can lead to the body’s owner being
convicted is far from being straightforward. The materiality of fingerprint and DNA evidence is
a materiality that is inseparably both material and discursive, made up of intertwined matter
and meaning. There is no doubt that matter is an important factor in producing forensic
evidence; without bodily traces such as fingerprints or body fluids at crime scenes, there could
not be any fingerprint or DNA evidence. However, forensic evidence is far from directly rooted
in an immediate bodily materiality. This is not to say that the connection between bodies and
evidence is spurious, quite the contrary. The connection is so solid precisely because it is made
solid. In this, forensic evidence has intriguing parallels to the sexed bodies discussed by Butler
and Grosz: material-discursive practices materialize and solidify bodies or evidence as tangible
phenomena. In addition, neither sex nor forensic evidence could be meaningful without being
(also) discursive.
 Human Nature
To address the inequities of police policy, we must interrogate the Human that
lies behind the dogmatic image of thought. Without this, we will never LEARN
anything about the nature of police violence and will REPLICATE the production
of racialized subjects deemed non-Human.

Philips 20 (Chas. Assistant Prof. of Political Science at Gettysburg College. “Human without
Image: Deleuzian Critique beyond the Neighbourhood Effect” in Deleuze and Guattari Studies
14.1 (2020): 152–176 DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2020.0395 © Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs)

The Image of Thought is Deleuze’s conceptual shorthand for a dominant philosophical tradition
of thinking that is grounded in the realm of the recognisable. In this model, thinking is an
already-settled starting point from which all human beings begin; the actualised world is thus
grasped as intelligible by the concord of our faculties, and organised into a taxonomy of
grouped categories. Deleuze reviews Descartes’s move to eliminate Aristotle’s presupposition
of ‘Man as a rational animal’ in an effort to avoid all presuppositions – to start at the very
beginning of philosophy (Deleuze 1994: 129). In order to construct a philosophical proof without
relying on Aristotle’s presuppositions, Descartes strips away every possible assumption to end
with his proof: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Deleuze points out that he fails to see the ‘subjective or
implicit presuppositions contained in opinions rather than concepts, what is meant by self,
thinking, and being’ (Deleuze 1994: 129). The critique of Descartes’s proof (and the many
models that derive from it) is that it assumes that ‘everyone knows what it means to think and
to be’ (Deleuze 1994: 130) based on the assumption that everyone finds themselves already
thinking. Thus, the beginning point for Descartes has smuggled in a different set of
presuppositions about thinking that Deleuze points out and refutes as a non-philosophical Image
of Thought (Deleuze 1994: 132). The three levels of the Image of Thought are: ‘A naturally
upright thought, an in principle natural common sense, and a transcendental model of
recognition’ (Deleuze 1994: 134). Each of the eight postulates constituting this Image of
Thought represent fundamental misunderstandings–and therefore obstacles–to the practice
of thinking as Deleuze understands it: the purported good will of the thinker, the reliance on
common sense as a ready-made faculty, the model of recognition, the sufficiency of
representation, the aspiration of eliminating error, the sufficiency of logic and truth as a
structure, the reliance on solutions, and the emphasis on knowledge rather than learning. I
argue that they also implicitly frame an ‘Image of the Human’ based on this Image of Thought–
a racialised figure of the human that grounds and perpetuates invasive policing policy
inequitably among urban spaces. Just as Deleuze articulates a critique to the dogmatic and
stultifying Image of Thought, I propose a parallel critique of an Image of the Human in order to
expose and refute harmful policing practices framed around this image. The model of thought
that derives from the Image can be described as universal, representable, natural, general,
truth-based, upright (well ordered, susceptible to human mastery). Thought occurs, on this
account, through a unification of the faculties and a perfect distillation of the world into
recognisable categories that appear to exist prior to thought. Based on the third postulate, one
does not need to think to see a distribution of recognisable objects or concepts – they are simply
there. In his critique, Deleuze reminds us that ‘the form of recognition has never sanctioned
anything but the recognizable and the recognised; form will never inspire anything but
conformities’ (Deleuze 1994: 134). If we stick to the realm of recognition, we will be trapped in
the ‘rediscovery’ of existing or current values. For Deleuze, the encounter–that which compels
us to think – is not recognisable (Deleuze 1994: 139–40). It is sensed. We are drawn to the
encounter based on discord rather than a unity of the senses. We can sense that the realm of
the virtual is at work, even if we cannot access it. When we encounter something that
disorients or unravels our categories of recognition–a problem–we have the potential to learn
(Deleuze 1994: 164). Thus, thinking cannot be reduced to the empirical existence of objects or
experiences because thinking must (and does) draw on things that have yet to actualise and
are not graspable through common sense. Thinking draws on the very edges of our faculties,
where we can sense something that is imperceptible. If one dwells in the world of analogy,
opposition, resemblance, identity, comparison, qualities, quantities, distribution and category,
one has left thinking behind. The stultifying and oppressive Image of Thought is accompanied
by an implicit figure of the recognisable and rational human who engages in thought as
opposed to thinking. This human is coded in particular ways 11 – it knows rather than learns,
obeys rather than transgresses, accepts rather than questions, remains silent rather than
objecting, and is a static being rather than a dynamic becoming. This human is not an Idea; she
is an object. I am calling this the Image of the Human. Like thought, the Image of the Human is
a governing principle taken to be a given–the Image is predicated on the assumption that the
human is a settled, recognisable point of departure that relies on no presuppositions. Even
Descartes, who attempted to strip away all philosophical presuppositions in order to get to his
point of departure, leaves the category of the human securely, if implicitly, intact; he ‘presents
the I think as another procedure of definition, one capable of demonstrating the specificity of
humanity or the quality of its substance’ (Deleuze 1994: 257). The concept of thinking, as
Descartes defines it, provides the parameters of the human that Deleuze traces through the
Western philosophical canon. It can be simplified as rational in thought and self-governed in
practice. The faculties of the thinking human are in concordance in a univocal, whole, singular
self. According to Georges Dicker, Descartes’s presupposition of a substance as the foundation
of the ‘I think’ is ‘the most basic assumption involved in the cogito’ (Dicker 1993: 50). Subjects
are stable, static, univocal, rational beings who process past memories to reasonably inform
future decisions in linear patterns. Deleuze critiques this model of Thought (and, by
implication, the accompanying figure of the human who correlates with it) as reductive and
inaccurate, and he provides space for a fractured self, experiencing newness in the face of
repetition with a difference. My goal is to transpose Deleuze’s analysis back to the discussion of
Sewell et al.’s studies in order to identify the way this problematic Image of the Human
undergirds and informs policing policy. Sewell et al. reveal that SQF and other aggressive
policing techniques are more often deployed in neighbourhoods of colour than in white
communities (see Sewell and Jefferson 2016; Sewell et al. 2016). Men of colour experience
aggressive and violent encounters with the police at disproportionately high rates. Using this
statistical data, it can be posited that policing policy is based around an implicit Image of the
Human that is racialised: certain techniques are used only on those who fall outside this
operational Image of the Human. Accordingly, I argue that conceptions of the human that
ground policing practices are constituted by, and help reconstitute, processes of racialisation.
Such processes provide the rationalised resources for the policing practices discussed above.
The rational, singular, radically self-governing figure of the human–docile and disciplined–is a
figure marked (in part) by whiteness. Bodies who do not comport with this latent category of
the recognisable ‘human’ find themselves subject to the modes of policing described above
that are justifiable only outside boundaries of the Human. What would it mean to disrupt this
Image of the Human in the same way Deleuze wants to upend the Image of Thought? Perhaps
Deleuze has given us the resources to think through the way an Image of the Human is
smuggled into aggressive policing and surveillance. If the Image of the Human is a problematic
and oppressive image that is racially grounded – rather than a settled and given point of
departure – then the twin projects of disrupting the Image of Thought and the Image of the
Human may yield a new set of criticisms for the framework on which policing policy appears
to operate.12
 Human Rights

Human rights introduce transcendence into political thought and practice. This
creates a universal and abstract human subject that inhibits movement and
becoming while disregarding the immanent modes of existence of individuals.
As a result, we systematically overlook the way human rights sustain quotidian
violence in the status quo.

Lefebvre 12 (Alexandre, Lecturer in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and the
School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, “Human Rights in Deleuze and
Bergson’s Later Philosophy,” in Deleuze and Law Edinburgh University Press)

What fault does Deleuze identify in human rights discourses? Transcendence. He repeats this
criticism time and again: Human rights introduce transcendence into political thought and
practice.

1. ‘If you’re talking about reconstituting transcendence or univer- sals, restoring a reflective
subject as the bearer of rights, or setting up a communicative intersubjectivity, then it’s not
much of a philosophical advance (invention philosophique).’ (Deleuze 1995: 152, translation
modified)

2. ‘These days it’s human rights (droits de l’homme) that provide our eternal values. It’s the
constitutional state and other notions everyone recognizes as very abstract. And it’s in the
name of all this that think- ing’s fettered, that any analysis in terms of movement is blocked.
But if we’re so oppressed, it’s because our movement is being restricted, not because our
eternal values are being violated.’ (Deleuze 1995: 122, translation modified)

3. ‘Human rights say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of people provided with
rights.’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 107)

4. ‘A concern for human rights shouldn’t lead us to extol the “joys” of liberal capitalism of
which they’re an integral part. There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the
very core by its part in generating human misery.’ (Deleuze 1995: 173)

Deleuze’s definition of transcendence is negative and uncompromising. Transcendence is the

immanence of one term to another (Deleuze 2006: 385). Or, expanding the formula, when one
term is immanent to another, the latter transcends the former. The definition is negative
because transcendence is a function of immanence that negates or ‘denatures’ itself. In other
words, transcendence is essentially deriva- tive: ‘transcendence is always a product of
immanence’ (Deleuze 2006: 388). And the definition is uncompromising because it applies to
any situation where we say that something is immanent to something else. This ranges from
major cases of transcendence, such as ‘the world is my representation’ (idealism) or ‘the world
is in God’ (religion), to turns of phrase that introduce its trace, such as ‘it’s raining today’ (if we
mean some ‘it’ that is the subject of the action), or ‘freedom of speech is in the Constitution’ (if
we mean that an eminent document contains our freedom). Transcendence, for Deleuze, is
everywhere.

What about human rights? As the quotations below show, Deleuze attacks different aspects of
transcendence. We can take them one-by-one. 1. Deleuze’s baseline criticism of human rights
is that they ‘suppose a universal and abstract subject of rights, identified with no one in par-
ticular and irreducible to singular, existent figures’ (Patton 2005: 58, emphasis added). This
characterisation informs his three substantive

criticisms.
2. Human rights inhibit movement and becoming. On Deleuze’s account, human rights
represent a closed set of enumerated qualities. He calls them ‘eternal values’ because they
mark the human being as a stable, given essence. To understand this criticism, it is important to
remember that Deleuze is not only concerned with capital C catastro- phes, i.e., the kind of
major outrage associated with human rights, but also with everyday violence, or rather, the
violence of the everyday: ads, magazine quizzes, psychiatric tests, heteronormativity, i.e.,
anything that works with a fixed concept of the subject. It is this second kind of violence that
human rights sustain. Because they reinforce a closed concept of the human, Deleuze
implicates human rights within a much broader criticism of representational thought as a
limitation on possibil- ity and experimentation. 1 In this respect, his assessment coincides with
that of Alain Badiou: ‘Let us note that a certain twenty-first century , under the sign of human
rights as the rights of the natural living being, of finitude, or resignation to what there is, tries
to return to man as a given’ (Badiou 2007: 169).

3. Human rights disregard the modes of existence of people provided with rights. For Deleuze,
the criterion for effective political philoso- phy and practice is that concepts must connect to
the ‘present milieu’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 100). In other words, they must respond to the
case at hand, such that both concept and situation are recre- ated from within the context of
their encounter. Because human rights operate as axioms and remain unmodified by
intervention, Deleuze calls them abstract and ineffective. Hence his polemic: ‘You invoke
human rights, what does that mean? It means, “Ah, [you] Turks have no right to massacre
Armenians”’ (Deleuze 2004: ‘G pour Gauche’). In short, by designating human rights as axioms
that transcend concrete situations, Deleuze argues they are unresponsive to the problem at
hand.2

4. Human rights [obscure] blind us to harm of our own making. By positing a transcendent
universal humanity, human rights threaten to introduce a spurious sympathy or
sentimentality into crises that are (inadvertently) of our own design. As Susan Sontag writes,
‘So far as we feel sympa- thy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our
sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our
good intentions) an impertinent – if not an inappropriate – response’ (Sontag 2002: 102).
Human rights are part of a philosophy of transcendence that reinforces a
universal and ahistorical model of human nature. These rights are unrelated to
the immanent conditions of real individuals in specific political contexts and can
always be suspended to preserve the interests of global capitalism. Reject
transcendent human rights in favor of immanent practice of jurisprudence.
Patton 12 (Paul, professor of philosophy at the university of new south wales, “Immanence,
Transcendence, and the Creation of Rights,” in Deleuze and Law, Edinburgh University Press)

The refusal of transcendence is one of the constant motifs of Deleuze’s philosophy. His thought
renounces all forms of appeal to transcend- ent values, concepts of history, or human nature
in favour of a radical immanentism. At the same time, it purports to be an untimely philoso- phy
in Nietzsche’s sense of the term, opposed to the present in the name of a time and a people to
come. This raises a problem: if Deleuzian political philosophy is denied recourse to any kind of
transcendence, how does it attain the necessary distance that enables it to be critical of the
present? The answer relies on the distinction between virtuality and actuality that runs throughout
Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy. In A Thousand Plateaus, they contrast the plane of
organi- sation or actuality, on which we encounter real things, real people and various kinds of
becoming (becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and so on), with the plane of immanence or
virtuality, on which we encounter abstract machines, pure events and becomings-
imperceptible. The plane of organisation is where history unfolds through processes of
relative deterritorialisation and transformation or metamorphosis of existing institutions,
forms of life and subjectivity, along with processes of reter- ritorialisation, capture, or
blockage of such transformative processes. Deleuzian philosophy is properly described as a
philosophy of imma- nence because the planes of immanence and organisation are mutually
implicated in one another and because the plane of immanence is the more profound inner realm
of reality.

With reference to this dual-aspect ontology, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that every process or
event simultaneously inhabits both the historical world of actuality and the ahistorical world
of the virtual events or processes. Pure events or becomings are never exhausted by the
historical events in which they are actualised. Rather, they constitute ‘a shadowy or secret
part that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1991: 147; 1994: 156). Deleuzian criticism of the present then takes the form of identifying
those social, intellectual and artistic or other movements in which pure eventness or
becoming is expressed. These are the lines of flight along which change happens. They are the
processes of relative deterritorialisation by means of which existing assemblages are
transformed into something else. Such criticism is always situational or site-specific. There is
no master plan and no general recipe for effecting change in a particular direction. That is why
Deleuze prefers the multiple forms of becoming-revolutionary over any unitarian concept of the
revolution, or the varieties of becom- ing-minority over the position of the majority. The
majoritarian subject of modern Western political societies is always an abstract figure that
corresponds to no particular individual or to nobody, whereas minori- ties understood as
expressions of becoming-minor are ‘seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger
uncontrollable movements and deter- ritorializations of the mean or majority’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980: 134; 1987: 106).
This preference for particular and local forms of resistance to the present explains why,
towards the end of his life, Deleuze criticised the increasingly popular recourse to human rights
as a basis for criticism. In conversation with Antoine Dulaure and Claire Parnet in 1985, he
complained of the recourse to abstraction and reluctance to embrace movement in contemporary
thought and politics:

In philosophy we’re coming back to eternal values, to the idea of the intel- lectual as custodian of eternal
values. We’re back to Benda complaining that Bergson was a traitor to his own class, the clerical class, in
trying to think motion. These days it’s the rights of man that provide our eternal values. It’s the
constitutional state (état de droit) and other notions that everyone recognizes as very abstract. And it’s in
the name of all this that thinking is fettered and that any analysis in terms of movements is blocked.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1990: 166; 1995: 121–2)

What is Philosophy? is equally critical of the uses made of rights talk in the contemporary world.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that human rights have come to function as axioms within the
immanent axiomatic of global capital. As such, the basic civil and political rights regarded as
human rights coexist alongside other axioms, such as those designed to ensure the security of
property. The result is that when economic condi- tions demand the tightening of credit or the
withdrawal of employment, the rights of the poor to basic social goods are effectively
suspended. Human rights are widely proclaimed but, in the absence of any effective
institutional mechanism for their enforcement, it is left to individual states and non-state
organisations to decide when and where their infringement is so serious as to require action.
In addition to these famil- iar criticisms of the operation of human rights, Deleuze and Guattari
are critical of the very concept of human rights in so far as these are supposed to be grounded
in universal features of human nature such as human freedom, rationality, or the capacity to
communicate. Such universal rights ‘say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of
people provided with rights’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 103; 1994: 107). Since they
presuppose a universal and abstract subject of rights, irreducible to any singular, existent
figures, they are eternal, abstract and transcendent rights belonging to everyone and no one
in particular. This may well appear from the perspective of contemporary concep- tions of human
rights to be an outdated understanding. Nevertheless, it goes some way towards explaining
Deleuze’s response, when asked by Raymond Bellour and Francois Ewald in 1988 why, unlike
Foucault, he took no part in the human rights movement or debates about the constitutional state:
‘If you are talking about establishing new forms of transcendence, new universals, restoring a
reflective subject as the bearer of rights, or setting up a communicative intersubjectivity, then it’s
not much of a philosophical advance’ (Deleuze 1990: 208; 1995: 152). 1

Deleuze elaborates on the emptiness of abstract human rights in his Abécédaire interviews with
Claire Parnet, with reference to the problems facing an Armenian population that had been
subjected to a massacre by Turks and, after having fled to the then Armenian Soviet Socialist
Republic, to a massive earthquake.2 He objects that, when people make declarations about
human rights in such situations,

these declarations are never made as a function of the people who are directly concerned , the
Armenian society, the Armenian communities, etc. Their problem is not ‘the rights of man’ . . . I would say
that it’s not a question of ‘the rights of man’, it’s not a question of justice, rather it’s a question of territory,
of jurisprudence. (Deleuze 1996: ‘G comme Gauche’)

In this passage, Deleuze contrasts the outdated, abstract and empty concept of human rights
with the rights required in order for this Armenian enclave within the former USSR to survive.
These rights, he suggests, must be considered in the context of a quite specific territorial and
political assemblage, just as he had earlier explained in relation to desire: desire is never simply
desire for someone or something but always desire for and from within a particular aggregate or
assemblage (Deleuze 1996: ‘D comme Désir’). The specific needs and context of the Armenian
people concerned call for the creation of new rights, or the modification of existing rights, rather
than the simple application of universal principles to this particular case. Human rights grounded
in a particular rights-bearing feature of human nature are useless because they are fixed and
ahistorical, unable to evolve in accordance with the requirements of a particular case.
Situations such as this call for a crea- tive response that Deleuze calls jurisprudence: ‘This
Armenian problem is typically what can be called an extraordinarily complex problem of
jurisprudence’ (Deleuze 1996: ‘G comme Gauche’).
Law
Internalization of the law amounts to self-imposed terrorism and despotism.
The subject and the social are purged of all value and replaced with endless,
structural negativity.
Colebrook 9
[Claire, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and cultural
theorist, “Legal Theory after Deleuze” ch. 2 in Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures, 2009 Palgrave
Macmillan, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230244771]

It is true, they acknowledge, that we are currently suffering from an Oedipal structure, which is
tied directly to capitalism and a certain notion of the law. Here they draw directly on the
structural psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, who insisted that one could only be a subject
through subjection to law, and that this subjection was Oedipal in its imaginary dimension.
Deleuze and Guattari oppose this thesis by insisting on the reality of desire. Social machines or
the network of law and relations are not primary, for social machines and law work upon and
require flows of desire. Desire is not some imagined effect of the law. It is not the case that one
requires an original prohibition to create a desire that must have been. It is the case, they
concede, that Oedipal desire is an effect of the law, for it is the prohibition on incest that leads
us to assume that incest is what we must have desired. This prohibition distorts a real and
revolutionary desire, a desire that is beyond the law insofar as it is not yet a desire for
recognition or social production. It is an intensive desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 114).

As an example we might return to the Mabo case. One way to read the legal claim of Aboriginal
peoples for native title is through recognition. A claim for land would be a claim for inclusion,
given that selfhood today is largely conferred through capacities for ownership. On such a
reading the desire of any claim is derived from the social machine of legitimation. Another,
intensive, reading of such claims is that there is a directly revolutionary desire that takes the
form of an attachment to the spirit of a space that is not yet subjected to the social machine of c
apital. This desire for land might enable the formation of another social machine that would also
be a coding of desire. However, as it functions in the Mabo v Queensland judgements, we could
see the desire for land as an opening up of the ‘war machine’, where the terms of a body politic
are not yet decided (Ivison, Patton and Sanders, 2000).

Deleuze and Guattari create a positive concept of desire that provides a radical overturning of
the structurally constitutive understanding of law. It is not the case that in the beginning is law,
system and relation, with the non-relation or ‘in itself’ being imagined after the event. Instead,
they posit desire as a potentiality for creating relation: for example desires for land, for body
parts, for sounds, for attachments. There can only be social machines, systems of law or
lawfulness in general because of this potentiality for relations. We can give this potentiality a
number of names, including the Body without Organs, desire, difference in itself, or the virtual.
In all cases what Deleuze and Guattari reject is the primacy of ‘a’ relational system or even
systematicity in general. There can only be systems, differences or laws if there are virtual
potentials to differ, to enter into relation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 111).

Without setting up an overly dichotomous relation between Deleuze and Derrida we might
suggest that the great contribution of Deleuze’s theory is that while he, like Derrida, insists that
any presented being is the effect of some process of genesis, he also insists that it is possible to
enquire into the virtual potentials from which such genetic potentials unfold. Derrida continually
insisted that we only know genesis through the structures it has enabled, even if those
structures never exhaust those potentials. This is made clear in Derrida’s very early essays on
culture and the emergence of social relations. In response to Levi-Strauss, who argues that
culture emerges with the prohibition of incest or the subjection of natural bodies to an order of
exchange, Derrida notes that this distinction between pre-cultural desires and social structures
must itself rely on a system of distinctions (Derrida, 1978). We are always already within
difference, system and relations. To posit some naively utopian moment prior to prohibition is
always to look back from instituted relations to some imaginary and illusory origin. The pre-
systemic origin is effected from the system itself.

When Deleuze and Guattari direct their arguments against Oedipus they do so in direct criticism
of this assumption of the necessary imposition of law. It is not the case, they insist, that desiring
bodies are constituted through law. It is not through prohibition or subjection that something
like a self who is ‘before the law’ can take existence (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 161).
Whereas bodies and their relations were once dominated or ‘overcoded’ through the imposition
of terror by despots, it is now the ‘signifier’ that reigns despotically, internalising terror in the
form of the Oedipus complex. To explain this they make a comparison between a ‘surplus value
of code’, enjoyed by the despots, and the general process of ‘decoding’ in capitalism. A social
body produces material for consumption through its interactions and technical processes. A
certain excess can be enjoyed by the despot (in the form of sumptuous displays, wasteful
expenditure or even the enjoyment of bodies denied to others). It is in this excessive
consumption that the body of the despot turns the circulation of goods into a means for
establishing his precedence. In this manoeuvre one body is set above the social body to define
its point of order, the point from which it can be terrorised . Deleuze and Guattari describe the
despot as one who subjects social alliance (relations among tribes and bodies) to filiation. The
despot will claim to be descended directly from the gods. The despot’s body is therefore set
outside the territory of producing bodies, as a point of anti-production. It is this point of
immobility that subjects relations and flows of production to a seemingly transcendent or
abstract point of consumption. The goods consumed by the despot in displays of excess are
therefore productive of a surplus value of code, allowing the social machine to be explained by a
body that is not part of the machine of production.

Deleuze and Guattari make a series of points regarding what they refer to as this historical stage
of despotism. First, social machines (or the productive relations among bodies) are always
repressions of desiring machines. Deleuze and Guattari’s project in Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A
Thousand Plateaus (1987) is one of writing a history of varying relations between social
machines and desiring machines. Desiring machines are relations that are not yet organised
according to named bodies (such as mother–father–child, master–slave or worker–labourer). A
desiring machine is a flow of milk connecting lips and breast, a flow of blood connecting scarring
hand and enjoying eye, a flow of food from hand to mouth or flows of sound connecting
birdsong to attending ears. When such flows become stabilised, through regularised practices of
child-rearing, tattooing, hunting or collective eating, then a social machine forms organised
bodies from flows of desire. Their important point is that one should not see social machines as
collections of human subjects, for there can only be discernible human forms (mother–father,
male–female, or hunter–consumer) after desiring flows have been assembled into some
minimally stable body of relations. This allows them to see law and terror as a form of
deterritorialisation.

Social machines commence as territories, or relatively stable systems of relation that enable
production. As soon as one body appears as a point of law or order for a territory then one has
moved from the primitive to the despotic social machine, to a body of law that overcodes the
whole. The modern notion that we can only be subjects insofar as we are submitted to a system
of signification – and that outside the law there is only the chaos and the terror of the
undifferentiated – merely substitutes the abstract terror of the signifier for the concrete terror
of the despot (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 73). The idea that we are necessarily mediated by
transcendence is, Deleuze and Guattari insist, an ‘archaism’ that allows despotism to continue in
an abstract and internalised form. The notion, then, of justice as some absent, unattainable,
ever-deferred but always admonishing ideal is profoundly oedipal. We no longer regard
ourselves as terrorised by some actual body who threatens to punish us for inflicting disorder on
the social machine. Instead, we imagine that there is no self outside its submission to systems.
Beyond our submission there is only the nightmarish chaos of the undifferentiated . When we
subject our desire to deferral and lack we are really only obeying a structural law of civilised
humanity. They describe this ‘paralogism’ of the law as, ‘The extraction of a transcendent
complete object from the signifying chain, which served as a despotic signifier on which the
entire chain thereafter seemed to depend, assigning an element of lack to each position of
desire, fusing desire to a law, and engendering the illusion that this loosened up and freed the
elements of the chain’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 110). We should not, according to
Deleuze and Guattari, simply accept this miserable and Oedipal fiction of necessary subjection. It
matters little whether this is a literal abandonment of the mother in the face of paternal threat,
or the structural resignation to system and signification in the face of a fall into psychotic or
meaningless disorder. What occurs with the modern conception of law and desire is an
increasing internalisation of terror and despotism, and an increasingly miserable distance from
law. One is a subject only through subjection of desires to the law, while law can only be given ,
not as any actual or positive body, but as that which will always be above and beyond any
achievable end (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 215).

It is all too easy to see the practical consequences of what Deleuze and Guattari describe. We
can see the ways in which the subject of law in modernity suffers from this internalised,
abstract, deferred and negative terror of structural negation. Humanity has become nothing
other than a structure of subjection. In liberal democracies the self has no positive quality
other than its submission to regulation. The social order, ideally, has no positive quality other
than its prohibition of the intrusion of positive content from the network of social circulation.
Human rights mark an interesting point within the discourse of liberalism that would define the
self as properly autonomous, self-constituting and distinct from the imposition of any positive
norms. Originally defined through notions of non-interference, rights have become ways of
maintaining minimal forms of normative content. The right to free speech, for example, is
thoroughly in accord with an internalisation of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as
capitalism’s decoded axiomatic; one is no longer governed by a tyrannical body, but is self-
governing precisely through the absence of any specific norm or quality. The order of law as it
appears in the imperial formation, and as it will evolve later, indeed will have something in
common: the indifference to designation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 214). If there is no law
other than the law of self-regulation, then the only truth or right of humanity lies in its quality of
self-making. This allows us to protect, defend and define rights to free speech and conscience,
but also explains those odd intrusions such as the right to ‘bear arms’. In the absence of any
norm or law other than individuals’ capacities to enter into relation, one must also begin to
acknowledge the rights of those bodies to preclude undue intrusion, possibly justifying a right to
defence.

Deleuzian philosophy offers a critical and clinical approach to the law, whereby
the law is freed from subordination to transcendent categories of judgment and
made an immanent and creative science of jurisprudence.
Sutter and McGee 12 (Laurent FWO Senior Researcher in Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit
Brussel, and Kyle, practicing lawyer in the US, “Introduction,” Deleuze and Law, Edinburgh
University Press)
Let’s return for just a moment to the connection Deleuze draws between law and philosophy by
situating himself as its vertex. Reflecting on the hesitation that he felt when the time came to
choose an academic curriculum, Deleuze added that he continued to be interested in law despite
choosing philosophy. Instead of some kind of intellectual teenage fling, law never ceased to haunt
his philosophical work. The science of the case practised in law courts on a daily basis was for
him such an object of admiration that one may hazard the thesis that phi- losophy was never an
exclusive pursuit for the young Gilles or even the mature Professor Deleuze, that his perspective
on philosophy was always informed by law to a substantial degree. We know that he came to the
subject of his thesis, David Hume, through the concept of law, we know that he counted himself a
casuist by the 1960s, and we know that his literary studies are shot through with elements that can
only be called legal. Sacher-Masoch, Kafka, Melville’s Bartleby, the Proustian law of love, and
others again: these are the objects of a deeply jurisprudential philosophical engagement with
literature. There was something like regret in his voice when he spoke to Parnet about law: the
regret that philosophy, at least as it was practised in mid-century Europe, was not enough. And
when one reads Deleuze’s work while keeping that hint of regret in mind – the regret concerning
the importance, the exemplarity of law – one cannot resist the conclusions that form the taproot of
this collaboration. From Empirisme et subjectivité to Critique et clinique, all of his books in one
way or another testify to his persistent interest in, even passion for, law. Often, even most of the
time, such testimony only concerns one or two sentences: fragments of analysis, lapidary theses,
mere illustration, spectres of thought. But whether they materialise in the form of analysis, thesis,
or illustration, each of these elements allows us to assert the hypothesis that, contrary to
appearances, there was and is a real Deleuzian philosophy of law that remains to be unfolded.
And perhaps even further: this philosophy is not fragmentary in any pejorative sense but is a
conceptually articulated system of sometimes inarticulate propositions, a virtual system that is
perfectly differentiated lying beneath his actual metaphysics, as though it were its shadow.

Can we reconstruct that system? Assuredly not, not here: in addition to the fact that such a project
calls for precisely the kind of sustained treatment that we must deny ourselves here, we run the
risk of looking like despots overcoding the territory that the chapters that follow this text will
actually trace out in detail. Therefore we want only to entice you. We want only to mark some of
the coordinates, indicate potential properties of the system. Is it a system? We don’t know. But
we think it might be, so we will accept the hypothesis provisionally, run an initial experiment,
and see where it takes us. If things look promising, read on to the next chapter.

Two main theses constitute this system. The first thesis is voiced by Deleuze in his Présentation
de Sacher-Masoch: ‘Irony and humour are the essential forms through which we apprehend the
law’ (Deleuze 1967: 75; Deleuze 1989: 82). And the second, in an interview with François Ewald
and Raymond Bellour, later published in Pourparlers: ‘Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law,
and deals with singularities, it advances by working out from [or prolonging] singularities’
(Deleuze 1990: 209–10; Deleuze 1995: 153). All the clues spread across Deleuze’s work are mere
commentaries, developments, or illustrations of these two theses. Here is the basis of our
experiment. Those which flow from the first one form the ‘critical’ part of his system of
philosophy of law, devoted to the critique of law and judgment . On the other hand, those
which relate by a more or less lengthy chain of rationes back to the second thesis form the
‘clinical’ part of the system, devoted to the description of the practice of law and
jurisprudence. The aim of the entire system is to displace and substitute for the critical
economy of law understood as loi a kind of clinical economy of law understood as droit,
removed from the classical philosophical frameworks within which, since at least Cicero, law
has been imprisoned. Critique is not to be despised, but neither is it to be valorised for itself. It
is a part of a more expansive programme – and cannot be allowed to dominate. The totalising
spirit is strong with critical practice and represents a real obstacle to the functioning of the
constructive system. We can say that critique, then, grasped as a component rather than a whole,
is nothing but a movement towards clinique. Law’s grandeur, praised by Deleuze throughout his
entire oeuvre, comes precisely from its cultivated distance towards philosophy, or at least a
certain (critical) philosophical attitude. The long history of the relationship between philosophy
and law has consisted in an attempt to submit law to the transcendent categories of judgment
created by the Greek master-philosophers and developed in the thought of Roman Stoicism. To
this manoeuvre, law has always responded with the strictly immanent pertinence of the
science of the case, considered as the sole horizon of practice. As is shown by (among other
jurispolitical currents) the widespread invocation and arguable success of the contemporary
universalising ideology of human rights, which relies upon and entrenches the capitalist socius
and its semiotic of reactionary archaisms, this defence continues to work on the sidelines, to
foster resistance to the imperial locutions of transcendent Law – the dumbest philosophy
(using Deleuze’s own words), the most insensitive and ham-handed philosophy, has
triumphed, or offers itself as trium- phant, imposing upon law another horizon and form of
organisation, artificial, pretentious and expropriative.

Deleuze’s thinking on law is an appraisal of law’s grandeur – and a critique of the kind of
philosophy which tends to diminish it. But because it is an appraisal formulated by a philosopher
who has never renounced his own conceptual practice, it presents a very peculiar twist. As Alain
Badiou claims in his widely misread book, Deleuze is a ‘classi- cal’ philosopher, who belongs to
the – very French – tradition of René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche (Badiou 1997: 29;
2000: 45). He is a philosopher whose work takes aim at one single goal: the perfection of
philosophy itself. Because we mean this ‘perfection’ to register in the great classical tenor of
G.W. Leibniz, whose eclecticism never derogated from but always augmented his univocal
constructive adventure in pure thought, it is clear that to sing law’s grandeur is part of an
enterprise that remains altogether philosophical. What Deleuze wants is to pro- claim
philosophically law’s specificity so that it becomes an example for philosophy. As an immanent
practice of the case, law (droit) is the incarnation of what philosophy has to achieve for
herself in order to be able to leave the world of law (loi), judgment and debt, whose
fascinated observation has caused her stagnation. In that sense, to take an interest in and to
learn from law to the extent that it becomes possible to present the latter as a model for
philosophy has always meant, for Deleuze, to remain faithful to the discipline to which he
devoted his life. His purpose was to put an end to the conflict of faculties opposing the
teachers and disciplines of law and philosophy until the fall of theology by the end of the
eighteenth century, one more favourable to the latter than to the former. By singing the grandeur
of the practice of law, he wanted to sing the grandeur of a philosophical practice able to
perceive law’s grandeur by its own means and in its own way, rather than that of the practices
that tried to diminish law, and, in that way, to sadden and diminish themselves. Pursuing his
interest in law, Deleuze nevertheless remained completely faithful to his metaphysical
commitments and his theoretical programme: to have done with judgment, and to announce
the arrival of a practical philosophy, a new philosophical pragmatism, focusing on the singular
case rather than on law (loi). Philosophising law had proven to be a conceptual failure (although
an historical, imperial, bourgeois success): it was time to inject philosophy with a dose of law.

If Deleuze’s interest and humour-riddled attitude towards law helped him to implement his
programmatic reversal of all philosophical values, it also produced a similar reversal in the realm
of law itself. Since Cicero, jurisprudes and legal theorists have devoted themselves to the
problems posed by the philosophy of law and judgment: the foundation of the legal order, the
rationality of judgment, the principled justification of court decisions, the legitimacy of rules
and norms, and so on. From Deleuze’s point of view, these problems could be divided into four
cat- egories: legalism (justification of droit by loi), naturalism (foundation of droit in loi),
conventionalism (guarantee of droit by loi), and institution- alism (limitation of droit by loi). For
him, all the questions belonging to these four categories belonged to the realm of what he called,
follow- ing Bergson, ‘false problems’ (Deleuze 1966: 3; Deleuze 1991: 15–21; see also Deleuze
1994b: 168ff.), that is, problems requiring of thought nothing more than the already-known. The
most important critique addressed by Deleuze to the philosophy of law and judgment is
precisely that it always asked questions to which it already had all the answers prepared. Only
the opposite, the unrecognised which exceeds the cat- egories of law and judgment, can be
interesting from a properly juristic perspective , Deleuze suggests. A problem is worth
examining only if it can generate or cause the emergence of new questions, questions to
which it is impossible to respond with mere confirmation and dogmatic classification, but
which can only be handled through the invention of an unthought, unrecognisable
consequence. By focusing on the clinique of the practice of law, he tried later to formulate the
problems specific to law (droit), without any regard for those imposed on them by law (loi) and
overcoded by judgment. For the justifications of legalism, he substi- tuted strategies of practical
intervention; for the foundation of natural- ism, the transformations of droit; for the guarantees of
conventionalism, the bricolage of new rapports; and for the limitations of institutionalism, the
creativity proper to legal invention. For a perverse, negative vision of law – as a tool for
maintaining the status quo or as an instrument of repression, which are perversions because
law is only passage – he tried to substitute an integrally affirmative vision, focusing on its own
productivity.

Deleuze’s take on law produced not only a deep restatement of phi- losophy, then, but also of
law. How far does this rearticulation reach? What are its concrete consequences, effects,
resonances? These are the two general questions the present book wants to explore. If the primary
objects of the programme formulated by Deleuze have here begun to be probed (that is: the
passage from the critique of law to its clinique), the crucial details as well as the way concrete
legal practices are affected by them have not. But if one is to take seriously the clinical thesis,
stating that ‘jurisprudence [of the case] is the philosophy of law’, it seems that one has first to
accept that, in the first instance, only those phenomena belonging to the realm of adjudication can
be considered ‘concrete legal practices’ concerned by it. For Deleuze, legislation belongs to
another practice than that of law, even though it is a practice that cuts across the latter and
frequently enters into composition with it. This other practice is politics. By adjudication, one
has then to broaden the usual definition and understand by this the whole ensemble of
operations through which a case individuates and becomes an occasion for law to exercise, to
practice its inherent creativity. To grasp the concrete consequences engi- neered in this
transformation of the understanding of law requires us to try to map all these operations. But
to draw such a map can only be done by way of the cases submitted to our attention through
world-historical processes characterising and shaping our present milieu, directly or indi-
rectly: the crises of contemporary law and legal rationalities, the emer- gence of biological
regulation and genomic law, the problem of human rights, the role of illegalisms and the
expansion of antisocial regulatory efforts, the classical and modern images of law (Plato,
Leibniz, Kant), the classical and modern critiques of law (Socrates, Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Kafka,
Melville), the exemplarity of Roman law and the neoarchaistic appropriation of its concepts and
models of reasoning, the conceptual personae of the advocate and the judge, the place of law
in the axiomat- ics of capital, and so on. Throughout his oeuvre, Deleuze multiplies entries into
the realm of legal practice, and we can no longer marginalise their importance for his thought,
for philosophy, and for law.

The critical part of the system consists partly in re-reading the history of thinking
(philosophical as well as literary) as the progressive self- destruction of law. To the classical
image of law created by Plato can be opposed the critique of this very image by Socrates, a
critique that ruins both its foundational pretences (the Good to which law must be referred) and
its projected redemptive or soteriological power (the Good expected from its exercise). Similarly,
to the modern image of law developed by Kant can be opposed its critique by Sade, Sacher-
Masoch, Kafka and Melville. This critique, explains Deleuze, takes the form of a skewed comical
gloss put on Kant’s straight-laced image of law. For Sade, this perspective consists in ironically
perverting law by referring it not to its intrinsic Good (the form of law), but to its intrinsic Evil, as
expressed by an outside (the Sadian institution). For Sacher-Masoch, it consists in humorously
subverting law by making it produce, while maintaining its form, consequences contrary to those
necessarily expected from it (the Masochist contract). For Kafka, it consists in nonsensically
invert- ing law by explaining how the universality of the assumed purity of the form of law is
haunted by the singularity of the impure desire which is its motor. And, for Melville, it consists in
converting law through slapstick by showing how its success is always also its failure (Captain
Vere’s or Bartleby’s pact). Following this history of the image of law, and of its critique, jurists
are put in a curious situation. What if the comical opera- tors of law were the lawyers
themselves? What if they were those who incarnate the comical dimension of law, better than any
philosopher or any writer – simply because law (loi) is not their problem? What if the critical
operations of the modern image of law were the very opera- tions of law (droit), those that
lawyers practise every day without even noticing?

The same goes with the clinical part of the system. Exactly as there is a critical history of law
(loi), there is a clinical history of the practice of law (droit). The latter is composed of several
important steps. The two most important ones are named ‘topical’ and ‘axiomatic’ by Deleuze
and Guattari, borrowing the distinction from Paul Veyne’s classic Le pain et le cirque. The
axiomatic practice of law is the practice of jurisprudence – of case law – as manipulated and
framed by the philosophical apparatus of capture. It is immanently within the framework of this
practice that the four categories of false problems engendered by the philosophy of law and
judgment (legalism, naturalism, conventionalism, institutional- ism) are challenged and resisted
through the exercise of four regimes of legal practice (intervention, subvention, convention,
invention). But precisely because it still has to fight against the modern image of law, the
axiomatic practice of law remains too tightly bound to it. Contrarily, the topical practice of law,
corresponding to Roman law before Cicero’s attempt to introduce Greek philosophy into it,
doesn’t have to face the same difficulty. It is only in such a practice that one can discover the last
active remnants of the Leibnizian dream of a ‘Universal Jurisprudence’, a dream shared by
Deleuze. That is: the project of a casuistic practice of law proceeding directly to the creation of
principle and legal con- cepts rather than to their application. To free law from Law , then,
requires that law become devoted to the ‘free and savage’ creation of non-decomposable,
non-transposable principles extracted from singular cases, remaining always within the strict
limits of the case or singular- ity. The philosophy of law (loi) and judgment tried to define a sort
of a programme posing the principles at a transcendent height broodingly inaccessible to law
(droit). The topical practice of law replies by displac- ing principles from the government of its
action to its end, understood as the ultimate moment of its process of creation and invention.
Laws are not productive or primary; they rely upon and presuppose institutions
that emerge from the creative and inventive processes of social relations.
Schuilenburg 12 (Marc, Lecturer in Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “Institutions and
Interactions: On the Problem of the Molecular and the Molar,” in Deleuze and Law Edinburgh
University Press)

In a filmed interview with Claire Parnet, Deleuze gives the example of smoking in taxis to explain
what ‘jurisprudence’ is (Deleuze 1997a: ‘G’): a man sues the owner of a cab for the right to
smoke in his taxi; the owner loses the case on the grounds that when someone takes a taxi, he is
renting it, and the renter has the right to smoke in his rented location. According to the judge’s
verdict, the taxi is a rolling apartment, and the customer is the renter. Ten years later, Deleuze
continues, the taxi is no longer seen in this way, it becomes assimilated instead to being a form
of public service, and no one has the right any more to smoke in taxis. In response to Parnet,
Deleuze points out that jurisprudence is ‘a ques- tion of situations that evolve’. A clearer answer
on the meaning of the practice of jurisprudence would be hard to find in his work. According to
Deleuze, jurisprudence operates in concrete situations and on specific problems. It is ‘law in
action’ (working case-by-case) and has the capac- ity to invent or create rights and rules. As
such, the practice of juris- prudence ‘deals with singularities’ (Deleuze 1995: 153; 2006: 350) and
concerns a process that is already active prior to its normalisation on the level of the law.

It is interesting to notice that in his book on Hume Deleuze draws a similar contrast between
‘the law’ and ‘institutions’. For Deleuze, Hume’s distinction between ‘the law’ and ‘institutions’,
and his argu- ment on the positivity of an institution rooted in the social world, imply a new
conception of law, one more open to the psychological and social dimensions of humans (Dosse
2010: 113–14). The law, Deleuze writes in Empiricism and Subjectivity, is a ‘limitation of
enterprise and action, and it focuses only on a negative aspect of society’ (Deleuze 1991: 45).
Criminal law, for instance, does not tell us how to behave, but only which types of conduct are
forbidden and the punitive response to wrongdoers. The assumption in classical punishment
theory is that effective punishment of the offender will deter the commission of further acts
of harm against society (Beccaria 2009). Institutions, however, comprise ‘the essence of
society’ and are ‘a model of actions, a veritable enterprise, an invented system of positive
means or a positive invention of indirect means’ (Deleuze 1991: 45–6; 2004: 19–21). Given this
con- ception of the social as ‘profoundly creative, inventive, and positive’, the law, Deleuze
concludes, ‘is not primary, it presupposes an institu- tion that it limits’ (Deleuze 1991: 46). In
other words, the issue of law and order is a secondary issue. Initially there is the permanent
process of creation and invention. Order and stability always follow later. They emerge from
the dynamics within the social, as a temporary congealing point of continually branching
series of relations that do not represent ‘things’, but events that never obtain their final
meaning. This raises the question how such a combinatory of two levels proceeds.

Rather than tracing this combinatory between them through a judicial framework, I want to
suggest that Deleuze’s concepts of ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ provide a way to answer this
question in detail. Reading ‘molar’ for ‘the law’ and ‘molecular’ for ‘institutions’ (and ‘jurispru-
dence’), enables us to see how at the most basic level of coexistence, interactions can cause
the disruption of an existing social-cultural field, which subsequently develops in a way not
laid down in advance or thought possible.1 I would further suggest that this approach is best
expressed in the work of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904). The microsociology
of Tarde is an important inspiration for Deleuze’s concept of molecular processes, which have
the potential to bring about significant changes on the molar level of the social order . Against
this background, three problems need to be addressed. First, where the concepts of molar and
molecular come from and how Deleuze and Guattari transform them into a sociological
problem. Second, the way Tarde shows how to move from molar representations to molecu- lar
interactions (and the other way around). Third, the way in which the relation between the molar
and molecular comes about in complex assemblages (agencements).
 Legal Judgment (Criminal Justice)

Appeals to courts as a basis for judgement and justice reflects a transcendental

notion of governing absolution relations. This in turn creates a legal subjectivity
that isn’t limited to the justice system, but rather particular logics of judgement
that come to be exercise on a molecular and molar level
Mussawir 10 (Dr Edward Mussawir is a senior lecturer in the Griffith Law School. His research
covers various themes in jurisprudence including jurisdiction, judgment, legal personality, the
legal status of animals and the work of Gilles Deleuze. Dr Mussawir is the Managing Editor of the
Griffith Law Review: Law, Theory, Society and teaches civil procedure and legal theory, “The
Activity of Judgment: Deleuze, Jurisdiction and the Procedural Genre of Jurisprudence” in Law,
Culture, and the Humanities, November 25 2010, Pgs 465 – 467)
II. The Law of Actions and Procedural Jurisprudence Where does one look for a contemporary account of jurisdiction and procedural
jurisprudence? Today, consideration of a ‘‘Law of Actions’’ in legal
scholarship can usually be found as part of the
historical introductions to the Roman foundations of Western civil law categories,4 but its connection
to a genre of jurisprudential thought which takes the procedures of judgment as its basis is less commonly acknowledged or
a Law of Actions for a long time constituted the greater
explored. The fact for instance that the rubric of
portion of jurisprudential writing in classical and medieval Europe , and that the technical problematics of
juridical procedure clearly occupied a large space in the minds of its legal scholars and theorists, is not often acknowledged with
regard to the contemporary state of jurisprudence .
It has been legal historians generally who have noted the
peculiar centrality of procedural matters to the early arrangements of systems of justice . Henry
Sumner Maine famously remarked for instance that: ‘‘So great is the ascendancy of the Law of Actions in the infancy of Courts of
Justice, that substantive law has at first the look of being gradually secreted in the interstices of procedure; and the early lawyer can
only see the law through the envelope of its technical forms.’’5 This particular connection between juridical procedure and
jurisprudence is difficult to reconstruct for modern thought. The sense with which procedural matters of law –
matters to do with the instrument or technical form of judgment – were more than just
administrative problems in relation to justice but indeed had the more central task of focusing
our substantive sentiments of ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘wrong’’ and giving them a certain palpableness and
intensity, gets somewhat lost in positive jurisprudence.6 Legal thought has for some time
tended to separate the technical craft from the metaphysics and moral philosophies of
judgment. And as such, the rehearsed relationship between the practices of judgment, the
institution of legal subjectivity and the orders of social truth is remitted either to a
transcendental forum or to the functioning of an entirely mechanical State apparatus. The
codes of civil procedure in modern democracies exemplify this jurisprudential schism. By
pursuing an ideology of centralization and uniformity, modern juridical systems attempt as
much as possible to abstract the procedural element from the substantive element of law and
legality. Hence, the procedural differences that the modern codes organize , as Frederic William Maitland
noted, are thought as ‘‘mere variations of one general theme – procedure in an action in the High Court
of Justice. It was entirely otherwise in the Middle Ages,’’ he adds, ‘‘then lawyers say very little of the procedure in an action, very
much of the procedure in some action of a particular kind … Knowledge of the procedure in the various forms of action is the core of
English medieval jurisprudence.’’7 This is to say that medieval legal thinking was to a large extent a jurisprudence of jurisdiction. And
by totalizing and unifying the jurisdictional organization of actions, modern law obscures the
relation of its procedure to the particular forms of authority and categories of judgment and
subjectivity that it inaugurates. This fact tends to obscure the connection that a local knowledge or science of the various
forms of procedure has with the socionormative function of legal order. Civil procedure is meant to offer , in
modern arrangements, only the merely logistical rules for accessing a single ‘‘justice system’’
rather than describing radically discrete and plural forums of justice. The traditional jurisprudence of
‘‘actions’’ however – as a central genre in which law was to be theorized – considered these local problems of forum and procedure
as substantially and ethically paramount. Juridical
apparatuses of procedure then do more than manage the
functioning of a justice system: they also describe forms and structures through which particular
logics of judgment come to be performed . One contemporary author who has attempted to pursue a certain
procedural genre of analysis in the Western philosophies of judgment is Ian Hunter. In his Rival Enlightenments, Hunter draws a
distinction between two procedural orders of philosophical and socio-political judgment – a confessional-sacramental order and a
civil, State-centred order – and uses these to describe two competing intellectual cultures in early modern Germany. Hunter
identifies not a single ‘‘Enlightenment’’ but two: one influenced by university metaphysics and exemplified by the work of Kant,
Leibniz and Wolff and the other by the ‘‘civil philosophy’’ of Pufendorf and Thomasius. The ‘‘rival’’ enlightenments could be
characterized by the conflicting ways in which they negotiated the relation between civil and sacramental jurisdictions: the former
seeking to have them ‘‘co-administered’’ so to speak in a unified tribunal of moral self-governance, while the latter seeking to keep
them in fundamentally separate domains. By describing the ‘‘civil philosophy’’ of Pufendorf and Thomasius as competing with the
metaphysical enlightenment normally associated with Kant, Hunter succeeds in showing that contemporary critical theory finds its
roots in a more theological and religious ethic than is normally acknowledged: an ethic that he terms a ‘‘resacralization of politics.’’8
The supposed secularism of an enlightenment aesthetic of subjectivity and truth in modern
critical thought has not been matched by a non-transcendent, non-confessional or
‘‘desacralized’’ development in its legal and political theory. Hunter’s analysis is important for the study of a
procedural genre of jurisprudence because it describes a major philosophical trend in Western thought in terms of the distinct
procedural apparatuses that continue to ‘‘perform’’ it. On the one hand ,
a sacramental order of judgment establishes a
realm of ‘‘truth’’ through the attachment to a purely transcendent justice and is aimed at
governing ‘‘absolute’’ moral relations and relations of conscience. The civil order of judgment on
the contrary concerns a realm of social power aimed instead at managing matters of civic
behaviour, office and decorum. By seeking to amalgamate these orders of jurisdiction, however,
modern jurisprudence has attempted to co-ordinate for itself a unified moral and political center
of judgment. This serves, as Hunter puts it, to radically collapse what might have alternatively been a ‘‘hard-won separation of
the pursuit of moral regeneration and the exercise of civil authority.’’9 An aborted concern to keep the institutions and procedures
of civil adjudication distinct from the theological, transcendental and sacramental arrangement of judgment in Western political and
legal theory, may still affect the contemporary directions of critical theory.

The object of judgement is not to bring justice to American life, but rather mark
certain bodies as fundamentally guilty in the pursuit of rendering life
responsible and accountable. This appeal to politics creates a dogmatic imagery
of justice that limits the becoming of the world.
Mussawir 10 (Dr Edward Mussawir is a senior lecturer in the Griffith Law School. His research
covers various themes in jurisprudence including jurisdiction, judgment, legal personality, the
legal status of animals and the work of Gilles Deleuze. Dr Mussawir is the Managing Editor of the
Griffith Law Review: Law, Theory, Society and teaches civil procedure and legal theory, “The
Activity of Judgment: Deleuze, Jurisdiction and the Procedural Genre of Jurisprudence” in Law,
Culture, and the Humanities, November 25 2010, Pgs 468 – 470)
1. Deleuze’s Critique of Judgment Deleuze’s theoretical contribution to the critical and aesthetic analyses of judgment might be
slightly misstated however by locating it solely in this short essay. ‘‘To Have Done with Judgment’’ was a note on the styles and
politics that seemed to tie together the works of four diverse authors – Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, D.H. Lawrence and
Franz Kafka. The title is thus misleadingly prescriptive and analytic. In fact, ‘‘to have done with judgment’’ describes a certain style or
‘‘literary effect’’ that Deleuze admires in each of the authors he recalls in this essay rather than constituting anything more universal
or allencompassing in a critical, political or philosophical sense. In order to appreciate the kind of project expressed in the works of
Nietzsche, Artaud, Lawrence and Kafka – and to appreciate what it is that makes their projects resonate with his own – Deleuze
finds it necessary to postulate a so-called ‘‘doctrine of judgment’’ to which each of their styles
can be opposed. This doctrine in turn serves as a conceptual tool in a theoretical account of the
aesthetics of judgment for Deleuze. The ‘‘doctrine of judgment’’ is described in ‘‘To Have Done with Judgment’’ as
being given through the co-ordination of two forms of ‘‘infinity’’: 1) it is the idea of an infinity of debt (being
in debt to God or to the deity) and 2) it is the immortality of existence (an infinity in the order of
time). This doctrine arises supposedly by raising the world of finite personal debts (debts that accrue and are paid off in the flesh)
to the form of an infinite theological debt (a debt that cannot be paid off); and hence by postponing and deferring: –
coordinating existence with an order of infinite time in which one judges and becomes
judgeable. The ‘‘doctrine of judgment’’ can therefore be opposed to certain systems of
finitude: a system of affect or cruelty and a system of ‘‘becoming.’ ’ In such a system, as opposed to
judgment, Deleuze notes: Existing beings confront each other, and obtain redress by means of finite
relations that merely constitute the course of time … One begins by promising, and becomes indebted not to a
god but to a partner, depending on the forces that pass between the parties, which provoke a change of state and
create something new in them: an affect … [T]here exists a justice that is opposed to all
judgment, according to which bodies are marked by each other, and the debt is inscribed
directly on the body following the finite blocks that circulate in a territory .14 This is the ‘‘system
of cruelty’’ that Deleuze sets up as a counter to the doctrine of judgment and which expresses the style in the works of Kafka,
Nietzsche, Artaud and Lawrence. Judgment, for instance, goes beyond the drama of enmity and cruelty. It is not enough to
simply have enemies and to find the means of making them pay for their offences – judgment
seeks individuals who are fundamentally ‘‘guilty’’ and whose debts have become infinite
before the instance of higher values, in a transcendent register and according to pre-existing
criteria. It is not content in other words merely to do violence to others: judgment needs
instead to render life deeply shameful and responsible. If the ‘‘system of cruelty’’ is a system of violence
without hatred or resentment, the doctrine of judgment maintains a system of hate and resentment
through the suspension and postponement of violence. Thus, to write as though one is engaged in combat
rather than embroiled in war-politics; or as though one is a kind of intoxicated insomniac rather than a ‘‘dreamer’’; to make affects
The critique of judgment
rather than judgments: this is the stylistic rehearsal that Deleuze admires in his favourite authors.
for Deleuze is therefore a critique of doctrine or the critique of a certain dogmatic imagery .15
One of the central theses of Deleuze’s work is that the history of philosophy is weighed down by a dogmatic image of
thought: – a subordination of the power of thought to the moral forms of the ‘‘true’’ and the
‘‘good’’ and also a subordination of differences of thought to an abstract form of
representation. Where he speaks of a ‘‘doctrine of judgment’’ then, it is situated within the terms of this project: it is this
moral doctrine which ‘‘[f]rom Greek tragedy to modern philosophy’’16 has needed to bring thought before a tribunal in order to
determine its proper orientation. The significance of Deleuze’s thesis, however, for the legal and jurisprudential accounts of
judgment is more complex. Firstly, the relationship between judgment and jurisprudence is not the same as that between judgment
and philosophy. If philosophy is an art of thinking for which the mode or modality we call judgment may be too ‘‘moral’’ in its
determinations; jurisprudence on the other hand – being concerned professionally with the arts and
practices of judgment itself – necessarily has different orientations and limitations to contend
with. Moral thought and moral doctrine may not threaten the activity of jurisprudence in the same way that they do philosophy. If
the morality of a so-called ‘‘doctrine of judgment’’ for instance, threatens our very possibility to ‘‘think’’ in philosophy according to
Deleuze, jurisprudence on the other hand instead seeks to give judgment and moral sentiment a certain locus, limitation or
jurisdiction. This is why Deleuze himself has not necessarily ‘‘done with’’ judgment in the essay of the same name, but has posed the
problem of its power in a new way: a way which attempts to address the relation between representation
and expression.
They are not the renouncement of power, but rather the invention of a new
form of power to judge that actively contributes to Western systems of value.
Focusing on the punishment of criminal justice law and its reactivity obfuscates
the active mechanisms of judgement that leads to subjects internalizing blame,
inferiority, and ressentiment.
Mussawir 10 (Dr Edward Mussawir is a senior lecturer in the Griffith Law School. His research
covers various themes in jurisprudence including jurisdiction, judgment, legal personality, the
legal status of animals and the work of Gilles Deleuze. Dr Mussawir is the Managing Editor of the
Griffith Law Review: Law, Theory, Society and teaches civil procedure and legal theory, “The
Activity of Judgment: Deleuze, Jurisdiction and the Procedural Genre of Jurisprudence” in Law,
Culture, and the Humanities, November 25 2010, Pgs 470 – 472) *edited for gendered language

2. The Reactivity of Judgment: Justice Represented Deleuze’s critique of judgment can be seen as an
‘‘expressive’’ account of its forces and its power. Judgment and its values become something
very different when viewed from the side of their expression as opposed to their representation.
To understand judgment as a kind of power or expression is to take it as more than a mere subjective faculty. For Deleuze it is not
primarily ‘‘us’’ who judge existing beings according to preordained criteria of representation,
but rather judgment itself which constitutes the invention of a particular style of existing, a
particular arrangement of forces, a ‘‘machinic assemblage’’ of desire and expression, that in
effect describes a type of power not foreign to Western systems of value. ‘‘Christianity,’’ Deleuze
writes, ‘‘did not renounce power, but rather invented a new form of power as the Power to judge
…’’17 If judgment then is first of all the invention of a kind of power, the question to be posed
of this power is not necessarily what are its formal conditions, but how has it been set-up,
performed or proceduralized? In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze describes a method of interpretation which takes
force – and in particular ‘‘active’’ and ‘‘reactive’’ force – as the source of values.18 If the power of judgment is an
arrangement of values then it is given by the interaction of its active and its reactive forces: –
active force gives value to that which goes to the limit of what it can do while reactive force arranges value by seeking to separate
active force from what it can do.19 The critique is thus situated at the level where we ask what kind of phenomenon active and
reactive forces make of judgment. It is clear that judgment makes itself known much more easily and
familiarly in its reactivity than its activity. Whenever we understand judgment as the application of pre-given criteria,
as a moral determination or as an ‘‘appeal’’ to certain values, we understand the connection or
the affinity it has with reactive forces. Similarly when we ascribe a ‘‘purpose’’ to judgment, this purpose is also
an expression of judgment’s reactivity: its mode of reacting and separating active force from
what it can do. The fact that judgment also has an activity and expresses an active sense is something that is easily passed over
within the critiques of judgment, even though – as will be argued – the matter of judgment’s activity and
performance has been the subject of a vast jurisprudential discourse on procedure. To address
the subject of judgment’s reactivity is thus to address the ways in which it becomes a
psychological, emotional and ‘‘inner’’ phenomenon separated from its external modes of
performance, procedure and ritualization. Deleuze describes Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality as an
inventory of the inner psychological types of reactivity or of the various ways in which reactive force triumphs over
active force in judgment: that is, as the forms of ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic
ideal.20 One of the more creative aspects to Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s work in Nietzsche and Philosophy is the
linking of these three themes with certain typological and topological formations of consciousness directly conversant with and
rivaling Freud’s theory of the unconscious. Ressentiment for instance follows a certain reversed dynamism
of repression. As a topological principle it is a kind of indigestion; an inability to have done with anything; a
state in which only the reaction to traces and memories can enter consciousness. Thus,
ressentiment is defined as ‘‘a reaction which simultaneously becomes perceptible and ceases to
be acted.’’21 As a typological principle on the other hand, this inability to repress or forget anything
describes a ‘‘spirit of revenge’’ in the one who judges. It constitutes an endless need to blame
and accuse. The (person) of ressentiment cannot respect or admire (their) enemies or (their)
friends: unable to obtain redress, (they) is content to hate everything which affects (them) . One can see the
‘‘reactive’’ and ‘‘inner’’ sense this type of individual gives to the phenomenon of judgment. (They) doesn’t just make judgment
bear on certain individuals or groups, (they) makes it a necessary and fundamental part of all
existence; (they) cannot localize judgment; (they) cannot give judgment its institutional locus or its locality of performance: its
jurisdiction.22 How then does judgment become something ‘‘acted,’’ ‘‘performed’’ or ‘‘expressed’’ rather than remaining extended
upon ‘‘perception,’’ ‘‘feeling’’ and ‘‘sentiment’’? Deleuze poses the problem of justice in Nietzsche’s work in these terms. If
judgment seems to have an innate communion with reactive feeling – with ressentiment and the spirit of revenge – then the
to prevent
question would not necessarily be how to suppress these reactive forces but rather how in fact to ‘‘act’’ them:
them from forming the kind of community or association with other reactive forces that
leaves judgment in an interior and representational dimension. In order for people of equal power to
process and ‘‘have done with’’ their resentments of one another in the name of justice, it must give judgment certain localizations
and powers of performance; it must make judgment something capable of being acted, here and now, in this or that forum. On the
other hand, when judgment is left to its reactive forces – when it becomes perceptible and ceases
to be acted – justice in turn can only become an object of representation. Not only do reactive forces
always work simply to represent justice (to themselves and to others); but whenever justice becomes a matter of
representation it is not without the resentful sting of a deeply reactive sentiment. Part of the
implication of this for Deleuze is that an art of judgment would necessarily have to take something other
than the representation of justice as its object.

Changing the punishment written into criminal justice legal codes ignores the
larger question of the activity of judgement being a tool of training and
codification. The notion of “just” judgements is the cleansing of the
consciousness that contributes to insidious uses of rationality and peace to
exterminate difference.
Mussawir 10 (Dr Edward Mussawir is a senior lecturer in the Griffith Law School. His research
covers various themes in jurisprudence including jurisdiction, judgment, legal personality, the
legal status of animals and the work of Gilles Deleuze. Dr Mussawir is the Managing Editor of the
Griffith Law Review: Law, Theory, Society and teaches civil procedure and legal theory, “The
Activity of Judgment: Deleuze, Jurisdiction and the Procedural Genre of Jurisprudence” in Law,
Culture, and the Humanities, November 25 2010, Pgs 472 – 474) *edited for gendered language

‘‘activity’’ and ‘‘expression’’ constitute a key to the

3. The Activity of Judgment: Justice Expressed For Deleuze,
relation between justice and judgment. In so far as we are content to let our judgments be a mere
representation of justice and in so far as we also take the reaction and reactivity of judgment
as being at the origins of a spirit of justice, then we neglect the truly active and expressive
sense that gives judgment a certain power and authority . Deleuze notes that: On the one hand, revenge and
ressentiment are not the origin of justice. Moralists, even socialist ones, make justice derive from a reactive feeling, from deeply felt
offence, a spirit of revenge or justiciary reaction. But such a derivation explains nothing it would have to show
how the pain of others can be a satisfaction of revenge, a reparation for revenge … Justice is the
generic activity that trains (hu)man’s reactive forces , that makes them suitable for being acted and holds
(hu)man responsible for this suitability itself. To justice we can oppose the way in which ressentiment and
then bad conscience are formed: by the triumph of reactive forces, through their unsuitability
for being acted, through their hatred for everything that is active … Thus ressentiment, far from being at the
origin of justice, is “the last sphere to be conquered by the spirit of justice … The active, aggressive, arrogant (hu)man is still a
hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive (hu)man.”23 What constitutes the activity and performance of judgment? The
problem is a delicate one because when we recognize judgment’s activity in history Deleuze notes, it appears decidedly unjust,
The history of judgment’s performances, as we have seen, is the history of a
stupid, brutal, inverted.
cruel and morbid arrangement of torture, ordeal and inquisition . This, however, would not be an inadequacy
inherent to the performance of judgment itself but an inadequacy of history for thinking this performance. History attaches
judgment to the reactive ends pursued by States, churches, empires etc. The real activity of judgment on the other hand – according
to Deleuze – does not have an historic meaning but at most a ‘‘pre-historic’’ meaning and a ‘‘post-historic’’ meaning. In its pre-
judgment’s activity is exercised on the reactive forces themselves, to train them
historic meaning,
and to render them capable of being acted. Judgment’s activity is in this sense ‘‘the labour performed by (hu)man
upon (themselves) during the greater part of the existence of the human race, (their) entire prehistoric labour … notwithstanding
the severity, tyranny, stupidity and idiocy involved in it.’’24 We must imagine the activity of judgment as having
been selective and ruthless, but ruthless only in relation to humanity’s reactive forces and with regard to the pettiness of
human sentiment and ill-disposition – aimed at creating an individual who can finally act (their) reactive
forces. This briefly is the ‘‘post-historic’’ sense: the activity of judgment is usurped by the product of the activity – an
‘‘autonomous and supramoral’’25 individual who, being no longer responsible to any tribunal, is
fit to be authentically irresponsible. The activity of judgment is indeed aimed at ‘‘holding responsible,’’ but whereas
history gives us individuals held responsible for their actions by institutions that set down petty laws designed at self-preservation,
the activity of judgment holds the human species responsible on the contrary for its reactions,
for its ‘‘established values,’’ for its resentments and morality. Nietzsche indeed invites us to consider the kind
of shame involved for noble peoples in obeying and submitting to the law.26 The activity of judgment ‘‘shames’’ but
shames humanity for all of its reactive states: its ‘‘reason,’’ its ‘‘obedience,’’ its ‘‘peace,’’ its
‘‘compassion’’ etc. These, Nietzsche imagines, are the forms under which judgment would become something
simultaneously perceptible and yet cease to be acted or performed. Judgment must be given its jurisdiction or its forum of
performance: it must have a certain dramatic localization in order for it to remain an activity rather than just a reactive sentiment.
And justice lies not in the general functioning of these forums as tribunals of judgment –
giving the sovereign force of expression to reactive and ‘‘popular’’ sentiment – but in the
selective movement by which such reactivity is forced to pass into the field of its
dramatization and becoming held thereby responsible for its reactivity. The aesthetic relation between
justice and judgment is styled by Deleuze therefore as a relation of expression. To say that the activity of judgment makes justice
something ‘‘expressed’’ does not just mean that justice has to be said or spoken in judgment, it also means that if there is a relation
between judgment and justice – or if there is a relation of justice within judgment – it is not a relation of representation but a
relation of expression. We can be sure that when judgment becomes simply the means of representing
what is just; when we are content to make ‘‘just’’ judgments which please us in consciousness ,
then we have also botched the problem of how simply to act judgment, how to invent an
activity for judgment: – an activity which, however cruel, may still be ‘‘one hundred paces nearer to justice.’’27 It does
not concern the authority of what is said, its rationale, signification and its analogy with other
judgments etc.; it concerns the staged authority of saying it, the intensity in becoming the one
who says it, the ‘‘tonality of the soul,’’ to borrow Pierre Klossowski’s phrase, of the one who does it.28 If justice is, in this
way, a fundamental affect in the art of judgment, then it does not belong to judgment’s various
outcomes, remedies, rationalizations and representations: – it belongs simply to the process by
which judgment becomes an object of performance. All of this places a renewed importance on
the jurisprudential accounts of procedure ; not so much in terms of the rules for accessing a particular
‘‘justice system’’ but rather in the way in which it is procedure which addresses the problem of the
legality of judgment in terms of its expression : that is, not necessarily according to the metaphysical question:
‘‘what is the truth or logic of this or that case/drama?’’ but according to the jurisprudential question which asks conversely: ‘‘what
are the cases which dramatize this or that logic or truth?’’
 Liberalism

Liberal notions of justice and rationality rely on a transcendental subject that

gives this world meaning and value. This view of politics territorializes desire in
the pursuit of reproducing fixed positions of thought that make governability
and extermination inevitable.
Jun 9 (Nathan Jun (Ph.D., Philosophy and Literature, Purdue University; M.A., Philosophy,
University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of Philosophy at Midwestern State University in Wichita
Falls, Texas, where he specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy,
social and political philosophy, and the history of political thought, “Deleuze and Normativity”,
June 2009, Pgs 349-352)

The primary focus of Deleuze’s early works is metaphysics and the history of philosophy. Though they can hardly be called
the political dimension of books like Difference and Repetition (1968) tends to be so
“apolitical,”
vague and understated as to require extraction by skilled exegetes. 24 Nevertheless, a few ideas from these
works are worth noting in brief detail in order to understand Deleuze’s later, more explicitly political endeavors. The first is
Deleuze’s critique of the subject. As we noted above, liberal political philosophy—not to speak of
modern philosophy more generally— begins with the concept of the individual, selfidentical
subject (as opposed to non-subjective concepts such as essences, substances, or, in the political realm, sovereigns). Within this
framework, the subject is not only conceptually distinct from the world but substantially distinct; it
is, in a word, beyond or transcendent of it. This is because the subject (which is immaterial and
active) constitutes the world (which is physical and passive). To this extent, moreover, the
subject is superior to the world because it gives form and content to an otherwise empty and
inert “prime matter.” Deleuze denies this dualistic picture of reality. Following Spinoza, he instead claims that
there is only one Being or substance which expresses itself differentially through an infinite
number of attributes (chief among them thought and extension) which are in turn expressed
through an infinite number of modes. Because Being is univocal, the world and everything it contains
—from physical objects to mental constructions— cannot be articulated in terms of relations
of self-contained identity.25 It does not follow from anything, it is not subordinated to anything, and it does not resemble
anything; it expresses and is expressed in turn: Expression is on the one hand an explication, an unfolding of what expresses itself,
the One manifesting itself in the Many. . . . Its multiple expression, on the other hand, involves Unity. The One remains involved in
All being is immanent ; there
whatever expresses it, imprinted in what unfolds it, immanent in whatever manifests it.26
is no transcendence, thus there are no self-contained identities outside the world (gods,
values, subjectivities, etc) that determine or constitute it.27 Furthermore, substance is at root a difference
that exists virtually in the past and is actualized in various modes in the present.28 These modes are not stable
identities but multiplicities, “swarms of difference,” complicated intersections of forces.29
“There is no universal or transcendental subject, which could function as the bearer of
universal human rights, but only variable and historically diverse ‘processes of
subjectivation.’”30 The Cartesio-Kantian subject which underlies modern politico-philosophical
thought is therefore a fiction. It neither transcends the world nor is transcended by anything else in turn. But there is
another key concept that underlies much modern thought—the concept of rationality. Simply put,
rationality involves an alleged direction of fit between our thoughts and the world (theoretical rationality) or between our
desires/moral beliefs and our actions (practical rationality). Both conceptions involve the idea of representation— our
thoughts
are rational to the extent that they accurately represent the world (i.e., are true); our actions, in
turn, are rational to the extent that they accurately represent our desires /moral beliefs.31 Ever
since Kant, moral philosophers have tended to regard rationality as the foundation of normativity. As Christine Korsgaard puts it,
“Strictly speaking, we do not disapprove the action because it is vicious; instead, it is vicious because we disapprove it. Since morality
it is whether we
is grounded in human sentiments, the normative question cannot be whether its dictates are true. Instead,
have reason to be glad that we have such sentiments, and to allow ourselves to be governed by
them.”32 The point here is that an immoral action—one which we ought not to perform—is one which we have a rational reason
not to perform. What distinguishes normativity from conventional modes of practical reasoning is
the universalizable or categorical nature of the rational reason in question—i.e., the fact that in all
relevantly similar circumstances it applies equally to all moral agents at all times. Typically this rational reason has taken the form of
a universal moral principle, such as Kant’s categorical imperative (“so act on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a
universal law”) or Bentham’s principle of utility (“act so as to bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It is
Deleuze
precisely this universal and abstract character which makes normativity “transcendent” in the sense outlined earlier.
regards this concept of rationality, no less than the concept of the subject, as a fiction:
“Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a
single center, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates
everything, but mobilizes and moves nothing.”33 The problem with this “dogmatic image of
thought” is that it relies on representation, and difference (read: substance) cannot be
represented through linguistic categories. This is because linguistic categorization assumes that the things it aims
to represent are fixed, stable, and self-identical, which, as we noted above, they are not. The
difference at the heart of being is fluid, constantly overflowing the boundaries of representation.34 In the place of representational
language, Deleuze offers what he calls a “logic of sense” (which, for the sake of brevity, we shall not explore here).35 Deleuze’s
political philosophy as outlined in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia36 may be seen as an extension of his earlier
ontology. Like all of Deleuze’s works, Capitalism and Schizophrenia is so formidably dense and complicated that we cannot begin to
do it justice in an essay of this size. Instead we will limit ourselves to a brief “thematic overview” of those ideas and concepts which
are relevant to understanding the role of normativity in Deleuze’s political thought. As we noted earlier, liberal political
theory begins with “already constituted individuals, each with his or her interests,” just as the
dogmatic image of thought begins with “already constituted identities , each with its qualities.”37
The foundational question of liberalism posed earlier—viz., “why and under what conditions should these
individuals come together and allow themselves to be governed”—is a question concerning the
relation between individuals and governments . Like the relation between mind and world in the dogmatic image of
thought, the relation between individuals and governments in liberal theory is one of
representation. As Todd May notes, “If a government is to be a legitimate one, the interests of each individual must be
represented in the public realm occupied by government. . . . [Thus] liberal theory is a form of the dogmatic image
of thought.”38 Just as Deleuze replaces the foundational modern concept of identity with the concept of difference, so does he
replace the concept of the individual subject with other concepts such as the machine . In
Deleuze’s political ontology, individuals, communities, states, and the various relations that obtain among them are all understood
as machines or “machinic” processes. Unlike
an organism, which is “a bounded whole with an identity and
an end,” and unlike a mechanism, which is “a closed machine with a specific function,” a
machine is “nothing more than its connections; it is not made by anything, and has no closed
identity.”39 Whereas liberalism regards the relation between individuals and society
mechanistically (i.e., as a “specific set of connections”) or organically (i.e., “as a self-organizing
whole”), Deleuze regards this relation “machinically” (i.e., “as only one level of connections that
can be discussed”).40 Unlike the static, self-contained, and transcendental subject of liberal
theory, machines are fluid, mobile, and dynamic; they are capable of changing, of connecting
and reconnecting with other machines, they are immanent to the connections they make, and
vice versa. In creating these connections, moreover, machines produce and are produced by desires (hence “desiring-
machines”).41 The liberal subject consents to be governed because it lacks the ability to realize its
own interests independently of the state . Machines, in contrast, “do not operate out of lack.
They do not seek to fulfill needs. Instead they produce connections. Moreover, the connections they produce
are not pre-given. . . . Machines are productive in unpredictable and often novel ways.”42 There are different types of machines
which can be distinguished according to how they operate. In all cases, machines are driven by fuel, which Deleuze variously
describes as power (especially in his book on Foucault)43 or, more typically, forces. Deleuze distinguishes between two types of
force to which he assigns different names in different books. On the one hand there is what he refers to as “active force” in his book
on Nietzsche and as “social” or “oedipal” force in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. On the other hand there is what he refers to as
“reactive force,” “forces of desire,” or “schizophrenic” force. What are these forces and how do they operate according to Deleuze?
In one decidedly aphoristic passage, Deleuze claims there are only forces of desire (i.e., active or schizophrenic forces) and social
(i.e., reactive or oedipal) forces.44 A force of desire or active force is one which “goes to the limit of its power,” i.e., which expresses
Social or reactive
itself creatively to the fullest extent of its ability, which produces rather than represses its object.45
forces, in contrast, “decompose; they separate active force from what it can do; they take away
a part or almost all of its power . . . they dam up, channel, and regulate” the flow of desire. 46 In
making this distinction, Deleuze does not mean to suggest that there are two distinct kinds of forces which differentially affect
objects exterior to themselves. On the contrary, there is only a single, unitary force which manifests itself in particular
Each of these assemblages, in turn, contains within itself both desire (active force)
“assemblages.”47
and various “bureaucratic or fascist pieces” (reactive force) which seek to subjugate and
annihilate that desire.48 Neither force acts or works upon preexistent objects; rather everything that exists is alternately
created and/or destroyed in accordance with the particular assemblage which gives rise to it. As May notes by way of summary,
“power does not suppress desire; rather it is implicated in every assemblage of desire.”49 Machines are constituted (“assembled”)
by forces that are immanent to them; “concrete social fields” are therefore affects of complex movements and connections of forces
which vary in intensity over time.50 For Deleuze, forces are principally distinguished according to their affects, which in turn are
distinguished according to whether they are life-affirming or life-denying at the level of life itself.51 Unlike the concept of “coercive
the concepts of life-affirming/denying are, in the first
power,” which has a kind of built-in normativity,
instance at least, purely descriptive; that is, they describe the way forces produce reality and
nothing else. Given the ubiquitous and ontologically constitutive nature of force, it goes without saying that force simpliciter
cannot be “abolished” or even “resisted.” As we shall see, this does not mean that repressive social forces (or machines) cannot be
opposed. It does imply, however, that for Deleuze, (as for Spinoza) the question is not whether and how resistance is possible, but
ratherhow and why desire comes to repress and ultimately destroy itself in the first place .52 This
requires, among other things, an
analysis of the various assemblages that come into being over time (vis-
à-vis their affects) as well as the experimental pursuit of alternative assemblages at the level of
praxis. According to Deleuze, repressive forces do not emanate from a unitary source but rather within multiple sites. The
complex interconnection of these sites, moreover, is precisely what gives rise to the various machines that inhabit the social world
(this is what he means when he suggests that power is “rhizomatic” as opposed to “arboreal”). This
is not to say that
power does not become concentrated within certain sites; indeed, much of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia is given over to an analysis of such concentrations as they manifest themselves in
particular political and economic forms. What this analysis reveals is a constant conflict between
reactive machines (e.g., the State-form) which seek to “overcode” and “territorialize” desire ,
and various desiring machines (e.g., the nomadic war machine), which seek to “reterritorialize”
themselves along “lines of flight.” Similar analyses could no doubt be afforded of the “Church-
form,” the “gender-form,” and countless other sites of concentrated power. In all such cases,
however, one and the same force is simultaneously seeking to escape and re-conquer itself, and
it is precisely this tension which allows ostensibly “revolutionary” or “liberatory” movements
(e.g., Bolshevism) to occasionally metamorphose into totalitarian regimes (e.g., Stalinist Russia).
For Deleuze, then, political power is multifarious and rhizomatic in nature.53 Unlike Marxism and other
“strategic” political philosophies which identify a unitary locus of repressive power, the “tactical” political philosophy of Deleuze
“perform[s] [its] analyses within a milieu characterized . . . by the tension between irreducible and mutually intersecting practices of
power.”54 In older radical philosophies such as anarchism, manifestations of power are distinguished according to their effects.
These effects, in turn, are distinguished according to their relative justifiability within a universalizable normative scheme that is
both prior and exterior to power itself. Repressive power, again, is only a species of “power to,” which is at least analogous if not
identical to Deleuze’s all-encompassing “force.” The only real difference is that “repressive power” in the
classical paradigm involves the forcible or even violent compulsion of bodies (what Foucault
calls “biopower”) whereas repressive forces in the Deleuze scheme principally work to
subjugate desires. This brings us to the question of how Deleuze reinvents the concept of
political normativity. Some thinkers, most notably Paul Patton and Todd May, have attempted to situate Deleuze’s thought
within the normative paradigm of classical liberalism. May, for example, tries to found Deleuze’s political philosophy on a pair of
although he is
normative principles which, he thinks, are intimated below the surface of Deleuze’s writings. As I shall argue,
correct to point out that Deleuze “promotes” ways of thinking and acting that affirm life, this
promotion need not—indeed, cannot—be cashed out in terms of liberal (or what I will call
“nomological” normativity). In the next and last section, we will explore an alternative reading of Deleuze on normativity
— one which relies on the concept of “absolute deterritorialization,” or what I will call “pragmatic norms.”
 Policing

Professional policing is a paranoid response to the deterritorializing effects of

late capitalism. We must address the affective tendency toward paranoia first –
or else emerging technological and social developments will always be
perceived as signaling the breakdown of society – which, in turn, justifies ever-
more police violence.

Watson 99 (Sean, Lecturer at the University of the West of England, “Policing the Affective Society: Beyond
Governmentality in the Theory of Social Control,” S OCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199906) 8:2 Copyright ©
1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 8(2), 227–251; 008043)

We need a social theory which reflects this affective spectrum within the organic
infrastructure of the human. We actually find this in the Deleuzian /Foucauldian paradigm.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalist societies themselves are divided. On the one hand they have
‘schizophrenic’ tendencies associated with the market – tendencies which tend to decode and
recode human bodies through signs, images and objects. These can be combined with every
other sign, image and object, articulated through the accelerating assem- blages of
communications technology and global capitalism, powered by elec- tricity and human desire
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1977; 1992). These schizophrenic effects of the post/late-modern marketplace have
of course been much commented upon by Jean Baudrillard and Frederick Jameson, among others, since
Deleuze and Guattari’s ground-breaking work. So why are we not culturally ‘deterritorialised’ – why
are we not all ‘schizo’s’?9 Because capitalism contains powerful paranoid forces of
‘reterritorialisation’. These include, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the Oedipalising effects
of the nuclear family which implants a minimal level of stability into our bodily coding, or
‘striation’, and the institutions of the state which mop up some of the worst effects of
deterritorialisation by engaging in massive disciplinary and normalising projects (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1977). We see, then, that as the schizophrenic effects of the market have become ever
more potent, so the governmental institutions of the state have expanded to immense
proportions. Lacan’s and Foucault’s work charts two different aspects of the social Imagin- ary in its
efforts to assert some order upon human desires. Lacan’s work is an account of the processes which attempt
to fix desire through Symbolic Oedi- palisation, and Foucault’s work is a catalogue of the paranoid
forces of the state and other institutions of reterritorialisation as they have progressed in
response to the schizophrenic effects of capitalism. Key among these disci- plinary institutions
is, of course, professional policing. CONCLUSION I have suggested that we could better understand
police culture if we analysed it from the point of view of the affective repertoires which struc-
ture it. I have then put forward the proposition that police occupational culture might, from the
point of view of affective repertoires, be charac- terised as culturally paranoid (and I have
clearly set out what I mean by cul- tural paranoia). I have shown that the mainstream police studies
literature strongly supports such an interpretation. I have then gone on to look at some findings
from my own research and asked how they might be theorised. I have proposed that policing is in fact a
function of what Michel Foucault has called ‘governmentality’, and I have then taken the novel step of
identifying governmentality with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Imaginary. This would imply then that the
police are the institutional embodiment of the Imagin- ary. I have then identified a performative
contradiction in which the police find themselves. They want to identify themselves with the rule of law,
but law is a creature of Lacan’s Symbolic order of language. Thus while they want to identify with the rule
of law, they always feel it to be inadequate, somehow lacking something – it can never live up to the
rigorous standards of order and stasis demanded by the Imaginary. I have suggested that such tensions
within their cultural identity push them into a hostile and defensive splitting of the world. Then there is the
order of the Real, the extreme flu- idity and difference of the material world which constantly threatens the
divisions and ordering which the Imaginary and Symbolic orders undertake in the construction of human
consciousness, identity and culture. I have sug- gested that the Deleuzian paradigm (including feminist
versions of this framework) may afford help in understanding affective processes at this more
basic material level, and in this case may also help to explain, at a his- torical level, why the
police have necessarily found themselves undertaking a social role which is fundamentally
paranoid in character. They may also give clues regarding what kinds of affective response we
can expect in the police community to further levels of deterritorialisation of human desires at
the social level. We can begin to see why the police must function as the institutional
embodiment of the Imaginary – they are at the heart of the paranoid pole of modernity , and when
we zoom back down to the perspective of the indi- vidual police officer we can see his/her
predicament. S/he cannot help but be suspicious of heterogeneity , s/he cannot help but be
repelled by the idiosyn- cratic , that is his/her affective role in the larger scheme of things. S/he
must personify that Imaginary desire for simplicity, order and stasis which is within us all. This perhaps
gives us some fresh insight into the recently resur- gent discussion of institutional racism
among the British police. From this perspective we can see clearly how an organisational mandate can be
directly linked not only to a certain range of institutional practices but to particular emotional orientations
to socially marginal groupings. These links are sys- temic – not just a question of a few emotional
‘bad apples’. Even more uncomfortably, it may even be that our own tolerance of differ- ence
and social heterogeneity is conditional upon us having the bearers of the social Imaginary
among us, in order to provide us with some sense of onto- logical security. It is only because
they are paranoid that we feel safe to cele- brate difference – a sort of emotional division of
labour. One could perhaps speculate, then, that it is in times of the most extreme social
fragmentation, at times of crisis for the family and the governmental disciplines, that police
officers feel themselves most repelled by the society in which they work, and gravitate
towards ‘despising’ positions. In my own interviews with them they did express such sentiments
regarding perceived social fragmentation. They expressed similar concerns about the effects of the
mass media and other communication technologies . Why? Because, they said, they make
people desire things that are not appropriate for them, they combine things which do not
belong together, they constantly create new hybrids. Human desires are deterritorialised, our
images of ourselves, our communities and our history are thrown into turmoil. The
‘hyperreality’ of these new information spaces is unpredictable, uncontrollable, unregulat-
able. It is a massive flow of images and energies – nothing is fixed. In truth the post-modern
fascination with the hyperreal may turn out to be an even more subtle means of social control than the
disciplines of modernity. However, that is not how it looks from the point of view of the (very
modern) policing Imaginary. From their point of view it looks as if all hell has broken loose and
they are repelled by what they see. Down on the ground we know that ‘re-moralising’ is failing –
because there are no longer any easily locatable fixed communities to re-moralise – nothing to identify with
as an object of salvation. Does this mean that we will see an inevitable slide towards the
predominance of more aggressive, and cynical, affective orientations within police culture ? As
Žižek says, ‘ “Real” violence is a kind of acting out that emerges when the symbolic fiction that
guarantees the life of a community is in danger’ (Žižek, 1996). Such questions regarding the
affective currents dominating our cultural landscape are of the utmost important, yet until we
have a comprehensive theory of the affective society, together with appropriate research
programmes, we have no hope of answering them.
Affective paranoia link is functionally baked into the subject position required
to do police work.

Watson 99 (Sean, Lecturer at the University of the West of England, “Policing the Affective Society: Beyond
Governmentality in the Theory of Social Control,” S OCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199906) 8:2 Copyright ©
1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 8(2), 227–251; 008043)

SOURCES OF BAD FEELINGS

At the most general level, the research revealed police officers to be pre- occupied with a whole host
of general sources of bad feelings. These included various forms of stress and trauma associated
with the job. Most particularly there was the fear of injury to oneself, the fear and horror at
witnessing death and injury, dealing with other people’s grief, distress and anger in tragic cir-
cumstances, and so on. Also, at the opposite end of the spectrum of police work, there was the
mundane and everyday bureaucracy and administration which is perceived to be expanding and
obstructing the police officer’s ability to carry out ‘real’ police work. When this was placed
within the context of the apocalyptic visions of growing chaos and social disintegration common
amongst police officers, what emerged was a very real fear of not being able to cope. Two
sources of emotional discomfort, however, struck me as particularly interesting when going back over the
data some time after my original research. First, the problem of the permanence of suspicion as an
orientation to the world. The suspicious outlook is of course cultivated as the key affec- tive
and cognitive tool for doing the job. But when one combines this with the lack of any real
boundary between work and non-work – the tendency for the identity ‘police officer’ to
overlay all other sources of identity – then one has a profound source of affective dissonance.
The police officer never knows what kind of an interaction he is engaged in. A pleasant chat
with a neighbour can easily turn into a source of intelligence. All interaction is potentially
instrumental, all human beings are potentially a means to an end in the fight against chaos.
How can one sustain ordinary social relationships within this framework and how should one
feel about one’s fellow human beings? Added to the ambivalence of social relationships
produced by the permanence of suspicion, is the feeling that their watchfulness, their gaze, is
never quite enough; that ‘too many of them think that they can get away with it’. Secondly, a
number of anxieties around the nature of authority emerged. How does one consistently inspire
respect for the uniform and what it is per- ceived to represent? It is clear that different officers are
differentially gifted with whatever it takes to inspire respect. Age and gender are obvious vari- ables in a
society where such factors have traditionally been markers of auth- ority, but there are also other more
subtle components. Some officers, while valuing public deference highly, find it difficult to inspire
respect without resort to oppressive means. The relationship between fear and respect is a
strong one for many officers (many of the officers I interviewed were quite explicit about this linkage).
This anxiety was reflected most powerfully in their own fear of being laughed at, this being
the most extreme challenge to the police officer’s dignity and authority. It is absolutely not to
be tolerated and less obviously mocking attitudes, or actions, are often interpreted within the
narrative of mockery (‘he’s taking the piss’ was one of the most common refrains of all). This fear of
being laughed at was peculiarly mirrored by the powerful impulse towards humour at the
expense of those they despise. They mocked those whom they most fear being mocked by.
Moreover their humour was generally cynical and destructive, again expressing these strong
feelings. Susan Purdie puts this joking function in the following way: ‘Low others’ are a threat to the dominant
group that constructs them, because, as I have suggested, there is no point in ‘othering’ people who have no claim to
the identity space you are trying to occupy. Those groups we persistently ‘other’ are actually those we perceive as very
similar to ourselves, but different in one respect – skin colour, reproductive function, accent – which can be fastened on
as entailing the low characteristic which makes them so ‘inferior’. . . . So all joking objects, the apparently wholly
‘low’ as well as the evidently ‘high’, are perceived as holding a power of some kind over the jokers. (Purdie, 1993: 66)
The problem of sustaining a clear conceptual distinction between themselves and the ‘other’,
between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, is a problem which appears to suffuse the whole
of police culture. This compounds the problem of sustaining the legitimacy (and therefore
authority) of their voice over those of ‘others’, and this is the threat Purdie is alluding to. As I have
suggested, this ambivalence of identity is something which researchers such as Hobbs and Smith and Gray
have also hinted at. We can see it in the ambivalent relation- ship to ‘good class criminals’ which
is a theme throughout police studies litera- ture. We can see it in the confused tangle of
attitudes to gender, sexuality and violence at the heart of the ‘cult of masculinity’. The presence
of these endemic areas of ambivalence was strongly confirmed here in my own findings.
Lacanian imaginary and Foucauldian governmentality are one and the same in
the context of policing. Both of these structural operations depend on affective
anxiety. Policing as structured by la ack can’t ever be solved.

Watson 99 (Sean, Lecturer at the University of the West of England, “Policing the Affective Society: Beyond
Governmentality in the Theory of Social Control,” S OCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199906) 8:2 Copyright ©
1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 8(2), 227–251; 008043)

How might we begin to theorise this? We can see here, emerging from these particular research findings,
two overt concerns with the police function. First, the sense of policing as an omnipresent gaze, a
diffuse panopticism – an eye which potentially captures everything, freezing it into stasis.
Secondly, the sense of policing as an image of authority – the specular image of the uniform
which must not be laughed at. One way to think of these concerns is as aspects of the Lacanian
Imaginary operating at the governmental level. In the Lacanian schema there are three orders of reality –
the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real (Lacan, 1977; Žižek, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1996). The Imaginary is
the first level of human identity formation and reality con- struction. It is, loosely, the impulse
to filter and freeze the torrent of flux and change in the physical universe (the Real) into
stable, manageable chunks of experience. Boundaries are put around bits of the world,
barriers are set up, things are ordered and simplified . At the individual level, Lacan discusses the
origins of the Imaginary in the ‘mirror stage’ where the infant first looks into a reflective surface and
identifies with its own specular image – thus setting up a sense of where ‘I’ ends and ‘other’ begins . For
Lacan the Imaginary is a fundamental force in the creation of the subject but nevertheless all
of its products are ultimately fragile illusions . A major source of fragility is the second order of
reality – the Symbolic order. The Symbolic is the order of lan- guage. Language is ambivalent with respect
to the ordering imperatives of the Imaginary. As science and law, for example, language can be used for
order- ing, classifying and regulating purposes – in other words it can be made to serve the Imaginary. But
as deconstructionists and others have shown, lan- guage itself is very slippery stuff. It can never quite be
made to mean what we want it to mean. This is partly because our intentions constantly slip our grasp, but
also because language has polysemic qualities. Words often have many connotations; these are different for
different people in different con- texts, and they change over time. Indeed the very meaning of words is
some- thing about which people struggle. So the Symbolic actually has a propensity for fluidity, creativity,
change, flux – potentially all of the things that police- men do not like. As is well known, Michel Foucault
argues that somewhere in the second half of the 17th century, a quite new political paradigm
was born (Foucault, 1991). This involved the creation of the notion of a population as an entity
in its own right, with qualities which could be measured and understood and ultimately
managed, mastered, controlled. This management of the popu- lation – for the benefit of the
people – was to be the objective of good govern- ment. Thus political-economy, the science
which took the management of the population and its powers and resources as its object, was
born. According to Foucault we must understand the subsequent development of the insti-
tutions of the state in this light. The state is not so much a single entity as a massive aggregate
of apparatuses for collecting information, collating, pro- cessing, and imposing regimes upon
the population. Here I wish to make a theoretical link. Suppose we equate the Imaginary – this
impulse for self pres- ence, stasis, ordering, boundary maintenance etc. – with Foucault’s
‘govern- mentality’, the great political fantasy of ordering and distributing of populations –
the attainment of ‘the right disposition of things’ (Michel Foucault quoting Guillaume de La
Perrière, 1991: 94). Researchers have long been aware that the police fulfill (what Foucault would call) a
governmental function – a fact which, if true, would make them an institutional embodiment of the
Imaginary order. Allan Silver states that: The policed society is unique in that central power
exercises potentially violent supervision over the population by bureaucratic means widely
diffused through civil society in small discretionary operations that are capable of rapid
concen- tration. (Silver, 1967) Simultaneously the police exercise supervision through ‘pervasive
moral display’. They are the very Image of the authority of the ‘centre’. Serving the
governmental project is always about the fantasy of transparency, of knowing all about the
population, of measuring, recording, collating, classifying. As Carolyn Steedman rightly points out,
the police were coopted as social statis- ticians almost from the outset. Mid-Victorian society came to
enumerate itself, and the transmission of statis- tical information from the provinces to central government, and its
return, in government report, re-published in local papers, played an important role in this enumeration. But provincial
police officers, acting as social statisticians, played a direct role in this process. (Steedman, 1984: 139) We can begin
to see the police experience of permanent suspicion and watchfulness within this wider
context of governmentality and also of the Imaginary – it is an eye which looks into the mirror
of society in order to find its own moral reflection, its own orderly Image. Wherever and
when- ever it fails to find correspondence between the social and its own moral Image it is of
course empowered to ‘exercise potentially violent supervision’ over those elements of society
which fail to fit. Conversely, the social must look into the mirror of the police officer as
‘pervasive moral display’ and see itself – it must identify with that Image as the spectacle of its
own moral impulses. If not, if the Image is ridiculed , for example, then again a (poten- tially violent)
reassertion of authority follows. Note that these two functions map precisely onto the two key
sources of anxiety on which I have focused attention – anxiety in relation to the problems of
permanent watchfulness, and anxiety about appearing to be authoritative and inspiring
respect. Note also that the infrastructure of this whole process is affective. The police claim
that when they look into the body of the population they see a distinct and growing lack of
reflection of their moral and regulative ideals. They also claim to find a persistent and growing
lack of identification with their own moral authority amongst members of the communities
they police. Why is this such an enduring theme, what is the source of this lack? Is this somehow
connected with their institutional embodiment of the Imaginary order? There are fundamental
performative contradictions at the heart of police practice which may make this sense of lack
inevitable. As we have seen, police officers define their identity most closely in relation to the
function of law- enforcement. This work is the key source of self-esteem. Law-enforcement
resulting in ‘closure’, a ‘good result’, is what produces the feeling of a job well done. It is what
makes a police officer feel like a police officer – it is his/her ‘manifest’ identity. But , as the
literature in this field never ceases to recount, law enforcement comprises only a very small part of
what a police officer actually does . I have already begun to suggest that we must view the police
officer’s ‘latent’, but more fundamental, identity as a governmental one – a pacifying function
which reaches far beyond the enforcement of law alone and in which law is simply one tool
among many. I have defined this more all-embracing governmental rationality as a response to the
impulse of the Imaginary, the desire for a general pacifica- tion, control, order, through a
panopticist gaze and the many disciplinary regimes. Now, the police officer wants to identify
with the law, but law is a creature of language , the order of the Symbolic. Certainly it is a form of
lan- guage designed specifically to serve the demands of the Imaginary. It is the language of order and
stasis. But like all linguistic phenomena it remains polysemic despite the best efforts of its
designers. It is bound, ultimately, to be inadequate to the demands of the Imaginary (and
therefore of govern- mentality). So for the police their actual governmental function determines that they
persistently feel and express their dissatisfaction with the scope of the law. One of the sentiments expressed
again and again, in my own research data, was dissatisfaction with the law as it stood, with its supposed
inade- quacies. Another source of deep frustration was the perceived way in which criminals
could turn the law to their own advantage, could pervert its true spirit . And of course such is in
the nature of any creature of language – its meaning and use can never be fixed and mastered . So despite
wanting to identify absolutely with the rule of law, the police officer never really can. By
virtue of his/her occupational role, his first allegiance is to governmentality and the order of
the Imaginary. The law, as expressed within the Symbolic order is always a source of
disappointment and frustration. They are con- demned perpetually to the anxiety produced
by this fault line at the heart of their cultural milieu. As Foucault points out, law is only one
subordinate tool of governmental rationality. The police officer’s anxiety is further increased,
therefore, by the fact that s/he may have to go outside the limits of the law in pursuit of the
governmental function. We may find, then, desperate attempts to distinguish justified rule-
breaking from ‘real’ crime. But the contradictions remain: the sense of lack in the law is
permanent. And indeed, as we shall see, this sense of inadequacy, lack or loss, permeates
their responses to all of their idealised objects .
Criminal justice practices no longer operate through hierarchal patterns, but
rather work through rhizomatic, decentralized process of surveillance and
information. Police reforms ignore the shift from hierarchization to constant
gaze and visibility that renders citizens intelligible. Any sort of resistance
against the system fails to the rhizomatic growth of the surveillant assemblage
that will reorganize and begin new lines.
Chapman 16 (Jessica Chapman holds a Master of Arts in Communication and a Bachelor’s
degree in Political Science from Carleton University, “Becoming the Camera: Body worn video
and shifting expectations of police work”, 2016, Pgs 27 -29)
Gandy’s panoptic sort (1993) works to apply this panopticism to the growing number of databases that now track, sort, and
categorize us. The panoptic sort refers to what Gandy considers a form of cybernetic triage,
“through which individuals and groups of people are being sorted according to their presumed
economic or political value” (p. 1- 2). In other words, subjects are being sorted according to their level
of risk, as determined by systems built specifically to sort the desirable from the undesirable.
These seemingly mundane systems can be considered a nod to the risk society, as they sort
individuals in a probabilistic manner that aims to minimize risk. By extension, the shift toward a
society preoccupied with risk mitigation has changed the objective of policing from reactive to
proactive. Policing has become less about justice and is increasingly dependent on monitoring,
sorting, and evaluating risks associated with criminality in an effort to stop crime before it
happens. As the panopticon is no longer adequate to describe the extensive surveillance infrastructure that exists today, a
more appropriate description of the current state of 28 surveillance emerges from Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1987) discussion of the assemblage. Haggerty and Ericson extend Deleuze’s assemblage in their work
The Surveillant Assemblage (2000), arguing that the surveillant assemblage results from the conglomeration
of a number of previously independent surveillance systems that begin working together to
various extents. According to Haggerty and Ericson, the surveillant assemblage is a mechanism of
disembodiment that separates physical bodies from the data that they generate and
reassembles that information as virtual ‘data doubles’ (p. 605). It should be noted that in policing contexts
these data doubles are often used to criminalize individuals and to predict and intervene in
future behaviour (Wilkinson & Lippert 2012; Finn 2009). This conglomeration of surveillance systems results in an intertwined
and interconnected assemblage tasked with constantly sharing and sorting information. The assemblage can be
described as rhizomatic both because of its rapid expansion and because it is said to level the
hierarchy of surveillance – subjecting everyone to the gaze. However, one of the most important parts of the
rhizomatic nature of the surveillant assemblage is that, “ a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot,
but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000, p. 614).
Essentially, the system will compensate for any resistance by reorganizing itself in a manner that
finds a way around resistance, much in the same way that rhizomes will grow around any
obstacles in their path. It would seem that resistance is futile but in reality, things are much messier in the assemblage. I
would argue that it is certainly possible to resist within the assemblage; however, effective resistance
requires that we play by the rules of the system. In other words, by leveraging the tools of the
assemblage it is possible to cause resistance inside the system, something that is largely
facilitated by the lack of centralized power. I argue that this is what we are witnessing as police organizations adopt
their own cameras in an attempt to maintain control over their visibility as they become incorporated into the assemblage. Haggerty
has also proposed that modern surveillance leads to a hierarchy of visibility that focuses the gaze on
certain individuals while sparing others. Haggerty (2006) argues that, “the types of surveillance accentuated in the
panoptic model typically involve the monitoring of people who reside at a lower point in the social hierarchy” (p. 29). However,
Haggerty also considers the possibility that hierarchies of visibility are being recalibrated as the surveillant gaze becomes increasingly
omnipresent and indiscriminant (p. 29).
Although hierarchies are leveling as police are removed from the
top and subjected to the gaze, their attempts to control their visibility is resulting in newly
formed nodes of power within the assemblage. Consequently, hierarchies may be leveled, but
some groups are able to maintain a privileged position.
 Surveillance
Police surveillance is no longer hierarchal, but rather decentralized and
interconnected through different locations. Only immanent resistance can bring
down procedures of criminal law inherent to the surveillant assemblage’s
obsession with capture and information.
Wilkinson and Lipper 2011 (Blair Wilkinson has a bachelor’s in criminology from University
of Windsor and currently complete their master’s thesis in Criminology, Randy Lippert is a PhD
professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Windsor, “Moving
Images Through an Assemblage: Police, Visual Information, and Resistance”, October 13 2011,
https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1007/s10612-011-9141-0) SA = Surveillant Assemblages

Public and private institutions increasingly deploy video surveillance to monitor an

Introduction
array of domains. The recorded images, both still photographs and video-footage, constitute a type of visual information that
is stored or activated for myriad purposes. The images are sometimes transferred from these institutions to police to aid
investigations, to generate confessions, and for use as legal evidence in the courts. However, for this transfer to occur, police must
engage these institutions and then transform the acquired informationFootnote1 into knowledge about crime and other risks
(Ericson and Haggerty 1997). Themovement of visual information through and in relation to the police,
itself a neglected substantive area in criminology and overlapping fields, is also an opportunity
to further explore and assess the surveillant assemblage concept. Haggerty and Ericson (2000)
introduced the surveillant assemblage (SA) concept in an effort to progress from well-worn
explanations of surveillance based on George Orwell’s state-centred ‘Big Brother’ and Michel
Foucault’s omnipresent ‘panopticon’ , conceptions which scholars had stretched ‘beyond recognition [to]… fit current
developments’ (2000: 607). The de-centralized SA refers to an array of state and non-state
institutions, technologies, and forms of information that become temporarily and loosely
stitched together (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). The SA works not via omnipresent Orwellian ‘telescreens’ or panoptic ‘soul
training’ but through a process of abstracting human bodies from locations and separating them into
information flows which are reassembled for intervention (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 606). The value of
this concept for understanding surveillance has been since debated and criticized (Hier 2003; Bogard 2006; Ericson 2007; Hier and
Greenberg 2009; Lippert 2009). This study reveals the processes of, and resistances to, a surveillant assemblage linking private
The movement of images
businesses and individuals, police and the courts through the use of video surveillance images.
from private sources to police to the courts is a process through which these images, and the
persons and forms of conduct they represent, are assigned criminal meaning. Surveillance image
production and transfer to police and beyond— the flow of this visual information—epitomizes
SA formation and creation of a criminal ‘data-double’, an ‘electronic profile, compiled from
personal data fragments, of an individual…’ (Lyon 2007: 199). While video surveillance creeps toward new functions
as it is driven by a precautionary logic, its products—the recorded images—are evinced being actively transformed through human
labour. Unlike assumptions about the effectiveness of video surveillance in stopping crime among the wider public (see Hay 1995),
and in popular culture (see Lyon 2007: 145–149), this criminalizing movement through a SA is revealed as less than seamless; it
encounters forms of resistance along the way. Among identified barriers are police workload, which stems from a reliance on human
labour, and technological limitations. As well, if images reach the courts they can still support defence strategies premised on
criminal law principles. Thus, the new abundance of visual information leads to resistance to police practices from lawyers and
However, this resistance occurs
related representation problems that require additional sources, including other images.
late in the process when harm from criminalization, partially due to mass media’s relentless
erosion of the public’s presumption of innocence, has already resulted. Moreover, while there may
be a capacity to do so, there is little evidence, based on crime types captured by surveillance
images and used by police, of powerful agents being scrutinized and a corresponding leveling of
surveillance hierarchies, at least within this particular SA. In surfacing these aspects, this exploratory study
suggests that despite previous criticisms, the SA concept can be effectively taken in critical directions in
making sense of surveillance, asymmetrical criminalization processes, and the police role
therein. It also reveals more broadly that while the alleged effectiveness of video surveillance fuels its institutional use in order to
solve social problems and manage risk, the extraction from digital memories of the visual information it
produces, and its subsequent transformation into problem-solving knowledge elsewhere,
remains a very uncertain process. Surveillant Assemblages The assemblage concept was drawn from
the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Rather than
suggesting surveillance is centralized and hierarchal , as epitomized by Big Brother and panoptic imagery,
Haggerty and Ericson originally asserted the SA entails weed-like ‘rhizomatic’ growth ‘across a series of
interconnected roots which throw up shoots in different locations’ (2000: 615). Thus, the de-
centralized SA has a capacity to level surveillance hierarchies and scrutinize those both with
and without power since ‘no major population groups stands irrefutably above or outside of
the surveillant assemblage (2000: 617–618). A key criticism emerging from the aforementioned debate about the SA is
that Haggerty and Ericson’s claims of a leveling effect on surveillance are somewhat ‘exaggerated’ (Hier 2003: 406) and threaten
to ‘relativize asymmetrical surveillant applications’ ( see Hier and Greenberg 2009: 20). This exaggeration
allegedly stems from the fact Haggerty and Ericson “do not go far enough in explicating the significance of
‘centres of appropriation’” (22). These are astute criticisms of the original work. Yet, perhaps as a response, the SA has
been recently deployed in a register more critical than its original formulation (see Coleman 2004; Ericson 2007). For example, in
Ericson (2007) the SA re-appears as one of two forms of ‘counter-law’ (the other being forms of law
pitted against law, such as the infamous US Patriot Act) , a concept, somewhat ironically, drawn from Foucault’s
work. According to Ericson (2007: 22–23) institutions are increasingly under the spell of a precautionary
logic, a ‘logic of uncertainty’ that fosters suspicion , that becomes reason for preemptive
measures, and leads to criminalization through a SA. In turn, this erodes traditional principles,
standards and procedures of criminal law (Ericson 2007: 24–30). While the role of the police institution
in flows of knowledge about crime remains paramount, most crime is not discovered by or
reported to police; other institutions often commence criminalization (Ericson 2007: 2). With this renewed
attention to criminalization, and its tether to ‘counter-law’, the SA concept is taken in a de-relativizing direction.
This is the theoretical point of departure of this article, which seeks to take previous criticisms and insights seriously in empirically
assessing the SA concept in the context of the transfer of video surveillance images through the police institution. We attend to
the SA by identifying and investigating the police institution
neglected aspects identified in previous work on
as a ‘centre of appropriation’ where information flows are assembled in a SA. This, in turn, can
reveal specific ‘asymmetrical applications’ (Hier and Greenberg 2009: 22) in relation to
information use and transfer from one institution to another. In so doing, however, we take seriously
Bogard’s (2006: 98) assertion that ‘[i]t is especially important to focus on modes of resistance that are
immanent to how the system organizes itself, not just [external] laws or political reforms…’. Forms
of resistance include technical, organizational, and social processes that inhibit information flows too. Identifying resistance in
relation to the movement of visual information through the police institution and a SA, what is tantamount to a criminalizing
movement, is of chief interest here.
 State Based Politics
Political governance seeks to preemptively constrain the possibilities for action
by interrupting and capturing the flows of sociality in order to extract from
them a surplus that reifies its own power
Patton 12
[Paul Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy in the School of History and Philosophy at the
University of New South Wales, “Deleuze’s Political Philosophy,’ Ch. 9 in the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze, 2012, Cambridge University Press]

The fact that Deleuze read Marx during the 1960s alongside Nietzsche perhaps explains some of
the anti-political themes that occasionally manifest themselves in his work ( N 51). There is no
discussion of Nietzsche’s views on politics and the state in Nietzsche and Philosophy, only
comments on his theory of culture and, at the end of the book, on the implications of
Nietzsche’s theory for practice. However, if Deleuze had elaborated a Nietzschean politics on
the basis of applying the theory of power outlined in Nietzsche and Philosophy to the social and
political field, and supposed a simple axiological priority of the active over the reactive and the
affirmative over the negative, the argument might run along the following lines. Power is
fundamentally active and relational, appearing in the interaction between different kinds and
degrees of force. In the state of nature, individual and collective bodies collide in the pursuit of
their activities. However, purely chaotic interaction is not a state of social existence: at best, life
under such conditions will be uncertain, at worst it will be brutish and short. Hence, it can be
argued, the overriding aim of political government is the establishment and maintenance of
relatively stable forms of interaction. Social relations require the stabilization and fixation of
certain forms of interaction, including the institution of forms of government which enable
stable and predictable forms of action upon the actions of others. In these terms, government
is a form of action upon individual or social forces which seeks to limit or constrain their
possibilities for action. From the perspective of the forces governed, the government of
individual and collective bodies is essentially reactive. Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the
state as a process of capture operating upon the primary flows of matter and activity in the
social field renders explicit this reactive character of the political apparatus. The state, they
argue, captures flows of population, commodities, or money in order to extract from these
flows a surplus which then becomes a means to maintain and enhance its own power . It is an
institution whose primary mode of operation is one of limitation or constraint, a matter of
separating active forces from what they can do. In these terms, the state is by definition always
a secondary formation, and the political sphere is always reactive by nature. In this way, the
argument sketched above would lead to a fundamentally anti-political orientation.

Elements of such an orientation may be found in Difference and Repetition, for example, in the
form of Deleuze’s defense of the singular against the general, the individual against the herd,
and a resistance to forms of equality and equalization. This “antipolitical” theme emerges from
the conception of the social field (like every other) as a field of free differences and the rejection
of representation: every time there is representation there is always “an unrepresented
singularity” who does not recognize himself or herself in the representant. Hence the
misfortune of speaking for others ( DR 52). Elsewhere in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze
points out that for every philosophy that begins from a subjective or implicit claim about what
everybody is supposed to know there is another which denies this knowledge or fails to
recognize what is claimed. Such philosophies rely not upon the common man but on a different
persona: “Someone who neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent
anything” ( DR 130). 14

The theory of capitalist society outlined in Anti-Oedipus establishes a fundamental dualism

within capitalist society between the deterritorializing tendency of capital and the necessary
reterritorialization effected by the state and its agents. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari suggest,
the revolutionary path lies not in the attempt to set limits to market forces and the impetus of
deterritorialization, but in the opposite direction, pursuing ever further the movement of
decoding and deterritorialization ( AO 239–40). Much of the analysis of capitalism in Anti-
Oedipus supports such a reading. For example, the authors describe the capitalist axiomatic as a
system of enslavement in which all are subject to the constraint of its axioms. By contrast with
the form of slavery established by the Despotic state , which at least retained an apparatus of
anti-production distinct from the sphere of production and a corresponding class of masters,
capitalism installs “an unrivalled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation” in which “there are no
longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves” ( AO 254). Here, there is
only one class, and bourgeois and proletarian alike are slaves of the social machine. In contrast,
Deleuze and Guattari point to “the revolutionary potential of decoded flows” and suggest that
the opposition to this machine which is relevant from the point of view of revolutionary politics
is not that between capitalist and worker but that between “the decoded flows that enter into a
class axiomatic on the full body of capital, and on the other hand, the decoded flows that free
themselves from this axiomatic” ( AO 255).

Other elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s mature political philosophy disallow a simplistic anti-
political point of view. The axioms of the capitalist social machine do not simply repress a
natural state of free and undirected social existence. They are also constitutive of new social
forces and forms of life. Deleuze and Guattari are not Romantic anarchists who believe in a
realm of social being beyond the subjection to political power. It would be an error, they argue,
“to take a disinterested stance toward struggle on the level of the axioms” ( ATP 463). The
reason is not simply that the conditions of people’s lives are at stake in those axioms, but also
that forcing changes at the level of the axiomatic is itself an indispensable mechanism of
affecting the possibility of future changes . As we have seen, it is a fundamental feature of the
axiomatic that it cannot reterritorialize existing flows without creating conditions that will
generate new forms of deterritorialization.
The state is an apparatus of capture subject to the axiomatic of global capital
Patton 12
[Paul Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy in the School of History and Philosophy at the
University of New South Wales, “Deleuze’s Political Philosophy,’ Ch. 9 in the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze, 2012, Cambridge University Press]

Although this political ontology does not include normative political concepts of equality,
freedom, and justice, it does include a kind of formal normativity. Moreover, there is a
progression in Deleuze and Guattari’s work from a focus on this formal normativity in the earlier
work toward increasing engagement with explicitly political normativity in their later work. By
“formal normativity” I mean the way in which Anti-Oedipus discusses political institutions only
from the perspective of a universal theory of society and history. The specifically political
organization of society plays no independent role in this theory. Rather, it is treated as
continuous with the co-ordination and control of laws of matter and desire in non-state societies
governed by the Territorial machinewith its systems of alliance and filiation. 16 Deleuze and
Guattari present the state as a new mechanism of alliance rather than as the embodiment of
any ideal treaty or contract on the part of its subjects ( AO 195–96). They argue that the state
form appeared in human history in the guise of the different kinds of Despotic machine, each
with its own mechanisms of overcodingthe laws of desire , before becoming subordinate to the
“civilized machine” that is global capitalism. What they call the Territorial, Despotic, and
Civilized social machines are treated only as different regimes of co-ordination and control of
the local desiring-machines that constitute individual, familial, and social life. There is no
discussion of the norms that regulate modern political life, only the normativity inherent in the
typology of desiring machines as embodying either the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascistic
pole of desire or the schizoid and revolutionary pole ( AO 340). For this reason, their
“schizoanalytic ” theory and practice of desire proposes neither a political program nor a project
for a future form of society.

A Thousand Plateaus broadens and generalizes Deleuze and Guattari’s social ontology so that it
becomes a general theory of assemblages and the manner in which these are expressed
throughout human history. The last vestiges of Marxist teleology are removed from their
universal history such that social formations are denied by processes or becomings and “all
history does is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession” ( ATP 430). The
successive plateaus provide a series of new concepts and associated terminology with which to
describe different kinds of assemblages. These include concepts designed to express social,
linguistic, and affective assemblages , such as strata, content and expression, territories, lines of
flight, or deterritorialization; the terminology employed to outline a micro- as opposed to
macropolitics, along with concepts such as body without organs, intensities, molar and
molecular segmentarities, and the different kinds of line of which we are composed; the
terminology employed to describe capitalism as a nonterritorially based axiomatic of lows of
materials, labor, and information as opposed to a territorial system of overcoding; and finally,
they include a concept of the state as an apparatus of capture that, in the forms of its present
actualization, is increasingly subordinated to the requirements of the capitalist axiomatic, along
with a concept of abstract machines of metamorphosis, or nomadic war machines, that are the
agents of social and political transformation.

This machinic theory of society is normative in a specific and formal sense, namely that the
different kinds of assemblage amount to a world in which systematic priority is accorded to
minoritarian becomings over majoritarian being, to planes of consistency over planes of
organization, to nomadic machines of metamorphosis over apparatuses of capture, to smooth
rather than striated space, and so on. Deleuze and Guattari’s political ontology presents certain
kinds of movement as primary: becoming-minor as a process of deviation from a majoritarian
standard, lines of flight or deterritorialization rather than processes of reterritorialization or
capture, and so on. In this sense, their ontology of assemblagesis also an ethics or an ethology .
This ethics might be characterized in the language of one or other of the plateaus as an ethics of
becoming, of l ows or lines of l ight, or as an ethics and a politics of deterritorialization. 17 It is
“political” only in the very broad sense that it enables us to conceptualize and describe
transformative forces and movements as well as the forms of “capture” or blockage to which
these are subject.
Impacts
 Extinction
We stand at the threshold for the defeat of the human race – only a renewed
poesis staves off inevitable self-destruction
Bifo 17. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Italian post-autonomist activist, artist, and theorist, professor of
Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera (Italy), “The Second Coming of What?” e-
flux journal #83 – June 2017, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/142355/the-second-coming/

The second coming of communism will happen on grounds that have nothing to do with Leninist force and Bolshevik coercion,
The second coming of communism will happen as an effect of the
nothing to do with political dictatorship.
trauma that capitalism (and the capitalist use of technology) has inflicted on the human mind.
Economic competition and obsessive accumulation have provoked violence, frustration, and
war. Communism means ridding ourselves of the superstition of property and the superstition
of salaried work. The redistribution of wealth and the emancipation of social time from the
blackmail of salaried work: there is no other key to the future. What happened in 2016 (Brexit,
the victory of Trump, spreading nationalism in Europe, spreading civil war around the global) is
jeopardizing the mental world-map inherited from the modern age. This is confirmed by an
article entitled “Toward a Global Realignment” by Zbigniew Brzezinski, published in The American Interest
in June 2016.1Until his death in May of this year, Brzezinski was a leading foreign policy intellectual who for decades was an
According to Brzezinski, Daesh is only the beginning
authoritative representative of the American establishment.
of a terrorist planetary war that will mark the current century. Westerners, Brzezinski says,
have to realize that after five hundred years of predation, massacre, and humiliation, the
colonized peoples of the world have started taking their revenge, launching religious and
national wars everywhere. The oppressed of the world are able to take revenge now because
of the accessibility of deadly and massively destructive weapons. After centuries of plunder
and humiliation, the victims are reacting. On the other side, white Western workers,
impoverished by the financial aggression of the last thirty years, are seeking social revenge
and unleashing a global racial war. From an internationalist point of view, this is
the worst-case scenario—a perfect recipe for the defeat of the human
race. The victory of Donald Trump is the price that the white working class is willing to pay in
order to take revenge against the neoliberal left. Humiliated people sometimes decide to identify with the
humiliator in chief. Humiliated white US workers have chosen Trump because he is the humiliator of
the humiliating neoliberal elite. They think: he is our man because he is the one who best knows how to humiliate those
who have cheated us. Unavoidable and Unpredictable In the crystal ball of our century, it’s easy to see an
increase in war and exploitation. But we should never forget that the unavoidable usually does not happen, because in
history it is the unpredictable that prevails. Our first task as intellectuals is to describe the unavoidable. We
have to look straight into the eyes of the beast. But simultaneously we have to remember that
the game-changing event that opens a new view and new possibilities is unpredictable. The
more complex a system is, the less we can predict the wide-ranging effects of a marginal
cultural trend or an unknown technical discovery. Thus,
notwithstanding our feelings
of despair, we should not stop exercising the art of thinking and the art of
philosophical imagination. I know that in the age of communication and
speed, thought is dismissed as an old habit . Thought seems ineffective and
ornamental. But this is part of the unavoidable. We should not stop thinking
because the unpredictable may soon need to be thought, and this is our
job, our task: thinking in times of apocalyptic trauma. This is why we should not stop
Lenin wrote that “capitalism brings
repeating the word internationalism. You know what internationalism is. When
war like clouds bring the storm,” he knew that the First World War was unavoidable, and he
knew that this unavoidability could only be subverted by the unpredictable: a workers’
revolution. In 1914, while French and German socialists voted for war credits, succumbing to
the rhetoric of patriotism and accepting national war, Lenin said no to the war. I’ve never been a
Leninist, but I cannot deny that at the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, Lenin was right.
Similarly today, despite the unavoidability of war, we must say no to the
war. We must organize desertion and boycotts; we must prepare the overthrow of the
system that has generated the war. Internationalism is not a moral value nor an ideology, but
the materialist understanding of a simple fact: the workers of the world share a common
interest, which is having more of what they produce, and working less. When workers are
united in a social conflict, they can win. When they are captured by nationalist
sentiment, when national fronts proliferate, war spreads and workers lose everything—no
matter if they’re German or French, American or Russian. The rising nationalism of our time is
an effect of the defeat that the working class has suffered; the betrayal by the neoliberal left
The neoliberal left bears the
has deprived the working class of all political defenses.
responsibility for the defeat of workers, for the impoverishment of
society, and for the humiliation that is now turning people against
progressive values. Workers hate the left (and rightly so), because it is identified with
financial aggression and neoliberal cosmopolitan conformism. Tony Blair is now trying to come
back. He wrote a message to the British people saying that Brexit was a mistake, and the
mistake has to be mended. He will come back to help Britain behave. If I had to choose
between Nigel Farage and Tony Blair, I would not choose Farage, but nor
would I choose Blair. Blair and the Blairist left have destroyed all trust in
democracy. The Ceremony of Innocence Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the
worst Are full of passionate intensity. —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” The line “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” makes
me think of what is happening every day in the Mediterranean Sea, where innocent people are drowned by wars fuelled by the
West. This is free association, of course—Yeats could not have imagined the tragedy that war and migration are provoking in the
European consciousness is denying the meaning of what is
Euro-Mediterranean in our postmodern times.
happening. Everywhere along the Mediterranean coast, concentration camps are built with EU
money. In Turkey, in Libya, in Egypt, in those countries led by fascist murderers like Al-Sisi and
Erdoğan, migrants are detained, tortured, enslaved, killed in those concentration camps that
Auschwitz is under construction all
Europeans do not want to host on their soil.
along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In the 1940s, the majority of Europeans did not know
and could not have known about Auschwitz. Now we know. Now everybody in Europe knows that
concentration camps are back. Europeans prefer to externalize the horror, to pay executioners
who are far from the eyes of European children. Nazism is externalized. The Yeats poem unchains many
Meaningful arbitrariness is the gift that
meaningful if arbitrary associations: this is what poetry does.

poetry offers to our minds. Serendipity in the process of meaning-making.

Poetical ambiguousness is the vibrational condition that leads to
conceptual discovery, to the imagining of other possible lands that we
cannot see now. What is happening in the Euro-Mediterranean will not be overcome in
political terms. Political decision is impotent. What we need is a reactivation of human
empathy, which is beyond politics. It’s pre-political, or post-political, or meta-political—I don’t
know. If the majority of Europeans are unable to feel empathy for the thousands who have
drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years, they are dangerously sick. And they are sick
because of the long-lasting impoverishment that financial capitalism has produced in their lives.
In such conditions of apathy and depression and fear, the political reason of governments
cannot decide. And the wave of migration and despair will not stop crashing on the shores of
our cursed continent-fortress. Irony and the Limit of Our Language “The best lack all conviction,” says Yeats. Think of the
former German pope, Joseph Ratzinger—Pope Benedict XVI—who came to Rome promising the final establishment of truth.
Ratzinger was an intellectual and a supporter of absolute truth. Right-wing Catholics felt emboldened by his ascent to the throne. He
said: “God is one, and the Truth is one.” In his best-known speech, delivered in Regensburg, Bavaria, the philosopher Ratzinger
denounced relativism, which he regarded as the plague of modernity. I’m not generally a fan of Nanni Moretti, but I like Habemus
Papam, the movie he directed in 2011. It’s a movie about the fragility of human beings—in particular, about the fragility of a human
being who is elected pope. In the movie, Cardinal Melville (played by Michel Piccoli) is elected pope. When he is expected to give his
first public speech to a massive crowd assembled in St. Peter’s Square, he realizes that he has nothing to say. All of a sudden, he is
overwhelmed by the reality of the world, and he mumbles: “I cannot speak.” Then he goes to a psychoanalyst (played by Nanni
Moretti himself). The pope is depressed because he has seen the truth that he was trying to conceal: there is no truth in the world.
In February 2013, Joseph Ratzinger decided to follow in the footsteps of Michel Piccoli. Ratzinger became the first pope to resign in
five centuries. Today,
the relationship between reality and imagination is growing more complicated
than Jean Baudrillard could ever have imagined. The real pope imitates the actor impersonating the pope, and
accepts the dark truth that he is not strong enough to sustain the responsibility of telling the truth because he feels that the truth is
evading him. Obviously, this is only my interpretation of the resignation of Ratzinger, which was an act of intellectual courage and
moral humility. How does one understand the decision of a pope, who has been chosen by God through the intermediary of the Holy
Spirit, to resign? I think the only possible interpretation is that Benedict felt depressed, and spoke sincerely with God, and humbly
Depression is not about guilt, nor is it a limitation of the reasoning
revealed his intimate apocalypse.
mind. It is the disconnection of reasoning from desire. Then Mario Bergoglio was elected pope, becoming the
first Pope Francis in the history of the Catholic Church. He went to the window overlooking St. Peter’s Square and said: “Buonasera.
I’m the man who comes from the end of the world.” He meant Argentina, a country ravaged by the beast of financial capitalism.
Since that moment, the apocalypse has shone through the acts of Bergoglio, because he is a man who dares to face the end. From
the end of the world, Francis has been opening a new path in theology. Shortly after his election, he gave
an interview to the magazine Civiltà cattolica. In the interview, he reflects on the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity.
My interpretation of Bergoglio’s remarks is that the main problem for Christians today is not faith. Nor is it truth. Something is more
urgent: the focus of Christians today should be charity, mercy, the living existence of Jesus. The Church, in the words of Bergoglio,
It is sometimes called “compassion.” It is sometimes called
should be thought of as a war hospital.
“solidarity.” Deleuze and Guattari, in the introduction to What is philosophy?, speak of
“friendship.” What is friendship? It is the ability to create a common world, a world of ironic
enunciations and expectations. Friendship is the possibility of creating a common path in the
course of time. As the Zapatistas say, quoting the poet Antonio Machado, “Caminante no hay
camino el camino se hace al andar.” We make the road by walking. There is no truth, there is
no meaning, but we can create a bridge beyond the abyss of the nonexistence of truth . “The
best lack all conviction” means that the best have irony, the nonassertive language that aims
to tune in to many levels of meaning. The ironic smile also implies empathy, the ability to share
the precariousness of life without heaviness. When irony is divorced from empathy, when it
loses the lightness and pleasure of precariousness, it turns into cynicism. When irony is
divorced from empathy and solidarity, depression takes ahold of the soul. For semiologists,
cynicism and irony are related, because they share the presumption that truth does not exist.
But we have to go beyond semiology: the two concepts differ because the ironic person is
someone who does not believe but rather feels empathically the common ground of
understanding. The cynical person is someone who has lost contact with pleasure and who
bends to power because power is his only refuge. The cynical person bends to the power of
reality, while the ironic person knows that reality is a projection of the mind, of many
interwoven minds. When philosophers realized that God was dead and there was no
metaphysical foundation for our interpretations, different ethical stances emerged. One stance was
based on aggressiveness and the violent enforcement of the Wille zur Macht: there is no truth in the world, but I’m stronger than
irony: friendship and
you, and my strength is the source of my power which establishes truth. Another stance was
egalitarian sharing can build a bridge of meaning across the abyssal nonexistence of meaning.
Biorhythm and Algorithm Depression can evolve in different ways: if you look at the present
reality of America, you see that the prevailing evolution of depression is Donald Trump. “The
worst are full of passionate intensity,” says Yeats. Faith in belonging and identity is the fake ground of passionate intensity.
Belonging implies a natural ontological or historical ground of conformity among individuals. This is why belonging implies violence
Identity is the result of this process
and submission. If you want to belong, you have to accept the rules of conformity.
of conformity and subjection. Passionate intensity is the foundation of the identity that
humiliated people crave. But identity has to be protected against existence, against
transformation, against becoming, against pleasure, because pleasure is dis-identity. Identity
is a simulation of belonging that is asserted through violence against the other. “Surely the second
coming is at hand. / … a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight.” In 1919, Yeats expected the second coming of Jesus
Christ. However, in the decade that followed, Jesus Christ did not come back. Hitler came. So we should ask: What is
going to happen now? I’ll try to reframe the present situation from the point of view of rhythm. In particular, I want to
say something about algorithm and biorhythm. Rhythm is the singularization of time . Rhythm is
scanning time in attunement with cosmic breathing. Rhythm is the vibration that aims to
harmonize the singularity of breathing and the surrounding chaos. Poetry is the error that leads
to new continents of meaning. Although the theory of biorhythm elaborated by Wilhelm Fliess at the end of the
nineteenth century is generally considered pseudoscientific, I’m interested in its metaphorical implications. The organism is
composed of vibrant matter, and the pulsations of the organism enter into a rhythmic
relationship with the pulsations of other surrounding organisms. The conjunction of conscious
and sensitive organisms is a vibrating relationship: individual organisms search for a common
rhythm, a common emotional ground of understanding, and this search is a sort of oscillation
that results in a possible (or impossible) syntony. Within the conjunctive sphere of biorhythm,
the process of signification and interpretation is a vibrational process. When the process of
signification is penetrated by connective machines, it is reformatted. It mutates in a way that
implies a reduction: a reduction to the syntactic logic of the algorithm. The word “algorithm”
comes from the name of the Arabic mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (meaning, a native of
Khwarazm), whose work introduced sophisticated mathematics to the West. However, I prefer
a different etymology and a different meaning. “Algorithm” for me has to do with the Greek
word algos, meaning pain. Furthermore, the English word “algid” refers to frigidity, both
physical and emotional. So I suggest that “algorithm” has to do with frigidity and pain. This
pain results from the constriction of the organism, the stiffening of the vibrational agent of
enunciation, and the reduction of the continuum of experience to the dictates of
computation. When the social concatenation is mediated by connective machines, human
agency undergoes a process of reformatting. No one really knows what human agency is, or what humans are
doing when they are said to perform as agents. In the face of every analysis, human agency remains
something of a mystery. If we don’t know just how it is that human agency operates, how can we be so sure that the
processes through which nonhumans make their mark are qualitatively different? An assemblage owes its agentic
capacity to the vitality of the materialities that constitute it. Something like this congregational agency is
called shi in Chinese tradition. Shi helps to illuminate something that is usually difficult to capture in discourse: namely the kind of
potential that originates not in human initiative but instead results from the very disposition of things. Shi is the style, energy
propensity, trajectory, or élan inherent to a specific arrangement of things. Originally a word used in military strategy, shi emerged
in the description of a good general who must be able to read and then ride the shi of a configuration of moods, winds, historical
trends, and armaments: shi names the dynamic force emanating from a spatio-temporal configuration rather than from any
When the algorithm enters the realm of
particular element within it … The shi of an assemblage is vibratory.2
social concatenation, modes of interaction undergo a reformatting process, and algorithmic
logic pervades and subjugates the vibrant concatenation. The insertion of the algorithm into
the semiotic process breaks the continuum of semiosis and life. In the connective domain,
interpretation is reduced to the syntactical recognition of discreet states. The vibrational sign
is stiffened, to the point of losing the ability to decode and to interpret ambiguousness and
irony. Difference is then interpreted according to the rules of repetition, and the
indetermination that makes poetical misunderstanding (or hyper-understanding) possible is
cancelled. As the semiosphere is reformatted according to the algorithm, the vibratory nature
of biorhythm is suffocated. Breathing is banished from the semiotic exchange, and poetry—
the error that leads to the discovery of new continents of meaning, the excess that contains
new imaginings and new possibilities—is frozen. This is what Guattari called a chaosmic
spasm.
The construction of subjects, communities, and humanity as closed and
coherent unities that must stave off all differential flux licenses claims of racial
superiority and human exceptionalism. As humanity is defined by the expulsion
of difference, human extinction is inevitable.
Colebrook 12. Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State
University, “Face Race,” Deleuze and Racism, online/google books

The human race is facing extinction. One might even say that there is a race towards extinction,
precisely because humanity has constituted itself as a race . The idea of a single species,
seemingly different but ulti mately grounded on a humanity of right and reason, has enabled
human exceptionalism, and this (in turn) has precluded any questioning of humanity's right to
life. In actuality, humanity is not a race; it becomes a racial unity only via the virtual, or what
Deleuze and Guattari describe as a process of territorialisation, deferritorialisarion and
reterritori- alisation. In the beginning is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the 'intense
germinal influx', through which individuated bodies (both organic and social) emerge . Race or
racism is not the result of discrimination; on the contrary, it is only by repressing the highly
complex differentials that compose any being that something like the notion of 'a' race can
occur. This is why Deleuze and Guattari argue for a highly intimate relation between sex and
race: all life is sexual, for living bodies are composed of relations among differential powers
that produce new events: encounters of potentialities that intertwine to form stabilities . Race
and racism occur through such intersections of desire, whereby bodies assemble to form
territories. All bodies and identities are the result of territorialisa- rion, so that race (or kinds)
unfolds from sex, at the same rime that sexes (male or female) unfold from encounters of
generic differences. All couplings are of mixed race.It is through the formation of a relatively
stable set of relations that bodies are affected in common. A body becomes an individual
through gathering or assembling (enabling the formation of a territory). A social body, tribe or
collective begins with the formation of a common space or territory but is deterrirorialised when
the group is individuated by an external body - when a chieftain appears as the law or eminent
individual whose divine power comes from Lon high'. This marks the socius as this or that
specified group. Race occurs through reterritorialisation, when the social body is not organised
from without (or via some transcendent, external term) but appears to be the expression of the
ground; the people are an expression of a common ground or Volk. The most racially
determined group of all is that of 'man', for no other body affirms its unity with such shrill
insistence. 'Humanity' presents itself as a natural unified species, with man as biological ground
from which racism might then be seen as a differentiation. The problem with racism is not that it
discriminates, nor that it takes one natural humanity and then perverts it into separate groups.
On the contrary, racism does not discriminate enough; it does not recognise that 'humanity ,'
'Caucasian' and 'Asian’ are insufficiently distinguished. Humanity is a virtuality or majority of a
monstrous and racial sort. One body - the white man of reason - is taken as the figure for life in
general. A production of desire - the image of 'man' that was the effect of history and social
groupings - is now seen as the ground of desire. Ultimately, a metalepsis takes place: despite
seeming differences, it is imagined that, deep down, we are all the same. And because of this
monstrous production of 'man in general', who is then placed before difference as the unified
human ground from which different races appear, a trajectory of extinction appears to be
relentless. Man's self-evident unity, along with the belief in a historical unfolding that occurs as
a greater and greater recognition of identity (the supposed overcoming of tribalism towards the
recognition of one giant body of human reason), precludes any question of humanity's
composition, its emergence from difference and distinction and the further possibility of its un-
becoming. Humanity has been fabricated as the proper ground of all life - so much so that
threats to all life on earth are being dealt with today by focusing on how man may adapt,
mitigate and survive. Humanity has become so enamoured of the image it has painted of its
illusory beautiful life that it has not only come close to vanquishing all other life forms, and has
not only imagined itself as a single and self-evidenrlv valuable being with a right to life, it can
also only a imagine a future of living on rather than face the threat of living otherwise. Part of
the problem of humanity as a race lies in the ambivalent status of art, for art is the figure that
separates white man par excellence; humanity has no essence other than that of free self-
creation, and so all seemingly different peoples or others must come to recognise their
differences as merely cultural, as the effect of one great history of self-distinction. On the other
hand, if art were to be placed outside the human , as the persistence of sensations and matters
that cannot be reduced to human intentionality , then 'we' might begin to discern the pulsation
of differences in a time other than that of self-defining humanity. Far from extinction or human
annihilation being solely a twenty-first- century event (although it is that too), art is tied
essentially to the nonexistence of man. Art has often quite explicitly considered the relation between humanity and
extinction. For it is the nature of the art object to exist beyond its animating intention, both intimating a people not yet present
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 180), and yet also often presupposing a unified humanity or common 'lived'. Wordsworth - yes,
Wordsworth! - was at once aware that the sense of a poem or work could not be reduced to its material support, for humanity is
always more than any of the signs it uses to preserve its existence: Oh! why hath not the Mind Some element to stamp her image oil
In nature somewhat nearer to her own? Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?
(1850, The Prelude V 45-9: 109) If the archive were to be destroyed, would anything of 'man' remain? Art gives man the ability to
imagine himself as eternally present, beyond any particular epoch or text, and yet also places this eternity in the fragile tomb of a
material object: 'Even if the material lasts only for a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in
'Man' as a race (as a unified body
the eternity that coexists with this short duration' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 166).
imagining himself as a natural kind) is essentially tied to extinction: for man is at once an ex
post facto or metaleptic positing of that which must have been there all along, awaiting eternal
expression, at the same time that 'man' is also that being who hastens extinction in general by
imagining himself as a single tradition solely worthy of eternal life. This unified humanity that
has become intoxicated with its sense of self-positing privilege can only exist through the
delirium of Race, through the imagination of itself as a unified and eternal natural body: All
delirium is racial, which does not necessarily mean racist. It is not a matter of the regions of the
body without organs 'representing' races and cultures. The full body does not represent
anything at all. On rhe contrary, the races and cultures designate regions on this body - that is,
zones of intensities, fields of potentials. Phenomena of individualization and sexualization are
produced within these fields. We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we
never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing
becomes as easy as being born or dying. Along the way we struggle against other races, we
destroy civilizations, in the manner of the great migrants in whose wake nothing is left standing
once they have passed through. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 94) Racial delirium is not only a
passage through differential flux from which identity emerges; it also entails that 'we destroy
civilizations - affirming the potentiality of leaving any produced culture or tradition in ruins. If
racial delirium occurs as an affirmation of the possibility of anything becoming extinct, racism is
a neurotic grip on survival. Racism - including, and especially, the affirmation of 'man' - is a
repression of racial delirium; humanity is always a virtual production or fabrication that posits
itself as ultimate actuality, occluding the differentials from which it emerges.
 Internalized Terror

Internalization of social regulations amounts to self-imposed terrorism and

despotism. The subject and the social are purged of all value and replaced with
endless, structural negativity.
Colebrook 9
[Claire, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and cultural
theorist, “Legal Theory after Deleuze” ch. 2 in Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures, 2009 Palgrave
Macmillan, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230244771]

It is true, they acknowledge, that we are currently suffering from an Oedipal structure, which is
tied directly to capitalism and a certain notion of the law. Here they draw directly on the
structural psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, who insisted that one could only be a subject
through subjection to law, and that this subjection was Oedipal in its imaginary dimension.
Deleuze and Guattari oppose this thesis by insisting on the reality of desire. Social machines or
the network of law and relations are not primary, for social machines and law work upon and
require flows of desire. Desire is not some imagined effect of the law. It is not the case that one
requires an original prohibition to create a desire that must have been. It is the case, they
concede, that Oedipal desire is an effect of the law, for it is the prohibition on incest that leads
us to assume that incest is what we must have desired. This prohibition distorts a real and
revolutionary desire, a desire that is beyond the law insofar as it is not yet a desire for
recognition or social production. It is an intensive desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 114).

As an example we might return to the Mabo case. One way to read the legal claim of Aboriginal
peoples for native title is through recognition. A claim for land would be a claim for inclusion,
given that selfhood today is largely conferred through capacities for ownership. On such a
reading the desire of any claim is derived from the social machine of legitimation. Another,
intensive, reading of such claims is that there is a directly revolutionary desire that takes the
form of an attachment to the spirit of a space that is not yet subjected to the social machine of c
apital. This desire for land might enable the formation of another social machine that would also
be a coding of desire. However, as it functions in the Mabo v Queensland judgements, we could
see the desire for land as an opening up of the ‘war machine’, where the terms of a body politic
are not yet decided (Ivison, Patton and Sanders, 2000).

Deleuze and Guattari create a positive concept of desire that provides a radical overturning of
the structurally constitutive understanding of law. It is not the case that in the beginning is law,
system and relation, with the non-relation or ‘in itself’ being imagined after the event. Instead,
they posit desire as a potentiality for creating relation: for example desires for land, for body
parts, for sounds, for attachments. There can only be social machines, systems of law or
lawfulness in general because of this potentiality for relations. We can give this potentiality a
number of names, including the Body without Organs, desire, difference in itself, or the virtual.
In all cases what Deleuze and Guattari reject is the primacy of ‘a’ relational system or even
systematicity in general. There can only be systems, differences or laws if there are virtual
potentials to differ, to enter into relation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 111).

Without setting up an overly dichotomous relation between Deleuze and Derrida we might
suggest that the great contribution of Deleuze’s theory is that while he, like Derrida, insists that
any presented being is the effect of some process of genesis, he also insists that it is possible to
enquire into the virtual potentials from which such genetic potentials unfold. Derrida continually
insisted that we only know genesis through the structures it has enabled, even if those
structures never exhaust those potentials. This is made clear in Derrida’s very early essays on
culture and the emergence of social relations. In response to Levi-Strauss, who argues that
culture emerges with the prohibition of incest or the subjection of natural bodies to an order of
exchange, Derrida notes that this distinction between pre-cultural desires and social structures
must itself rely on a system of distinctions (Derrida, 1978). We are always already within
difference, system and relations. To posit some naively utopian moment prior to prohibition is
always to look back from instituted relations to some imaginary and illusory origin. The pre-
systemic origin is effected from the system itself.

When Deleuze and Guattari direct their arguments against Oedipus they do so in direct criticism
of this assumption of the necessary imposition of law. It is not the case, they insist, that desiring
bodies are constituted through law. It is not through prohibition or subjection that something
like a self who is ‘before the law’ can take existence (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 161).
Whereas bodies and their relations were once dominated or ‘overcoded’ through the imposition
of terror by despots, it is now the ‘signifier’ that reigns despotically, internalising terror in the
form of the Oedipus complex. To explain this they make a comparison between a ‘surplus value
of code’, enjoyed by the despots, and the general process of ‘decoding’ in capitalism. A social
body produces material for consumption through its interactions and technical processes. A
certain excess can be enjoyed by the despot (in the form of sumptuous displays, wasteful
expenditure or even the enjoyment of bodies denied to others). It is in this excessive
consumption that the body of the despot turns the circulation of goods into a means for
establishing his precedence. In this manoeuvre one body is set above the social body to define
its point of order, the point from which it can be terrorised . Deleuze and Guattari describe the
despot as one who subjects social alliance (relations among tribes and bodies) to filiation. The
despot will claim to be descended directly from the gods. The despot’s body is therefore set
outside the territory of producing bodies, as a point of anti-production. It is this point of
immobility that subjects relations and flows of production to a seemingly transcendent or
abstract point of consumption. The goods consumed by the despot in displays of excess are
therefore productive of a surplus value of code, allowing the social machine to be explained by a
body that is not part of the machine of production.

Deleuze and Guattari make a series of points regarding what they refer to as this historical stage
of despotism. First, social machines (or the productive relations among bodies) are always
repressions of desiring machines. Deleuze and Guattari’s project in Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A
Thousand Plateaus (1987) is one of writing a history of varying relations between social
machines and desiring machines. Desiring machines are relations that are not yet organised
according to named bodies (such as mother–father–child, master–slave or worker–labourer). A
desiring machine is a flow of milk connecting lips and breast, a flow of blood connecting scarring
hand and enjoying eye, a flow of food from hand to mouth or flows of sound connecting
birdsong to attending ears. When such flows become stabilised, through regularised practices of
child-rearing, tattooing, hunting or collective eating, then a social machine forms organised
bodies from flows of desire. Their important point is that one should not see social machines as
collections of human subjects, for there can only be discernible human forms (mother–father,
male–female, or hunter–consumer) after desiring flows have been assembled into some
minimally stable body of relations. This allows them to see law and terror as a form of
deterritorialisation.

Social machines commence as territories, or relatively stable systems of relation that enable
production. As soon as one body appears as a point of law or order for a territory then one has
moved from the primitive to the despotic social machine, to a body of law that overcodes the
whole. The modern notion that we can only be subjects insofar as we are submitted to a system
of signification – and that outside the law there is only the chaos and the terror of the
undifferentiated – merely substitutes the abstract terror of the signifier for the concrete terror
of the despot (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 73). The idea that we are necessarily mediated by
transcendence is, Deleuze and Guattari insist, an ‘archaism’ that allows despotism to continue in
an abstract and internalised form. The notion, then, of justice as some absent, unattainable,
ever-deferred but always admonishing ideal is profoundly oedipal. We no longer regard
ourselves as terrorised by some actual body who threatens to punish us for inflicting disorder on
the social machine. Instead, we imagine that there is no self outside its submission to systems.
Beyond our submission there is only the nightmarish chaos of the undifferentiated . When we
subject our desire to deferral and lack we are really only obeying a structural law of civilised
humanity. They describe this ‘paralogism’ of the law as, ‘The extraction of a transcendent
complete object from the signifying chain, which served as a despotic signifier on which the
entire chain thereafter seemed to depend, assigning an element of lack to each position of
desire, fusing desire to a law, and engendering the illusion that this loosened up and freed the
elements of the chain’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 110). We should not, according to
Deleuze and Guattari, simply accept this miserable and Oedipal fiction of necessary subjection. It
matters little whether this is a literal abandonment of the mother in the face of paternal threat,
or the structural resignation to system and signification in the face of a fall into psychotic or
meaningless disorder. What occurs with the modern conception of law and desire is an
increasing internalisation of terror and despotism, and an increasingly miserable distance from
law. One is a subject only through subjection of desires to the law, while law can only be given ,
not as any actual or positive body, but as that which will always be above and beyond any
achievable end (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 215).

It is all too easy to see the practical consequences of what Deleuze and Guattari describe. We
can see the ways in which the subject of law in modernity suffers from this internalised,
abstract, deferred and negative terror of structural negation. Humanity has become nothing
other than a structure of subjection. In liberal democracies the self has no positive quality
other than its submission to regulation. The social order, ideally, has no positive quality other
than its prohibition of the intrusion of positive content from the network of social circulation.
Human rights mark an interesting point within the discourse of liberalism that would define the
self as properly autonomous, self-constituting and distinct from the imposition of any positive
norms. Originally defined through notions of non-interference, rights have become ways of
maintaining minimal forms of normative content. The right to free speech, for example, is
thoroughly in accord with an internalisation of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as
capitalism’s decoded axiomatic; one is no longer governed by a tyrannical body, but is self-
governing precisely through the absence of any specific norm or quality. The order of law as it
appears in the imperial formation, and as it will evolve later, indeed will have something in
common: the indifference to designation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 214). If there is no law
other than the law of self-regulation, then the only truth or right of humanity lies in its quality of
self-making. This allows us to protect, defend and define rights to free speech and conscience,
but also explains those odd intrusions such as the right to ‘bear arms’. In the absence of any
norm or law other than individuals’ capacities to enter into relation, one must also begin to
acknowledge the rights of those bodies to preclude undue intrusion, possibly justifying a right to
defence.
 Joy
The notion of the stable subject evinces an era of the regulation of joy, as the
will to difference is vampirically sucked from radical thought.
Deleuze and Parnet 87. Dialogues II, pg. 59

Why write about Spinoza? Here again, let us take him by the middle and not by the first
principle (a single substance for all the attributes). The soul AND the body; no one has ever had
such an original feeling for the conjunction ‘and’. Each individual, body and soul, possesses an
infinity of parts which belong to him in a more or less complex relationship. Each individual is
also himself composed of individuals of a lower order and enters into the composition of
individuals of a higher order. All individuals are in Nature as though on a plane of consistence
whose whole figure they form, a plane which is variable at each moment. They affect each
other in so far as the relationship which constitutes each one forms a degree of power, a
capacity to be affected. Everything is simply an encounter in the universe, a good or a bad en-
counter. Adam eats the apple, the forbidden fruit. This is a phenomenon of the indigestion,
intoxication, poisoning type: this rotten apple decomposes Adam’s relationship. Adam has a bad
encounter. Whence the force of Spinoza’s question: ‘ What can a body do?', of what affects is it
capable? Affects are becomings: sometimes they weaken us in so far as they diminish our
power to act and decompose our relationships (sadness), sometimes they make us stronger in
so far as they increase our power and make us enter into a more vast or superior individual
(joy). Spinoza never ceases to be amazed by the body . He is not amazed at having a body, but by
what the body can do. Bodies are not defined by their genus or species, by their organs and
functions, but by what they can do, by the affects of which they are capable - in passion as well
as in action. You have not defined an animal until you have listed its affects. In this sense there is a
greater difference between a race horse and a work horse than between a work horse and an ox. A distant successor of Spinoza
would say: look at the tick, admire that creature; it is defined by three affects, which are all it is capable of as a result of the rela -
tionships of which it is composed, nothing but a tri-polar world! Light affects it and it climbs on to the end of a branch. The smell of a
mammal affects it and it drops down on to it. The hairs get in its way and it looks for a hairless place to burrow under the skin and
drink the warm blood. Blind and deaf, the tick has only three affects in the vast forest, and for the rest of the time may sleep for
years awaiting the encounter. What power, nevertheless! Finally, one always has the organs and functions corresponding to the
affects of which one is capable. Let us begin with the simple animals who only have a few affects, and who are neither in our world,
nor in another, but with an associated world that they have learnt how to trim, cut up, sew back together: the spider and his web,
the louse and the scalp, the tick and a small patch of mammal skin: these and not the owl of Minerva are the true philosophical
beasts. That which triggers off an affect, that which effectuates a power to be affected, is called a signal: the web stirs, the scalp
creases, a little skin is bared. Nothing but a few signs like stars in an immense black night. Spider-becoming, flea-becoming, tick-
When Spinoza says ‘The surprising thing is the body ...
becoming, an unknown, resilient, obscure, stubborn life.
we do not yet know what a body is capable of. . .’, he does not want to make the body a
model, and the soul simply dependent on the body. He has a subtler task. He wants to demolish
the pseudo-superiority of the soul over the body. There is the soul and the body and both
express one and the same thing: an attribute of the body is also an expressed of the soul (for
example, speed). Just as you do not know what a body is capable of, just as there are many
things in the body that you do not know, so there are in the soul many things which go beyond
your consciousness. This is the question: what is a body capable of? What affects are you
capable of? Experiment, but you need a lot of prudence to experiment . We live in a world which
is generally disagreeable, where not only people but the established powers have a stake in
transmitting sad affects to us. Sadness, sad affects, are all those which reduce our power to
act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priest, the
captors of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. The powers that be need to
repress us no less than to make us anxious or, as Virilio says, to administer and organize our
intimate little fears. The long, universal moan about life: the lack-to-be which is life ... In vain
someone says, ‘Let’s dance’; we are not really very happy. In vain someone says, ‘What
misfortune death is’; for one would need to have lived to have something to lose. Those who
are sick, in soul as in body, will not let go of us, the vampires, until they have transmitted to us
their neurosis and their anxiety, their beloved castration, the resentment against life, filthy
contagion. It is all a matter of blood. It is not easy to be a free man, to flee the plague, organize
encounters, increase the power to act, to be moved by joy, to multiply the affects which
express or encompass a maximum of affirmation. To make the body a power which is not
reducible to the organism, to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness .
Spinoza’s famous first principle (a single substance for all attributes) depends on this assemblage and not vice versa. There is a
Spinoza-assemblage: soul and body, relationships and encounters, power to be affected, affects which realize this power, sadness
and joy which qualify these affects. Here philosophy becomes the art of a functioning, of an assemblage. Spinoza, the man of
encounters and becoming, the philosopher with the tick, Spinoza the imperceptible, always in the middle, always in flight although
he does not shift much, a flight from the Jewish community, a flight from the Powers, a flight from the sick and the malignant. He
may be ill, he may himself die; he knows that death is neither the goal nor the end, but that, on the contrary, it is a case of passing
the
his life to someone else. What Lawrence says about Whitman’s continuous life is well suited to Spinoza: the Soul and the Body,
soul is neither above nor inside, it is ‘with’, it is on the road, exposed to all contacts,
encounters, in the company of those who follow the same way, ‘feel with them, seize the
vibration of their soul and their body as they pass’, the opposite of a morality of salvation ,
teaching the soul to live its life, not to save it.
 Micro-Fascism

Reactive and ressentiment fueled responses to the flux that is life produces
micro-fascism. This mode of subjectification ensures the death of politics and
the loss of value to existence.
Seem 83. Mark Seem, translator of Anti-Oedipus, famous American intellectual, “Introduction”
in Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, Trans. 1983, xvi-xvii

Such a set of beliefs, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate, such a herd instinct, is based on the
desire to be led, the desire to have someone else legislate life. The very desire that was
brought so glaringly into focus in Europe with Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism; the desire that is
still at work, making us all sick, today. Anti-Oedipus starts by reviving Reich's completely
serious question with respect to the rise of fascism: 'How could the masses be made to desire
their own repression?' This is a question which the English and Americans are reluctant to deal
with directly, tending too often to respond: "Fascism is a phenomenon that took place
elsewhere, something that could only happen to others, but not to us; it's their problem ." Is
it though? Is fascism really a problem for others to deal with? Even
revolutionary groups deal gingerly with the fascisizing elements we all
carry deep within us, and yet they often possess a rarely analyzed but
overriding group 'superego' that leads them to state, much like
Nietzsche's man of ressentiment, that the other is evil (the Fascist! the
Capitalist! the Communist!), and hence that they themselves are good . This
conclusion is reached as an afterthought and a justification, a supremely self-righteous
rationalization for a politics that can only "squint" at life, through the thick clouds of foul-
smelling air that permeates secret meeting places and "security" councils. The man of
ressentiment, as Nietzsche explains, "loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors,
everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how
to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and
humble."2 Such a man, Nietzsche concludes, needs very much to believe in some neutral,
independent "subject"—the ego—for he is prompted by an instinct of self-affirmation and
Jeff-preservation that cares little about preserving or affirming life, an instinct "in which every
lie is sanctified."3 This is the realm of the silent majority . And it is into these back
rooms, behind the closed doors of the analyst's office, in the wings of the Oedipal theater, that
Deleuze and Guattari weave their way, exclaiming as does Nietzsche that it smells bad there,
and that what is needed is "a breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world." In
examining the problem of the subject, the behind-the-scenes reactive and reactionary man,
Anti-Oedipus develops an approach that is decidedly diagnostic ("What constitutes our sickness
today?") and profoundly healing as well. What it attempts to cure us of is the cure
itself. Deleuze and Guattari term their approach "schizoanalysis," which they oppose on every count to psychoanalysis. Where
the latter measures everything against neurosis and castration, schizoanalysis begins with the schizo, his breakdowns and his
breakthroughs. For, they affirm, "a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic
lying on the analyst's couch. . . ."Against the Oedipal and oedipalized
territorialities (Family, Church, School, Nation, Party), and especially the
territoriality of the individual, Anti-Oedipus seeks to discover the
"deterritorialized" flows of desire, the flows that have not been reduced
to the Oedipal codes and the neuroticized territorialities, the desiring-
machines that escape such codes as lines of escape leading elsewhere. Much
like R.D.Laing, Deleuze and Guattari aim to develop a materialistically and experientially based analysis of the "breakdowns" and the
Rather than view the creations
"breakthroughs" that characterize some of those labeled schizophrenic by psychiatry.
and productions of desire—all of desiring-production—from the point of view of the norm and
the normal, they force their analysis into the sphere of extremes. From paranoia to
schizophrenia, from fascism to revolution, from breakdowns to breakthroughs, what is
investigated is the process of life flows as they oscillate from one extreme to the other, on a
scale of intensity that goes from 0 ("I never asked to be born . . . leave me in peace"), the body
without organs, to the nth power ("I am all that exists, all the names in history"), the
schizophrenic process of desire.

Violence is carried out – not just through the centralized power of the State,
but also – through a diffused micrological fabric. When desire comes to desire
its own repression, we become invested in the microtextures of our own
subjugation.
Deleuze and Guattari ’80. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1933:
MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY 208-231
What is a center or focal point of power? Answering this question will illustrate the
entanglement of the lines. We speak of the power of the army, Church, and school, of public
and private power ... Power centers obviously involve rigid segments. Each molar segment has
one or more centers. It might be objected that the segments themselves presuppose a power
cen- ter, as what distinguishes and unites them, sets them in opposition and makes them
resonate. But there is no contradiction between the segmen- tary parts and the centralized
apparatus. On the one hand, the most rigid of segmentarities does not preclude centralization:
this is because the common central point is not where all the other points melt together, but
instead acts as a point of resonance on the horizon, behind all the other points. The State is not
a point taking all the others upon itself, but a resonance chamber for them all. Even when the
State is totalitarian, its function as resonator for distinct centers and segments remains
unchanged: the only difference is that it takes place under closed-vessel conditions that increase
its internal reach, or couples "resonance" with a "forced move- ment." On the other hand, and
conversely, the strictest of centralizations does not eradicate the distinctiveness of the centers,
segments, and circles. When the overcoding line is drawn, it assures the prevalence of one seg-
ment, as such, over the other (in the case of binary segmentarity), gives a certain center a power
of relative resonance over the others (in the case of circular segmentarity), and underscores the
dominant segment through which it itself passes (in the case of linear segmentarity). Thus
centralization is always hierarchical, but hierarchy is always segmentary. Each power center is
also molecular and exercises its power on a micrological fabric in which it exists only as diffuse,
dispersed, geared down, miniaturized, perpetually displaced, acting by fine segmentation,
working in detail and in the details of detail. Foucault's analysis of "disciplines" or micropowers
(school, army, factory, hospital, etc.) testifies to these "focuses of instability" where groupings
and accumulations confront each other, but also confront breakaways and escapes, and where
inver- sions occur.25 What we have is no longer The Schoolmaster but the monitor, the best
student, the class dunce, the janitor, etc. No longer the general, but the junior officers, the
noncommissioned officers, the soldier inside me, and also the malcontent: all have their own
tendencies, poles, conflicts, and relations of force. Even the warrant officer and janitor are only
invoked for explanatory purposes; for they have a molar side and a molecular side, and make us
realize that the general or the landlord also had both sides all along. We would not say that the
proper name loses its power when it enters these zones of indiscernibility, but that it takes on a
new kind of power. To talk like Kafka, what we have is no longer the public official Klamm, but
maybe his secretary Momus, or other molecular Klamms the differences between which, and
with Klamm, are all the greater for no longer being assignable. ("[The officials] don't always stick
to the same book, yet it isn't the books they change, but their places, and [they] have to squeeze
past one another when they change places, because there's so little room." "This official is rarely
very like Klamm, and if he were sitting in his own office at his own desk with his name on the
door I would have no more doubt at all,"26 says Barnabas, whose dream would be a uniquely
molar segmen-tarity, no matter how rigid and horrendous, as the only guarantee of certainty
and security. But he cannot but notice that the molar segments are necessarily immersed in the
molecular soup that nourishes them and makes their outlines waver.) And every power center
has this microtexture. The microtextures—not masochism—are what explain how the
oppressed can take an active role in oppression: the workers of the rich nations actively
participate in the exploitation of the Third World, the arming of dictatorships, and the
pollution of the atmosphere.
 Negativity
Negative conceptions of desire result is apathy manifested as inaction and a
sense of existential emptiness unable to respond to global violence – any action
motivated by negativity fails to fulfill the constitutive ontological void that it
creates.
Bignall 10
(Simone Bignall. Senior Lecturer in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New
South Wales in Sydney. (2010). Desire, Apathy and Activism. Deleuze Studies, 4(Supplement), 7-
27. doi:10.3366/e1750224110001108)

*we don’t endorse problematic language

While global society flounders in economic crisis and political violence, middle-class white
westerners comprise a political strata apparently characterised by ‘motivational deficit’ (Critchley 2007;
Bernstein 2001). The rituals of liberal democracy produce a politics that palls with the immensity and
complexity of global injustices and the tasks of redress that are called for. In modern thought, apathy is often
associated with negativity – it signifies incapacity, immobility, absence of direction, or existential
emptiness. In fact, the prevalence and constancy of apathy as an indicator of dissatisfaction in
everyday life may correlate, at least in part, to the emphasis modern western philosophy places upon
critical negativity and negation. I begin by arguing that this persistent emphasis on negativity is a residual
effect of the negativity of desire which is conventionally understood to be the grounding
condition of action. However, while this generative negativity is celebrated within modernism and
many strains of ‘postmodernism’, neither style of thinking is capable of conceptualising a mode of
transformative action that is not problematically fettered to the negativity that such action
paradoxically aims to oppose. I then suggest that Deleuze and Guattari’s absolutely positive concept
of desire – and their corresponding ontology of the complex relational self – offers an alternative
way of understanding political motivation, potentially enabling a path of flight from the pervasive
problem of political disengagement.
I. Apathy

The amorphous phenomena of ‘boredom’ and ‘apathy’ define a characteristic modern negativity (Spacks 1995;
Svendsen 2005). Modernism ‘posits an isolated subject existing in a secularised, fragmented world
marked by lost or precarious traditions: a paradigmatic situation for boredom’ (Spacks 1995: 219). While
alienation is associated with a sense of subjective disconnection and paralysis, modern apathy extends across the entire
social field as an effect of ‘profound’ boredom that has no focus and no relief (Heidegger 1993: 99).
Profound apathy is then socially indicated by a systemic loss of interest and attachment, a turning away
and closing off from others, and a n associated failure of responsibility and care in comportment
towards others (Hammer 2004; Emad 1985). One ceases to be attentive to others when afflicted by
apathy: ‘boredom, unlike engagement, implies no respect for the identity of the other’ (Spacks 1995: 231). The
typically modern (and western) stance of foppish or cultivated disinterest in others may also serve a related
socio-cultural function; in contriving to be bored, the subject rejects the possibility of intimacy
and so ‘repudiates attempts to establish a mode of equality’ (199).
One’s relation to oneself is also called into question by the experience of boredom. Conceptualised as a project of development,
the modern self is constituted through reflexive acts of desire and by the recognition these acts
solicit. The process of self-determination is effectively halted by boredom, since ‘almost always it suggests
disruptions of desire: the inability to desire or to have desire fulfilled’ (Spacks 1995: x). For the self defined
by desire, such disruption corresponds with a loss of motivation, direction and satisfaction. The
negativity of profound boredom collapses the self into an existential crisis: one suffers a hiatus
in one’s project of self-directed desire and the material transformations associated with one’s project.

However, negativity paradoxically plays a privileged role in modern critical philosophy and underlies
modern conceptions of agency (see Coole 2000). Boredom is not simply disabling and disruptive, but is
also understood as the putative ground for the emergence of reflexive selfhood: ‘boredom reveals
beings as a whole’ (Heidegger 1993: 99). Boredom reveals an ontological void, an open emptiness which is a
primary and defining negativity, but which is also constitutive and transformative because it
defines one’s fundamental attitude of being-in-the-world as unfinished and striving. In turn, this striving
plays a causal role in projects of self-directed becoming. In this capacity, ‘boredom aids the
fulfilment of desire’ (Spacks 1995: 242). On the one hand, then, boredom is an existential negativity
that indicates an absence of desire or interest, a state of alienation and loss of affective capacity,
and a moment of existential crisis experienced as a painful suspension of the passage of
developmental time. In this sense, the primary cultural function of boredom is to serve as a critical
indicator of subjective or social dissatisfaction. On the other hand, boredom is a generative negativity:
a causal absence felt as alienation and emptiness, which prompts an active desire for alleviation of
the uncomfortable experience of negativity. Such negativity constitutes a subject-in-process and
causes the production and transformation of being. In this sense, a second overarching cultural function
of boredom is the provocative role it plays as a causal or motivating force of constructive
processes.

While action seeks to ‘negate the negative’,

This ambivalence, I suggest, sits at the heart of the problem of apathy.
negativity is always necessarily preserved because it is not only critical but also constitutive. This is often
celebrated in terms of the resilience of ‘difference’ as the power of critical opposition or destabilisation within dialectical and
deconstructive politics, but it also means that the causal or constitutive
force of negativity has no final relief (see
Coole 2000). Consequently, subjectivity is condemned to oscillate anxiously between tenuous existence
and the void of subjective emptiness: ‘every human life is thrown back and forth between pain and boredom’
(Schopenhauer cited in Svendsen 2005: 131). Apathy takes hold because negativity is always preserved as a
necessary, constitutive force of subjective life. Critical theory thus often adopts an attitude of
resignation towards the phenomenon of negativity. It seems ‘there is no solution to the problem of
boredom’ (Svendsen 2005: 133), and with this resignation comes apathy. Alternatively, critical thought
seizes upon the generative aspects of ontological negativity in order to reinvigorate a sense of
democratic purpose and commitment to activity. Indeed, in grappling with the material reality of global conflict, post-
imperialism, strife, terror, poverty, ecological devastation and global displacement, a significant strain of contemporary political
drawing on Lacan’s concept of the
philosophy takes ontological negativity as a given point of departure. Often
divided and self-alienated subject, this kind of project is exemplified by the post-Marxist political
thought of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, or of Slavoj Žižek.
Negative desire rooted in lack results in passivity and ensures that the subject
must always maintain an internal ontological void as a necessary component of
their being. Prefer a process of becoming motivated by desiring-production.
Bignall 10
(Simone Bignall. Senior Lecturer in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New
South Wales in Sydney. (2010). Desire, Apathy and Activism. Deleuze Studies, 4(Supplement), 7-
27. doi:10.3366/e1750224110001108)

*we don’t endorse problematic language

The key problem for activism is that both desire/action and apathy/inaction are prompted by
constitutive negativity. Generative negativity has the potential to motivate action and
transformation, but worldly evidence suggests that the response mostly tends towards apathy and
inaction. In my view, this problem arises because apathy and activism are both tied to the same
motivational force: the ambivalent negativity of desire. Desire/lack produces the model of the
split self as the seat of motivation; the split subject is motivated to negate the negativity that
divides it, but must paradoxically preserve this negativity that not only divides, but also constitutes its
being. One way out of this difficulty is suggested by the alternative process of transformation or becoming
described by Deleuze. This unconventional ontological process is not driven by lack or absence felt as emptiness,
dissatisfaction or loss accompanied by a consequent longing for fulfilment. Nor does it rest upon
an acknowledgement that the self is always already ‘undone’ by alterity and is moved to
conscionable action for the other as a result. On the contrary, Deleuze’s alternative theory of ontology
describes an unambiguously generative process of association caused by a purely positive and
productive force of desire. Desiring-production results in a process in which the self is not
‘undone’, but ‘done’ or ‘made’ through difference. The following section considers this alternative understanding
of ontology, in order to re-assess the critical privilege currently attracted by the modern concept of negativity.

II. Desiring-Production and the Complex Self

The conceptualisation of desire as associational or ‘machinic’ appears as a persistent theme throughout

Deleuze’s work (Deleuze 1990, 1991, 1997; Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987). Unlike the conventionally negative
concept of desire/lack, which undermines the unified self and results in the ‘split’ subject,
desiring-production is a positive causal force that generates a ‘complex’ individual. Like the ‘dividual’,
a ‘complex’ self is also decentred and uncertain, but not in the same way as the Lacanian subject
is. Deleuze’s alternative theory of ontology emerges from his quite particular and innovative reading of Spinoza (Deleuze 1990). As
part of an assemblage also combining (and at times creatively transforming) aspects of Bergsonian, Humean and Nietzschean
thought, Deleuze’s
Spinozism enables a model of selfhood that constantly flees or escapes its own limits
by forging increasingly complex and active relations with other bodies.

individuals are complex forms of order that develop consistency over

According to Deleuze and Guattari,
time. Bodies are ‘assemblages’ that arise via the causal force of desire, which brings about the
process of association and connection joining constituting elements (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 1–9, 283–96).
Desire results in emergent complex bodies when the elemental relations that compose the body
take on enduring habits of association. The individual is thus a complex and shifting unity of
‘movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an infinity of parts’ into a set of
resonating relations (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256). On this view, any consistent form of complex organisation
constitutes an individual body, which therefore might not be material in a physical sense. Selves,
communities, languages, philosophies: all are ‘bodies’ existing as relatively consistent forms of
actual or ordered being, rather than formless virtual states of quickly morphing force relations that
combine in transient unities and then fragment and dissolve.

as forms of enduring order comprised of semi-stable relationships between parts,

Furthermore,
bodies exist across varying levels of complexity. I am a body composed of elemental relations. Some of these are
internal relations, for example between my biological cells or between the thoughts that lend order to my comprehension of things.
Others are external relations I have forged with other bodies in my world, for example with colleagues, with locations, or with
internal and external relations that engage me
Deleuzian philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 260, 254). These
with varying kinds of consistency on various levels of order and in various circumstances of
engagement collectively constitute and define me. Thus, bodies are complex forms of individuation
defined by the stability or consistency of their internal and external relationships and the
complex and multi-leveled affective capacities these produce.

However, while individuals are here constituted by their relations with others, these are not simply
one-on-one encounters between entire entities. Revising Kleinian object-relations theory, Deleuze and Guattari
insist that an individual emerges with the forging of part relations, for example by incorporating ‘a breast into
his mouth, the sun into his asshole’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 4). Accordingly, individuation involves the
establishment and perpetuation of the complex part relationships that collectively define a
particular bodily entity. Our interrelationships, our desires, describe the complex ‘piecemeal
insertions’ we make into each other’s lives (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 504). Complex bodies are thus
affected not wholly or in entirety, but by a vast number of internal and external relations at any
one time, which impact upon and transform them in partial and selective ways according to the nature of
the elemental connections and disjunctions (261ff). Some of these partial affections are fairly constant forces in a life,
giving individuals a certain consistency across time and environments; others are transient relations that affect bodies momentarily,
though sometimes significantly enough to introduce a radical and lasting alteration to their character. Shifts in connective relations
at the elemental level cause the kinds of continuity and change that simultaneously define the consistency of a character and
evidence its transformation over time.

the superior affinity for activism

The rest of this paper will be devoted to expanding some rationale for argument about
of the complex relational subject. Deleuze’s concept of causal desire as a generative positivity that
produces and transforms complex bodies points to a way out of the difficulty described in the first half
of this paper. Unlike ‘split’ subjectivity, the ‘complex’ subject is constructed through the creative
force of desiring-production, which is unconnected with ontological lack, and thus neither
depends upon nor multiplies negativity when it diversifies the desiring self. But it is not yet apparent
how Deleuze’s affirmative and relational bodily ontology and the causal positivity of desiring-production relates to the activism of
the subject. It seems that bodies are complexly constituted by difference and desire – a body is a form that emerges or emanates via
the force of desire, but apparently as a passive effect of the encounters and affective relations that define its character. In fact, for
there are active and passive forms of bodily constitution. The
the Spinozist (and Nietzschean) Deleuze,
normative aim of a body is to increase its affective capacities by increasing its active powers of
engagement and sociability (Deleuze 1988: 97–104). This idea, taken from Spinoza, is expressed in various places
throughout Deleuze’s own oeuvre. In the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, for example, he describes the becoming of
being as a process involving an increasing activity of constitution, in terms of a kind of non-linear ‘progression’ through the moments
described as the ‘three syntheses of time’ (Deleuze 1994: 70–91). This process is not so much a temporal progression of successive
stages of bodily development occurring through time, as it is a description of the qualitative shifting of the nature of a body’s
constitution throughout its existence. A body takes shape with the initially passive or chance combination of simple elements into a
complex order; but it may gradually develop a more active and directed process of self-formation, if it exercises a capacity to
selectively choose the part-relations that will come to comprise the character of the emergent body.
 Racism

Control Societies enable the creation of racial hierarchies through differential

practices of inclusion. All difference is eliminated by being folded into the social
order.
Hardt 98
[Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher, “The Global Society of Control” Discourse ,
Fall 1998, Vol. 20, No. 3 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389503]

The end of the outside, which characterizes the passage from disciplinary society to the society
of control, certainly shows one of its faces in the shifting configurations of racism and alterity in
our societies. We should note first of all that it has become increasingly difficult to identify the
general lines of racism. In fact, we are continually told by politicians, the media, and even
historians that racism has progressively receded in modern societies- from the end of slavery to
decolonization struggles and civil rights move ments. Certain specific traditional practices of
racism have un doubtedly declined and one might be tempted to view the end of the Apartheid
laws in South Africa as the symbolic close of an entire era of racial segregation. From our
perspective, however, it is clear on the contrary that racism has not receded, but ac tually
progressed in the contemporary world, both in extent and intensity. It appears to have declined
only because its form and strategies have changed. If we take manichean divisions between
inside and outside and exclusionary practices (in South Africa, in the colonial city, in the
Southeastern United States, or in Palestine) as the paradigm of modern racisms, we must now
ask what is the postmodern form and what are its strategies in today's imperial society of
control.

Many analysts describe this passage as a shift in the dominant theoretical form of racism, from a
racist theory based on biology to one based on culture. The dominant modern racist theory and
the concomitant practices of segregation are centered on essential biological differences among
races. Blood and genes stand behind the differences in skin color as the real substance of racial
differ ence. Subordinated peoples are thus conceived (at least implicitly) as other than human,
as a different order of being. Indeed we can think of numerous instances of colonialist discourse
that describe natives using animal attributes, as not quite human, as being of a different nature.
These modern racist theories grounded in biology imply or tend towards an ontological
difference - a necessary, eternal, and immutable rift in the order of being. In response to this
theoretical position, then, modern anti-racism positions itself against the notion of biological
essentialism, and insists that differences among the races are constituted instead by social and
cultural forces. These modern antiracist theorists operate on the belief that social
constructivism will free us from the straight-jacket of biological determinism: if our differences
are socially and culturally determined, according to this idea, then all humans are in principle
equal, of one ontological order, of one nature.

The passage to Empire, however, the passage to the society of control , to postmodernity, has
brought a shift in the dominant line of racist theory so that biological differences have been
replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers as the key representation of racial hatred and
fear. In this way imperial racist theory attacks modern anti-racism from the rear , and actually
coopts and enlists its arguments. Imperial racist theory agrees that races do not constitute
isolable biological units and that nature cannot be divided into different human races. It also
agrees that the behavior of individuals and their abilities or aptitudes are not the result of their
blood or even their genes, but are due to their belonging to different his torically determined
cultures (21). 9 Differences are thus not fixed and immutable but contingent effects of social
history. Postmodern racist theory and modern anti-racist theory are really saying very much the
same thing, and it is difficult in this regard to tell them apart. In fact, it is precisely because this
relativist and culturalist argument is assumed to be necessarily anti-racist that the dominant
ideology of our entire society today appears to be against racism, and that postmodern racist
theory appears not to be racist at all

We should look more closely, however, at how imperial racist theory operates. Etienne Balibar
calls the new racism a differential ist racism, a racism without race, or more precisely, a racism
that does not rest on a biological concept of race. Although biology is abandoned as the
foundation and support, he says, culture is made to fill the role that biology had played .10 We
are accustomed to thinking that nature and biology are fixed and immutable, but that culture is
plastic and fluid: cultures can change historically and mix to form infinite hybrids. There is a limit
to the flexibility of cultures, however, in postmodern racist theory. Differences between cultures
and traditions are, in the final analysis, insurmountable. It is futile and even dangerous,
according to this postmodern theory, to allow or insist that cultures mix: Serbs and Croats,
Hutus and Tutzis, African-Americans and Korean-Americans must remain separate. The cultural
position is no less "essentialist" than a biological one as a theory of social difference , or at least
it establishes an equally strong theoretical ground for social separation and segregation. This is a
properly pluralist theoretical position: all cultural identities are equal in principle. This pluralism
accepts all the differences of who we are as long as we agree to act on the basis of these
differences of identity and thus preserve them as contingent, perhaps, but quite persistent
markers of social separation. The theoretical substitution of culture for race or biology is thus
transformed paradoxically into a theory of the preservation of race. This shift in racist theory
shows us how the imperial and postmodern theory of the society of control can adopt what is
traditionally thought to be an anti-racist position (that is, a pluralist position against all
necessary markers of racial exclusion) and still maintain a strong principle of social separation

We should be careful to note at this point that imperial racist theory of the society of control is a
theory of segregation, not a theory of hierarchy. Whereas modern racist theory poses a hier-
archy among the races as the fundamental condition that makes segregation necessary, imperial
theory has nothing to say about the superiority or inferiority of different races or ethnic groups
in principle. It regards that as purely contingent, a practical matter. In other words, racial
hierarchy is viewed not as cause but effect of social circumstances. For example, African-
American students in a certain region register consistently lower scores on aptitude tests that
Asian-American students. Imperial theory understands this as due not to any necessary racial
inferiority but rather to cultural differences: Asian-American culture places higher importance
on education, encourages students to study in groups, and so forth. The hierarchy of the
different races is determined only a posteriori, as an effect of their cultures- that is, on the basis
of their perfor- mance. According to imperial theory, then, racial supremacy and subordination
is not a theoretical question, but arises through free competition, a kind of market meritocracy
of culture

Racist practice, of course, does not necessarily correspond to the self-understandings of racist
theory, which is all we have consid- ered up to this point. It is clear from what we have seen,
however, that racist practice in the society of control has been deprived of a central support: it
no longer has a theory of racial superiority that was seen as grounding the modern practices of
racial exclusion. According to Deleuze and Guattari, though, "European racism . . . has never
operated by exclusion, or by the designation of some- one as Other. . . . Racism operates by the
determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to
integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves. . . . From the
viewpoint of racism, there is no ex- terior, there are no people on the outside."11 Deleuze and
Guattari challenge us, in effect, to conceive racist practice not in terms of exclusion but as a
strategy of differential inclusion. No identity is designated as Other, no one is excluded from
the domain, there is no outside. Just as postmodern racist theory cannot pose as a point of
departure any essential differences among human races, post- modern racist practice cannot
begin by an exclusion of the racial other. White supremacy functions rather through first
engaging alterity and then subordinating differences according to degrees of deviance from
whiteness. This has nothing to do with xenophobiathe hatred and fear of the unknown
barbarian. It is a hatred born in proximity and elaborated through the degrees of difference of
the neighbor.

This is not to say that our societies are devoid of racial exclusions-certainly they are criss-crossed
with numerous lines of racial barriers, across each urban landscape and across the globe. The
point, rather, is that racial exclusion arises generally as a result of differential inclusion. In other
words, it would be a mistake today, and perhaps is also misleading when considering the past,
to pose the Apartheid or Jim Crow laws as the paradigm of racial hierarchy. Difference is not
written in law, and the imposition of alterity does not go to the extreme of Otherness. Empire
does not think differences in absolute terms- it poses racial differences never as a difference of
nature but always a difference of degree, never as necessary but always accidental.
Subordination is enacted in regimes of everyday practices that are more mobile and flexible
but that create racial hierarchies that are nonetheless stable and brutal.

The form and strategies of postmodern racism in the society of control help to highlight the
contrast between modern and imperial sovereignty more generally. Colonial racism, the racism
of modern sovereignty, first pushes difference to the extreme and then in a second moment
recuperates the Other as negative foundation of the Self. The modern construction of a people
is intimately involved in this operation. A people is defined not only in terms of a shared past
and common desires or potential, but primarily in dialectical relation to its Other, its outside. A
people (whether diasporic or not) is always defined in terms of a place (be it virtual or actual) .
Imperial order, in contrast, has nothing to do with this dialectic. Imperial racism, or differential
racism, in the society of control integrates others with its order and then orchestrates those
differences in a system of control. Fixed and biological notions of peoples thus tend to dissolve
into a fluid and amorphous multitude, which is of course shot through with lines of conflict and
antagonism but none which appear as fixed and eternal boundaries. The surface of the imperial
society of control continuously shifts in such a way that it destabilizes any notion of place. The
central moment of modern racism takes place on its boundary, in the global antithesis between
inside and outside. As Du Bois said nearly 100 years ago, the problem of the 20th century is the
problem of the color-line. Imperial racism, on the other hand, looking forward perhaps to the
next century, rests rather on the play of differences and the management of
microconflictualities within its continually expanding domain.

To many across the world, of course, the racial relativism of Empire and its first movement of
universal inclusion is itself threat- ening. Being outside provides a certain protection and
autonomy. In this sense, the rise of various discourses of essential and original racial or ethnic
difference may be seen as a defensive reaction to imperial inclusion. The rise of Confusionism in
China or religious fundamentalisms in the United States and the Arab world all cast the identity
of the group as founded on ancient origins and finally incommensurable with the outside world.
The ethnic conflicts in Rwanda, the Balkans, and even the Middle East are commonly
understood as a reemergence of irrepressible and irreconcilable ancient alterities. From our
perspective, of course, these differences and conflicts cannot be understood in the context of
any ancient origins but only by situating them within the present imperial con- figuration.
Empire will accept the racial and ethnic differences it finds and put them to work; it will stand by
observing these conflicts and intervene when adjustment is necessary. Any attempt to remain
Other to Empire will be futile. It feeds on alterity, relativizing it and managing it
 War on Difference
The impact is a war on difference in which a new totalitarianism premised on
reactive orientations to desire and a hatred of the world outpaces traditional
liberal-democratic governance entirely. Today, all that remains is an inaccurate
simulation of political participation – true conflict over differing visions of the
political is eliminated, erecting a normal, everyday fascism that results in a
reactive orientation to the inevitable anxiety of life producing a constant war
on difference.
Karatzogianni and Robinson 13. Athina Karatzogianni, Senior Lecturer in Media and
Communication at the University of Leicester (UK), and Andrew Robinson, independent
researcher and writer, “Schizorevolutions vs. Microfascisms: A Deleuzo-Nietzschean Perspective
on State, Security, and Active/Reactive Networks,” Selected Works, July 2013,
http://works.bepress.com/athina_ karatzogianni, 8-17, via academia.edu

Thesis 2: The threatened state transmutes into the terror state. The return of state violence
from the kernel of state exceptionalism is a growing problem. It is grounded on a reaction of the
terrified state by conceiving the entire situation as it is formerly conceived specific sites of
exception and emergency (c.f. Agamben, 1998, 2005). New forms of social control directed
against minor deviance or uncontrolled flows are expanding into a war against difference and a
systematic denial of the ‘right to have rights’ (Robinson, 2007). The
project is not simply
an extension of liberal-democratic models of social control, but breaks
with such models in directly criminalizing nonconformity from a
prescribed way of life and attempting to extensively regulate everyday
life through repression. This new repressive model, expressing a kind of neo-
totalitarianism, should be taken to include such measures and structures as the rise of gated
communities, CCTV, RFID, ID cards, ASBOs, dispersal zones, paramilitary policing methods, the
‘social cleansing’ of groups such as homeless people and street drinkers from public spaces,
increasing restrictions on protests and attacks on ‘extremist’ groups, the use of extreme
sentencing against minor deviance, and of course the swathe of “anti-terrorism” laws which
This increasingly vicious state response
provide a pretext for expanded repression.
leads to extremely intrusive state measures . The magazine Datacide analyses the wave of
repression as ‘the real subsumption of every singularity in the domain of the State. From now on if your attributes don't quite extend
to crime, a judge's word suffices to ensure that crime will reach out and embrace your attributes’ (Hyland n.d.). To decompose

networks, the state seeks to shadow them ever more closely. The closure of space is an inherent
aspect of this project of control. While open space is a necessary enabling good from
the standpoint of active desire, it is perceived as a threat by the terrified state, because it is
space in which demonised Others can gather and recompose networks outside state control.
Given
Hence, for the threatened state, open space is space for the enemy, space of risk.
that open space is in contrast necessary for difference to function (since
otherwise it is excluded as unrepresentable or excessive), the attempts to
render all space closed and governable involve a constant war on
difference which expands ever more deeply into everyday life . As Guattari
aptly argues, neoliberal capitalism tends to construe difference as unwanted ‘noise’ (1996: 137).
Society thus becomes a hothouse of constant crackdowns and surveillance , which at best
simulates, and at worst creates, a situation where horizontal connections either cannot emerge
or are constantly persecuted. Theories such as those of Agamben and Kropotkin show the predisposition of the
state to pursue total control. But why is the state pursuing this project now? To understand this, one
must recognise the multiple ways in which capitalism can handle difference. Hence, there are two poles the state can pursue, social-
democratic (adding axioms) or totalitarian (subtracting axioms), which have the same function in relation to capitalism, but are quite
different in other regards. State terror involves the replacement of addition of axioms (inclusion through representation) with
This parallels the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power
subtraction of axioms (repression of difference).
in international relations. Crucially, ‘hard’ power is deflationary (Mann 2005: 83-4). While
ideological integration can be increased by intensified command, ‘soft’ power over anyone who
remains outside the dominant frame is dissipated. Everyday deviance becomes resistance
because of the project of control which attacks it. It also becomes necessarily more
insurrectionary, in direct response to the cumulative attempts to stamp it out through micro-
regulation. What the state gains in coercive power, it loses in its ability to influence or engage
with its other. But the state, operating under intense uncertainty and fear, is giving up trying
to seem legitimate across a field of difference. A recent example of this concerns the
treatment of whistleblowers: Bradley [Chelsea] Manning and by extent the publisher Julian
Assange in the WikiLeaks case (for a discussion of affect see Karatzogianni, 2012) and Edward
Snowden in relation to the recent revelations about NSA surveillance program PRISM (Poitras
and Greenwald’s video Interview with Edward Snowden, 9 June 2013). This is not to say that it
dispenses with articulation. It simply restricts it tautologically to its own ideological space
Legitimation is replaced by information, technocracy and a
(Negri 2003: 27).
simulation of participation (Negri 2003: 90, 111.). There is a peculiarly close relationship between the state
logic of command and the field of what is variously termed ‘ideology’ (in Althusser), ‘mythology’ (in Barthes) and ‘fantasy’ (in Lacan):
second- order significations embedded in everyday representations, through which a
simulated lifeworld is created, in which people live in passivity, creating their real
performative connection to their conditions of existence and bringing them into psychological
complicity in their own repression. Such phenomena are crucial to the construction of
demonised Others which provides the discursive basis for projects of state control.
‘[Conflict is] deflected... through the automatic micro-functioning of
ideology through information systems. This is the normal, ‘everyday’
fascism, whose most noticeable feature is how unnoticeable it is’ (Negri
1998a: 190). In denial of generalisable rights, the in-group defines social space for itself and
itself alone. The result is a denial of basic dignity and rights to those who fall
outside "society", who, in line with their metaphysical status, are to be
cast out, locked away, or put beyond a society defined as being for "us
and us only" (the mythical division between social and anti-social ). The neo-
totalitarian state resurrects the tendency to build a state ideology, but this ideology is now
disguised as a shared referent of polyarchic parties and nominally free media. Failing to think in
 Romantically crossing an airport barrier for a
statist terms is no longer any different from criminal intent.
goodbye kiss is taken as a major crime, for the state, being terrified, responds
disproportionately; the romantic is blamed for producing this response (Baker and Robins, 2010). He
Such is the
should have thought like the state to begin with, and not corrupted its functioning with trivialities such as love.

core of the terror-state: constant exertion of energy to ward off constant

anxiety, at the cost of a war on difference. Networks under Threat - Network Terror Thesis 3:
Networked movements escape the state-form.Thesis 4: State terror targets and terrifies movements.Thesis 5: Movement terror is
an outcome of state terror against movements. At the intersection of the threatened state and the sources of its anxiety lies the
collapse of marginal integration and ‘addition of axioms’ in neoliberalism. Capitalism has been clenching its fists on the world for
some time, and many spaces and people are falling through its fingers. The formal sector of the economy is shrinking, leaving behind
it swathes of social life marginalized from capitalist inclusion. Much of the global periphery is in effect being forcibly ‘delinked’ from
the world economy as inclusion through patronage is scaled down due to neoliberalism. For instance, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa
has almost dropped out of the formal international economy’ (Mann, 2005: 55-6). Religious,
militia and informal economic organisations have replaced the state on the ground across
swathes of Africa, and ‘whole regions have now become virtually independent, probably for the
foreseeable future, of all central control’ (Bayart, Ellis and Hibou, 1999: 19-20). These spaces are
the locus of the state’s fear of ‘black holes’ where state power breaks down and insurgents can
flourish (Korteweg, 2008; Innes, 2008). On a human scale, exclusion, or ‘forced escape’, is even more noticeable. Arif Dirlik argues
that capitalism controls enough resources that it no longer needs to control the majority of people; it can simply ignore and exclude
four-fifths of the world (1994: 54-5). William Robinson refers to a new stratum of ‘supernumeraries’ in countries like Haiti, who are
completely marginalised from production, useless to capitalism and prone to revolt (1996: 342, 378). This became even more
evident with the extreme recent seismic event in January 2010 a paradigmatic failure to save lives. This stratum is another locus of
Such people are in Žižek’s terms the ‘social symptom’ of the current world order,
the state’s fears.
‘the part which, although inherent to the existing universal order, has no ‘proper place’ within it’
(Žižek, 1999, p. 224). Hence, as Caffentzis puts it, ‘Once again, as at the dawn of capitalism, the
physiognomy of the world proletariat is that of the pauper, the vagabond, the criminal, the
panhandler, the refugee sweatshop worker, the mercenary, the rioter’ (1992: 321). Viewed in
affirmative terms, these excluded sites and peoples are associated with the network form. The
last few decades have seen a proliferation of network-based movements -- some
emancipatory, others less so -- drawing their membership from marginalised groups and
creating autonomous zones in marginal spaces. In the South, such movements often grow out
of the everyday networks of survival which ‘provide an infrastructure for the community and
a measure of functional autonomy’ (Hecht and Simone, 1994: 14-15; c.f. Lomnitz, 1977;
Chatterjee 1993). The discontented excluded lie at the heart of today’s asymmetrical wars. For
instance, Giustozzi has investigated the origins of the Pakistani Taleban, revealing that it
flourishes mainly among young people who do not receive ‘peace, income, a sense of purpose, a
social network’ from the established structure of tribal power (Giustozzi 2007: 39), while Watts
(2007) has referred to what is known locally as the ‘restive youth problem’ as central to the
conflict in the Niger Delta. One can also refer here to mass protest revolts such as those in
Greece and the French banlieues, and spectacular revolts against state power in which police
stations and state symbols are attacked, such as the Boko Haram revolt in Nigeria and the
uprising of Primero Comando da Capital (PCC) in Sao Paolo. Ignoring for the moment the
distinctions among such movements, their vitality can clearly be traced to their networked and
marginal loci. Resisting
or eluding the terror-state’s grab for space, horizontal
networks flow around the state’s restrictions, moving into residual
unregulated spaces, gaps in the state’s capacity to repress, across national
borders, or into the virtual. Repression drives dissent from open to clandestine forms,
creating a field of diffuse resistance and deviance, which ‘returns’ as intractable social
problems and inert effects. The point, made clearly by Colin Ward, is that horizontal conflicts –
which are in fact conflicts between two perspectives, two projects, or two ways of seeing – are
misrepresented as a unilateral violence by one side and thus become insoluble. Those with no
place in social life, such as inner-city children, wage ‘jungle warfare’ against the constraints of
It is also important to recognise that
dominant discourse (Ward, 1978/1990: 89-90).
the nihilistic or non-dialogical aspect of this activity is a consequence of its
discursive exclusion. The excluded do not cause social problems. Social problems are
caused, prior to any act of individual deviance, by the discursive asymmetry between included
and excluded. In constituting monologism of the former and voicelessness of the latter, state terror precludes horizontal
dialogue and renders conflict intractable. Nevertheless it raises the question: why is this not consistently

The emotional zero-degree

producing an affirmative movement against state terror?
of reactive desire is the fear arising from state terror . Brian McMarvill and Rob
los Ricos argue that capitalism is sustained by fear, and this fear is almost inescapable today:
within the system it becomes fear of losing subsistence, if one is poor or losing property and
status if one is less poor, and outside it becomes fear of state repression and violence (n.d.: 15). The
emotional effects of state terror on movements can be discussed in terms of the effects of experiences of oppression. In the work of
everyday humiliation and indignity produces ‘moods of fatalism’ which
David Matza for instance,
suspend constraints on action along with the sense of being a human agent (Matza 1964).
Material scarcity arising from capitalist/statist resource grabs can
reinforce tendencies for networks to become reactive . With conditions of life
put at risk, irrational mass attachments resurface, channeling in a distorted way the new class
contradiction between included and excluded. Networks tend to take a reactive form when exposed to a hostile
context. For instance, in Skinner’s study of Chinese peasants over time, villages are shown to open and close to the world in
neoliberalism strengthens
response to external openings and risks (Skinner 1971). Bourdieu similarly argues that
reactive networks by demoralising and producing emotional turmoil (1998: 100), while Bauman links
paranoiac social forces to insecurity (Bauman 2000). Scarcity is an existential phenomenon which is actualised (not rooted) in
material deprivation, but it is harder to sustain an orientation to abundance when deprivation is prevalent. However, neither fear
Rather, they generate alienation only when encrusted
nor deprivation, are alienating of themselves.
psychologically as reactive desire. How one manages fear will determine whether one remains
autonomous or becomes sucked into the web of psychological alienation, which begins with
Reactive desire can take three different
the renunciation of autonomous desire.
forms: as external blockage of active desire, as internal ‘repression’ in the
psychoanalytic sense, and as desire itself when disempowered by
repression (Deleuze 2006: 61). If movements respond to state terror by
internalising its effects, internalising scarcity as an existential condition
and fear as emotional, sexual and bodily rigidity, they reproduce the
affective form of state power, even while adopting the network form in
their social interrelations. The future of the state is fundamentally connected to
reactive desire; people can disarticulate and dismantle the state by overcoming reactive forces
However, negative energies do not stop at the limits to
(Guattari, 1996: 256).
the state-form. These reactive forces, unleashed from statist and majority
insecurities, contaminate networks. By enacting terror, the threatened state in turn
threatens and encourages the formation of reactive networks. From the immanent standpoint
of a network, it becomes necessary to strike back against this fear, indignity, intolerance and
rightslessness, in violent and/or non-violent terms. With reactive desire operating inside emergent networks, a
split appears between affinity- networks based on active desire and reactive networks, which give a central place to reactive desire.
This way
Affinity-networks create and are sustained by what Sahlins terms ‘primitive affluence’, a type of existential abundance.
of experiencing the world is difficult to sustain amidst state terror. However, there are different
ways of responding to state-induced anxiety. The compositive energies of affinity are present in
both types of networks. In internal structure, reactive groups rely on active energies and
affinity. Hence, Marc Sageman’s account of Wahhabi groups emphasises the emotional force of
the ‘small-world network’ as their integrative force: ties of kinship, friendship and discipleship
create a strong emotional force of cohesion (Sageman, 2004: 107:138). However, reactive
networks also internalise statist-majoritarian conceptions of self. Reactive networks seek to
psychologically recompose the self, acting-out violence against outsiders for the purpose of
They are defined by a
internal composition of the self and in-group (Theweleit, 1987).
refusal to identify with their actual life-condition as minoritarian,
networked, excluded or marginal people. Instead, they hide behind a
myth of belonging to a superior in-group, which should become the new
master. The passage from state terror to reactive network terror occurs through the graded
stratifications, whereby majoritarian categories enter everyday life (Wallerstein 2004: 37-9).
These stratifications, constructed around marked and unmarked terms, discursive exclusions
and hierarchies, are products of the field of ‘ideology’ or ‘fantasy’ surrounding the state . Status-
groups, or ‘neoarchaisms’ as Deleuze and Guattari call them (1983: 257-8), occur at the
intersection of states and networks and can attract either emancipatory or reactive forces.
For instance, Pieterse argues that rigid ethnic identities arise from
authoritarian institutions and political cultures, and are an effect rather
than a cause of conflicts based on ‘the politics of hard sovereignty’
(Pieterse, 1998). Outside such contexts, communities are neither denumerable nor
exhaustive of identity (Chatterjee 1993: 223). Fear bridges the gap between segmentary
identities and predatory social action. Arjun Appadurai analyses reactive networks as emerging
from fear (2006: 1). Asking why groups which are often small and weak are subjected to such
vicious fear and rage, Appadurai answers that such groups are targets of anxiety, because of
their problematic position in nation-state discourse (ibid. 49). Assigning minorities as a grey
area between citizen and humanity-in-general, states displace fear of their own marginalisation
onto minorities (ibid. 43). The underlying reason for such acting-out is the insecurity produced by neoliberal capitalism and a
rapidly-changing world (ibid. 83-4). ‘[M]inorities are the flash point for a series of uncertainties that
mediate between everyday life and its fast-shifting global backdrop’ (ibid. 44). Hence, violence is
not simply a consequence of, but a means to produce antagonistic identities, which ward off
uncertainty (ibid. 7). In this context, the narcissism of minor differences has gained a new
importance. Difference itself is the target of narcissism, and the impossibility of its elimination leads to an excess of violence
(ibid. 11). Networks acting on such fear reproduce the terroristic tendencies of the state, directing them against other groups using
Affinity-networks are the
network means. Beyond network terror: safe spaces, open spaces, spaces of dialogue Thesis 6:
antidote to state terror and movement terror. The impulse to condemn deviance, resistance
and insurrection is disturbingly strong in academia, and doubtless strengthened by revulsion
against network terror. Yet this networked rebellion of the excluded is the key to hopes for a
better world. In the spiral of terror between states and movements, it is important to recognise
that the source is the state and the weak point is in the movements . In today’s social war, the
Other is not even accorded the honour of being an enemy in a fair fight. As
long as social
conflicts are seen through a statist frame, social war is doomed to
continue, because discursive exclusion produces social war as its
underside, and renders resistance both necessary and justified . The cycle of
terror starts with the state: its terror at an existential level of losing control and fixity. This
terrified state produces state terror and thereby creates the conditions for movement terror.
It is naive to look for a way out from this side of the equation. State terror
can end only when the state, both accepts the proliferation of networks
beyond its control, and adopts a more humble role for itself, or when it
collapses or is destroyed. On the other side, we should find hope in the proliferation of
resistance among the excluded. We need to see in movements of the excluded the radical
potential and not only the reactive distortions. To
take Tupac Shakur’s metaphor, we
need to see the rose that grows from concrete, not merely the thorns . The
problem is, rather, that many of the movements on the network side of the equation are still
thinking, seeing and feeling like states. Such movements are potential bearers of the Other of
the state-form, of networks as alternatives to states, affinity against hegemony, abundance
against scarcity. The question thus becomes how they can learn to valorise what they are --
autonomous affinity-networks -- rather than internalising majoritarian norms. For instance, in
terms of the impact of technosocial transformations on agency, the negotiation of ideology,
order of dissent in relation to capitalism as a social code, remains hostage to labor processes
and to thick identities of local/regional or national interests, which fail to move contemporary
movements to an active affinity to a common humanity and a pragmatic solution for an ethical,
non exploitative form of production (Karatzogianni and Schandorf, 2012). Here the exception
may like in the global justice movements and Occupy, although still here the discourse
remains often in reactive mode, due to state crackdowns experienced by the movements.
There is a great need to find ways to energise hope against fear . Hope as an
active force can be counterposed to the reactive power of fear. People are not in fact
powerless, but are made to feel powerless by the pervasiveness of the dominant social fantasy
and of separation. This yields a temptation to fall back on the power of ‘the powerful’, those who gain a kind of distorted
agency through alienation. But powerlessness and constituted power are both effects of alienation,
which can be broken down by creating affinity-network forms of life. An emotional shift can
thus be enough to revolutionise subjectivities. Hence, as Vaneigem argues, ‘[t]o work for
delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general
insurrection’ (Vaneigem 1967: 50-1). It has been argued in utopian studies that fear and hope
form part of a continuum, expressing ‘aspects of affective ambivalence’ connected to the
indeterminacy of the future (McManus 2005). The type of hope needed is active and
immanent, brought into the present as a propulsive force rather than deferred to the future.
Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ for this possibility. In his work
on conflict transformation, John Paul Lederach emphasises the need to turn negative energies
into creative energies and mobilising hope against fear (Lederach and Maiese, n.d.: 2-3;
Lederach, 2005). How is this change in vital energies to be accomplished? Deleuze and Guattari
They
invoke a figure of the shaman as a way to overcome reactive energies (1983: 167-8).
call for a type of revolutionary social movement ‘that follows the lines of
escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles
its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery’,
countering reactive energies (ibid. 277).
Alternatives
 Amor Fati
You should opt to embrace in amor fati – the use of critique as an ethically
transformative mechanism of change which seeks to dismember the very
nature of debate – only this radical act produces ethical subjects. Empty
yourself into a black hole of nothingness and experience the instant of sheer
euphoria – only then, have you embraced becoming.
Braidotti 10 Rosi Braidotti, Arts Faculty, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, “Nomadism: Against Methodological
Nationalism, Policy Futures in Education” Vol 8, Issue 3-4, pp. 408 – 418
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.408
This argument about a creative approach to a critical redefinition of the subject and the quest for a balancing act between past traditions and present transformations through
the method of disidentification from dominant images of the subject engenders a paradox: how to engage both affirmatively and critically with the present? How to work
towards the production of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing critical theory, which means resisting the present? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1992). The relationship
between creativity and critique is a problem that has confronted all critical theorists and radical pedagogues, namely how to balance the creative potential of critical thought
with the necessary dose of negative criticism that is constitutive of oppositional consciousness. How to resist the injustice, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being

worthy of our times, so as to engage with the present in a productively oppositional and affirmative manner? Amor fati is not fatalism, but the
awareness of a bond of profound intimacy between ourselves and the world, the space-time we
are living in. It is an acknowledgment that ‘we’ are in this together. Again, the ethical dimension
underscores the methodological issues and points to a solution. Nomadic thought challenges the
traditional equation between oppositional consciousness and resistance on the one hand and
negativity on the other. The assumption that opposition is the same as a belligerent act of
negation and even of destruction of present conditions has to be challenged. Whereas
dialectical thought results in establishing negativity as a productive moment in the dialectical
scheme which aims at overturning the negative conditions that produced it in the first place,
nomadic thought proposes a change of perspective that aims at recasting critique as affirmation.
This shift of perspective rests on Spinozist premises like philosophical monism and the emphasis on an ethical and affective component of subjectivity. A subject’s

ethical core is not his/her moral intentionality, as much as the effects of power (as repressive – potestas – and
positive – potentia) his/her actions are likely to have upon the world (Deleuze, 1968). Given that in this view the

ethical good is equated with radical relationality aiming at affirmative empowerment, the ethical
ideal is to increase one’s ability to enter into modes of relation with multiple others. Ethics is
about the cultivation of affirmative relations. Oppositional consciousness and the political
subjectivity or agency it engenders must actualize this ethical urge in the sense that they labour
to create alternatives by cultivating the relations that are conducive to the transmutation of
values. In other words: opposition is not about negativity, but rather about the transformation
of negative into positive passions and hence the production of affirmative alternatives. These do
not emerge dialectically, i.e. they are not tied to the present by negation, but must be allowed
to emerge out of a different set of premises, affects and conditions. In my terms, this is a project for social sustainability
that aims at combining processes of radical transformation with the possibility of constructing sustainable futures. The sustainability of these futures consists in their being able
to mobilize, actualize and deploy cognitive, affective and collective forces which had not so far been activated. How to assess and format these forces becomes a crucial issue
for critical theory – in terms of an ethics of affirmation that is also an ethology of forces. These forces concretize in actual, material relations and can thus constitute a network,
web or rhizome of interconnection with others. This is why Deleuze, paraphrasing Spinoza, argues that we have to learn to think differently about ourselves and we can only do

so together. To disengage the process of subject formation from negativity and to attach it to
affirmative otherness means that reciprocity is redefined not as mutual recognition but rather as
mutual definition or specification. ‘We’ are in this together in a vital political economy that is
both transsubjective and transversal its force. Thus, oppositional consciousness is central to
political subjectivity but it is not the same as negativity and that critical theory is about creation
and strategies of affirmation. Political subjectivity or agency therefore consists of multiple
micropolitical practices of daily activism or interventions in and on the world we inhabit. As Adrienne
Rich put it, the political activist has to think ‘in spite of the times’ and hence also ‘out of my time’, in

tune with the present but resisting its murderous tendencies. This tension creates the conditions
of possibility – of the future (2001, p. 159). Critical theory is not about looking for easy reassurances but for evidence that others, here and now, are
struggling with the same questions. Nomadic methodology works by empowering creative alternatives. This philosophical creativity operates a shift of paradigm towards a
positive appraisal of differences, multiplicity and complexity not as an end in themselves but as steps in a process of recomposition of the coordinates of subjectivity. This has
some important methodological implications for the role and function of Memory and the Imagination. The cartographic accounts of the subject of complexity and becoming,
which I described earlier, entail a sort of affective mapping of the thinker’s/reader’s interaction with others: texts, ideas, concepts or artworks. This perceptive and conceptual

All radical pedagogies stress the crucial role played by

engagement with bodies of work bypasses the classical binary thought.

the memory in the formation of politically active and ethically conscious subjects. Remembering
the wound, the pain, the injustice – bearing witness to the missing people – to those who never
managed to gain powers of discursive representation – is central to the radical ethics and
politics of philosophical nomadism . Another important use of memory is connected to the affective dimension. Let me illustrate it with an example:
what exactly is involved in ‘working from memory’ when one is writing commentaries on the history of philosophy or on other theoretical texts? The most notorious statement
to this effect concerns Deleuze’s two-volume study of cinema, in which he states that he did not watch again any of the movies he was to discuss. He just wrote from the
memory of the first time he watched those films, which often was years before. Most of his literary citations, however, bear the same style: they are rarely verbatim repetitions
of the original texts. Nor are they ‘close textual readings’, following the dominant mode of teaching philosophy in the academic world today, where the repetition of ‘his
master’s voice’ is the name of the game. ‘Faithfulness’ here equates flat repetition, or the replication of sameness. Writing from memory, or ‘by heart’ involves a number of
precise methodological steps. Firstly, it means that one is exempted from checking against the original, at least during the process of writing the actual commentary. This
expresses the conviction that the ‘truth’ of a text is somehow never really ‘written’. Neither is it contained within the signifying space of the book, nor is it about the authority of
a proper noun, a signature, a tradition, a canon, let alone the prestige of a discipline. The authoritativeness of citation is discarded for an altogether different kind of accuracy.
The ‘truth’ of a text resides rather in the affects, i.e. the kind of outward-bound interconnections or relations that it enables, provokes, engenders and sustains. Thus, a text is a

Thinking, like
relay point between different moments in space and time, as well as different levels, degrees, forms and configurations of the thinking process.

breathing, is not held into the mould of linearity, or the confines of the printed page, but it
happens outside, out of bounds, in webs of encounters with ideas, others, texts. The linguistic
signifier is merely one of the points in a chain of effects, not its centre or its endgame. Secondly,
and as a consequence of the above, ‘working from memory’ implies respecting the specific, non-
linear temporality of this intensive process of thinking. The notion of ‘duration’ is of crucial
importance here. The active, minoritarian or nomadic memory triggers molecular becomings
and thus works towards affirmation. In order to do so, however, it constantly reconnects to the
virtual totality of a continuously recomposing block of past and present moments. In a
synchronization exercise, moments in time coincide in the ‘here and now’ of actualizing
processes of heightened intensity or becoming. When applied to the reading of theoretical,
social and cultural texts, this means that one starts working from oral traces and affective
imprints, i.e. more viscerally. The focus is not on representation or citation, but on the affective
traces, on what is left over, what remains, what has somehow caught and stuck around, the
drags and the sediments of the reading and the cognitive process. This assumes that the focus
does not fall on textual interiority and a detailed reproduction of the text’s intentions, meanings
and conceptual structures. Equally inadequate is the weight of Oedipal tradition and the veneration of the authority of the past as a support mechanism
for the habit of faithful textual commentaries. I prefer to think of this way of relating to memory in terms of nomadic

transpositions, that is to say as creative and highly generative interconnections which mix and
match, mingle and multiply possibilities of expansion and growth among different units or
entities. Transpositions require precision in terms of the coordinate of the encounters, but also
a high charge of imaginative force. 415 They may appear as random association to the naked eye, but in fact they are a specific and accurate
topology of forces of attraction, which find their own modes of selection, combination and recomposition. Musical scores function by

transpositions, much as the transmission of genetic information (Fox-Keller, 1983): they proceed
by leaps and bounds, but this is neither anarchical, nor chaotic. The coherence of this system is
the result of the affinity and empathy that allowed for the preliminary selection to be made in
the first place, resulting in the storage of the data in/as memory. There is no spontaneity at
work here, but rather a careful dosage of forces, a process of selective affinities. The model for this is the
quick glance of the painter that captures the ‘essence’ of a landscape or the precise quality of the light upon it, in a fleeting moment and which is wrongly rendered in terms of
‘insight’. It has nothing whatsoever to do with interiority, however, nor with inscrutable depths. It is rather related to external forces, their irresistible energy and mobility. Just

this is not superficiality, but a way of

like travellers can capture the ‘essential lines’ of landscape or of a place in the speed of crossing it,

framing the longitudinal and latitudinal forces that structure a certain spatio-temporal
‘moment’. These multilayered levels of affectivity are the building blocks for creative transpositions, which compose a plane of actualization of relations, that is to say
points of contact between self and surroundings. They are the mark of immanent, embodied and embedded relations. Capturing such forces is not

dependent upon the supervising control of a conscious subject who centralizes and ordains the
information according to a hierarchy of sensorial and cognitive data. Moments like that – when
the self is emptied out, dissolving into rawer and more elementary sensations – mark
heightened levels of awareness and receptivity. In spiritual practices like meditation what is
labelled as concentration is represented by deep vacuum. You look through reality to focus
elsewhere. In fact, you are focusing on the ever-receding horizon of elsewhereness itself – that
is, infinity. An intransitive gaze that marks the intensive state of becoming. What looks like absent-mindedness, on closer
scrutiny reveals itself to be a qualitative leap towards a more focused, more precise, more
accurate perception of one’s own potentia, which is one’s capacity to ‘take in’ the world, to
encounter it, to go towards it. It is about respecting a creative void without forcefully imposing
upon it a form that corresponds to the author’s own intentions or desires – it is an opening-out
towards the geo-philosophical or planetary dimension of ‘chaosmosis’ (Guattari, 1992). The form or the
discursive event rather emerges from the creative encounter of the doer and the deed, or from
the active process of becoming . This amounts to turning the self into the threshold of gratuitous
(principle of non-profit), aimless (principle of mobility or flow) acts which express the vital
energy of transformative becomings. If the activity of thinking is represented along these lines, it
then follows that the more selfreflexive a posteriori process of theorizing this activity requires
methodological skills other than the ones that are usually praised, rewarded and perpetuated in
academic circles. Notably, the key habit of ‘faithfulness to the text’ and of citation as repetition of the author’s intended meaning, gets displaced. Instead what
comes to the fore is the creative capacity that consists in being able to render the more striking lines, forces or affective charges of any given text or author. To do so, what one
needs to be loyal to is neither the spurious depth of the text, nor the author’s latent or manifest intentionality, and even less to the sovereignty of the phallic Master. Loyalty is
instead required to the intensity of the affective forces that compose a text or a concept, so as to account for what a text can do, what it has done, how it has impacted upon
one according to the affective coordinates I outlined above. Accounting backwards for the affective impact of various items or data upon oneself is the process of remembering.
In Bergson as in Deleuze it has as much to do with the imagination, that is to say creative reworking, as with the passive repetition of chronologically prior, recorded and hence
retrievable experiences. Memory is ongoing and forward-looking precisely because it is a singular, yet complex subject that is always, already in motion and in process. This
memory has to do with the capacity to endure, to ‘sustain’ the process of change or transformation. Duration and endurance are also ethical categories to do with sustainability,

Creativity is a nomadic process

not just an aesthetic one. Sustainability emerges (again) as the guiding principle of these intensive methods of analysis.

in that it entails the active displacement of dominant formations of identity, memory and
identification. Becoming has to do with emptying out the self, opening it out to possible
encounters with the ‘outside’. As Roy puts it: the pragmatic purpose was to introduce a ‘swerve’
or deviation in the plane of taken-forgranted assumptions by means of which a new experiment
of thought could be inserted in the interstices that might help teachers get an insight into the
generative possibilities of the situation. (Roy, 2003, p. 2) Remembering in the nomadic mode is the active reinvention of a self that is joyfully
discontinuous, as opposed to being mournfully consistent, as programmed by phallogocentric culture. It destabilizes the sanctity of the past and the authority of experience. This
is the tense of a virtual sense of potential. Memories need the imagination to empower the actualization of virtual possibilities in the subject. They allow the subject to differ

Desire as plenitude rather challenges the

from oneself as much as possible while remaining faithful to oneself, or in other words: enduring.

matrix of having and lacking access to recognition by Self and Other as transcendent categories.
Becoming is molecular, in that it requires singular overthrowing of the internalized simulacra of
the self, consolidated by habits and flat repetitions. The dynamic vision of the subject as
assemblage is central to a vitalist, yet anti-essentialist theory of desire, which also prompts a
new practice of sustainable ethics, which aims: ‘to open up the fastness in which thought takes
refuge, provoking by that same parting novel, nonhumanist stirrings’ (Roy, 2003, p. 1). Desire is the
propelling and compelling force that is driven by self-affirmation or the transformation of
negative into positive passions. This is a desire not to preserve, but to change: it is a deep
yearning for transformation or a process of affirmation. Empathy and compassion are key
features of this nomadic yearning for in-depth transformation. Proximity, attraction or
intellectual sympathy is both a topological and qualitative notion: it is a question of ethical
temperature. It is an affective framing for the becoming of subjects as sensible or intelligent
matter. The affectivity of the imagination is the motor for these encounters and of the
conceptual creativity they trigger off. It is a transformative force that propels multiple,
heterogeneous ‘becomings’ of the subject.
 Bodies as Conjugations of Forces
We must replace the understanding of the subject and of the human as stable
and enclosed space with an understanding of the subject as a conjugation of
forces in constant becoming. This opens radical political potentialities by
uncovering a field of pre-individual intensities and avoids racialized
understandings of humanity and the war on difference. Such a critique of the
Self-Same-Subject is a prerequisite to police reform, to learning about the topic,
and to political activism.

Philips 20 (Chas. Assistant Prof. of Political Science at Gettysburg College. “Human without
Image: Deleuzian Critique beyond the Neighbourhood Effect” in Deleuze and Guattari Studies
14.1 (2020): 152–176 DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2020.0395 © Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs) green=short

Difference and Repetition does not conclude with any clear normative propositions for engaging
in the world it describes. As mentioned in the introduction, I read it as both a transgressive
critique of the Western philosophical canon and a set of resources drawn from that critique that
can be mobilised to engage in radical politics. In the spirit of that project, this section brings
Deleuze’s theoretical resources to bear on the study and navigation of oppressive spaces that
are subject to invasive policing policy. Although social scientists might take the empirical world
to be reducible to positivist, scientific determination and subjectivity distilled into identity-based
agents, Difference and Repetition uncovers a world marked by creative emergence and open to
radical political potentiality. First, a return to Leibniz’s idea of the sea as Deleuze reads it: 13 The
idea of the sea . . . is a system of liaisons or differential relations between particulars and singularities corresponding
to the degrees of variation among these relations–the totality of the system being incarnated in the real movement of
the waves. (Deleuze 1994: 165)The sea is comprised of a near infinite number of indiscernible
elements interacting with one another, the aggregate of which constitutes the dynamic ‘body’ of
water we encounter. An observer does not have access to the precise way each element
contributes to the overall constitution of the sea, or even how each element is distinct from
other elements; and the complexity of the system of different elements makes predicting the
behaviour of its entirety difficult or impossible. But, one can see the real movements of the
waves, and experience the manifested actuality of the system as one observes or interacts with
it. A swim in the ocean introduces the body to the complexity of the system in physical terms:
one is pushed and pulled by the combined power of the differential elements constituting the
ocean, even as the body attempts to navigate its force. Even if there are discernible patterns and
rhythms, the system is always in a state of creative becoming . In rough waters, the body may be
overwhelmed and overcome by the power of the waves, the intensity of the current and the
vastness of its volume. The milieu of the ocean, which includes the swimming body, emerges as
its own problematic field of relations; one must attend, respond and adapt to its developing
conditions in order to persist as a body. The spaces that Sewell and colleagues study are akin to
these complex systems of interacting elements, experienced and observed as discernible space
to navigate. Like the sea, neighbourhoods and cities are constituted by (non-)events,
(non-)encounters, relations among differential elements, rapidly changing conditions as they
interact with overlapping milieu, persistent features that appear permanent, subsystems and
super-systems that reorganise local features, internal logics or rhythms below the level of
intelligibility, untimely actualisations of intensive structures, and problems without solutions.
One can observe and describe the actualised contours of a neighbourhood and empirically
analyse behaviour and health in a particular space without ever engaging with the genetic
principles that precede these actualities. The social scientific model for understanding the
impacts of aggressive policing is a valuable interpretation of this actualised world, but, like any
approach, it is limited by its methodological restrictions. A critical and diagnostic
interpretation that attends to the virtual–and thus offers a richer account of the process of
actualisation – may also reveal a more effective mode of orienting oneself or one’s community
to it. Bracketing the realm of potentiality yields (and must yield) a more limited range of
strategies for moving in an oppressive space . ‘To learn to swim’, Deleuze writes, ‘is to
conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in
order to form a problematic field’ (Deleuze 1994: 165). Again, like Leibniz’s sea, an individual
body is constituted by a unique constellation of elements and expresses ‘an Idea the
actualisation of which it determines’ (Deleuze 1994: 254). Although these individual elements
are common or indiscernible, they express a unique idea of that individual. Perhaps Deleuze is
inviting us to ‘conjugate’ these ‘distinctive points’ in the particular context in which we find
ourselves, and attempting to use this conjugation to problematise the structure and constitution
of our milieu. Perhaps Deleuze provides a strategy for navigating spaces of inequality–the
terrain of the problem–in a way that fosters newness. Conjugating oneself differently (anew)
in order to adapt to local (and non-local) conditions constitutes what Deleuze calls learning.
The body, the neighbourhood, the policy and the structure must all be understood as systems
in a state of becoming. The oppressive conditions endured by many populations are
exacerbated by the Image of Thought/Human because it constrains possibilities for change to
the recognisable realm of the already-actualised rather than the rich and creative realm of
potentiality. And, because the Image of the Human reflects and reaffirms a racialised world in
which oppression is not distributed equally , it seems likely that one’s relation to these
intersecting modes of oppression will modify the ways in which a body is (and can be)
conjugated among these elements. The Deleuzian call to problematise a field through one’s
help to inform such efforts. Each of us must learn to critically ‘swim’ in ways that will open
new terrain for thought and politics, and this creative potentiality is found by attending to the
intensive space of the virtual. Perhaps a degree of relief may be found through the emergence
of the new or the different that is expressed by the pre-individual subject; perhaps the
creative potentiality of the virtual provides a valuable normative addendum to the realm of
the actual. In the closing pages of chapter 5, Deleuze reiterates his understanding of the
individual as distinct from competing models. Descartes’s epiphany about the subject–that the I
sees the Self–fails to see the virtual derivation of the subject that precedes this encounter.
Deleuze explains that both the I and the Self exist only in extensity (as a form or the matter of a
form, respectively); the differences from which they develop in the realm of the virtual are
cancelled as they become actualised. Again, Descartes’s point of departure for deriving the
subject, it seems, is the already-actualised entity found in extensity. In contrast, Deleuze is
intent on theorising the pre-individual aspects of the individual. A primary problem is that
Descartes’s version of the subject is inseparable from identity (the actualised I who ‘thinks’) and
the Self who sees itself through a ‘continuity of resemblances’ (Deleuze 1994: 257). Thus,
identity emerges at the intersection of the thinking I who sees itself resembling a previous Self.
The Deleuzian subject is far more complicated and far less stable than the liberal subject. For
Deleuze, the resemblances that the I sees in relation to the self are the after-effects of a
process of actualisation that started in the realm of pure difference; those apparent
‘differences’ are merely the cancelled forms of difference that were lost in extensity. Contra
this version of the subject, every individuating factor is already difference and difference of
difference. It is constructed upon a fundamental disparity, and functions on the edges of that
disparity as such. That is why these factors endlessly communicate with one another across
fields of individuation, becoming enveloped in one another in a demesne which disrupts the
matter of the Self as well as the form of the I. Individuation is mobile, strangely supple,
fortuitous and endowed with fringes and margins; all because the intensities which contribute
to it communicate with each other, envelop other intensities and are in turn enveloped. The
individual is far from indivisible, never ceasing to divide and change its nature. (Deleuze 1994:
257) The ‘condensation of distinctive points’ or ‘open collection of intensities’ constituting the
subject are mistaken for evidence of the incompletion or interruption of the individual. The
error is to attempt to ‘complete’ the subject, or to pin it down into its finished, univocal stasis,
rather than an ‘indeterminate, floating, fluid, communicative and enveloping- enveloped’
individual (Deleuze 1994: 258). As Claire Colebrook writes, ‘it is only by repressing the highly
complex differentials that compose any being that something like the notion of “a” race can
occur’ (Colebrook 2013: 35). For Descartes (and Kant), the I is both a finished product and a
starting point for doing philosophy. But coercing the individual into a completed form of
identity stultifies its potential by denying the ongoing role virtuality plays. Thus, Deleuze
leaves behind identity as the foundational form of philosophy, and embraces the ‘full, positive
power of individual’ as completely incomplete (Deleuze 1994: 258). It is from this Deleuzian
subject that we find an accompanying normative warning. If the subject is constituted through
intensive differences of elements that precede the actualisation of the Self and I, then the
individual is always emerging from an ‘undifferenciated abyss’ of elements that remain in the
realm of the virtual. Thus, the condition of being is characterised not by a static and
purportedly ‘whole’ subject encountered in extensity, but by the ever-present potentiality of
being reconstituted by intensive differential elements. A form of the individual driven by
becoming, rather than identity, accounts for the rich terrain of the virtual that is always
refashioning the individual in creative ways . Thus, Deleuze urges us not to be explicated too much ...
not to explicate oneself too much with the other, not to explicate the other too much, but to maintain one’s implicit
values and multiply one’s own world by populating it with all those expressed that do not exist apart from their
it is not the other which is another I, but the I which is an other, a fractured I.
expressions. For
There is no love which does not begin with the revelation of a possible world as such,
enwound in the other which expresses it. (Deleuze 1994: 261) To fully explicate oneself or the
other would be to (attempt to) eliminate this virtual remainder, and to cancel the very
generative force of becoming that drives newness. To avoid this catastrophic languishing,
Deleuze encourages us to foster the persistent alterity of the other in order to preserve its
intensity, just as we must allow the alterity of the self to persist as an intensive remainder to
our own individuality. The I that one encounters in extensity is a temporary and differenciated
being – a snapshot – on its way to becoming a new individual that draws from the intensive
components of its past. The I is thus an other – i n a state of alterity both to other individuals,
but also to its own form of becoming . If there is an objective here, it is to dedicate myself to
‘sensing’ intensities without cancelling them; to invite another world that is the actualisation
of intensity in this world. 14 Using Deleuze’s work to interrogate the limits of a positivist, data-
derived model points towards opportunities to critique the limits of the social scientific method,
as well as provide a supplementary set of considerations with which to engage. Much of the
social scientific research surrounding policing aspires to code behaviour in positivist terms,
statistically derive each predictive claim using data-driven probabilities and develop policing
models that reflect this explication. My argument is that both the study and any normative
claims that emerge from it are mired in the practice of explicating the other as fully as
possible–eliminating vital space for virtuality along with those variables that inhibit
meaningful scientific results. The process of extrapolating scientific conclusions based on
observational health outcomes, for instance, attempts to translate the complexity of humans
into observable, static, extensity-based organisms. By design, it also simplifies the complexity
of the milieu in question by ‘controlling’ for intervening variables. The realm of the intensive is
off-limits for this type of study if it involves the non-observable. The resulting strategy of
analysis inadvertently imposes being on intensive becoming. If the assumptive framework
undergirding all studies of human behaviour informs what range of normative strategies are
available in response, then a complementary diagnostic approach that includes space for
intensive potentiality can also clear terrain for new prognostic strategies that are more
compatible with a Deleuzian approach. Its inclusion may also explain why existing policing
strategies that rely on a purely observable and data-driven model may not be as effective as a
more inclusive enquiry. The process and result of learning in a complex multiplicity is a violent
and unpredictable set of potentialities. Learning takes the form of undetermined
experimentation without specific expectations. I take the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in
2014 and in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015 to be [are] examples of experimental learning. In
both cases, the police killings of black males were not unprecedented or even atypical.
However, the reaction to them was unique and reflected something natal: repetition, with a
difference. A certain set of conditions coalesced to cross a tipping point; populations
responded to actualised experiences of a virtual Idea of racial injustice and police violence .
Although they could not have been predicted, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray became the
encounters that force us to think. Suddenly, a violent process of learning is underway.
Activists, local citizens, politicians and police departments began to react to the multiplicity of
circumstances that were suddenly in flux. The uprisings in both cities represent a collective
conjugation of bodies, in which populations who experience long-term effects of racism react
to the relations that make up those conditions . Like the circumstances that constituted the
genetic conditions for the uprising, the ongoing results of this collective conjugation cannot be
described in advance and are yet to be realised . However, they reflect the intensive processes
that mark the realm of the virtual, and cannot be understood apart from them.
 Criminal Justice Courts

The alternative is to adopt tactics of jurisprudence that act as a social

maneuvering around criminal legal systems. Direct revolution will merely fail
and reproduce acts of judgement. The only option is the subversion from within
the legal system that seeks to counter “just” convictions and goals of justice.
Mussawir 10 (Dr Edward Mussawir is a senior lecturer in the Griffith Law School. His research
covers various themes in jurisprudence including jurisdiction, judgment, legal personality, the
legal status of animals and the work of Gilles Deleuze. Dr Mussawir is the Managing Editor of the
Griffith Law Review: Law, Theory, Society and teaches civil procedure and legal theory, “The
Activity of Judgment: Deleuze, Jurisdiction and the Procedural Genre of Jurisprudence” in Law,
Culture, and the Humanities, November 25 2010, Pgs 481-483) *edited for gendered language

3. Procedural Tactics: Combat, Protraction…Foucault and Deleuze are united in the particular way in which
they are interested in jurisprudence, juridical procedure and the ‘‘activity’’ of judgment.
Judgment does not have a universal meaning or value – nor does it have even a classical or traditional faculty.
There are no origins to judgment (whether metaphysical or phantasmatic); only its ‘‘invention’’ as a kind of power; as
a technical contrivance. ‘‘It was only gradually that the gods and (human) together raised themselves to the activity of
judging – for better or for worse, as can be seen in Sophocles’ plays.’’48 This is why procedural jurisprudence is
essentially – as it was with the law of actions – a survey, a theory and a technical knowledge of
certain tactics that, rather than constituting a more or less subjective function of judgment , show
the various ways of getting-around it. ‘‘There is knowledge,’’ Foucault supposes, ‘‘only insofar as something like a single combat, a
Tactics, if they are the subject of
tệte-à-tệte, a duel is set up, contrived, between (hu)man what (they) knows.’’49
jurisprudence, are not ‘‘official’’ or formal procedures. They belong , as one author puts it, to the
‘‘knowledge or science of maneuvering.’’ 50What characterizes a procedural tactic is not necessarily
that it is based outside of the official rules of procedure but that it defines a locally practiced
way of managing and navigating one’s path within these rules. A tactic is a way of proceeding
that does not refer to or constitute a complete procedural ‘‘forum’’ as such. This area of juridical
knowledge, as mentioned, no longer has the same centrality to the genres of jurisprudence as it once
did. Procedure nowadays refers to a simple efficiency and regularity of proceeding in the courts ;
while ‘‘tactics’’ commonly refers to the various lawyerly ways of diverting or frustrating what
would otherwise be a proper ‘‘course of justice.’’ All of this has meant that a tactical procedural basis of modern
jurisprudence is conspicuously underdeveloped or that problems of tactics do not often get raised today to the level of theoretical
significance. For this reason, the directions in which to seek out a jurisprudential treatment of
procedural tactics need not be obvious or conventional. Deleuze is fond of noting for instance how a modern
theoretical arrangement of procedure is set out in Franz Kafka’s The Trial according to two tactical juridical concepts: apparent
acquittal and protraction. 51 What makes these concepts ‘‘tactical’’ rather than formal is that both mechanisms
are aimed only at managing the procedural apparatus itself and do not concern the matter of
its outcomes or objects: its verdicts. They are equally opposed to an acquittal as they are to a
conviction. ‘‘Apparent acquittal’’ for example, according to one advocate trying to explain the functioning of the
mysterious court system in Kafka’s novel, is a tactic of having the trial end and begin again repeatedly: –
instead of being actually acquitted, one might follow the tactic of an ‘‘apparent’’ acquittal which
brings the trial to an end but in the certainty that it will start up again at some stage without
notice. ‘‘Protraction’’ on the other hand is the tactic of keeping the trial always in its preliminary
stages: drawing it out, managing its small performative elements etc. It is in this sense that both
tactics are situated not as structures or forums of judgment but as the avenues by which one
maneuvers around judgment, ‘‘de-totalizing’’ its verdicts and keeping it constantly at arm’s length. In ‘‘To
Have Done with Judgment’’ Deleuze also describes this texture of procedural tactics in Kafka as a kind of ‘‘combat.’’ It is combat
which ultimately serves as a counter to the doctrine of judgment. ‘‘Thus, all of Kafka’s works could be
entitled ‘Description of a Combat’ … All gestures are defenses or even attacks, evasions, ripostes,
anticipations of a blow one does not always see coming, or of an enemy one is not always able
to identify.’’52 Deleuze cautions not to confuse the procedural tactic of combat with the form of a ‘‘judgment of God.’’ As with
the Germanic procedures: the battle, the combat, oath or ordeal are not reducible to the judgment of God which would apportion
the resulting victory and defeat, since for Deleuze the procedural setup is itself devised precisely as a means of excluding judgment
Combat is in this sense always nothing more than a tactic, a maneuver, a mere
as well as God.
posturing in relation to the procedures of judgment. It is a figure for the tactical arrangements
of power one garners as a pure counter-system of judgment: jurisprudence.
 Lines of Flight
Refuse the Truth of structures and closed systems which prevent escape and
instead create a line of flight.
Deleuze and Guattari ’80. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1874:
THREE NOVELLAS, OR “WHAT HAPPENED?” p. 204

As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean nothing. It is an affair of
cartography. They compose us, as they compose our map. They transform themselves and
may even cross over into one another. Rhizome. It is certain that they have nothing to do
with language; it is, on the contrary, language that must follow them, it is writing that must
take sustenance from them, between its own lines. It is certain that they have nothing to do
with a signifier, the determination of a subject by the signifier; instead, the signifier arises at
the most rigidified level of one of the lines, and the subject is spawned at the lowest level . It
is certain that they have nothing to do with a structure , which is never occupied by any-
thing more than points and positions, by arborescences, and which always forms a closed
system, precisely in order to prevent escape . Deligny invokes a common Body upon which
these lines are inscribed as so many segments, thresholds, or quanta, territorialities,
deterritorializations, or reterritorializations. The lines are inscribed on a Body without
Organs, upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract line with
neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: the real of the BwO. This body is the only
practical object of schizoanalysis: What is your body without organs? What are your lines?
What map are you in the process of making or rearranging? What abstract line will you
draw, and at what price, for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? What is your
BwO, merged with that line? Are you cracking up? Are you going to crack up? Are you
deterritorializing? Which lines are you severing, and which are you extending or resuming?
Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or
structures. It pertains only to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals.
Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is
a question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being. Practice does not
come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the
drawing of the lines; it confronts the same dangers and the same variations as the
emplacement does. Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new. Or rather, there is no problem
of application: the lines it brings out could equally be the lines of a life, a work of literature
or art, or a society, depending on which system of coordinates is chosen.
Line of molar or rigid segmentarity, line of molecular or supple seg- mentation, line of flight
—many problems arise. The first concerns the particular character of each line. It might be
thought that rigid segments are socially determined, predetermined, overcoded by the
State; there may be a tendency to construe supple segmentarity as an interior activity,
something imaginary or phantasmic. As for the line of flight, would it not be entirely
personal, the way in which an individual escapes on his or her own account, escapes
"responsibilities," escapes the world, takes refuge in the desert, or else in art... ? False
impression. Supple segmentarity has nothing to do with the imaginary, and micropolitics is
no less extensive or real than macropolitics. Politics on the grand scale can never administer
its molar segments without also dealing with the micro- injections or infiltrations that work
in its favor or present an obstacle to it ; indeed, the larger the molar aggregates, the greater
the molecularization of the agencies they put into play. Lines of flight, for their part, never
consist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when you drill a
hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all directions, even if it
makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight. There is nothing
imaginary, nothing symbolic, about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line
of flight, among animals or humans.13 Even History is forced to take that route rather than
proceeding by "signifying breaks." What is escaping in a soci- ety at a given moment? It is on
lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the
State. "I may be running, but I'm looking for a gun as I go" (George Jackson). It was along
lines of flight that the nomads swept away everything in their path and found new weapons,
leaving the Pharaoh thunderstruck. It is possible for a single group, or a single individual
even, to exhibit all the lines we have been discussing simultaneously . But it is most
frequently the case that a single group or individual functions as a line of flight; that group
or individual creates the line rather than following it, is itself the living weapon it forges
rather than stealing one. Lines of flight are realities; they are very dangerous for societies,
although they can get by without them, and sometimes manage to keep them to a minimum.
 Nomadism

We endorse a nomadic politics of becoming. Nomadism affirms difference as

something that radiates beyond all limits and boundaries. It evades the binary
logics of nationalism and humanism, encouraging us to free desire and become
hybrids in permanent transition.
Braidotti 10 Rosi Braidotti, Arts Faculty, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, “Nomadism: Against Methodological
Nationalism, Policy Futures in Education” Vol 8, Issue 3-4, pp. 408 – 418 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.408

The theoretical core of a nomadic philosophy of the subject consists of a firm stand against the
traditional image of thought and the pedagogical practices that assume a unitary vision of the
self. This humanistic subject claims to be structured and ordained along the axis of self-reflexive
individualism and scientific rationality, which are indexed on a linear and progressive temporal
line. Nomadic subjectivity on the contrary moves beyond identitarian categories and it rests on a
process ontology that challenges the traditional equation of subjectivity with rational
consciousness and resists the reduction of both to a linear vision of progress. Thus, instead of
deference to the authority of the past, we have the fleeting co-presence of multiple time-zones,
in a continuum that activates and de-territorializes stable identities. This dynamic vision of the
subject enlists the creative resources of the imagination to the task of enacting transformative
relations and actions in the present. This ontological non-linearity rests on a Spinozist ethics of
affirmation and becoming that predicates the positivity of difference. I will return to this later on in the
article. The nomadic vision of the subject as a time continuum and a collective assemblage implies
a double commitment, on the one hand to processes of change and on the other to a strong
sense of community – of our being in this together. Our co-presence, that is to say the
simultaneity of our being in the world together, sets the tune for the ethics of our interaction.
Our ethical relation requires us to synchronize the perception and anticipation of our shared,
common condition. A collectively distributed consciousness emerges from this – i.e. a transversal form of non-synt hetic
understanding of the relational bond that connects us. This places the relation at the centre of
both the ethics and the epistemic structures and strategies of the subject. Nomadism 409 This
vision of a collectively assembled, externally-related and multilayered subject that acts in a time-
continuum clashes frontally with the established view of the European subject of knowledge.
Following the critical premises of post-structuralist critiques of humanism by Foucault (1966), Deleuze & Guattari (1972, 1980),
nomadic thought questions the classical vision of the philosophical
Derrida (1991) and Irigaray (1977),
subject as the quintessential European citizen. ‘Europe’ stands in this discussion for a tacit consensus about the
self-evidence of the universalizing powers of self-reflexive and self-correcting reason. This flattering rendition of philosophical
‘Europeanness’ transforms Europe from a concrete geo-political location and a specifically grounded history, into an abstract
Europe
concept and a normative ideal that can be implemented across space and time, provided the right preconditions are met.
as the symbol of universal self-consciousness posits itself as the site of origin of reason and self-
designates itself as the motor of the world-historical unfolding of the philosophical ratio. This
titanic sense of entitlement rests structurally on the claim to universality and also on a
hierarchical and dialectical vision of Otherness or difference. A binary logic of self–other
opposition is at work in this oppositional model, which results in reducing ‘difference’ to
pejoration, disqualification and exclusion. Subjectivity is postulated on the basis of sameness,
i.e. as coinciding with the dominant image of thought and representation of the subject. Deleuze
& Guattari offer the perfect synthesis of this dominant image of the subject as
masculine/white/heterosexual/speaking a standard language/property-owning/urbanized. This
paradigm equates the subject with rationality, consciousness, moral and cognitive universalism.
This vision of the ‘knowing subject’ – or the ‘Man’ of humanism – constructs itself as much by
what it includes within the circle of his entitlements, as in what it excludes. Otherness is
excluded by definition. This makes the others into structural and constitutive elements of the
subject, albeit by negation . Throughout Western philosophy, Otherness has been constructed
with distressing regularity along the intertwined axes of sexualization, racialization and
naturalization (Braidotti, 2002, 2006). The others – women or sexual minorities, natives and non-
Europeans and earth or animal others – have been marginalized, excluded, exploited and
disposed of accordingly. The epistemic and worldhistorical violence engendered by the claim to
universalism and by the oppositional view of consciousness lies at the heart of methodological
nationalism or conceptual Eurocentrism. On Accountability Nomadic philosophies have targeted
this lethal oppositional logic for criticism and have called it to accountability. So have radical
epistemologies such as feminism, environmentalism, post-colonial, race and critical legal theories. They are formulated as a
response to concrete world historical events, such as colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust and communist totalitarianism, which
exemplify some of the crimes that were committed in the name of Europe’s alleged universal civilizing mission. These historical
events are set off against the self-aggrandizing narratives. The juxtaposition highlights new critical and creative modes of addressing
subjectivity and ethics, which debunk methodological nationalism. Both the critique of ahistorical Eurocentrism and the quest for
alternative genealogies of thought express a form of ethical and political accountability that requires adequate understandings of
one’s specific location, that is to say one’s embedded and embodied perspectives. Michel Foucault’s cartographies of power (1977)
provide a conceptual and methodological example of this approach, as does Deleuze’s concept of radical immanence (1995). The
feminist method of the politics of location is also central to this debate, in that it provides both the means to explore and the
creative force to experiment with alternative representations of the knowing subject. The politics of location, first developed (Rich,
1985) as a way of making sense of diversity among women within the category of gender of sexual difference, became the
cornerstone of feminist situated epistemologies (Haraway, 1988). In its nomadic variable, it can be extended into a cartographic
method of accounting for multiple differences within any subject position (Braidotti, 1994). These degrees of differentiation are
explored and rendered as analyses of power-locations and power-relations. This method aims at achieving epistemological and
political accountability by unveiling the power locations which one inevitably inhabits as the site of one’s subject-position. A
As such it responds to my two
cartography is a theoretically-based and politically-informed reading of the 410 present.
main requirements: namely, to account for one’s locations in terms both of space (geo-political
or ecological dimension) and time (historical and genealogical dimension); and to provide
alternative figurations or schemes of representation for these locations, in terms of power as
restrictive (potestas) but also empowering or affirmative (potentia ). I consider this cartographic gesture to
be the first methodological move towards a vision of subjectivity as ethically accountable and politically empowering. The practice of
accountability (for one’s embodied and embedded locations) as a relational, collective activity of undoing power differentials is
linked to two crucial notions: memory and narratives. They activate the process of bringing into discursive representation that which
Accounts of these
by definition escapes self-representation and can only be disclosed by the active intervention of others.
‘politics of locations’ are cartographies of power that go beyond genealogical selfnarratives and
express a view of subjectivity that is relational and outside-directed. In nomadic philosophy, this
vision is expressed through conceptual personae, or figurations. These are ways of situating and
framing the subject position and its political and epistemological practices which produce an
array of creative counter-images of the subject. Examples are:
feminist/womanist/queer/cyborg/diasporic/nomadic/native – as subject positions. These are
figurations for specific geo-political and historical locations. To mistake them for mere
metaphors would be to miss the point altogether. Figurations are forms of literal expression that
bring into representation that which the system had declared off-limits. There are situated practices that
require the awareness of the limitations as well as the specificity of one’s locations. A figuration renders our image of thought in
terms of a decentered and multilayered vision of the subject as a dynamic and changing entity; as such it can be taken as a
dramatization of processes of becoming. This process assumes that identity takes place in between nature/technology; male/female;
We live in permanent
black/white; local/global; present/past – in the spaces that flow and connect such seeming binaries.
processes of transition, hybridization and nomadization. And these in-between states and
stages defy the established modes of theoretical representation, precisely because they are
zigzagging, not linear and processoriented, not concept-driven. Critique and creation strike a
new deal in actualizing the practice of conceptual personae or figuration as the active pursuit of
affirmative alternatives to the dominant vision of the subject. In this critical perspective, to
stress the situated structure of philosophical discourse – and thus reject universalism – also
means to recognize the partial or limited nature of all claims to knowledge. The immediate consequence
of this acknowledgement is both ethical and methodological. It requires a specific form of accountability for the production of
The critique of both universalism and of liberal individualism is a fundamental
philosophical ideas.
starting point to rethink the interconnection between the self and society in an accountable
manner. To apply this to the issue of methodological nationalism: a new agenda needs to be set,
which is no longer that of European or Eurocentric identity, but rather a radical transformation
of it, in a process of rupture from Europe’s imperial, fascistic and undemocratic past. If the
fundamental question, as Deleuze teaches us, is not about who we are, but rather about what
we are capable of becoming, then methodological nationalism must give way to self-criticism
and self-transformation on the basis of accountability for our complex history. As Balibar (2001) and
Bauman (2004) have argued recently, contemporary European subjects of knowledge must meet the ethical obligation to be
accountable for their past history and the long shadow it casts on Europe’s present-day politics. The new mission that Europe has to
embrace entails the criticism of narrow-minded selfinterests, intolerance, and xenophobic rejection of otherness. Symbolic of this
closure of the European mind is the fate of migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, who bear the brunt of racism in contemporary
This process-
Europe. Multiple counter-definitions of cosmopolitan values constitute the site of resistance to this mindset.
oriented vision of the subject is capable of a universalistic reach, though it rejects moral
universalism. It expresses a grounded, partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of
collectivity and relationality. The fact that ‘we’ are in this together results in a renewed claim to
community and belonging by singular subjects. This results in a proliferation of locally situated
micro-universalist claims, which Lloyd called ‘a collaborative morality’ (1996, p. 74). Nomadism 411 One
evident and illuminating example of this alternative approach is the brand of situated cosmopolitan neo-humanism that has
emerged as a powerful ethical claim in the work of postcolonial and race theorists, as well as in feminist theories. Examples are: Paul
Gilroy’s planetary cosmopolitanism (2000); Avtar Brah’s diasporic ethics (1996); Edouard Glissant’s politics of relations (1990);
Ernesto Laclau’s micro-universal claims (1995); Homi Bhabha’s ‘subaltern secularism’ (1994); Vandana Shiva’s anti-global neo-
humanism (1997); African-American spirituality, as bell hooks and Cornell West demonstrate, as well as the rising wave of interest in
African humanism or Ubuntu, from Patricia Hill Collins (1991) to Drucilla Cornell (2003). Thus, the anti-humanism of social and
cultural critics within a Western post-structuralist perspective can be read alongside the cosmopolitan neo-humanism of
contemporary race, postcolonial or non-Western critics. Both these positions, all other differences notwithstanding, produce
inclusive alternatives – locations and figurations – that enlarge and go beyond humanist individualism. Without wishing to flatten out
structural differences, nor draw easy analogies between them, I want to stress the resonances between their efforts and respective
political aims and passions. Western post-humanism on the one hand and non-Western neo-humanism on the other transpose
hybridity, nomadism, diasporas, creolization processes into means of regrounding claims to connections and alliances among
different constituencies. They bring strong evidence to support the claim that methodological nationalism and theoretical
Eurocentrism are of hindrance, rather than assistance, in trying to redefine the cosmopolitan and interconnected nature of the
contemporary subject. This alternative vision of the subject combines critical elements, like the
rejection of Euro-universalism, with creative elements, like the recomposition of a new ethical
sense of pan-humanity. In both cases the transformative element is of crucial importance. On
Dis-identifications Transformative projects involve a radical repositioning on the part of the
knowing subject, which is neither self-evident, nor free of pain. No process of consciousness-
raising ever is. In poststructuralist feminism, this project has also been implemented methodologically through the practice of
dis-identification from familiar and hence comforting values and identities (De Lauretis, 1986; Braidotti, 1994). Dis-
identification involves the loss of cherished habits of thought and representation, which can also
produce fear, sense of insecurity and nostalgia. Change is certainly a painful process, but this
does not warrant the politically conservative position that chastises all change as dangerous.
The point in stressing the difficulties and pain involved in the quest for transformative processes
is rather to raise an awareness of both the complexities involved and the paradoxes that lie in
store. Changes that affect one’s sense of identity are especially delicate. Given that
identifications constitute an inner scaffolding that supports one’s sense of identity, shifting our
imaginary identifications is not as simple as casting away a used garment. Psychoanalysis taught us that
imaginary relocation is complex and as time-consuming as shedding an old skin. Moreover, changes of this qualitative kind happen
more easily at the molecular or subjective level and their translation into a public discourse and shared social experiences is a
complex and risk-ridden affair. In a more positive vein, Spinozist feminist political thinkers like Moira Gatens & Genevieve Lloyd
(1999) argue that such socially embedded and historically grounded changes are the result of ‘collective imaginings’ – a shared
desire for certain transformations to be actualized as a collaborative effort. Let me give you a series of concrete
examples of how dis-identifications from dominant models of subject-formation can be
productive and creative events. First of all, feminist theory is based on a radical disengagement
from the dominant institutions and representations of femininity and masculinity, to enter the
process of becoming-minoritarian or of transforming gender. In so doing feminism combines
critique with creation of alternative ways of embodying and experiencing our sexualized selves.
Secondly, in race discourse, the awareness of the persistence of racial discrimination and of
white privilege has led to serious disruptions of our accepted views of what constitutes a
subject. This has resulted, on the one hand, in the critical reappraisal of blackness (Gilroy, 2000; Hill
Collins, 1991) and on the other, in radical relocations of whiteness (Ware, 1992; Griffin & Braidotti, 2002). 412
Specifically, I would like to refer to Edgar Morin’s account of how he relinquished Marxist
cosmopolitanism to embrace a more ‘humble’ perspective as a European (Morin, 1987). This process
includes both positive and negative affects: disappointment with the unfulfilled promises of
Marxism is matched by compassion for the uneasy, struggling and marginal position of post-war
Europe, squashed between the USA and the USSR. This produces a renewed sense of care and
accountability that leads Morin to embrace a post-nationalistic redefinition of Europe as the site
of mediation and transformation of its own history, which I discussed earlier. The positive
benefits aspects of this dis-identification are epistemological but extend beyond; they include a
more adequate cartography of our real-life conditions and hence less pathos-ridden accounts.
Becoming free of the topos that equates the efforts for identity changes with suffering results in
a more adequate level of self-knowledge and therefore clears the grounds for more adequate
and sustainable relations to the others who are crucial to the transformative project.
Methodologically, this vision allows us to replace linearity with a more rhizomatic and dynamic
style of thinking. The basic method is that of creative repetitions, i.e. retelling, reconfiguring and revisiting the concept,
phenomenon, event, or location from different angles. This is akin to Spinozist perspectivism, but infuses it with a nomadic spin
which establishes multiple connections and lines of interaction. The following factors are central to this methodological approach.
First is the notion of repetition as the internal return of difference, not of sameness. It is creative mimesis, not static repetition.
Revisiting the same idea or project or location from different angles is therefore not merely a quantitative multiplication of options,
but rather a qualitative leap of perspective. This leap takes the form of a hybrid mixture of codes, genres, or modes of apprehension
of the idea, event or phenomenon in question. One of the ways in which this can be accounted for is through an intensive or
affective mapping of how each of us relates to and interacts with the ideas/events/codes as processes. I shall return to the affective
element below. Ethically, each researcher or writer has to negotiate the often dramatic shifts of perspective and location which are
The key
required for the implementation of a process-oriented – as opposed to conceptbased and system driven – thought.
methodological feature that emerges clearly from this is an intense form of interdisciplinarity,
transversality and boundary-crossings among a range of discourses. More specifically, nomadic
transpositions constitute a way of reworking the interrelation among different axes of
difference: sexualization, racialization, naturalization. All these share a passionate commitment
to dislodge ‘difference’ from its hegemonic position as an instrument of worldhistorical systems
of domination, exclusion and disqualification, as I argued before. Linearity is especially
problematic on the methodological front for radical epistemologies and marginal discourses.
The question is how to implement a coherent but non-hierarchical system of knowledge transfer
and the transmission of the cultural and political memory of a past that is often not recognized
by official institutional culture. A poignant example of this is the transmission of the cultural and
political capital of a centuries-old movement such as feminism. Linearity is a very inadequate
way of accounting for intergenerational relations among women who belong to different
historical phases of the women’s movement. Nowadays, with a third feminist wave in full swing (Henry, 2004), it is
difficult to avoid both the hierarchical Oedipal narrative of mothers and daughters of the feminist revolution and the negative
passions that inevitably accompany such narratives. It is not always easy to challenge the hierarchical relationships that are socially
predicated on differences ordained along a chronological scale. The best antidote to it is an antiOedipal approach to the question of
inter-generational ethics. It results in the need to find adequate accounts for the zigzagging nature of feminist intellectual and
cultural memories, as well as their political genealogies .
This raises methodological issues of how to account
for a different notion of time – not Chronos, but Aion, the dynamic and internally
contradictory or circular time of becoming. A nomadic methodology posits active processes of
becoming: we need flows of empowering desire that mobilize the subject and activate him/her
out of the gravitational pull of envy, rivalry and egoindexed claims to recognition. What gets
reasserted in this effort is the need to work towards social sustainability and social horizons of
hope. Hope aims at change and transformations and it longs for mobility and becomings – that
is to say, for sustainable changes.

There is but one road to emancipation – nomadism. Nomadic thought opens up

the conditioned for renewed political and ethical agency – rather than being the
light at the end of the tunnel, it is the steam engine which propels us towards
the light.
Braidotti 10 Rosi Braidotti, Arts Faculty, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, “Nomadism: Against Methodological
Nationalism, Policy Futures in Education” Vol 8, Issue 3-4, pp. 408 – 418
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.408
As I argued earlier, the conditions for renewed political and ethical agency cannot be drawn from the
immediate context or the current state of the terrain. They have to be generated affirmatively
and creatively by efforts geared to creating possible futures, by mobilizing resources and visions
that have been left untapped and by actualizing them in daily practices of interconnection with
others. This project requires more visionary power or prophetic energy; qualities which are
neither especially in fashion in academic circles, nor highly valued socially in these times of
commercial globalization. Yet, the call for more vision is emerging from many quarters in critical
theory. Feminists have a long and rich genealogy in terms of pleading for increased visionary
insight. From the very early days, Joan Kelly (1979) typified feminist theory as a double-edged vision, with a strong critical and an
equally strong creative function. Faith in the creative powers of the imagination is an integral part of
feminists’ appraisal of lived embodied experience and the bodily roots of subjectivity, which
would express the complex singularities that feminist women have become. Donna Haraway’s work (1997)
provides the best example of this kind of respect for a dimension where creativity is unimaginable without some visionary fuel. Prophetic or
visionary minds are thinkers of the future. The future as an active object of desire propels us
forth and motivates us to be active in the here and now of a continuous present that calls for
resistance. The yearning for sustainable futures can construct a livable present. This is not a leap
of faith, but an active transposition, a transformation at the in-depth level (Braidotti, 2006). A
prophetic or visionary dimension is necessary in order to secure an affirmative hold over the
present, as the launching pad for sustainable becoming or qualitative transformations. The
future is the virtual unfolding of the affirmative aspect of the present, which honors our
obligations to the generations to come. 417 The pursuit of practices of hope, rooted in the ordinary micro-practices of everyday
life, is a simple strategy to hold, sustain and map out sustainable transformations. The motivation for the social construction
of hope is grounded in a profound sense of responsibility and accountability. A fundamental
gratuitousness and a profound sense of hope is part of it. Hope is a way of dreaming up possible
futures: an anticipatory virtue that permeates our lives and activates them. It is a powerful
motivating force grounded not only in projects that aim at reconstructing the social imaginary,
but also in the political economy of desires, affects and creativity. Contemporary nomadic
practices of subjectivity – both in pedagogy and other areas of thought – work towards a more
affirmative approach to critical theory. Beyond unitary visions of the self and teleological
renditions of the processes of subject-formation, a nomadic philosophy can sustain the
contemporary subjects in the efforts to synchronize themselves with the changing world in
which they try to make a positive difference. Against the established tradition of methodological nationalism, a different
image of thought can be activated that rejects Euro-universalism and trusts instead in the powers of diversity. It also enlists affectivity, memory and the
The key
imagination to the crucial task of inventing new figurations and new ways of representing the complex subjects we have become.
method is an ethics of respect for diversity that produces cosynchronizations of the nomadic
selves and thus constitutes communities across multiple locations and generations. This humble project
of being worthy of the present while also resisting and of constructing together social horizons of hope and sustainability expresses an evolutionary
talent that enables ‘us’ to be in this together.
 Rhizomatic Criminal Justice

In the face of this semiotic organization of violence and criminalization, we

must move towards the crystalline regime as a way to bring disrupt the current
organic regime’s obsession with stability and containment. This model of
politics offers a new regime of signs as a way to construct realities based in
promoting difference and becoming within molar segments of the criminal
justice system. Our rhizomatic orientation towards criminal justice is the only
method to foster a counter semiotic production to the status quo.
Milovanovic 7 (Dragan Milovanovic is a distinguished PhD research professor in the Justice
Studies Program at Northeastern Illinois University and also the editor of the International
Journal for the Semiotics of Law, “Diversity, law, and justice: A Deleuzian semiotic view of
‘criminal justice’” in The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, March 2007, Pgs 69-77)

We turn to the crystalline regime for possible alternatives. The crystalline regime is diametrically
opposed to the organic regime. Post WW2 reconstruction efforts were inspirational for its development.49 The main
difference that was to develop is the separation from the movement-image and the incorporation of the time-image. It is
marked by cuts, divisions, irrational (in a mathematical sense) separations, uncertainty,
disorder, undecidability, the incommensurable, and indeterminism. Probability theory of quantum
mechanics would seem to be its central pillar . Images no longer flow in linear, unfolding form toward a
picture of totality; rather, the flow is interrupted by bifurcations, by serial developments, and re-
articulation of irrational cuts.50 Death of one series is marked by a re-birth by another. At singularities, dice-throws rule.
For the crystalline regime, images of thought are inherently non-totalizable. They are nomadic,
rhizomatic, unpredictable. The cuts and divisions open up a space for surprise, the unexpected, the unpredicted – a
moment in which creative evolution may take place. Movement (action–reaction) is now subordinated to the
time-image. In Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, ‘‘meaning is never a principle or origin; it is produced. It is not
something to be discovered, restored, or re-employed – it is to be produced by new
machineries.’’51 In Deleuze’s view, the false is not imminent nor discoverable within phenomena, as in the organic regime.
Rather, it is the ‘‘power of the false’’: a continuous questioning brought about by the disruption of
the time-image; truth is created, continuously in these gaps, cuts, and divisions. It is fragile,
unstable, and potentially effervescent. It is, according to Deleuze,52 not toward a higher form of unity or totalization.
It is more connected with a becoming, not a being. Nor is truth to be found in its opposition to
false. Hence, truth can be created positively ;53 not in the react-negate form of Hegel’s master slave dialectic, but in
the affirmative form of Nietzsche and the ‘‘creative evolution’’ in Bergson. Thought, in other words, is not directed
toward an eventual specified end, but rather remains open, dialogical, creative, and
evolutionary directed toward an unspecified becoming. 54 The emerging ‘‘risk society,’’ according to Beck,55
provides increasing disruptions, breaks, cuts, and opportunities for new forms of negotiations and active construction of meaning
not necessarily rooted in the past, but with an eye toward creative evolution. Consider Beck’s remark in
the context of Deleuze’s who builds on Wilhelm Worringer:56 ‘‘the crystalline represents a will to abstraction.
When a culture feels that it is in conflict with the world, that events are chaotic and hostile, it tends to produce pure geometric
how two regimes of signs develop that
forms as an attempt to pattern and transcend this chaos.’’ Thus we can see
are markedly different in their form. Each provides an existential space within which reality may
be constructed, desire embodied, master signifiers created, discursive subject positions
populated. The organic tends toward rigidity (axioms, strata, territorialization, stasis,
homeostasis, totalizing, reactive forces), the crystalline to continuous change (far-from-
equilibrium conditions, singularities, dissipative structures, dynamic master signifiers, local
effects, active forces). We also indicated how a seventh form of a movement image, the hobbsrouss-sign, acts as a master
signifier having ubiquitous effects in the criminal justice system. Consider, then , how the two regimes of signs offer
operatives within a criminal justice system different ways to construct realities. 5. Crystalline regime:
social (transformative) justice We now turn to the notion of social justice, or transformative justice that
has affinities with the crystalline regime. Here we are concerned with alternative images of thought that wait to be
released within molar and molecular organizations of desire. We take as a given that desire has been organized
around lack, as Lacan quite accurately shows, but that it is also intimately connected with capital
logic as Deleuze and Guattari have argued in Anti-Oedipus and in A Thousand Plateaus. The
predominance of the values of diversity and tolerance can be better understood within the
Deleuzian framework of the crystalline regime where the time-image is ubiquitous. But how would
transformative justice appear? How would the regime of signs that are its constitutive parts develop? What would they look like?
Can we provide an indication of their possible development? Let us see if we can develop some initial approximations .
We begin
with decoupling the notion of justice from law . Derrida57 has argued that justice is much like a gift, it is
immeasurable; whereas law is like economics, subject to rationality and precise calculation. Law
may include justice, but it can never be congruent with it. So we proceed with the assumption that only
approximations of justice may appear in law. We also proceed with the assumption that formal rationality is a totalizing
discourse, which does not make much room for thinking otherwise, or for more sensitive and
holistic responses to harm. Deleuze’s study of cinema has applicability here. We want to make use of some of the
concepts he develops from the crystalline regime in indicating directions for a transformative justice, a justice which
moves back and forth from the micro to the macro, from the molecular to the molar, from
paranoiac libidinal investments of desire to the schizophrenic libidinal investments (schizophrenic as a
process not the end state, as in a clinical entity). We want to follow with Deleuze’s conceptualization of regimes of signs; how, that
is, new forms may emerge offering not only a diverse series of discursive subject positions hence
promoting differences, but also expressive forms (signifiers) and content (signified) with which,
through which, and by which a subject may be constituted in a more holistic fashion. We want to
separate desire from its connection to lack and instead situate it in a Nietzschean/Deleuzian frame in which it knows only
production, connection, development, ever more diversity. We want to develop a form of
transformative justice by which molar statistical aggregates are constantly infused with
subversive forms whereby they continuously deterritorialize and reterritorialize, where lines of
flight are released by which creative evolution may progress. Simultaneously, we want to be sensitive to
molecular libidinal developments that are both constitutive and constituting of molar aggregates, but being ever vigilant to forms
We want to move away from categorical descriptions (race, gender, class, defined
that are socially harmful.58
personalities) in releasing rhizomatic development, a becoming not a being. As Deleuze and Guattari59
advocate: the task of schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions liberating the prepersonal
mobilizing the flows they would be capable of transmitting,
singularities they enclose and repress;
receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply the schizzes and the
breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the desiring-machines that countersect
everyone and group everyone with others. This is the challenge for the coming revolutionaries who advocate
transformative justice. In incipient form we have elements of this in the early works by Quaker Ruth Morris,60 Sullivan and Tifft,61
and Ness and Strong62 on restorative justice. Unfortunately, theirs is more in line with the organic regime and with some further
analysis, can be shown to be buttressed by desire as lack. Morris63 has argued for a ‘‘transformative justice [that] includes victims,
offenders, their families, and their communities, and invites them to use the past to dream and create a better future.’’ Ness and
Strong’s64 brief forays into transformative justice rather than restorative justice would focus simultaneously on persons,
 ‘‘just as individuals must accept responsibility for their acts,
perspectives, and community. In their words,65
so societies must assume some responsibility for the inequalities that plague them .... – to
discern imbalances in equities, or disparities that result in less justice for some, and to seek
remediation and even transformation of those structures.’’ Sullivan and Tifft66 note that restorative justice is
too narrow, and that it should be extended ‘‘to take into account the ‘transformative’, economic, and structural dimensions of
justice; that is, the
social-structural conditions that constrain our lives and affect the extent to which
any one of us can live restorative lives. ’’ Their call is for a needs-based justice that is holistic in approach. Again, for
Ness and Strong, as well as to Sullivan and Tifft to a lesser of a degree, the organic regime still underlies the respective models, and
desire as lack can be shown to be its understructure. We need to have a new vision at the molecular and the
molar levels. In this direction we67 have identified a ‘‘radical accusatory’’ and a ‘‘reformist remedial’’ model that focus
simultaneously at the micro and macro levels, the molecular and molar levels. The former argues for doing away with current forms
of capitalist society completely; the latter, for a superliberalism in line with the initiative of Roberto Unger’s work.68 In either case,
what is being advocated is a constitutive approach; the molar and molecular are co-productive levels . We
recognize this in law by such studies as those by Ewick and Silbey’s The Common Place of Law69 where they indicate ‘‘legality’’
is not merely top down, but is ongoingly produced by everyday discourse and action. A similar
argument was made much earlier in David Matza’s Delinquency and Drift70 where they argue the very rationalizations
that are prevalent in juveniles’ regimes of signs allowing victimization without guilt, are
‘‘borrowed’’ from traditional defenses found in law. Schwendinger and Schwendinger71 also develop the micro–
macro connection in indicating that an ‘‘instrumental rhetoric’’ developed in juveniles’ regimes of signs
which objectify the other as allowable victims (I-it objectifications), arise in certain political
economies. Two examples may be provided that incorporate elements of a transformative
justice. We shall also indicate how the crystalline regime is an appropriate modeling of this initiative. Schehr’s72 and Arrigo et
al’s73 examination of victim offender mediation programs suggested that an additional component,
critical literacy, could be incorporated to these mediation efforts , much in line with the dialogical approach
of Paulo Freire,74 in empowering the disputants, while simultaneously providing the space within
which repressive structures could be made visible . This process of ‘‘conscientization’’ could lead to
fundamentally altered master signifiers and new discursive subject positions which are
constitutive of more humanistic regimes of signs.75 A second example can be provided at the more ‘‘meso’’
level, one lying between a micro and macro level. Christine Parker76 was interested in applying a restorative
justice model to the corporate world. She, however, does suggest elements by which a new
regime of signs and deterritorialization may take place. Her77 definition of justice is: ‘‘those
arrangements by which people can (successfully) make claims against individuals and
institutions in order to advance shared ideals of social and political life.’’ To this end, she first
recognizes the ubiquitous nature of conflict in organizational contexts (workplaces, schools, governmental
organizations, families, etc.), much of which is characterized by power differentials . Her proposal is for ‘‘access
to justice plans.’’ This incorporates, firstly, being sensitive to those directly affected by organizational
actions and being receptive to their contribution to a list of injustices most commonly appearing ;
secondly, establishing restorative justice programs informed by these injustices ; and thirdly, establish
mechanisms that assure access to these institutions. For the latter, she suggests some external monitoring
mechanism. Organizations can be judged in terms of reduction of domination and an increase in
justice. Where an organization continuously falls short of providing justice a closer scrutiny by external monitors would be
triggered. In both our examples, we have a ground up form of development. Neither has a specific end
point beyond more justice. There is not a primarily deductive form of justice rendering; rather,
discourse will emerge from bottom up, an alternative regime of signs will have room to
develop. Said differently, a constantly new core of master signifiers could emerge from alternative
practices, the one at the more micro level, the other at the more meso level. Deleuze and Guattari’s
theory of the emergence of these signifiers has been creatively developed and applied by Murray78 to the emergence of new legal
signifiers and signifieds. Given alternative practices, suggestive is that alternative abstract machines will evolve
which provide form to desire. Drawing from dynamic systems theory, intensive processes culminate in self-organization;
that is, particular strata and particular regimes of signs attain only contingent stability. The notion of
‘‘refrain’’79 captures this developmental process. For Murray,80 ‘‘nome law’’ captures the notion of emerging qualities
of new constellations of signifiers within the legal sphere. It is a reconnectedness of various lines
of flight; a new diagram marked by far-from-equilibrium conditions within which intensive
processes produce novel assemblages. Suggested by Murray is that the emerging abstract machine
engenders symmetry breaking, and out of these processes various new lines of flight emerge ,
some self-organizing into strata, some remaining dormant, but with a small perturbation, having the ability to transform
into more symmetry breaking. The refrain, in short becomes the singularity from which new dynamic
master signifiers emerge becoming the basis for novel thought. Said in another way, emerging
images of thought begin to transform old static signified (organic regimes) into more holistic
and interconnected imageries (crystalline regimes). To return to our introductory paragraph of this article,
what operatives within traditional criminal justice institutions begin to do is immerse themselves
within an alternative milieu marked by far-from-equilibrium conditions, where more
comprehensive understandings of harm and how to respond to it begin to emerge. We cannot
in advance draw the blueprint for the emerging forms; we can, however, theorize an
alternative direction that semiotic production may take. We are at one with Unger’s81 criticism
of formal rationalization extending world-wide. As he82 tells us, the cost of our search for immanent
order... [is] the immunization of the basic institutions of society, defined in law, against
effective criticism, challenge, and revision. By embracing forms of thought, discourse, and
practice – such as rationalizing legal analysis – that contribute to this immunization , we frustrate
our interests, betray our ideals, and belittle our hopes. His call, and ours, is for a pragmatic approach in law, one
with a high premium on practical experimentalism (‘‘democratic experimentalism’’). As he83 concludes, ‘‘It is true that we cannot be
a
visionaries until we become realists. It is also true that to become realists we must make ourselves into visionaries.’’ In short,
social justice model rather than a criminal justice model – that is, one better connected with the
logic of the crystalline regime of signs – can provide a direction for a better and more
comprehensive understanding of problems in living and lead to more genuine restorative
responses.

A rhizomatic understanding of criminality and justice is key for fostering new

relationships towards knowledge and development. Emphasizing the becoming
and embracement of difference helps to increase social accountability and
break linear conceptions of progress adopted by modern-day policy makers.
Phillips 17 (Jake Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Sheffield Hallam University,
“Towards a Rhizomatic Understanding of the Desistance Journey” in The Howard Journal of
Crime and Justice, January 31 2017,  https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1111/hojo.12193

The Rhizome The journey metaphor has proved useful in terms of enabling policy makers and
practitioners to conceptualise desistance‐based practice. Metaphors can, and do, have purchase when it comes
to explicating complex ideas. However, one can argue that the journey metaphor does not do justice to the
complexity of desistance itself and needs recasting. A rhizomatic form of the desistance journey
offers one possibility of doing so, and in the following section I capture some of the ways in which Deleuze and
Guattari's work provides us with a set of analytic tools with which to think about desistance and refine the desistance journey
metaphor. Deleuze and Guattari (2013) advocate the use of the rhizome to philosophise the non‐linear
nature of time, development of knowledge and behaviour. A rhizome is ‘an elongated, usually
horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its
length’ (rhizome, n. 2010). Examples of rhizomes include: root ginger, potatoes and other tubers, and Japanese Knotweed .
Deleuze and Guattari (2013) offer six principles of the rhizome to critique modern thought: (i)
and (ii) connection and heterogeneity; (iii) multiplicity; (iv) asignifying rupture; and (v) and (vi)
cartography and decalcomania (pp.5–13) . Their work offers a framework with which to rethink
the way in which people grow. Within their work we can identify four features of the rhizomatic concept that can be
useful when considering the process of desistance. First, that growth is an endless process; second, that it is a
process which occurs along several paths at any one time ; third, that the process of growth is also
a process of metamorphosis; and fourth, the idea of the desister as the nomad . In the following recasting
of the desistance journey, I argue that if we are to understand the desistance process as a journey, then we should consider it a
journey of growth which comprises a multitude of pathways, turning points, dead ends and relays. These concepts work together to
convey a more complex version of the metaphor for the desistance process. The Endless Journey I argued above that one
problem with the journey metaphor as currently used is that it is difficult to identify the end
point of a desistance journey. This is problematic because it means that we, and desisters, do not necessarily
know when ‘success’ has been achieved. Indeed, success in the field of desistance is notoriously difficult to define,
partly because of its subjective nature. This has presented problems for policy makers seeking to capture
and evaluate the work done by agencies such as probation or prisons and has been a key
critique of practice over recent years (see, for example, Farrall 2002; King 2015). Indeed, as Farrington (2007, p.129)
highlights, there are many factors that need to be considered for someone to be identified as a ‘true desister’. A rhizomatic
approach allows us to foster this ambiguity because it is less teleological . It allows us to see that,
perhaps, we should not be too concerned about the end point but, instead , to acknowledge that
people are always changing, growing, and developing, regardless of whether they are desisters or not. Thus,
the idea that the rhizome ‘has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ might
allow practitioners to become less focused on achieving a particular goal, or aim. We can learn from
the way in which rhizomatic theory has been operationalised in the field of education to help us here. Rather than seeing learning as
a journey with an end (for example, successful achievement in exams or other assessment) rhizomatic learning sees
learning as an open‐ended process which is always being built upon: The rhizome models the
unlimited potential for knowledge construction, because it has no fixed points … and no
particular organization. (Driscoll 2004, p.389) Rhizomatic learning takes place within a social context – the growth of the
rhizome is unpredictable and can go wherever, but it cannot go beyond its context. Thus rhizomatic desistance would
consider both the individual, who grows into society through , for example, the process of
generativity or redemption, but also attempts to understand the networks and relationships
which feed into, and underpin, the process of desistance. To argue otherwise would belie the social context in
which desistance occurs (McCulloch 2005). This relates closely to the way in which desistance is conceptualised whereby
relationships and networks are valued over and above time and chronology: ‘we emphasize the quality, strength and
interdependence of social ties more than the occurrence or timing of discrete life events’ (Sampson and Laub 1993, p.21).
Multiplicitous Paths The notion of a zigzag journey has introduced some nuance into the journey metaphor but it still conveys the
The
desistance process as one singular line, which drifts from the positive, or desistant, to the negative, or persistent.
rhizomatic approach allows us to see both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ developments that occur in
people's lives simultaneously. For example, it is reasonable to assume that a desister may, simultaneously, continue
offending while, at the same time, embark on a relationship which, in turn, provides an impetus for a reduction in offending at an, as
yet undefined, point in the future. Indeed, Weaver found just this in her study of the importance of social relations in desistance as
highlighted above. Similarly, we can identify both negative and positive implications of developments
which are traditionally seen as inherently positive. Employment is acknowledged to be an important turning point
in a desister's life (Laub and Sampson 2001) but to suggest that it is wholly beneficial masks some of the problems of finding and
it fails to acknowledge that, for example, job insecurity and work
holding down a job. Moreover,
intensification are associated with poor general health and tense family relationships (Burchell et
al . 1999). As many of the jobs which offenders find are likely to be at the lower end of the salary scale, lack security and be informal
(Katungi, Neal and Barbour 2006), these issues are likely to present greater barriers than for non‐offending members of the
community. Thus, finding a job can lead people down more than one path (or, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, lines of flight) –
one path which is supportive of desistance (through increased human and social capital) and
another which might inhibit or frustrate desistance (through increased levels of anxiety). As Farrall (2002, p.42)
argues, ‘complex social processes have multiple causes’, and the image of the unidirectional
desistance journey fails to capture this. This can be applied to both the onset of offending as well as desistance from
it, yet the unidirectional desistance journey metaphor does not encapsulate this multiplicitous
nature of desistance. Rhizomatic thought asks us to think about , and allows us to visualise, the
multiple paths along which people travel simultaneously. Metamorphosis Another commonly‐used
metaphor in the field of desistance is that of ‘knifing off’. Although the metaphor of ‘knifing off’ is useful in terms of how desisters
might separate from a previous offending identity, much research suggests that the ‘ underlying
process [of desistance]
involves continuous change’ rather than the discontinuous change implied by ‘knifing off’
(Farrington 2007, p.124). Maruna and Roy (2007) have critiqued and clarified the metaphor's use. It is argued that through its
imagery of amputation, ‘knifing off’ leads readers to expect the removal of ‘the more extreme structural and social impediments’ to
desistance (Maruna and Roy 2007, p.120) when, in actuality, ‘knifing off’ tends to be more endogenous than exogenous. Moreover,
it might not be wholly appropriate, desirable, or possible, to totally leave one's identity behind . A
rhizome encapsulates this image and complicates the notion of ‘knifing off’, reflecting Maruna and Roy's (2007) finding that ‘almost
all of the individuals in our research eventually found a way to work with the past rather than knife it off or deny it altogether’
(p.117). Certain events in one's life allows one to rewrite one's identity and Deleuze and
Guattari's work allows us to capture this. They use the term ‘lines of flight’ to denote the
shoots which grow from a rhizome and they highlight the fact that a rhizome can grow in any
direction. Importantly, a line of flight may carry on growing, or it may get stopped (for example, if it hits the side of the plant
pot). If the shoot gets stopped, the rhizome will carry on growing, from the milieu , in a different
direction but the stopped shoot remains and serves to remind us that the plant attempted to go
in a direction but stopped (for whatever reason). Thus, such shoots, or lines of flight, serve to demonstrate that the
plant has changed, irrevocably, through that attempt to grow in a particular direction . For every
failed or successful attempt to grow in a particular direction, the plant undergoes a process of metamorphosis –
of continuous change. What is more, a successful shoot (one that does not get stopped) will produce more shoots, while the
stopped shoot will slowly shrink in terms of its relative size to the plant as a whole. Thus: failing parts in a person's history are
contracted while the reinterpreted, reconstructed parts are expanded to create a more congruent life story dialogue between the
future‐oriented present new ‘I’ and the past ‘thou’. (Rotenburg (1987) as cited in Maruna and Roy (2007, p.118)) Thinking about the
way in which lines of flight might get stopped, or might turn back, or proceed into a new space, means that such experiences are not
forgotten because a rhizome will always grow from the middle. Such an understanding of the process of ‘knifing off’
is more easily illustrated through the rhizome because the process of rewriting one's past is there to see via the changed shaped of
the rhizome after a line of flight which either stops, or returns to the milieu : It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle
(milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills … . When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes
nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, p.22) People
(or things) travel down lines of
flight when they grow. In doing so, they ‘de‐territorialise’. The process of de‐territorialisation is
a process of coding, decoding and recoding in much the same way that desisters rewrite their
histories, redeem and condemn themselves (Maruna 2001). Desisters travel down lines of flight in
order to reterritorialise their identity and their difference: the extreme lines of flight Miranda seeks to
become relevant are reterritorialized but also position her as someone new. Among some in her peer networks, and at some times,
this is a precarious and unstable positioning, as
her violent acts function to make her worthy of allegiance. Yet,
others position her as abject and monstrous, with potential psychiatric diagnoses threatening to
adhere to her a stable position as ‘sick’ … Simultaneously, these interactions create multiple new becomings for
Miranda, including that which she seeks – becoming relevant, and the unexpected – becoming pathological. (Henriksen and Miller
2012, p.454) Thus, travelling down lines of flight with a view to de‐territorialisation becomes a generative exercise. In the example
above, Miranda's line of flight has both negative and positive consequences. Nugent and Schinkel (2016) demonstrate that
desistance can be both positive and negative, sometimes simultaneously. We can see this as a process of metamorphosis – whether
lines of flight are often broken … Rhizo‐
an offender travels down a positive or negative line of flight, it changes them:
analysis allows us to see violent conflicts as multi‐linear, multi‐causal, and involving multiple
becomings, thereby complicating linear, causal and chronological explanations and
representations of violence. (Henriksen and Miller 2012, p.455) Henriksen and Miller (2012) further argue that ‘Such an
approach pushes us to avoid conceptualizing physical violence in terms of fixed positions such
as “victim” and “perpetrator”; a binary which often imbues some with agency while denying it
to others (p.455). Such a rhizo‐analysis can also be applied to desistance. Rather than desistance being metaphorised as a zigzag
journey, those instances of lapse, for example, can be seen as broken lines of flight, in which the process of enactment
changes people. Rhizomes can grow in many directions at once; people can grow in different
directions at once. The unidirectional image of the desistance journey does not allow for this because desistance
involves multiple becomings.

The move towards entropy and disorder helps visualize criminal justice through
a holistic lens that breaks free from capitalist theory of productivity and
change. You should orient yourselves towards the journey, and not the
endpoint, of politics. Obscuring the steps taken towards change re-entrenches
the status quo model of criminalization and rationality.
Phillips 17 (Jake Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Sheffield Hallam University,
“Towards a Rhizomatic Understanding of the Desistance Journey” in The Howard Journal of
Crime and Justice, January 31 2017,  https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1111/hojo.12193)
*edited for gendered language
Desister as Nomad But we are not just interested in the points in a person's life and the way in which they affect behaviour, beliefs,
relationships and the myriad other things that are correlated with desistance. Rather , desistance theories foster
understanding of the importance of the way in which desisters go between those points . Healy
(2010) has described desisters as being in a liminal space – somewhere between an offender and
non‐offender. Rhizomatic theory helps us to visualise this particular notion through the
concept of the nomad: The nomad has a territory ; (they) follows customary paths; (they) goes
from one point to another; (they) is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points,
etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points
determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine , the reverse
happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists
only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in‐between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an
autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. (Deleuze and Guiattari 2013, p.443) Deleuze and
Guattari ask us to think about what happens between the turning points which have, thus far, been seen to be critical to ‘successful
what happens after a desister leaves a relay behind – it is this kind of narrative
desistance’. But
which contributes to our understanding of desistance . Desistance is more than correlations; it is, as
desistance theorists have argued, a process. Indeed, much of the research on desistance is underpinned by
narrative methods, yet analyses often focus not so much on the gradual evolution of shifting narratives as on turning points and
abrupt transitions: To move from, say, unemployment to crime, or deprivation to crime, you need narratives; correlation alone
cannot assure causality, it is only the narratives which link factors to outcomes that can do this. (Young 2004, p.23) A
rhizomatic
approach requires that we take those narratives, the multiple journeys between the factors, or
points, seriously. It is only then that we have an adequate metaphor for desistance. To apply this more specifically to
desistance research we should be less interested in whether people have a job , a house, or a spouse
(the relays), and more interested in the multiple paths that they might take to get there and
the ramifications thereof. Weaver (2015) does this to considerable effect in her work which focuses on the importance of
social relations and how such objective and subjective relations enable, or inhibit, the progression of desisters along certain lines of
flight. ConclusionDeleuze and Guattari's work encourages us to recast the desistance journey in
rhizomatic terms: to think about desistance as a non‐linear and non‐ending process and
acknowledge that any change that happens in a person's life contributes to their change; their
metamorphosis from offender to non‐offender. Rhizomes highlight the multiple paths along which people travel at
any one time, acknowledging the fact that desisters might be making ‘progress’ in one element of their life
whilst heading towards entropy in another. Rhizomes encourage us to see the whole person ,
their whole circumstances, the paths they have trodden, and the relays they have traversed.
Rather than seeing people at a singular point in their life, rhizomes remind us that we are dealing with people
in a holistic sense. Finally, rhizomes remind us that we are dealing with individuals, with people who grow at different rates
and in different ways. The rhizome holds the potential to break free from the linear way in which
desistance is portrayed and (re)enacted through policy and criminal justice practices and
discourses. For all the nuances and the caveats inserted into research on the models and pathways of desistance, the chaotic
nature of desistance is often ‘tidied up’ in the process of its depiction as a journey. The rhizome offers a more useful means with
it offers a way of translating this complex
which to represent and understand the process of desistance. Moreover,
field of academic research into a model which can be more easily utilised by policy makers and
practitioners and which also avoids the simplification and obfuscation of the metaphors
currently in use.1
 Rights Alternatives
Immanent to Social Relations and Community Practices

Rights do not need to be enshrined by legal institutions. Rather, they can be

created through jurisprudence and understood as immanent to the social
relations and practices of communities.
Patton 12 (Paul, professor of philosophy at the university of new south wales, “Immanence,
Transcendence, and the Creation of Rights,” in Deleuze and Law, Edinburgh University Press)

A system of law does many things, but among its fundamental functions is the protection of
the rights of citizens, by providing legal remedies for their infringement. It is clear that Deleuze
recognises that we live in constitutional states in which our rights are, by and large, protected
by law. Within such states, the very concept of a right implies that certain kinds of action on
the part of citizens will be protected from interference by the state or by other citizens.
Conversely, so long as we are talking about effective rights and not simply the mere assertion
of a moral principle, the existence of rights implies the enforcement of limits to the degree to
which the state or citizens can interfere with the actions of others. While there are
philosophers and jurists who believe that the only rights are those enshrined in positive law, there
is no reason to restrict the concept of a right to this degree. Non-state territorial socie- ties also
have rights and even in societies governed by law it is common to criticise laws and other
institutions for not recognising rights, or for recognising rights that they should not. The fact
that there are cases in which we would agree that the rights of individuals or groups have not
been respected, even though they were treated in accordance with the law, is taken to imply that
rights exist independently of their institutional expression. In this way, the criticism of laws and
constitutions for their denial of civil rights to minority groups is taken as evidence that these
rights exist in some sense outside of or apart from their legal enactment. 4 This implies that
there is a difference between the rights that are protected and the laws by means of which they are
protected. It follows that a more general concept of rights will be one that does not differentiate
between legal, political or customary rights. So considered, rights may be defined as ‘established
ways of acting or established ways of being acted toward, ways of being treated’ (Martin 1993:
41). There is more to be said about what is meant by saying that a particular way of acting is
‘established’, but the important point here is that this definition gives us a concept of rights as
immanent to the social relations and prac- tices of a given community. It does not rely on any
transcendent concep- tion of human nature or of the moral ground of rights. All forms of right
will involve some kind of protection of certain ways of behaving, but the different institutional
expressions of rights are all downstream from this definition. Different kinds of right, whether
customary, political or legal, will protect different behaviours or call for different institutional
provisions to ensure the rights of individuals.

The context of Deleuze’s definition of jurisprudence in conversation with Negri makes it clear
that he understands the relation between law and rights in this manner. What interests him, he
points out, is not the law or laws (ni la loi ni les lois), nor is it right or rights (le droit ou les
droits): ‘C’est la jurisprudence qui est vraiment créatrice de droit’ (Deleuze 1990: 230; 1995:
169). Deleuze is not a legal positivist and his thesis that jurisprudence creates droit can be taken
to mean, certainly that it involves the creation of law but, more profoundly, that it also involves
the creation of the right or rights that are expressed by law. The example that Deleuze goes on
to invoke supports this reading. He refers to the project of establishing law/right in relation to
modern biology, where this implies the rights of individuals in relation to the new tech- nologies
made possible by modern biology. The new situations to which modern biology gives rise, the
new events that it makes possible, are all matters for jurisprudence. Moreover, Deleuze suggests,
these matters ought not be left to ethics committees or to judges but should involve those directly
concerned: ‘it is jurisprudence that truly creates law/right: this should not be left to judges’
(Deleuze 1990: 230; 1995: 169). So we might suppose, for example, that decisions about rights of
access to genetic material should involve the users of fertility treatments, or deci- sions about
access to genetic information should involve the users of genetic screening techniques. At this
point, he comments, we move from law to politics.

In effect, for Deleuze, jurisprudence was always a matter of politics, in the broad sense in
which he understood the term, and not merely confined to the legal institution. Jurisprudence
involves the creation of new laws but also the creation of the rights that are expressed in
these laws. In his 1988 conversation with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald, he identified
jurisprudence as the field or process through which peoples organised into constitutional states
(états de droit) enter into becomings. In the case of peoples governed by means of such states ‘it
is not established and codified rights that count, but everything that currently creates problems for
the law and that threatens to call what is established into question’ (Deleuze 1990: 209; 1995:
153, translation modified). Whether we consider the Civil or the Penal code, Deleuze suggests,
there is no shortage of such problems confronting the law. In this context, where he is clearly
referring to rights codified in law, he advances the thesis that ‘It is not codes or declarations that
create law (droit) but jurisprudence. Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law and proceeds by
singularities, by working out from singularities’ (Deleuze 1990: 209–10; 1995: 153, translation
modified).

The suggestion that jurisprudence is the philosophy of law is open to misinterpretation,

particularly in the English-speaking context where a primary sense of ‘jurisprudence’ is that of
philosophical reflection on law and legal concepts. This is not what Deleuze means by
‘philosophy of law’. Rather, he means to suggest that jurisprudence should be under- stood in
relation to law in the way that philosophy, as he understands it, relates to concepts. For
Deleuze, philosophy creates concepts and, as he says here, jurisprudence creates law, where
law must be understood as involving, among other things, a system of rights (Deleuze 1990:
230; 1995: 169). In addition, in so far as jurisprudence is also a matter of politics, it involves
the processes through which new ways of acting or being acted towards become established
(or old ways disestablished).
Nietzschean Rights

Rights do not emanate from some eternal feature of human nature. Rather,
rights are socially recognized guarantees of our power to affect others and be
affected.
Patton 12 (Paul, professor of philosophy at the university of new south wales, “Immanence,
Transcendence, and the Creation of Rights,” in Deleuze and Law, Edinburgh University Press)

Up to this point, I have argued that rights are not reducible to laws and that Deleuze’s conception
of jurisprudence refers to the creation of rights as well as new laws. This raises the question: what
is a right? And what is it to create new rights? Deleuze nowhere offers an answer to these
questions. The challenge is to provide answers that are compat- ible with his opposition to
transcendence and his commitment to imma- nence. Nietzsche and other historically minded
political philosophers show that this is not an impossible task. We must begin by setting aside
the widespread view that rights, in so far as they exist independently of their recognition and
protection in law, can only be moral rights. Many philosophers believe that individuals
possess certain rights by virtue of some rights-bearing feature of human nature, such as
rationality, sen- tience or the capacity to act in pursuit of chosen ends. In concert with a
universalist understanding of morality, this leads to the implausible idea that if a particular
right exists then it has always existed, whether or not it has been recognised. There may be
historical changes in the beliefs that people hold about rights and rights bearers (who qualifies)
but there is no change in what rights there are. According to this view, it makes no sense to say
that new rights have come into existence or that old ones have disappeared. As such, it is a
concept of rights that is clearly incompatible with Deleuze’s concept of jurisprudence.

Nietzsche provides an account of the origins of rights and duties that is more congenial to
Deleuze’s understanding of social relations as mobile relations of power and desire. 5 It also
satisfies the requirement of allowing that rights may exist independently of their embodiment in
law, without being committed to ahistorical or transcendent concep- tions of moral rights. In
Daybreak 112, On the natural history of rights and duties, he defines rights as recognised and
guaranteed degrees of power. My rights, he argues, ‘are that part of my power which others
have not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve’ (Nietzsche 1982: 67). He
goes on to canvass reasons why others might wish me to preserve a part of my power to act,
offering different reasons according to the nature of the power-relation involved. In this passage,
he does not explicitly consider the situation in which reciprocal rights and duties might arise
between parties of approximately equal power. However, he does canvass this situation in
Human, All Too Human 92, where he suggests that the idea of justice arises from a perceived
equality of power between the parties involved.6 Nietzsche’s definition of rights and duties is
cast in the terms of his conception of the parties involved as subjects of power, which means
not only as bodies endowed with certain capacities for action but also as bodies endowed
with a feeling of power that is acutely sensible to changes in the relations of power that
obtain between itself and other such bodies. That is one of the reasons that rights may come
to exist where they did not before, or go out of existence where they had previously existed.

Nietzsche does not consider the situation of modern democratic socie- ties governed by means of
laws, where it is assumed that all citizens are equal before the law and in their capacity to
influence the formulation of new law. In particular, he does not consider the situation of
democratic government where it is assumed that there must be some form of public justification
for the ways in which citizens collectively exercise coercive power over one another. Modern
theorists of constitutional democracy such as Rawls or Habermas do approach basic civil and
political rights in these terms. Such rights define the kinds of action by citizens and the kinds of
action towards others that all would allow for themselves and for their co-citizens. In
Nietzsche’s terms, these would be the ‘degrees of power’ that all citizens would be willing to
leave to themselves and to one another.
Connolly Rights

Rights do not emerge from institutions. They emerge from micropolitical

movements that involve affective changes in intra-subjective relations.
Patton 12 (Paul, professor of philosophy at the university of new south wales, “Immanence,
Transcendence, and the Creation of Rights,” in Deleuze and Law, Edinburgh University Press)

William Connolly’s conception of micropolitics and its relation to the rights of individuals and
groups offers a more comprehensive picture of what is involved in the emergence of new
rights. Connolly views democracy as a unique form of cultural and political practice that ‘enables
participation in collective decisions while enabling contesta- tion of sedimented settlements from
the past’ (Connolly 1995: 103). On this view, a distinctive feature of democratic politics is that
even the most strongly held convictions expressed in its laws and institutions are open to
change. For example, homosexual relations were illegal in many Western countries until the
1970s when cultural and political movements sought to challenge established norms of sexual
behaviour:

A political movement was necessary in this case to place a new right on the register of individual rights.
The evil it remedies was (and is) palpable and painful for a large number of people, but the new right itself
is not simply derivable from a fixed set of principles. It is a political invention, requiring . . . a whole lot of
micropolitical preparation. (Connolly 1999: 140)

Connolly illustrates the micropolitical preparation behind the emer- gence of a new right by
reference to the ‘right to die’. This is a right still in the course of becoming established
throughout many Western democracies that continue to afford institutional protection to Christian
moral beliefs. The strict laws against euthanasia in those countries reflect the fundamentally
Christian belief that suicide or assisted death is morally wrong. Connolly points to the kinds of
experience that might lead citizens to reconsider this particular belief such as watching a loved
family member endure a prolonged and agonising period of suffering in the course of a terminal
illness, reading a novel, seeing a film or hearing reports of such experiences from friends. The
internal conflict that such experiences might initiate between moral beliefs and concern for the
suf- fering of the dying could then be further exacerbated by being exposed to a better
understanding of the complexity of human death or more information about the available
means to ensure that it is relatively pain- less, and so on. Such experiences can lead to changes
in the beliefs, atti- tudes and affective responses of individuals towards active involvement in
one’s own death or the death of others, often as a result of prolonged movement backwards
and forwards between these different ‘registers of subjectivity’. In the course of this process,
Connolly points out, we become aware ‘how judgment occurs on several registers, and how much
more there is to thinking than argument’ (Connolly 1999: 148). Once this kind of intra-
subjective experience has become sufficiently widespread and individuals have begun to share
their newly revised attitudes and beliefs, it may become the basis for the establishment of a
right to die:

If the right to die becomes installed as a fervent demand by a significant constellation, they will work to
encase it in institutional practices such as court decisions, medical practices, legislative enactments, living
wills, family obligations and insurance policies. The political project will now be to devise procedural
protections against the misuse of this institutionally entrenched right rather than to prohibit it to guard a
contestable concep- tion or nature of God from performative assault by those who do not endorse it.
(Connolly 1999: 149)

Connolly provides an entirely immanentist account of the sorts of move- ment in the
sensibilities and beliefs of individuals and populations that are required in order for new
behaviours, or ways of being treated, to become established, first in a range of social attitudes
and practices and then in law. This account follows the general coordinates of Deleuze and
Guattari’s theory of micropolitics.8 These are the kind of subterra- nean political processes that
Deleuze has in mind when he remarks that, in moving beyond judges and moral experts to
consider new rights in relation to modern biology, we move from law to politics. While these are
below the threshold of public political reason and its institutional mechanisms, there is no
privileged site for the emergence of new rights. Sometimes this may begin with changes in the
affective constitution of people and their relations to one another as in the case of homosexual
rights or the right to die. At other times, it may begin with a legal deci- sion that is in advance of
the beliefs and desires of even a majority of the people, but that creates the conditions under
which new beliefs, affects and interpersonal relations become possible. The Australian High
Court’s 1992 decision in favour of Aboriginal or Native title to land was an example of the latter
kind. This judgment created a right which was entirely new in Australian property law and which
attracted violent condemnation from many in a community accustomed to the idea that
Indigenous people had no rights to the land. The creation of rights that is called for by Deleuzian
jurisprudence inevitably involves both micro and macro politics, along with legislative and
judicial decision. However the precise order and relationship between these elements may
vary from one situation to another.
 Topological Analysis of Space
Instead of assuming a neutral ontology of space which might fall prey to the
logic of control, we should understand space as a complex topological notion
produced by intensive differences.

Campbell 2016 (Elaine, Newcastle University, “Policing and its Spatial

Imaginaries,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 8: 71-89)

In contrast to criminologists, human geographers take space very seriously and have `turned’
from absolutist, to relative, to relational understandings of space in an ever-changing and
ongoing quest to capture both theoretically and empirically, the complexities and ambiguities
of spatial life – see Jessop et al (2008: 390-392) for a summary. Relational perspectives are not
homogenous – any more than they are universally welcomed (Elden, 2011) – and neither are
they cut from the same theoretical cloth, with structuration (Swyngedouw, 2004; Brenner, 2005),
dialectical materialist/Lefebvrian (Merrifield, 1993), assemblage (McFarlane, 2011), and actor-
network (Smith, 2003) theories all making an appearance within differently inflected frameworks.
Here, I want to focus on those accounts which are inspired by topological approaches to space
and the non-Euclidian (or post-Euclidian) geometries upon which they rest. This, then, aligns the
discussion with the growing number of relational geographies inspired by Deleuze, DeLanda,
Schatzki, and Latour, amongst others.

Leibniz’s work in non-Euclidean geometry and calculus – Monadology (1714) - is frequently

cited as the originary inspiration for the `topological turn’ in the social sciences, and in human
geography in particular (Allen, 2011a,b; Dainton, 2001; Jones, 2009; Massey, 2005). Others refer
to a mathematical lineage of topological thinking traced through the 19 th century studies of Gauss
(1777-1855), Reimann (1826-1866), Poincaré (1854-1912), and Klein (1849-1925) (Martin and
Secor, 2013; Merzbach and Boyer, 2011). The key point here is not to reconstruct the provenance
of what Allen describes `as a form of qualitative geometry’ (2011b: 316) , so much as explore
what this branch of mathematics has to say on the nature of space and, more importantly, how
topological thinking has informed the development of poststructuralist (relational) notions of
space and spatialities. In their account of the history of mathematics, Merzbach and Boyer define
topology as `the study of (the) intrinsic qualitative aspects of spatial configurations that remain
invariant under continuous one-to-one transformations’ (2011: 553). There are numerous figural
metaphors in circulation which attempt to capture this definition in material form – from the
Möbius strip and the Klein bottle, to coffee cups, doughnuts, handkerchiefs, rubber sheets,
and elastic bands. To explain: if we consider a handkerchief as a neatly ironed, flat surface,
this represents a geometric landscape of fixed corners, clearly defined edges, and measurable
coordinates of proximity and distance; once crumpled in a pocket, this same handkerchief
loses its calculability – corners meet, edges are lost, distance and proximity collapse as cotton
threads, previously arranged in a symmetrical, linear weave, are now traced through the
peaks and troughs, and loose folds of undulating irregularities. Think also of an elastic band
which can be infinitely twisted and stretched, changing its size and shape with each
manipulation; the point here is that no matter how many times it is contorted, its constituent
hydrocarbons `hold together’, and the elastic band retains its integrity as a discrete object.
Handkerchiefs and elastic bands illustrate two key topological ideas: the first allows for the
possibility of thinking of space in non-linear, non- metric terms; and the second encourages us
to recognise that measuring the distances between objects, or calculating their volume and
area, is less important than understanding how things hold together in a singular space. As
Martin and Secor put it:

`Topologists thus treat figures as manifolds – spaces whose coordinates are not extrinsic, as in
a line embedded within a Cartesian grid, but rather intrinsic to the surface itself – and focus
on what aspects of a figure remain constant ...... when the surface is bent, stretched, or
rotated, but not cut or augmented’ (2013: 423).

The recent importation of topological thinking into social science in general, and human
geography in particular, is reflected in the proliferation of special issues dedicated to this
innovative strand of inquiry. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2004, 22[1]),
Dialogues in Human Geography (2011, 1[3]), Theory, Culture and Society (2012, 29[4-5]), and
Space and Culture (2013, 16[2]), have all hosted collected papers which make sense of the world
through topological frameworks, with sociology, philosophy, psychology, computer science,
cultural studies, science and technology studies, human geography, and urban studies all
represented in this scholarship. Moreover, the pre-war work of Lewin (1936) and Lundberg
(1939) suggests that for psychology and sociology (respectively), there is an even longer
trajectory of topologically- inspired analyses. In its post-mathematical iterations, topological
approaches certainly introduce `promising vocabularies’ (Allen, 2011b: 317) which change the
way we talk about space, but this understates how this kind of relational thinking can (re)ignite
our critical imaginations and refocus our analytical attention in innovative and productive
ways. Criminology and policing studies have been slow to take space seriously and have not
yet dipped any conceptual toes into (the now) swirling topological waters; to paraphrase
Massumi (2002: 21), the point is not that criminologists should now become geographers and
mathematicians, but to borrow from these disciplines in order to make a difference in ways
we are unaccustomed to.

With remarkable insight (and foresight) Foucault’s reflections on the relationalities of space,
originally expressed in the 1960s2, prefigure the `topological turn’ in spatial analyses, more
frequently aligned with Deleuzian thought; as Foucault notes:

`The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives,
our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knaws at us, is also, in itself, a
heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could
place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse
shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one
another and absolutely not superimposable on one another’ (Foucault, 1986: 23).

Foucault’s words capture very neatly a way of spatial thinking which recasts territories,
borders, scales and networks as `spatial formations of continuously changing composition,
character and reach .... summoned up as temporary placements of ever moving material and
immanent geographies .... as situated moments’ (Amin, 2004: 34). The notion of relational
space as a meeting point, as `articulated moments in networks of social relations and
understandings’ (Massey, 1994: 154) is not to be confused with a place on the map – it does
not equate to a cartographic reference at a point of linear intersection. Rather, as Thrift
reminds us, `every space is shot through with other spaces’ (2006: 140); spaces are porous so
there are no boundaries; every space is in constant motion – `process is all in that it is all that
there is’ (ibid: 141); and there is no singular kind of space - `(s)pace comes in many guises:
points, planes, parabolas; blots, blurs, blackouts’ (ibid: 141). In Deleuzian terms, space is always-
already `becoming’, it is a multiplicity and is immanent in the folding and hybridisation of
bodies, affects, knowledges and things;3 as Colebrook notes, `(e)ach located observer is the
opening of a fold, a world folded around its contemplations and rhythms. There are as many
spaces or folds as there are styles of perception’ (2005: 190). Delanda talks of spaces as `zones
of intensity’ (2005: 80) which are indivisible but whose differences are productive of change and
transformation in our apprehension of `extensive space’. He explains: `intensive differences are
productive .... wherever one finds an extensive frontier (for example, the skin which defines
the extensive boundary of our bodies) there is always a process driven by intensive
differences which produced such a boundary (for example, the embryological process which
creates our bodies, driven by differences in chemical concentration, among other things’ (ibid:
81: original emphasis). This way of thinking foregrounds space as continually in-the-making,
assembled and disassembled as `an experimental matrix of heterogeneous elements,
techniques and concepts’ (Rabinow, 2003: 56); and it signals an object- centred approach to
analysis which, in line with Latourian actor-network theory, 4 acknowledges agential symmetry
across human/non-human, corporeal/material, natural/artificial, cultural/technological actors and
actants. Topological accounts, then, emphasise multiplicities, movement, foldings,
relationalities, intensities, hybridisation and immanence. Even so, Marston et al caution that
the world is not `simply awash in fluidities’ (2005: 423) and note that generative flows of bodies
and matter (sooner or later) encounter blockages, assemblages and coagulations that `congeal in
space and social life’ (ibid: 423). These authors make use of Deleuze’s (2004) concept of `the
cliché’ to capture emergence, or the opening out of a fold in the midst of force relations which
cluster, constrain, stabilise and normativise practice. Similarly, Jones talks of `phase space’, and
concedes that spatial immanence will inevitably encounter `bounded spaces .... institutionalized
through particular struggles’ (2009: 501); while Chettiparamb (2013) introduces the notion of
`fractal space’ to signify that even given the potential for endless variations, spatial relations may
nonetheless cohere and assemble in repetitive ways. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, `(n)ever
believe that smooth space will suffice to save us’ (1987: 500).

[…]

Topological thinking opens up fruitful ways of engaging with policing spatialities in a way
which not only unsettles criminology’s ontological commitments to territories, borders, scales
and networks, but also re-energises and redirects its critical, political efforts. Yet, in many
ways, the turn to relationality in spatial analysis is not so much a novel departure as a rekindling
of the criminological imagination in respect of space. That is to say, topology reminds us of the
well-established notion that space emerges from the relation between things; and that
continuity and change, repetition and difference are spatially accomplished. In today’s more
spatially ambiguous world, a re- acquaintance with this core premise has the potential to
overcome the limits of topographical thinking which regards forms of policing space – the
police cell, the border patrol, the airport, the city centre, and the red-light district – as pre-
fabricated spatial frames, rather than as sites in which space is twisted, stretched, continuous
and folded, blurring distinctions between inside/outside, proximity/distance and
above/below. Schatzki’s `site ontology’ offers an entry point for topological work, and though
Woodward et al’s exposition of a `site methodology’ is not intended to be prescriptive, it
nonetheless directs us to modes of analysis which remain alert to the immanent, generative
dynamics of the `situated moments’ of policing spatialities. The sites of policing are `dense
event-spaces of pervasive relations in which we find ourselves constantly immersed’ (Woodward
et al, 2010: 278). Such sites may (appear to) be mundane and prosaic – giving directions,
holding a press conference, sending an email; or extraordinary and spectacular – aerial search,
dawn raids, hostage negotiation. In either case, they can be the site of potentially
transformative and disruptive relations, which challenge, subvert or renegotiate the
constantly shifting spatial composition of injustices, discrimination, and conflict, as well as
those of trust, accountability and fairness. Enmeshed in the specific materialities and intensive
interplay of bodies, knowledges, affects and things, policing spaces are continually `in the
making’, reconfiguring in (sometimes) remarkable ways the complex geographies of
(geo)political landscapes.
Answers To
 Cede the Political

Philosophy enables the creation of the concepts that make politics intelligible
and allows the actualization of political concepts to be criticized. This makes
room for the reinvention of political and legal frameworks in a way that is
immanent to a social context. Our critique is a prerequisite to the creation of
new rights and freedoms that serve life.
Patton 12 (Paul, professor of philosophy at the university of new south wales, “Immanence,
Transcendence, and the Creation of Rights,” in Deleuze and Law, Edinburgh University Press)

The task of philosophy, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the creation of concepts or the
modification of old ones that give expression to the abstract machines and pure events on the
plane of immanence. Indeed, because the concepts that philosophy creates are supposed to
express pure events, it follows that philosophy shapes many of the mundane events in terms of
which we understand and respond to the history that unfolds around us. For this reason, and
because the task of philosophy as they conceive of it is to create new concepts, philosophy is an
inherently political activity. Philosophy has provided the concepts in terms of which we
describe political life and its processes: the social con- tract, revolution, republican and
democratic government have all been reinterpreted many times in the course of modern
political history. The social contract has been differently defined by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau
and Rawls. The concept of revolution has pursued ‘its immanent path’ from the English through
the French, American and then Soviet revolu- tions, each with their different ideals and aims
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 100). The concept of democracy contains at its core an idea of the
equality of all who are governed that is only partially or temporarily expressed in the idea of a
well-ordered society governed in accordance with a particular historical conception of justice.

The philosophical expression of pure events in concepts enables the redescription and
evaluation of actual historical processes and states of affairs, an activity which Deleuze and
Guattari call ‘countereffectuation’ and which serves to restore the connection of the actual to
the virtual, thereby loosening the hold that existing ways of thinking about the present have
over our actions and opening up space for the emergence of new ways of thinking and being
(Patton 2010: 58). The critical func- tion of the concept is ensured by the fact that, qua
expression of a pure event, it is never exhausted by its empirical manifestations, but also by
the fact that it relates to the milieu in which it is deployed. Philosophical concepts, they argue,
are always created in response to particular prob- lems. As a result, as Deleuze insists in the
Abécédaire, ‘there are no phil- osophical concepts that do not refer to non-philosophical co-
ordinates’ (Deleuze 1996: ‘D comme Désir’).

Deleuze and Guattari’s own contribution to political philosophy, understood in the narrow sense
of those concepts that relate specifically to the political institutions and structure of modern
societies, has been to propose concepts of open-ended transformative processes, such as
becoming-minoritarian, becoming-revolutionary and becoming-demo- cratic, as well as
concepts of the processes of capture that constrain the actualisation of these transformative
processes in the present, such as the capitalist axiomatic or the ‘control-society’. Thus, while
the philosophi- cal concept of democracy gives expression to a pure event of democra-
tisation that is both incarnated within and betrayed by actually existing democracies, the
concept of becoming-democratic reminds us that this pure event is also expressed in ongoing
efforts to give institutional expression to its core egalitarian ideals, whether in relation to
decision making, social status or the distribution of the material benefits of social cooperation
(Patton 2010: 154–9, 191–3). The difference between the pure event or process of democracy
and its current historical forms allows Deleuze and Guattari both to undertake the criticism of
actually existing democracies and to call for resistance to the present in the name of a
‘becoming-democratic that is not the same as existing forms of constitutional state’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 113).

Deleuze and Guattari do not explicitly consider the concept of right as a philosophical concept of
the same order as revolution or democracy, even though they invoke this concept from time to
time (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 102–4).9 However, there is no reason why they could not regard
the concept of right as a philosophical concept that, like revolution, has pursued its own
immanent path from ancient Greece up to the present. In these terms, another way to construe
Deleuze’s support for jurisprudence and his call for the creation of new rights would be to
propose a concept of ‘becoming-right’ alongside the concepts of ‘becoming-revolutionary’ and
‘becoming-democratic’ that together define the normative orientation of Deleuze’s later
political philosophy (Patton 2010: 154). His and Guattari’s commitment to democracy already
provides reasons to think that they are committed to the exist- ence of the basic civil and political
rights that are, in Habermas’s phrase, ‘co-originally constituted’ with one another and with the
requirements of a modern constitutional democracy (Habermas 1998: 122). Within the political
and legal framework established by such basic rights, it is open to citizens and their various
representatives to forge new rights. Ultimately, this can only refer to the ‘establishment’,
through changes in custom, public opinion and eventually law, of certain ways of behav- ing
and being treated. The preceding discussion of the micropolitics of embracing a right to die
provides one example of the ‘becoming-right’ of certain behaviours in relation to wilfully chosen
death.

Since it does imply the emergence of a majority view in favour of the right concerned, the
concept of becoming-right appears to conflict with Deleuze and Guattari’s principle that ‘all
becoming is a becoming- minoritarian’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 356; 1987: 291). A footnote
to this page in A Thousand Plateaus refers to the paradoxes of collective decision making as
evidence of the difficulty of determining the major- ity view within a given political community.
However, more recent theories of deliberative democracy take these paradoxes to show the
inappropriateness of understanding democratic decision simply as the aggregation of preferences
rather than as objections to the very idea of a majority view. In whatever way the process is
understood, the forma- tion and reformation of majoritarian opinions occurs at all levels of the
political organisation of society, from day to day opinions on matters of public concern to the
relatively settled opinions on fundamental ques- tions of justice and right. The reformation of
such opinions is implied by the idea that deterritorialised assemblages of desires, affect and
opinion become reterritorialised into new more or less settled assemblages that in turn affect
the public political institutions of the society. Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge the
importance of such reterritorialisation when they suggest that lines of flight or molecular
escapes would be pointless if they did not react back on the molar structure of social and
political life to reshuffle its distribution of rights, status and access to social goods (Deleuze
and Guattari 1980: 264; 1987: 216–17).
The concept of becoming-right helps to make sense of Deleuze’s criticism of human rights
alongside his praise of jurisprudence. His remarks make it clear that he is not opposed to rights as
such. His preference for jurisprudence over a transcendent list of human rights implies
opposition to the idea that there exists a definitive set of human rights grounded in some
rights-bearing feature of human nature. He opposes the idea that rights are ahistorical or
acontextual. Just as philosophical concepts must refer to the milieu in which they are
developed or modified, if they are to be politically effective and to realise the political
vocation of philoso- phy, so too must rights refer to the ‘immanent modes of existence’ of the
people concerned. In this sense, rights like concepts are situational or site-specific. The
establishment and protection of particular ways of behaving or being treated is part of the
ongoing struggle to maintain human freedom: ‘To act for freedom, becoming revolutionary, is
to operate in jurisprudence when one turns to the justice system . . . that’s what the invention of
right is ...’ (Deleuze 1996: ‘G comme Gauche’).

Finally, Deleuze’s preference for jurisprudence over declarations of human rights or their
enshrinement in legal codes is a preference for the ongoing and open-ended micro and macro
political processes that lead to the invention of new rights and the modification of existing
laws. Just as philosophy responds to problems by the creation of concepts, so when we
respond to particular situations by legal means we are involved in jurisprudence, meaning the
creative modification of existing legal principles or the invention of new ones to fit particular
cases. That is why Deleuze argues that situations such as the Armenian events he refers to must
be considered as cases to be decided rather than ‘elements of abstract law’. In other words, the
judicial response to such cases must be properly creative and not simply the rote application
of universal human rights. In law as in thought, this case-by-case approach is a means to
introduce movement into abstractions and thereby to approach more closely the conditions of
life: That’s what life is; there are no ‘rights of man,’ only rights of life, and so, life unfolds case by case.
(Deleuze 1996: ‘G comme Gauche’)
Traditional modes of politics must be replaced with joyous
micropolitical problematics.
Eloff 15. Aragorn Eloff, nomad in South Africa, “Children of the New Earth – Deleuze,
Guattari, and Anarchism,” July 31, 2015, http://meme.co.za/?p=152

Instead of programs for political action, let’s produce shared problematics. How do we
describe where we find ourselves? How did we get here? What are the intensive flows and
processes underlying the world as it is presented to us? What diagrams is all this the
effectuation of? Can we, via a practice of vice-diction, create new diagrams? We will
always get the solutions we deserve as a consequence of how we pose and incarnate
these problems.
Organisation is crucial, but let us not forget that for all their differences of instantiation,
any group can lapse into a mode of organisation that repeats the form of the Party and
hardens into a new dogma defined by unquestioning loyalty, ascetism and the crushing
or recuperation of desire turned against itself . We need “new micropolitical and
microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic
and new analytic practices.” This is not about creating agreement, because the more
we disagree “the more we create a field of vitality.”
Again, we should be wary of the subjugated groups and their repressed desires, the
groupuscules and their channelling of libidinal investments into hierarchies, reform
and inertia. What is the viscosity and consistency of our group forms? How do we come
together? What flows between us? What are our fluid dynamics? How quickly do we
congeal or dissipate?
Attentiveness to the new is crucial: the world now is not the world then and we are not
who we were. The new fascism – the Urstaat awakened and given new strength by
capitalism – produces a peace more terrifying than war and if we are not careful then “all
our petty fears will be organized in concert , all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to
make micro-fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle every little thing, every
suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets.” This does not mean that we
cannot, however, also act against our time in favour of a time to come.
Engagements on the level of discourse are important but limited. Control functions just as
much through machinic enslavement of the body – affects, percepts, imaginations,
desires, calories, flows of water and electricity – as it does through the social subjection
that produces, through the signifying systems that increasingly fill every corner of the
world, alienation and ideological hegemonies. The new signifying systems also operate in
a double movement, whereby they open up the flows of information whilst
simultaneously closing down collective enunciative capacity.
Ressentiment – revenge, resentment and reaction – impedes all revolutionary
becoming and will only lead to further oppression , of each other and of ourselves. Do
not trust those who spread ressentiment and call for the settling of accounts; they seek
only slaves as allies and always reproduce what they aim to destroy . “To have ressentiment
or not to have ressentiment – there is no greater difference, beyond psychology, beyond
history, beyond metaphysics. It is the true difference or transcendental typology – the
genealogical and hierarchical difference.”
This is especially true of identity politics. If we remained trapped in a Hegelian spirit
of revenge then our victories will always be written into the world as victories as
slaves. Identity, even intersectional identity, reifies molar categories in its production
of axes of differentiation. Instead of categories that always repeat the Same through
false appeals to identity, analogy, resemblance and opposition, we would do better to
think of our multiple and alway-shifting overlappings as events and encounters, not as
perennial attributes of interpellated subjects. If we’re seeking to hold on to established
identities, then what are we resisting? Our own transformation through association with
other bodies? Our capacity to expand joy? Is it not precisely the blockage of desiring-
production within sedimented identities that has resulted – and continues to result – in
relations of hierarchy and domination? Besides, “the forces of repression need always an
ascribable self and specifiable individuals to apply. When we become a little liquid, when
we evade the ascription of the self ” then perhaps we have a chance . Let us then become
liquid; let us fold and unfold and refold in the practice of what Edouard Glissant calls
‘relation-identity’. This way we can also begin to discover our “rigid segments,” our
“binary and overcoding machines,” and that “we are not simply divided up by binary
machines of class, sex, or age” but that there are “others which we constantly shift [and]
invent without realizing it.” Our true names are not “pure” but instead “bastard, lower,
anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor.”
At the same time, struggle on the level of axioms is not unimportant. The fight for
reforms – for service delivery, for jobs, for recognition, for a voice – can aid in minority
becomings. However, struggles on this level only facilitate such becomings and are not
always necessary. These molar politics are “the index of another coexistent combat,” a
micropolitics. At the very least, we must be done with the hegemony of hegemony. Our
“revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine .” We seek a nomadic
revolutionary science, not a Royal science of teleologies and base-superstructures and
counter-hegemonies and determinations in the last instance. We are multiple,
heterogeneous. There are always an infinity of peoples.
We must commit altrucide and suicide. For as long as we remain trapped in the infinite
demand of the Other, as long as our focus is on trauma, infinite justice, impossible
horizons and melancholia, we are separated from our capacity to act by a reimposed
transcendent dialectics of absolute responsibility. Instead, imbrication in movement,
reciprocal feedback loops, mutual enfoldings of affect and expression, exchange and
becoming-other-together.
There’s no space for activism in the status quo. State based modes of
repression capture all resistance. Our militant research approach is the only
way for politics to become possible again.
Svirsky 10. Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK),
“Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics,” Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 2

As Deleuze and Guattari have explained, this characteristic ‘royal’ science of politics ‘continually
appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science’–those forms of political investigation
looking ‘to understand both the repression it encounters and the interaction ‘ “containing” it’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367–8). One major task of new activist war machines is, then, to
escape entrapment within the black hole of the majoritarian discourse on civil society,
captured and defined by pervasive notions of ‘representative participation’. Although the
‘NGOisation’ of the public sphere since the 1980s (see Yacobi 2007), together with other forms
of political proliferation, have broadened the visible political field, the potential of non-
institutional forms of action has been weakened ideologically by a whole state apparatus
comprised of research centres and budgets, instrumental teaching, and a parliamentary
politics that has incorporated the discourse of civil society – all of which have effected a
sectorisation of society and political life. The epistemological aspirations of the three ‘ideal
circles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367) of the state, economy and civil society are commonly
used to categorise political eruptions as forms of participation in the official, representative
state politics. It is in this light that we must interpret the failure of academia to come to terms
with the division of labour lately being imposed by the transversal relations between
intellectual investigation and political situatedness embodied in militant research. As Deleuze
and Guattari suggest, ‘we know of the problems States have always had with journey-men’s
associations or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies . . . ’ (368).

It is clear that a Jamesonian ‘strategy of containment’ is at work in the narrative tradition of

royal political science. It is in the notion of ‘ representative participation’ that a function of
formal unity or a strategy of containment has been founded, which, as Jameson puts it, ‘ allows
what can be thought to seem internally coherent in its own terms, while repressing the
unthinkable . . . which lies beyond its boundaries’ (Jameson 1981: 38). By tying official politics
together with every form of political participation it can ensnare, what royal political science
does is ‘radically impoverish . . . the data of one narrative line’ – namely, that of the new
activisms–‘by their rewriting according to the paradigm of another narrative...’–namely, that of
representative participatory politics (Jameson 1981: 22). The subversive power of political
potentia is thus contained by this reductive strategy; civil society becomes the main territory of
this imprisonment, assisted by a false equation of official participation with challenging
politics.
They overdetermine what activist politics look like. Their claim that our
argument could be refined to be more overtly political is a smokescreen for
mass conformity that contributes to fascism.
Svirsky 10. Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK),
“Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics,” Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 3

Rather than problematising the political, this royal understanding of activism uses its ‘metric
power’ to axiomatise politics, while simultaneously repressing activist experiences that refuse
simply to align with ‘the given’ of formal politics . An example of this can be seen in the hostility
of western states towards organisations such as ‘Wikileaks’ or the ‘Animal rights movement’,
each of which are immersed in creative acts of citizenship that actualise ruptures. Such new
scenes and acts are constantly at risk of being appropriated by this royal science of politics,
which imposes upon them a model that channels civic participation according to established
rules and concepts. Activisms that seek only to guarantee the workings of representative
democracy are essentially slave activisms; they dwell in safety and their impact and potential is
expected to be absorbed without drawing the system into new structures of resonance.

The assumption that ‘mass participation is the lifeblood of representative democracy’ not only
imposes a particular model of the political, it also reinforces a pejorative way to conceive
activism. By positing representative democracy (or any other regime) as the reified model of
political process, theory necessarily idealises certain forms of involvement over others. For
example, classical participatory theory is often blind to [unable to comprehend] the creative
significance of the activist energies being unfolded in such events as critical teaching in schools,
revolutionary philosophical writing, the deconstructive effect of a critical assemblage that
confronts patriarchal power, or of civic homosexuality which disrupts heterosexism. In fact, the
assumptions underlying ‘representative’ participation are troublesome for at least two reasons.
Firstly, participation in the formal political process of ‘representative democracy’ does not in
itself necessarily implicate a critical attitude or action, seeking a less repressive and more
creative life. To evidence this, it is enough to keep in mind some fearful recent examples of
mass political support for ‘representative’ state violence, as occurred last May when thousands
of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and the streets of Jerusalem to back the killing by the Israeli
Defence Forces of nine activists from the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms
and Humanitarian Relief, as they boarded the Mavi Marmara ship sailing to Gaza as part of a
humanitarian flotilla. Similarly, we might remain mindful of other, no less electrifying, cases of
popular support for wars and genocides in South America, Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, or of
events such as the Holocaust. In these instances, mass participation more accurately falls within
the Reichian analysis of a popular ‘desire for fascism’–which lies worlds away from a
participatory liberalism that idealises the commitment of the public to activist citizenship (see
Isin 2009) and to the tolerant ‘good life’ that western democracy claims to represent. Secondly,
passivity is not necessarily a sign of political anaemia, but may be a cultural expression that
requires local explanation. Here, research at times confuses the visible with the political:
absence of visible mass participation might be a sign of unconscious and pre-conscious
compliance with ongoing forms of oppression, and can impact more energetically on the
perpetuation of a regime than can tangible acts of the body – these modes of active
abandonment produce the reign of daily microfascisms.

After Deleuze and Guattari, political activism may be approached in a fundamentally different
way: without an image, without a form. As Deleuze and Guattari make clear, the interaction
between royal and nomad science produces a ‘constantly shifting borderline’, meaning that
there is always some element that escapes containment by the ‘iron collars’ of representation
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367; see also Deleuze 1994). This occurs when the plane of
consistency is passionately thrown against the plane of organisation, when a nomad element
inserts itself in political struggles in which, for instance, the boundaries of citizenship are
challenged and reopened (as occurred in the struggle associated with the sans-papiers
movement, see Isin 2009), or barriers of ethnic segregation are challenged by new forms of
interculturalism (as occurs with bilingual forms of education). It is through these ‘smallest
deviations’ that smooth types of political activity dwell within the striated forms of state
politics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 371). Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s political
philosophies have created some of the conceptual tools which may be put to innovative use in
activism that seeks to break with repressive traditions. Their alien relation to the standards set
by the royal science of politics (see Patton 2000) – an alienation laid out in the philosophical
resources they draw on, in the issues and concepts that characterise their work and, principally,
in the incessant movement of their thought – points towards a richer philosophical weaponry
with which to confront and possibly overcome political inhibitions, in both knowledge and
practice.
Affective analysis is key in engagement with the political
Protevi 09,- Professor of French Studies and professor of philosophy at Louisiana State
University. (John, “Political Affect: Connecting the Social and Somatic,” pg. 35-36)

The affective response patterns of bodies politic, which are triggered by sensation and play a key
role in on-the-spot political cognition, are conditioned by our moods and personalities, which
are themselves formed by the repetition of episodes of affective cognition. Although cognitive
sense-making constitutes and reproduces bodies politic by the patterns of its action, this action
is itself patterned by virtue of the sociopolitical and historical embeddedness of bodies politic. In
other words, the differential relations of our autonomous reactions and their approving or
disapproving reception by others form patterns of acculturation by which we are gendered and
racialized as well as attuned to gender, race, and other politically relevant categories. Put yet
another way, we make our worlds in making sense of situations, but we do so only on the basis
of the world in which we find ourselves. Thus, in the notion of political affect I stress the
historically and socially embedded aspect of affective cognition. But this embeddedness is not
determinism. There is no gainsaying the singular nature of autonomous systems; an infant is not
a tabula rasa but contributes to the patterning in it is formed. And once formed—or better, at
any one point in the ongoing formation of our personality—there is almost always the potential
for changing affective cognitive patterns, even if this often entails a long and intense
sociocorporeal practice (that is, one involving other bodies politic) in which individuals place
themselves (or are placed) in situations wherein they deal with what is given by their personal
history in and through changing the sociocorporeal relations in which they find themselves.
Bodies politic thus must not be seen as mechanical in the sense of a determinist, behaviorist, or
disciplinary stimulus-response system (even though certain intense training situations might
have this as the limit case to be aimed at), but must be seen in terms of developmentally plastic
and co-constituted patterns, thresholds, and triggers that include the subjective level. In other
words, while some of the responses of systems to their triggers are stereotyped and expected
(and thus “successful” with regard to the aims of a disciplinary program), others are creative and
novel. This means that no disciplinary program, even in closed institutions, can ever be
completely successful. In Foucault’s terms, there is always resistance; in Deleuze and Guattari’s
terms, there is always a line of flight.

We have to understand affect in order to understand politics

Protevi 09,- Professor of French Studies and professor of philosophy at Louisiana State
University. (John, “Political Affect: Connecting the Social and Somatic,” pg. 37-38)

Viewed diachronically (that is, on a relatively slow mid-term/habituation or long-

term/developmental timescale), the patterns of this physiological flow regulation coalesce
through childhood, change at critical points entering and leaving puberty, and often settle down
into stable habits during adulthood. In other words, system patterns gradually crystallize or
actualize as intensive processes disrupt previous patterns; this can be modeled as the
construction of new attractor layouts and is experienced as being out of touch with your new
body (the gawkiness of adolescents). Psychologically, the first-order or personal body politic
engages in affective cognition, making sense of the situations in which its somatic life is lived in
sociopolitical embeddedness. This making sense is profoundly embodied; the body subject
opens a sphere of competence within which things show up as affordances, as opportunities for
engagement, and other people show up as occasions for social interaction, as invitations,
repulsions, or a neutral live and let live. In most synchronic episodes a quite precisely limited
virtual repertoire of affective cognitive response is available (a limitation of all that the body
could do, modeled as a regularly recurring attractor layout) and efficacious (although we can at
any time be overwhelmed by events that seem senseless to us and that scramble our sense-
making codes). Diachronically, however, we can see changes at critical points as intensive
processes disrupt actual sets of habits; this can be modeled as the production of new attractor
layouts and is experienced as psychic turmoil or exciting novelty. During childhood, such
transitions in affective cognition are well mapped by developmental psychologists, while even in
adulthood, traumatic events or flashes of insight can profoundly rearrange our habitual ways of
making sense, that is, rearrange the virtual repertoire, modeled as the production of new
attractor layouts.

Minoritarian becomings reconstitute sociality and give rise to new

constitutional and legal orders
Patton 12
[Paul Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy in the School of History and Philosophy at the
University of New South Wales, “Deleuze’s Political Philosophy,’ Ch. 9 in the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze, 2012, Cambridge University Press]

Micropolitics, formal normativity, and deterritorialization

Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy does not conform to the disciplinary norms of
anglophone normative political philosophy or German Critical Theory. For the most part, the
concepts developed in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus do not directly address the
macropolitical public domain, much less the normative principles on which this should be based.
They consider the different forms of modern government only from the Marxist perspective of
their subordination to the axioms of capitalist production. From this point of view, authoritarian,
socialist, and liberal democratic states are considered equivalent to one another insofar as they
function as models of realization of the global axiomatic of capital . They allow that there are
important differences among the various modern forms of state but provide little discussion of
these differences. They affirm the importance of changes to regimes of public right that come
about through struggles for civil and political rights, for equality of economic condition and
opportunity, as well as for regional and national autonomy. However, they offer no normative
theory of the basis of such rights, nor of the kinds and degrees of equality or regional autonomy
that should prevail ( ATP 470–71). They offer no justification for the establishment of basic civil
and political rights, for the kinds of differential rights that might apply to cultural or national
minorities, or for particular ways of distributing wealth and other goods produced by social
cooperation.
Instead, they focus on the micropolitical sources of political change such as the minoritarian
becomings that provide the affective impetus for political movements. On their view, the
sources of political creativity must always be traced back to shifts in the formations of individual
and group desire that in turn lead to changesin sensibility, allegiance, and belief. To the extent
that such micropolitical movements bring about changes in the majoritarian standards
themselves, along with new forms of right or different status for particular groups, they
effectively bring about what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “new earths and new peoples”
( WP 99, 101). At the same time, the significance of such minoritarian becomings for public
political right depends on their being translated into new forms of right and different statuses
for individuals and groups: “Molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not
return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes,
classes and parties” ( ATP 216– 17). In this manner, even though they offer neither descriptive
nor normative accounts of macropolitical institutions and procedures, Deleuze and Guattari do
provide a supplement to liberaldemocratic conceptions of political order. They invent a language
in which to describe micropolitical movements and infrapolitical processes that give rise to new
forms of constitutional and legal order. They outline a social ontology of assemblages and
processes that bears indirectly on the forms of public right. They invent concepts such as
becoming-minor, nomadism, smooth space, and lines of l ight or deterritorialization that are not
meant as substitutes for existing concepts of freedom, equality, or justice but that are intended
to assist the emergence of another justice, new kinds of equality and freedom, as well as new
kinds of political differentiation and constraint. 15

The forwarding of virtual democracy is a prerequisite to its realization

Patton 12
[Paul Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy in the School of History and Philosophy at the
University of New South Wales, “Deleuze’s Political Philosophy,’ Ch. 9 in the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze, 2012, Cambridge University Press]

What is Philosophy? argues for the inherently political vocation of philosophy. Philosophy is
defined as the creation of concepts where these serve an overtly utopian function: “ We lack
resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new
earth and people that do not yet exist” ( WP 108). In the present, the task of philosophy is
aligned with the struggle against capitalism . Deleuze and Guattari suggest that philosophical
concepts are critical of the present to the extent that they “connect up with what is real here
and now in the struggle against capitalism” ( WP 100). At this point, the outline of a new
concept appears in their political philosophy. What is Philosophy? contrasts the actual
universality of the market with the virtual universality of a global democratic state and describes
philosophy as it is envisaged here as reterritorialized on a new earth and a people to come quite
unlike those found in actually existing democracies. Deleuze and Guattari’s neo-Marxist support
for becoming-revolutionaryas the path towards a new earth and a people to come is combined
with a call for resistance to existing forms of democracy in the name of a “ becoming-democratic
that is not to be confused with present constitutional states” ( WP 113). In contrast to the
formal normativity of their earlier work, the political normativity of Deleuze and Guattari’s later
philosophy is defined by this relation between becoming-revolutionary and becoming-
democratic. On this basis, in full recognition of their differences from liberal normative political
philosophy, it nevertheless becomes possible to compare their later work with that of a
leftliberal political philosopher such as John Rawls . 20

We internal link turns their fw/liberalism good args

Patton 12
[Paul Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy in the School of History and Philosophy at the
University of New South Wales, “Deleuze’s Political Philosophy,’ Ch. 9 in the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze, 2012, Cambridge University Press]

Deleuze’s conception of philosophy is concerned above all to challenge the limits of our present
social world. What is Philosophy? presents a conception of the political vocation of philosophy
with far more radical ambitions than those acknowledged in Rawls’ realistic utopianism. Of the
four functions of political philosophy identified by Rawls, Deleuze’s philosophy does not address
those of resolution, orientation, or reconciliation. It does address the utopian function, although
not by setting out normative principles against which we might evaluate the justice or fairness of
social institutions. The sense in which Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy is utopian must
be understood in terms of the connection between the absolute deterritorialization pursued in
philosophy and the relative deterritorializations at work in its social milieu: “There is always a
way in which absolute deterritorialization takes over from a relative deterritorialization in a
given field” ( WP 88). The utopian vocation of philosophy can be achieved only when the
concepts that it invents engage with existing forms of relative deterritorialization. This
conception of philosophy therefore implies an immanent utopianism in the sense that it does
not simply posit an ideal future but rather aims to connect with processes of relative
deterritorialization that are present in but stifiled by the present milieu, extending these and
taking them to extremes. To the extent that these processes or “lines of flight ” encompass
resistant political forces along with the ideals or opinions that motivate them, this immanent
utopianism cannot avoid drawing on elements of present political normativity to suggest ways in
which the injustice or intolerability of existing institutional forms of social life might be removed .
In this manner, because the concept of democracy ties together a number of the values at the
heart of contemporary political thought, elements of that concept may be used to
counteractualize certain forms of resistance to the present in public political culture. These
elements in turn provide the components of the concept of “becoming-democratic” which
serves the utopian task of political philosophy by probing the limits of democratic processes in
contemporary society.

Deleuze offers no detailed account of “becoming-democratic.” However, it is possible to fill out

the concept with elements of his prior work with Guattari as well as occasional comments in
interviews. For example, in his interview with Negri , he suggests that new rights in relation to
the situations created by modern biology should be proposed by “user-groups” rather than
“supposedly well qualified wise men” ( N 170). In effect, he invokes the principle that decisions
ought to be taken in consultation with those most affected by them. This is one of the
founding principles of modern democratic governance, and Deleuze is not the only theorist to
recommend its extension and application to new contexts. This suggests that the opening-up of
decision-making procedures throughout society might constitute a vector of “becoming-
democratic.”

Minoritarian becomings provide another vector of “becoming democratic.” These are denied as
the variety of ways in which individuals and groups fail to conform to the majoritarian standard (
ATP 105–6). They have given rise to a succession of measures to extend the scope of the
standard and thereby broaden the subject of democracy: first, in purely quantitative terms by
extending the vote to women and other minorities; second, in qualitative terms by changing the
nature of political institutions and procedures to enable these newly enfranchised members to
participate on equal terms. Efforts to change the nature of public institutions in ways that both
acknowledge and accommodate many kinds of difference are ongoing, for example in relation to
sexual preference and physical and mental abilities, as well as cultural and religious
backgrounds. Deleuze and Guattari’s support for minoritarian becomings affirms the importance
of efforts to enlarge the character of the majority. By their nature, processes of minoritarian
becoming will always exceed or escape from the confines of any given majority. Nevertheless,
they embody the potential to transform the affects, beliefs, and political sensibilities of a
population in ways that can lead to the advent of a new people. To the extent that a people is
constituted as a political community, the transformations it undergoes will affect its
conceptions of what is fair and just. In turn, these will affect the distribution of rights and duties
as well as the presence of minority citizens in the public institutions and political functions of the
society.
 Feminism
Solves Essentialism

Becoming-women allows for feminism to break from essentialist feminism to a form

of feminism that instead acknowledges the difference between women while still
allowing political action

Claire Colebrook, 2000, is an Australian cultural theorist, currently appointed Edwin

Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. Deleuze and Feminist
Theory. Edinburgh, Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. April 14, 2000. PDF.
Why Deleuze? Why now? One answer to this problem might appear to lie in Gilles Deleuze’s
affirmation of difference, thus placing him and his work in a far more general resistance to
the Western metaphysical tradition’s commitment to being as self-identical. Perhaps, as the
postmodern attention to language and signification has demonstrated, what something is is
an effect of a dispersed system of relations and differences, with relativity being that which
conditions experience but remains necessarily beyond experience. One should no longer
strive to know or determine being, and in this liberation from some ultimate ground one
abandons all moralism, prescriptivism and hierarchy. The postmodern world is a world
without meta-narratives or authority only because it is also a world without ground. When
Deleuze and Guattari insist that relations are external to the terms related (Deleuze and
Guattari 3), they challenge the common sense assumption that our experienced world and
its order are the direct and immediate outcome of underlying identities or substances. The
general appeal of Deleuze for feminism has, for some time now, resulted from the
identification of Deleuze as a philosopher of difference: as a critic of ultimately determining
substance, as an antidote to the Hegelian interpretation of difference as the mere vehicle for
identity and knowledge, and as an antagonist of all that is Platonic, stable or unified. Both
the excitement and the alarm generated by Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “becoming-woman”
lay in its seemingly post-modern potential. Feminists had long noted that appeals to
essence, nature, being or necessity had done them no favours. As long as “woman” had a
nature, patriarchy could be explained and justified. While postmodernism in general
appeared to offer a liberating anti-foundationalism, where women were no longer tied to
their biology or history, Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on difference and becoming
actually offered “woman” as the key to all becomings (Deleuze and Guattari 275). In this
regard, while reservations were expressed about the appropriation of the feminine for yet
one more liberating theory that had not yet considered the concrete embodiment of
women’s struggles, Deleuze could also be hailed as part of a postmodern pantheon of
difference. Here, Deleuzean “becoming” would free the concept of woman from its humanist
and patriarchal dependency on man, remove all thought of a prescriptive, identity-based or
essentialist feminism, and enable sexual difference to be thought beyond its usual binary
and hierarchical figures. While post-modernism in general is an anti-essentialism, Deleuze’s
becoming-woman has the added benefit of tying the project of fluidity, non-identity,
difference and mobility to that which has always been identified with natural inertia,
biology, timelessness and non-transcendence--the feminine. Woman or the feminine would
be the key to all becomings, then, not because of any essence, but because man or the
human has been constructed as that which establishes the truth of identity and presence.
Woman could be affirmed strategically as that which has always been associated with the
other of man; “becomingwoman” signals that space or imagined other necessary to the
production of the male subject as the truth and order of female matter. Until relatively
recently feminist approaches to Deleuze have therefore been oriented by the problem of
difference’s anti-essentialist force. Early assessments of Deleuze expressed reservations
about the affirmation of difference and non-identity just as women were beginning to form
their own subject positions (Jardine). Deleuze could be placed within a tradition of male
subjectivity that defines itself in opposition to the mere fixity of being. As Rosi Braidotti
noted in Patterns of Dissonance, a celebration of postmodern non-identity can function as
yet one more maneuver in a tradition of modern Cartesianism that defines the subject as
other than any object, as nothing more than the mastery and negation of being-in-itself.
While Braidotti has subsequently turned to Deleuze in an affirmative spirit, she
nevertheless tempers her celebration of becoming and nomadic wandering with the
recognition that some minimal concept of identity or subject position is necessary for
political action. Braidotti herself desists from giving a fully-fledged theoretical answer to the
relation between difference and identity but her recognition of the problem opens the way
for those feminists who have been stringently critical of the affirmation of difference per se.
In opposition to those who have located Deleuze within an affirmative destruction of
essence, identity, being and nature, are those feminists who regard difference as a doxa, as a
definite position, value and decided term within a political arena. The clearest expression of
the political and necessary problems in any unthinking celebration of difference is given in
Rita Felski’s landmark essay “The Doxa of Difference,” where, according to Felski, Deleuzean
feminism is yet one more example of an unreflective celebration of difference. Difference is,
as Felski points out, never difference in itself. Difference is always articulated, defended,
defined and used from socially and politically constituted positions. Felski’s criticism,
although it includes Braidotti’s turn to Deleuze in its sights, actually offers one of the best
opportunities for realizing the feminist potential in Deleuze’s philosophy. If feminists are
going to be different--if sexual difference can delimit and point beyond the Western logos--
then difference needs to be thought differently, and not just affirmed as one more
revolutionary concept. Deleuzean feminists have, over the past decade, recognized the
problem of the social and political meaning of difference and have therefore supplemented
Deleuze’s project with the analysis of the figures and senses of difference that have
inevitably been defined through the image of gender (Lorraine; Olkowski). One should not
just affirm “woman” as the other, as different and beyond the strictures of patriarchy; one
should, following Irigaray, look at the way oppositions between identity and difference have
been defined on the model of the male subject. Only then can becoming-woman be affirmed
as more than the celebration of what is different from man. Only then can difference be
thought not as a value within a field of already defined terms but as what goes beyond the
image of man as a thinking being who recognizes, defines and orders difference-- what
Deleuze refers to as the “image of thought” (Difference and Repetition). It is possible to
criticize Felski for having missed the unique nature of the Deleuzean project. Yes, the
postmodern affirmation of difference is an uncritical celebration of a specific value that
always emerges from some specific political and social condition, but Deleuze’s difference is
not to be conflated with a bland postmodernism. Just as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
have pointed out that global capitalism is enabled and sustained by the simple affirmation
of difference and that only the production of a common humanity can effect the imagination
of a point beyond the exchange, equivalence and ungrounded flow of capital, so one could
turn to Deleuze’s difference as radically other than any postmodern notion of a free flow of
signifiers. But in order to recognize the force of Deleuze’s difference in this sense--as critical
of postmodern capitalism’s flows of signification--one needs to take Felski’s criticism of
difference seriously. If Deleuzean difference is not a refusal of fixed positions and a retreat
from political force just what is it? Here we need to turn to the feminist work on Deleuze
that approaches difference as sexual difference (Grosz), and perhaps we also need to flirt
with the concept of essence, a concept that Deleuze himself was capable of articulating in
ways that were compatible with positive difference. Today, perhaps, the great divide in the
thought of sexual difference lies in the Lacan/Deleuze binary, a binary that, like all other
simple dualisms, organizes a complex field of relations, differences, distinctions and
contraries. On the one hand, following the seductive mobilization of Lacan by Joan Copjec
(1994) and Slavoj Ž ižek, one could see sexual difference as the figure through which being
comes to be. In order to say that anything is at all some difference needs to be marked
between self and other, between presence and absence, and thought must both struggle to
think the “all” of being and recognize an “all” that lies beyond thought. This conflict between
that which must think all, and that which is not-all is parcelled out into the two logics of
male and female subjectivity. Male subjectivity is structured around the abandonment or
negation of an outside, and, concomitantly, the “lure of transcendence” or the idea of an “all”
to be captured by thought (Copjec 2002, 9). Woman stands for that other logic or non-
phallic jouissance, for it recognizes that being is not-all; feminine desire is not oriented to
totality. On the other hand, Deleuze offers a way of thinking sexual difference beyond the
male-female binary, not because of an anti-essentialism, but because of a far more rigorous
essentialism. For if one really thinks, if one encounters what is in its radical singularity as
possessing a power, force and potential--a capacity to relate--that goes beyond constituted
terms, then sexual difference no longer explains the thought (by a subject) of being. Rather,
thinking is sexual difference, the desiring response of life to life. And if life is sexually
different--becoming through creation, encounter, striving and production--then no single
point of creation, such as the difference between male and female bodies, can stand for or
explain life or creation as such. Sexual difference is not, thereby, subsumed beneath a
general notion of difference. For the concept itself is seen as an event of sexual difference, as
one of the ways in which life preserves in its being, enables action and effects relations--
relations that are both the effect of an encounter but that also determine what each point of
relative stability in any encounter is. Thought can only have a world because something
offers itself to be thought, but this neither determines what thinking is, nor does it exhaust
the potential of the world to produce other encounters, beyond those of thought or what we
have taken thought to be. One might have to think different styles of thinking, different
modes of conceptualization, different responses to life on the basis of different bodily
forces. If biologism and essentialism have been placed as pejoratives in postmodern
feminist discourse this is because biology has been seen as a determinism, where social
relations flow from the being of bodies or the essence of individuals. But Deleuze’s
biological life does not have its basis in a plane of substances that then produce relations.
On the contrary, one can--and one should--strive to imagine different worlds where the
essences, singularities and differences of life are not reduced to any single logic or set of
relations, such as the relation between man and woman. In this regard, one could go beyond
the idea that Deleuze offers a future to feminism by giving women a way of thinking essence
as a potential to become, and say that feminism offers Deleuzean philosophy a future. If
difference is to be more than just a single flow or system of relations then one might need to
begin with at least one other sexed subject, one other body whose desire is not that of
subject grasping the being of an object.
Exclusion Turn

Moving past forms of feminist philosophy to forms of poststructuralist critique is

necessary to avoid exclusion and make a space for the female subject

Braidotti 93 Rosi Braidotti, Rosi Braidotti is a Philosopher and Distinguished University

Professor at Utrecht University as well as director of the Centre for the Humanities in
Utrecht, Embodiment, Sexual Difference, and the Nomadic Subject, Hypatia, Volume 8,
Number 1, 1993, pg. 1-3.
In my previous work on contemporary French philosophy (Braidotti 1991), I put forward a
two-pronged argument: while stating my skepticism at the idea of the "crisis" of modernity,
a crisis of the philosophical subject that takes place at the same time as the historical
emergence of women as a political and theoretical force, I argued for the relevance and
usefulness of the poststructuralist critique of the language of metaphysics for feminist
theory. I stressed the point that the poststructuralists are relevant for feminism only partly
because of what they have to say about women (which is very scattered), about the
positivity of desire (Butler 1987), or about sexuality and embodied, sexed identities. Of
much greater relevance is their redefinition of thinking, and especially of the theoretical
process in a manner that Deleuze, for instance, describes alternatively as "non-reactive" or
"nomadic" (Deleuze 1968 and 1973). In other words, what is at stake in poststructuralist
philosophy is an empowering redefinition of the process of thinking itself, which in turn
accompanies the poststructuralists, elaboration of a new vision of subjectivity. French
philosophies of modernity, especially the work of Deleuze, are relevant for feminism
because they stress the need to think differently and to structure our theoretical practice
differently (Braidotti N.d.b). They point more specifically to what I see as a high priority for
contemporary feminist theory: namely, to leave behind the linear mode of intellectual
thinking, the teleologically ordained style of argumentation that most of us were trained in
as philosophers. This style is almost the trademark of philosophy as a discipline of thought,
in Foucault's sense of the term (Foucault 1977). In other words, I see it as essential that
women break free from what Teresa de Lauretis describes in her work on narrativity as
"the Oedipal plot" (de Lauretis 1984) of theoretical work. This Oedipal structure organizes
the meaning of a text as a process of identification of the practitioner-whether male or
female-with the achievement of a subjectivity that, qua active and empowered, is defined as
masculine. Applied to philosophy, this style of thinking means that the thinker is expected
and encouraged to cultivate a spirit of devoted respect for the masters, or the mistresses,
whose work has set the parameters of a canonical tradition of thought, thus encouraging
repetition and dutifulness. I see the institution of philosophy today as a powerdevice that
enforces the sanctimonious sacred- ness of certain texts: the texts of the great philosophical
tradition-all male, all white, all Eurocentric. I think it is time for feminists to get rid of the
"anxiety of influence" l of the masters, to break out of the paralyzing structures of an
academic style that has turned philosophy into a machine of intimidation and exclusion
(Deleuze 1975 and 1977). The position I defend expresses my attempt to avoid the mimetic
repetition of established academic and intellectual conventions based on the "phallo-
logocentric codes" that the poststructuralist generation has contributed to analyzing.
Taking leave from the masters, cultivating the art of disloyalty, or rather that form of
"healthy disrespect" (Chatelet 1973) inaugurated by Nietzsche, I think it important for
women to break away from the patterns of identification that the discipline of philosophy
expects, demands, and imposes on its practitioners, especially women philosophers.
Feminist theory marks the dis-identification of women from the phallo-logocentrism of this
discipline. What worries me politically about some of the attitudes displayed by women in
philosophy is the syndrome of the "dutiful daughter." There is an overriding conservatism
among women philosophers that I cannot share: as if they unquestioningly and implicitly
believed in the role that philosophy should play as a masterdiscourse. As if women were to
preserve the very idea that philo- sophical systems actually matter, that they are all-
important, that philosophy is and should remain a location of power, a masterdiscipline.
This pattern of identification with the powerformations of philosophy that, as a discipline,
implicitly supports masculine structures of thought is everything I want to fight against.
Indeed, I fear mimesis as a mere repetition without difference and, following the insight of
Luce Irigaray, I both long and fight for a strategic sense of mimesis as the making of a
difference through conscious repetition. I want women to dis-identify themselves with the
discipline of philosophy as a male-dominated, Oedipalizing, theoretically hegemonic,
exclusionary discourse of power. The only philosophy I want to practice is that which both
Irigaray and Deleuze defend as a form of creation of new ways of thinking. I am interested
only in systems of thought or conceptual frameworks that can help me think about change,
transformation, living transitions. I want a creative, nonreactive project, emancipated from
the oppressive force of the traditional philosophical approach. For me, feminist philosophy
refers both to a political practice and a discur- sive field marked by a specific set of
methodological and epistemological premises that I would call the theoretical and political
practice of sexual difference. The latter is the claim to material and symbolic recognition on
the part of politically motivated women; the "female feminist subject"2 (de Lauretis 1986)
is a new epistemological and political entity to be defined and affirmed by women in the
confrontation of their multiple differences, of class, race, age, life-style, and sexual
preference (Braidotti 1989).3 Feminist thought is the movement that makes sexual
difference operative, through the strategy of fighting for the social equality of the sexes.
Feminism is the question; the affirmation of sexual difference as positivity is the answer.
Accordingly, I see feminist philosophy today as the activity aimed at articulating the
questions of individual embodied, gendered identity with issues related to political
subjectivity, connecting them both with the problem of knowledge and epis- temological
legitimation (Harding 1991; Code 1991; Haraway 1990).4 In other words, feminist thought
is a practice that aims to locate and situate the grounds for the new female feminist
subjectivity. In stating this sort of agenda, I mean to pursue one of the central aims of
feminist poststructuralism: namely, the pursuit of a metatheoretical approach. In other
words, I do think that at this particular moment of feminist theory, it is urgent to think
about the nature and the status of thinking in general and also of the specific activity known
as "high theory," of which philosophy is an eminent example. Some feminist theorists like
Jane Flax and Julia Kristeva see this metadiscursive move as inevitable because historically
necessary (Flax 1990; Kristeva 1988). By my assessment of contemporary feminist thought,
one of the central issues at stake in the theories of subjectivity is how to reconcile
historicity, and therefore agency, with the political will to change, which entails the (uncon-
scious) desire for change. This qualitative distinction between will and desire implies a
vision of the subject as split and multiple. As such, it is for Jean- Francois Lyotard the
distinguishing feature of the postmodern condition (Lyotard 1979), in that it precludes the
possibility of a return to the classical definition of the subject as coinciding with his/her
consciousness. In laying down the foundations of a new kind of subjectivity, feminists are
therefore caught in the postmodern predicament of having to recombine different registers
of experience. The most difficult task is how to put together the will to change with the
desire for the new, which, as Deleuze teaches us, implies the construction of new desiring
subjects. This kind of politics of subjectivity implies also the problematization of the
question of identity.

Redetermining the female subject position must start outside of current

forms of theory and we must account for the differences inside of the
female subject position
Braidotti 93 Rosi Braidotti, Rosi Braidotti is a Philosopher and Distinguished University
Professor at Utrecht University as well as director of the Centre for the Humanities in
Utrecht, Embodiment, Sexual Difference, and the Nomadic Subject, Hypatia, Volume 8,
Number 1, 1993, pg. 5-7.
Conceptually, the distinction between philosophy and thinking is made necessary by the
fact that I see philosophy today as being incapable of thinking about the very questions that
I see as central: the female subject, in the framework of the feminist project of sexual
difference. This is because philos- ophy is for me intrinsically connected to domination,
power, and violence; I see philosophy as requiring mechanisms of exclusion and domination
as part of its standard practices. Philosophy is a hegemonic discipline whose historical task
has been to legislate among possible forms of knowledge, codifying certain modes of
thinking that then become legitimated as scientifically acceptable. Philosophy is all about
discursive power. Consequently, as Foucault (1977) convincingly argues, philosophy
creates itself through what it excludes as much as through what it asserts; philosophy
asserts its values through the exclusion of many-women, nonwhites, non- learned, etc. The
structural necessity of these pejorative others, these "slaves" of philosophy who stand in a
specular relation to the philosophical utterance, makes me doubt the theoretical capacity,
let alone the moral and political willingness, of this discipline to act in a nonhegemonic,
nonexclusionary manner. What is also at stake is the legacy of critical theory and its attempt
to separate philosophy from instrumental reason, but I cannot deal with this point here.6
Even more specifically, my reading of Deleuze's analysis of thinking (Deleuze 1970, 1972)
has convinced me of a sort of structural aporia in philosophical discourse. Discourse-the
production of ideas, knowledge, texts, and sci- ences-is something that philosophy relates to
and rests upon, in order to codify and systematize it. Discourse being, however, a complex
network of interrelated trutheffects, it far exceeds philosophy's power of codification. So
philosophy has to "run after" all sorts of new discourses (women, postcolonial subjects, the
audiovisual media and other new technologies, etc.) in order to incorporate them into its
way of thinking (Foucault 1971). In light of the intrinsinc link between philosophy and
discursive power, the question then becomes, What can motivate today a woman's choice
of/for philosophy? How can one go on doing philosophy? Deleuze and Irigaray, in very
different ways, point to what I see as the answer: they focus on the "desire for philosophy"
as an epistemophilic drive, i.e., a will-to-know that is funda- mentally affective. In other
words, they build on the logo-philic side of philos- ophy and remind us that philosophy used
to signify the love of, the desire for, higher knowledge. Thus, quoting Spinoza and Nietzsche,
Deleuze banks on the affective substratum as a force capable of freeing philosophy from its
hegemonic habits. Affectivity in this scheme is prediscursive: there is such a thing as a pre-
philosophical moment in the establishment of a philosophical stance, a moment in which
one chooses for philosophy. This prephilosophical moment of desire is not only unthought,
but it remains nonthought at the very heart of philosophy, because it is that which sustains
the very activity of philosophiz- ing (Braidotti N.d.a). In other words, we are left with the
problem of what is ontologically there but propositionally excluded by necessity in the
philosophical utterance. There is the unspoken and the unspeakable desire for thought, the
passion for thinking, the epistemophilic substratum on which philosophy later erects its
discursive monuments. I am interested in this substratum and how it can help us dislodge
the monuments. I want to emphasize that desire is what is at stake in the feminist politics of
pursuing alternative definitions of female subjectivity. The notion of desire in this
configuration is not a prescriptive one: the desire to become and to speak as female feminist
subjects does not entail the specific content of women's speech. What is being empowered
is women's entitlement to speak, not the propositional content of their utterances. What I
want to focus on is women's desire to become, not a specific model for their becoming. The
feminism of sexual difference should be read as emphasizing the political importance of
desire as opposed to the will, and of stressing its role in the constitution of the subject. Not
just libidinal desire, but rather ontological desire, the desire to be, the tendency of the
subject to be, the predisposition of the subject toward being. Feminist theory, far from being
a reactive kind of thought, expresses women's ontological desire, women's structural need
to posit themselves as female subjects-that is to say, not as disembodied entities, but rather
as corporeal and consequently sexed beings. Indeed, following Adrienne Rich (Rich 1976,
1979, 1985), I believe that the redefinition of the female feminist subject starts with the
revaluation of the bodily roots of subjectivity, rejecting the traditional vision of the knowing
subject as universal, neutral, and consequently gender-free. This "positional" or situated
way of seeing the subject states that the most important location or situation is the rooting
of the subject into the spatial frame of the body. The first and foremost of locations in reality
is one's own embodiment. Rethinking the body as our primary situation is the starting point
for the epistemological side of the "politics of location," which aims at grounding the
discourse produced by female feminists. The body, or the embodiment of the subject, is a
key term in the feminist struggle for the redefinition of subjectivity; it is to be understood as
neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather as a point of overlapping between
the physical, the symbolic, and the sociological. In other words, the starting point for
feminist redefinitions of female subjectivity is paradoxical: it is a new form of materialism
that nonetheless inherits the corporeal materiality of the poststructuralists and thus places
emphasis on the embodied and therefore sexually differentiated structure of the speaking
subject. In feminist theory one speaks as a woman, although the subject "woman" is not a
mono- lithic essence defined once and for all, but rather the site of multiple, complex, and
potentially contradictory sets of experience, defined by overlapping vari- ables.
Link Turn
Only becoming-woman ruptures the hegemony of the “man-standard” and the
way it steals and constructs the bodies of womxn, becoming-woman allows for
the stealing back of the body
Smith and Jun ’11 (Daniel and Nathan, Deleuze and Ethics. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 22 June 2016.)
One component of becoming-woman is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-
minoritarian” and the distinction they make between the major and the minor. Since “all
becoming is a becoming minoritarian,” becoming always occurs in relation to a minor molar
term – a woman or animal, for instance – that functions to destabilize the major molar term,
a man or human being, correspondingly (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 291; 1980: 356). The
identity categories that are “major” (for instance, human, male, adult, white, rational) are
defined as such in virtue of their dominance, the way they set the standards for the
hierarchical terms of identity; they distribute and maintain binaries that reinforce their
dominance. All molar subjectivities, both those of major and minor terms, are formed in
relation to this “man-standard,” as Deleuze and Guattari call it. The consequence of the
constitutive force of this “man-standard” is that even those who are part of a minority
group must still become minoritarian in order to break with it. Becoming, then, is a
process of departing from the standard, the norm, and the dominant pattern, a
transformation not just of majoritarian identity but of the minor, which has been defined in
relation to it. So, becoming-minoritarian in the form of becoming-woman is not a
revaluation of the degraded minor side of the binary, “woman,” but a break from such
rigidly dualist terms altogether, which are themselves a product of and in the service of the
“man-standard.” In this context, Deleuze and Guattari’s contentious claim that “in a way, it is
always ‘man’ who is the subject of becoming” appears less divisive and more explicable; as
they go on to clarify, “he is only this subject when he enters into a becoming-minoritarian
that tears him away from his major identity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 291; 1980: 357).
“Man” is always the subject of becoming not because only men can become or only men
need to undergo such transformative engagements, but rather because it is always with
respect to the “manstandard” that defines molar identities that one must deterritorialize.
The subject that desubjectifies itself, undoes its constitution in relation to the dominant
paradigm, is a subject that has been defined in relation to “man.” 8 As a molar woman, one
has been defined in relation to, indeed in opposition to, man, one’s femininity in contrast
with masculinity. 9 Becoming-woman, therefore, is a process that ruptures the
dominance of the “man-standard” around which are constructed our molar identities,
which in their oppositionality and rigidity constitute oppressive hierarchies .
Consequently, it cannot be undertaken by trying to become like the group “women” by
developing ostensibly “feminine” traits; as Deleuze continually emphasizes, becoming
bears little relation to resemblance or imitation . Paul Patton’s characterization of
becoming-woman elaborates on this point quite clearly while also portraying becoming-
woman in a way that might bolster some of the criticisms mentioned above. Accordingly, it
is worth quoting his account at length: Becoming-woman should be understood as a
becoming of the same type as becoming-animal, in the sense that it involves a virtual
alliance with the affects and powers that have been traditionally assigned to women. The
reality of the becoming has little to do with a relation to real women, but everything to do
with a relation to the incorporeal body of woman as it figures in the social imaginary. This
body might be defined in terms of the affects associated with the nurture and protection of
others, or the affects associated with dependent social status such as a capacity for
dissimulation or for cultivating the affection of others, delight in appearances and roleplay.
Becoming-woman does not involve imitating or assuming the forms of femininity but rather
creating a molecular or micro-femininity in the subject concerned by reproducing the
characteristic features, movements or affects of what passes for “the feminine” in a given
form of patriarchal society. (Patton 2000: 81) Many aspects of this account are quite apt:
becoming is a matter of virtual alliance rather than imitation; as a result, it is a question of
alliance through impersonal affects rather than personal identification; and, consequently,
becoming-woman necessarily involves a relation to “the incorporeal body of woman . . . in
the social imaginary” rather than relationships with particular, actual women. Yet, it
remains unclear what it would mean to “reproduce the characteristic features, movements
or affects of what passes for ‘the feminine’ in a given form of patriarchal society” in a way
that does not simply reproduce molar femininity in a masculine subject. Likewise, this
account leaves unanswered what it would mean for women to enter into becoming-woman:
how would becoming-woman be a meaningful process of transformation for women if it
consisted in reproducing, albeit perhaps as a parody, typical feminine traits? 10 If the first
component of the process of becoming-woman is its status as a type of becoming-
minoritarian, then the second key component of this concept is the body and the
relationship between the body and the constitution of normalized subjectivity. This aspect
of becoming-woman will shed light on the questions just raised. As recounted above,
becoming-woman is a process that departs from the dominant paradigm of man and
woman, masculine and feminine, for alternative ways of being gendered creatures. Thus, it
diverges from standard gender/sex models. The concept of becoming-woman, then, must be
understood as a response to the way molar sexed subjectivity is formed through the theft of
the body and the domestication of bodily affects. The sex/gender system that shapes us into
molar men and women functions through bodily normalization, that is, through the
enforcement of sexual dimorphism (that there are two sexes: male and female) and
concomitantly binary systems of gendered meaning (that there are two corresponding sets
of gendered roles, attitudes, characteristics: masculine and feminine). Such a system
involves taming the body so that it falls in line with the appropriate one of these two
options. This “theft” of the body – the teleological organization of its sexual organs, the
restriction and channeling of its forces, the molding of its capacities into acceptable patterns
– sexes and sexualizes it. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the body – with all its free-
flowing affects and uncontained movements – is stolen first from the little girl, who
subsequently can be held up as model of good behavior and a desirable object to the little
boy. 11 A vital part of this normalizing organization is the organization of the sexual organs,
the proper codification of the erogenous zones of the body. When the genitals are deemed
the appropriate erogenous zones, erotic and sexual activity is both limited to activity
between the two sexes and subordinated to reproductive ends. As a process that
deterritorializes molar men and women, becoming-woman is a way of stealing back the
body, stealing it away from the organization that invested it with the forms and
norms of sexed subjectivity. If the body has been stolen, becoming-woman is a return
to the body and a way of de-structuring the body. By undoing oppositional patterns of
sexed corporeality and subjectivity, becoming-woman also unhinges sexuality from the
normative and teleological paradigm to which it is confined, promoting the eroticization of
other parts of the body. 12 This last point leads us to the third key idea that helps explicate
the concept of becoming-woman. Throughout A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
thematize becoming as a matter of alliance, contagion, and involution in contrast to filiation,
heredity, and evolution: what is at stake in becoming is production rather than
reproduction. As a matter of alliance rather than filiation and heredity, the “nuptials” of
becoming are unnatural in the sense that they do not follow the prescribed pattern for
sexual reproduction: an association between man and woman that produces offspring. In
filial relations and the relations between the sexes for sexual reproduction, “the only
differences retained are a simple duality between the sexes within the same species, and
small modifications across generations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 242; 1980: 296). In
contrast to this conception, which reduces productive relations to those that take place
between two fixed and opposed sexes, the alliances that constitute becoming-woman
demand that we think sexual differences and their production differently. If our ways of
being sexed and sexualized creatures exceed the binary relations that have structured sexed
subjectivity, then the idea of sexual difference need not be thought as binary (male/female)
but as a multiplicity of sexual differences. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, there are “n sexes”
that are all the myriad ways of living one’s sexuality in one’s body in relation to other bodies
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 277; 1980: 340). 13 Lastly, for becoming to be involution
rather than evolution entails that it be a process of simultaneous deformation and
recreation rather one of progressive formation and development. Becoming-woman thus is
a generative process because in forming alternate “unnatural nuptials” it unweaves
oppositional and reproductively oriented forms of sexuality and sexed subjectivity. These
last two points – that becoming-woman is a matter of loosening the grip of normative
sex/gender arrangements on the body and that becoming-woman creates sexual differences
outside of these arrangements through its “unnatural nuptials” – clarify the relationship of
actual women to this process of becoming-woman. Indeed, if bodily subjection is what is
contested and undone through becoming-woman, then it is clear that the concept speaks
directly to the conditions in which actual women live rather than viewing them as vehicles
for men’s becomings or sweeping them up in a broader movement of transformation . While,
as Patton implies, the becoming-woman of a man need not happen in relation to an actual
woman (and certainly not in relation to her identity as such), and need not involve a
relationship between a man and a woman, the reality of becoming-woman appears to have
everything to do with real women. The reality of becoming-woman has to do with women’s
bodies and the bodies of men, in relation to whom they are defined, as well as with the
capacity of those bodies to experience different connections, to allow bodily affects to
flourish in ways unaccounted for by dualist conceptions of sex and sexuality. In light of this
conceptual contextualization, it appears that the feminist criticism that Deleuze and
Guattari are inattentive to women’s specificity is mistaken in at least one respect: the
constitution of sexed subjectivity. Although becoming-woman is an abstract concept, it is
one through which Deleuze and Guattari intend to embrace singularity precisely by
eschewing the generality of two sexes. 14 Likewise, given the way becoming-woman
functions in response to the injustice done to women by the theft of the body, it seems
unlikely that it would be a concept permitting women to serve as vehicles for men’s
becomings.
AT: View from Nowhere
A2: too abstract/doesn’t account for material conditions of womxn/view from nowhere

Smith and Jun ’11 (Daniel and Nathan, Deleuze and Ethics. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 22 June 2016.)
This inflection of Deleuzian ethics responds to the feminist concern that women’s
becomings will be subordinated to and undermined by a “more universalist movement of
becoming” because it demonstrates that Deleuze and Guattari are aware of, and indeed even
wary of, the sweeping force of absolute deterritorialization. Their construal of becoming
as a mode of resistance and ethical relation draws a picture in which the process is
not one in which indiviuals are swept up, desubjectified, and disposed of their “being
by the force of a movement external to them, but one in which courting
desubjectification is itself a tactical practice. We might, consequently, understand “a
more universalist movement of becoming” in a different sense, one that implies not an
overwhelming, and indeed, undermining force of change but a power of transformation into
which we tap in order to construct strategic forms of resistance. So, for instance, although
Jane Drexler suggests that Deleuze and Guattari’s “conceptual frameworks… sometimes
seem too far removed from real social situations” from the perspective of a concerned
feminist thinker, she also contends that “because the carnival of becoming occurs within the
cracks of an existent system of relations, it serves as a site for experimentation without the
threat of disappearing. Becoming-women, then, is an ongoing creative practice rather than a
question of being or not-being” (Drexler 200:233). While the “carnival” to which she refers
is a concept gleaned from Bakhtin, and Drexler’s assessment of Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept involves synthesizing these different theorists, her evaluation pertains to Deleuze’s
work in general: becoming-woman is not a decontextualized, ahistorical process , but
is an eruption from within the dominant reality and is responsive to it. Becoming-
woman, in particular is more fruitfully understood by feminist thinkers as a conceptual tool
to be used in the construction of new ways of living within (and against) a sex/gender
system rather than as a foil against which to protest. As we have seen in the previous
section, becoming-woman is actually an embodiment of a meticulous relation with
dominant reality; it amounts to a protest against naturalized sex/gender norms and the way
those norms for subjectivity tame and domesticate bodily forces, creating sexed types of
“docile bodies.” A Deleuzian ethos, therefore does not necessarily entail an unconcerned
and detached mode of creativity, one that lacks attentiveness to the exigencies of present-
day life and the specificity of sexed experience in particular. By reconsidering Deleuze’s
work from the perspective of a sympathetic feminist critic, we can emphasize alternate
webs of concepts and devise new points of connection that reveal different ways of thinking
about Deleuze’s ethics. While many feminist readers of Deleuze have embraced and adopted
his (and Guattari’s) way of conceiving the body and desire precisely because these
conceptions allow for an openness and creativity that other models of desire and sexed
corporeality do not. I have tried to emphasize another array of conepts that may also be of
value to feminists. In particular, the theme of responsiveness, which is subtly emphasized
throughout Deleuze’s work, may alleviate feminists’ concerns about the character of
becoming-woman by revealing becoming to be not a detached process of self-creation
that authorizes obliviousness to others but a process that is grounded in relations
with others and that enables us to transform those relations.

AT: Black Fem

Deleuze’s notion of the fold is necessary for black feminists to inherit historical
conditions and allow for the creation of new identities as a means of resistance
Davidson 10 Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Dr. Davidson is Assistant Professor of
Business Communication in the Price College of Business, co-director of the Women’s and
Gender Studies Center for Social Justice, and Faculty-in-Residence for Couch Residence Hall.
She is the author of The Rhetoric of Race and co-editor of two volumes: Critical Perspectives
on bell hooks and Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy. Her research
interests include: rhetorical theory and criticism, black feminism, and black philosophical
thought, Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, State University of
New York Press, Albany, New York, pg. 128-131.
In turning to Deleuze, I do not intend to provide a systematic overview of Deleuze’s work;
instead my focus will be on the implications of Delueze’s notion of the fold for black feminist
thought. This choice of focus is not arbitrary because, as Tom Conley observes, the notion of
the fold “counts among the most vital and resonate terms in [Delueze’s] copious and varied
writings.”33 Importantly, Deleuze develops his notion of the fold as a part of his analysis of
power structures. In that analysis, Deleuze raises a question about the power of resistance
that should be of central concern to all black feminists, including duCille. Deleuze writes:
“What remains, then, except an anonymous life that shows up on when it clashes with
power, argues with it, exchanges ‘brief and strident words,’ and then fades back into the
night, what Foucault called ‘the life of infamous men,’ whom he asked us to admire by virtue
of ‘their misfortune, race or uncertain madness?’ ”34 With this question, Deleuze wonders
whether marginalized groups, such as black women, can produce any real change in
speaking truth to power. What, in other words, is the point of struggling against the
proverbial wall of racism, classism, gender discrimination, and economic oppression, if
these struggles are destined to fade “back into the night”? This is certainly an
understandable reaction on the part of many black women “who are daily beaten down,
mentally, physically, and spiritually—women who are powerless to change their condition
in life.” One mark of their victimization, as hooks notes, is that they “accept their lot in life
without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.”35 In
the face of such a reality, the question shared by both Deleuze and black feminists concerns
whether there can be any source for resistance against power structures, and if so, what
those resources are. Deleuze’s notion of the fold, I want to suggest, is potentially significant
in this regard. Like duCille and other black feminists, Deleuze is not so much concerned with
alterity as with subjectivity, especially the becoming of subjects who are unable to self-
define, to become themselves, or to create themselves anew due to the pressures of social
forces. For this reason, Deleuze’s notion of the fold can provide new and valuable resources
for addressing questions of black female subjectivity raised by duCille and others. The
French term pli, as Conley explains, refers “both to a twist of fabric and to the origins of life,
bears a lightness and density that marks many of the philosopher’s refl ection on questions
of being and on the nature of events.”36 What is thought-provoking about Deleuze’s notion
of the fold is that, like a piece of fabric, it maintains its physical presence but at the same
time can create new spaces within its formation of new crevices and pleats. This is why the
fold is capable of “bearing almost infinite conceptual force.”37 Through its multiple foldings,
the subject maintains access to the internal and external aspects of her being. This means
that “[a] person’s relation with his or her body becomes both an “archive” and a “diagram,”
a collection of subjectivations and a mental map charted on the basis of the past and drawn
from the events and elements in the ambient world.”38 With this notion of the fold, then, I
want to suggest that the folding of the subject provides an interesting model for thinking
about the way in which black females can both inherit a historical condition and at the same
time create new identities within that condition. It bears noting that there is not an inside or
outside prior to the fold, instead the fold creates the inside as well as the outside. The inside
and outside of the fold are two sides of a single surface. Conley adds: “Thus the fold allows
the body and the soul of the subject to be and to become in the world through “intensions” . .
. felt about “extensions” in space. Because the inside and outside are conjoined by the point
of view of the soul on the world, the apprehension of the condition of possibility of variation
allows the subject to think about how it inflects and is inflected by the mental and
geographical milieus it occupies.”39 That said we need to ask whether there can be an
inside of thought for black women who are caught up in systems of power and trapped in
the position of other forgotten. Has the internal been forgotten? If so, how can it be
recovered? Echoing the insights of Fanon and hooks, duCille seeks a way for black women to
escape the external gaze that fixes black women in the static, illusionary position of the
other. This is accomplished through the recovery of a black female identity that is no longer
a marker of alterity but is capable of speaking its own name. In this attempt, Deleuze is an
important ally, because his notion of the fold signifies a way of producing an identity
internally. Like duCille, Deleuze rejects the idea of an ahistorical subjectivity whose identity
would escape from the vicissitudes of history and the external world. Instead of being
ahistorical and fixed, both thinkers would agree that subjectivity must be achieved, in other
words, that there is a struggle for subjectivity. Conley explains that this struggle is a “battle
to win the right to have access to difference, variation, and metamorphosis.”40 Similarly,
duCille describes the nature of this struggle in terms of the struggle by black women to
become the authors of their own text. Through this struggle, they seek to establish a space
of their own, as something other than the other. The fact that this is a “struggle” suggests
that the formation of positive subjectivity can only occur through resistance to existing
systems of power. Subjectivity, according to Deleuze, is in a certain sense defined by its
power to resist, because “diffuse centers of power do not exist without points of resistance
that are in some way primary”41 What type of internal relation to oneself is established by
folds? In folding, one is able to encounter another self, in a different way from the identity
imposed by external, marginalizing forces. Deleuze explains the dual nature of this relation
to oneself in the following terms: “On the one hand, there is a ‘relation to oneself’ that
consciously derives from one’s relation with others; on the other, there is equally a ‘self
constitution’ that consciously derives from the moral code as a rule for knowledge.”42 In
addition to the various forces that define the subject from the outside, Deleuze
acknowledges the “moral code” to know thyself.43 In this respect, his notion of the fold can
be useful to black feminists who seek to counter the commodification and colonization of
black women. This operation is at work in duCille’s reference to the many women who have
preserved counterhistories and countermemories of black women. Importantly, Deleuze
emphasizes that this counter-history need not be a mere reaction to a prior set of historical
conditions. Instead, the relation to oneself has an independent status. As Deleuze explains:
“It is as if the relation of the outside folded back to create a doubling, allowed a relation to
oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its own
unique dimension. . . . [T]he relation to oneself that is self-mastery, ‘is a power that one
brought to bear on oneself in the power that one exercised over others.’ ”44 Deleuze, like
duCille, is interested in establishing a positive notion of difference. Instead of being a
product of a relation to something else, positive difference is something like “the right to
difference, variation and metamorphosis.”45 This means that the struggle for subjectivity is
not just a reaction to a prior situation; instead it is a creative force and a source of change.
Along these lines, Deleuze’s fold provides a space for black women to create a positive
identity from a perspective and position internal to themselves. As Deleuze suggests, it is “a
differentiation that leads to a folding, a reflection.”46 Folding is thus not merely about
resisting the external; it is primarily about creating a “relation to oneself”47 Since the
process of folding functions “beneath the codes and rules of knowledge and power,” what is
also critical is that the folds are “apt to unfold and merge with them, but not without new
folding being created in the process.”48 It is important to emphasize that Deleuze does not
intend the fold as a retreat from the external world, since the outside and the inside are not
distinct from one another.49 Rather, while the fold provides a safe place for encountering
oneself, what is as critical is that black feminist subjectivity also unfold. It is in unfolding
that she may encounter the world in a newly constructed identity that can resist external
constitution: “unfolding means becoming.”50 Conclusion This chapter is an attempt to
challenge the postmodern identification of black women as other. Ann duCille, like a
number of other black feminists, suggests that the postmodern identification of black
women as a site of alterity and difference has at the best been ineffective and at the worst,
harmful, to the liberation of black women. Instead of emphasizing their alterity, duCille is
concerned with the subjectivity of black women and suggests that they be regarded as
sacred texts. The problem with postmodern discourse and its predecessors is that they
speak about black women without giving them authorship or voice. Instead of being objects
of interpretation, duCille calls for black women to establish authorship. In carrying out this
project, Deleuze’s notion of the fold is useful, because it offers a site of creative resistance.
The fold opens up a space in which black female identity can interact with itself and bring
about a convergence between the outside and the inside of thought.
 Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis’s theory of the Oedipus Complex reinforces the privatization of

the family and values of obedience that contribute to the production of
capitalist subjects.
Holland 12 (Eugene W. Holland is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University,
USA. Holland specializes in interdisciplinary social and critical theory. In addition publishing
articles in journals such as Culture, Theory and Critique, Symposium, South Atlantic
Quarterly, Cultural Logic, Strategies, Angelaki, and SubStance on topics in poststructuralist
theory and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he is the author of Readers Guide to A
Thousand Plateaus [Bloomsbury/Continuum 2013], Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market
Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike [University of Minnesota Press 2011], Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis [Routledge 1999], and Baudelaire
and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism [Cambridge UP 1993],“Deleuze and
Psychoanalysis” in “The Cambridge Companion to DELEUZE”, 2012, Pgs 314-318)

Now from a Jungian perspective, let us suppose that the develop- mental biology, neurophysiology and psychology of human being
make the issue of attachment to and separation from the Mother an archetypal Problem: we would expect that Problem
to express itself differently in different socio-historically speciic institutions and representations .
Deleuze and Guattari’s comparison of capitalism with despotism in Anti-Oedipus demonstrates precisely that: under
capitalism, separation from the Mother is achieved by means of a negative taboo proscribing
sexual relations with other members of the nuclear family ; but under despotism, separation is
achieved by means of a positive dispensation prescribing incest among members of the royal
family as a privilege only they may enjoy (AO 200–2). In one case, the archetypal Problem is “solved”
with a negative pro- scription bearing exclusively on family relations, while in the other, the
same Problem is “solved” with a positive though invidious pre- scription bearing inclusively on
caste relations in society as a whole that differentiate royalty from everyone else. There is a lot more
to such a comparison and the contextualizing procedure underlying it than this, but one thing they suggest is that the existence
of the psychoanalytic Oedipus Complex depends entirely on the historic- ally contingent
institution of the nuclear family , and that it is critical to understand the nuclear family in turn
as a strictly capitalist institution. It is crucial to note that this does not mean that the Oedipus Complex doesn’t exist, or
that psychoanalysis somehow got it wrong: on the contrary, the Oedipus Complex is in an import- ant sense all
too real, and the problem with psychoanalysis is that it got it right but does nothing to free us
from it; instead, it ends up actually reinforcing our subjection to ultimately capitalist social and
familial relations under the guise of promoting personal psy- chic health. Now what makes the
Oedipal-nuclear family a strictly capital- ist institution is this: at the same time that the
accumulation of wealth is privatized in the economy, the reproduction of subjectivity is
privatized in the family. So it is not simply that the nuclear fam- ily is smaller in scope or scale than all other “extended”
family forms throughout history (although this result is crucial): it is also that the relations of reproduction in the
family are increasingly segregated from the relations of production in the economy (which
themselves become increasingly segregated from politics and every- day life). Under capitalism,
economic production takes place exclu- sively outside the family, with the family relegated to
being a locus of consumption and reproduction. It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari say that of all the
modes of production, capitalism fosters the greatest “difference in regime” between social
produc- tion and what they call “desiring-production,” whereas in all other social formations,
production relations and “extended” family rela- tions coincide more or less and interconnec t.11
The complex rela- tions between social production and desiring-production are key to Deleuze and Guattari’s transformation of
psychoanalysis, and bear closer examination. Most important, the distinction between desiring-production and social production
does not correspond to the distinction between fantasy and reality: desiring-production and social produc- tion are equally real, and
they are both equally informed, invested, and motivated by fantasy. They are (to revert to the term Deleuze deploys later, in his
work on Leibniz and Foucault, and that we used a moment ago) precisely folds of one another. While it is true that they belong to
“different regimes,” and that the degree of differ- ence between them varies historically, ultimately, like instincts and institutions,
they are utterly interdependent and “identical in nature,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it, comprising the two sides of a single,
universal process of production: There is only one kind of production, the production of the real . And doubt-
less we can express this identity in two different ways ... We can say that social production, under determinate conditions, derives
that
primarily from desiring-production: which is to say that Homo natura comes first. But we must also say, more accurately,
desiring-production is first and fore- most social in nature, and tends to free itself only at the
end [of history]: which is to say that Homo historia comes first. (AO 32–33) Paradoxically, the identical nature of
desiring and social production only becomes apparent toward the end of history, under
capitalism, where the difference in regime is the greatest. To understand how this is so, we can as a kind of
first approximation think of desiring-produc- tion as libido and of social production as labor power. They
are both expressions of a single energy source which, as a second approxima- tion, we can consider to be actually akin to and
conceptually derived from Nietzschean will to power and Bergsonian élan vital. But under capitalism, this single form of
energy is divided in two so radically by the wholesale segregation of the relations of
reproduction (in the nuclear family) from the relations of production (in the economy ) that libido
appears to be the proper object and discovery of psychoanalysis and labor power the proper object and
discovery of political economy. And, in a limited sense, they are indeed discrete objects or concepts. But
schizoanalysis will insist on breaking through the limitations of the disciplinary effects of
institutionalized segregation (proclaiming that “Nature = Industry = History” [AO 25]), in order to grasp
production as a universal and thereby restore its full critical force, beyond both psychoanalysis
and political economy. One measure of the critical force unleashed by the schizoanalytic axiom that desiring-production and
social production are ultimately identical in nature despite their difference in regime is the insight it affords into the
capitalist “solution” to the archetypal Problem of the Mother, alluded to above . Imagine an abstract
machine or institution composed of three parts, where one’s access to a life- giving source is prevented by
the intermediation of a domineering third party . Now note that these are simultaneously the structural dynamics
of both the nuclear family and the capitalist economy: just as capital separates the worker from the means of
life (from “Mother Nature”) through primitive accumulation and defers the satisfactions of
consumption (consommation in French) until after work, after pay-day, and after retirement, so
does the father separate the child from the nurturing Mother (its means of life) through castration and
defers the satisfactions of sexual consummation (also consommation in French) until maturity and the founding of a
new family: “Father, mother, and child thus become the simulacrum of the images of capital
(‘“Mister Capital, Madame Earth,” and their child the Worker’),” Deleuze and Guattari pointedly sug- gest, adapting a quotation from
Marx (AO 264). (It should go without saying that there are myriad other ways of imagining, represent- ing, and institutionalizing
the
solutions to the archetypal Problem of separation.) But the point is that this is more than a mere structural homology:
Oedipal-nuclear family provides the perfect training ground in subservience and asceticism (or
subservience and other- directed consumerism, when the economy requires it) for the pro-
duction of “docile” capitalist subjects. Ultimately, not only is the nuclear family a strictly capitalist
institution, but psychoanalysis is, too – in that it sanctions, perpetrates, and reinforces the
Oedipal psycho-dynamics of castration, obedience, self-denial, and deferral so perfectly suited
to the socio-dynamics of capital accumulation. This diagnosis of the nuclear family and Oedipal psychoanaly- sis as
capitalist institutions does not exhaust the power of schizo- analytic critique, however. The importance of historical variation in the
relations between desiring-production and social production, initially prompted by Bergson and Jung perhaps, becomes all the
greater in Anti-Oedipus with the application of the structuralist and post-structuralist critique of representation. As we have just
seen, Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is impossible to conclude directly from a prohibitive law the true nature of what is prohib-
By drawing on semiotics, however, they insist
ited, or from psychic repression the true nature what is repressed.
on the importance of distinguishing not just between two terms – repression and the repressed
– but among three: irst of all, the repressing representa- tion (the signiier); second, the distorted
image of desire produced by the representation (its signiied); and inally, the referent, the desire
that actually gets repressed (AO 115 and passim). Two critical points follow immediately from this semiotic
analysis. The first is that we don’t necessarily learn about the contents of the unconscious from the
process of representation: the referent is not the same as the signfiied. The second is that
representation itself is the basis of repression, so that unconsciousness is assigned (following Kant
and somewhat in line with Lacan) to those forms of experience that defy or are denied representation. A third critical point then
follows from the mobilization of the tripartite critique of representation for a genealogy or archaeology of the Oedipus Complex
they insist that the Oedipus gets actualized as a lived complex only within the
itself. For even though
nuclear family under capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari also recognize that incest is an archetypal
Problem for human beings, so that the figure of Oedipal incest can appear as a kind of spectral
universal haunting all types of social formation. But in each type (analyzed by Deleuze and Guattari in the form of
three distinct modes of desiring- and social production), it follows a specific distribution among the three terms of repres- sive
representation. In the savage mode of production, the incest taboo as a negative prohibition is the distorted image of desire (the
signiied) produced by the real social imperative, which is a posi- tive requirement (the signiier) to knit productive social relations by
In the
marrying outside the clan; the real desired referent, meanwhile, is direct access to life (the reproductive power of women).
des- potic mode of production (examined briely above), incest occupies both the position of the
repressing representation (the signiier) and of the distorted image of desire (the signiied): in the
former pos- ition, incest within the ruling family appears as a royal prerogative, while for
everyone else in a caste society it is taboo ; the real desired referent, meanwhile, is rebellion
against the despot and re-distribu- tion of his accumulated wealth and privilege. In the capitalist
mode of production, and only there, incest occupies all three positions: the taboo against incest
is at the same time the repressing represen- tation (the signiier: “Thou shalt not ...”), the
distorted image of desire (the signiied: “So that’s what I wanted!”), and the real ref- erent of
desire – for within the confines of the nuclear family, the only objects of desire left are all
actually taboo: the Oedipus is now a complex. Social production has captured desiring-
production in a distinctive institution (the nuclear family) and deployed correspond- ing
representations (chief among them psychoanalysis itself) that together end up straitjacketing desire and
producing Oedipalized subjects ideally suited for enduring or even enjoying or craving the rigors
and blandishments of capitalism. In the worst light, Oedipal psychoanalysis thus appears as a
technology for reproducing and reinforcing capitalist subjectivity. But of course there is much more to
psychoanalysis than the Oedipus Complex, and psychoanalysis remains a particularly important reference for Deleuze and Guattari
in their deinition of desiring-production, to which we now turn.

Conceptions of rationality and pathological desire are not separate phenomena,

but rather manifestations of a will to power that produces the Real.
Holland 12 (Eugene W. Holland is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University,
USA. Holland specializes in interdisciplinary social and critical theory. In addition publishing
articles in journals such as Culture, Theory and Critique, Symposium, South Atlantic
Quarterly, Cultural Logic, Strategies, Angelaki, and SubStance on topics in poststructuralist
theory and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he is the author of Readers Guide to A
Thousand Plateaus [Bloomsbury/Continuum 2013], Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market
Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike [University of Minnesota Press 2011], Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis [Routledge 1999], and Baudelaire
and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism [Cambridge UP 1993],“Deleuze and
Psychoanalysis” in “The Cambridge Companion to DELEUZE”, 2012, Pgs 319-321)
Desiring-production also has important Kantian components, although here once again Kant is corrected by Nietzsche, as well as
supplemented by Marx and Bergson. Unlike the terms intuition, imagination, and understanding which dominate the first critique (of
desire plays an important role in the second and third critiques (of practical reason
pure reason),
and judgment). Whereas pure rea- son concerns knowledge, practical reason “is concerned not with objects
in order to know them, but with its own capacity to make them real (which does require
knowledge of them),” and desire is deined – surprisingly – as “the faculty which by means of its
repre- sentations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those repre- sentations.” 13 How
could desire possibly be understood to “cause the actuality” of its objects by means of representations? For Kant, this is explained by
distinguishing between two kinds of “actuality,” only one of which involves the exercise of reason. Without a grounding in reason,
desire causes the actuality of its objects only in the “patho- logical” form of hallucinations, not in
reality; only when informed by reason does desire become will, and thus become able to cause
the actuality of its objects in reality: “will ... is a causal agent so far as reason contains its
determining ground.”14 In order to convert desire into a will that has rational causal agency in reality, however, Kant
must rely on his three transcendent Ideas of Reason (Self, World, and God), and as we have
seen, this is where, with help from Nietzsche, Deleuze parts company with Kant. For Nietzsche in
effect refuses Kant’s distinction between irrational-pathological desire and rational will: they
become indistinguishable aspects of will to power . In stark contrast to the nihilism of modern science and the
cult of know- ledge for its own sake, Nietzsche’s noble artist or overman does not require rational knowledge in order to be a causal
he creates his own reality, along with whatever knowledge of it he may require . In a similar
agent:
the ability of human beings to picture objects in the
vein, but from a very different perspective, Marx high- lights
mind and then produce them in reality, instead of producing them instinctu- ally, as most other
species do (Marx cites bees and spiders). Bergson, too, highlights the human propensity to interrupt instinctual motor responses
to sensory stimuli in order to generate virtual images of Problems before producing actual solutions to them. Basing their concept of
Deleuze and Guattari will insist that “desire produces, [and]
desiring-production mainly on these sources,
its product is real ... [and that ] the objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself” (AO 26–
27). With this refusal or “loss of reality” attendant on the Nietzschean demotion of the conventional reality principle in favor of a
principle of real creativity, schizoanalysis
in a certain sense favors the perspective of the psychotic over
that of the neurotic. The final and perhaps most basic component of desiring-production drawn
from Kant is the notion that the mind functions via syntheses. For Kant, experience is not only
ordered according to the a prioris of space and time, but also processed by a set of three mental
operations he calls the syntheses of apprehension, reproduc- tion, and recognition. These
syntheses form the basis of all possible knowledge, and understanding how they operate is thus
crucial to determining which forms of knowledge are legitimate and which are not. While there
are no doubt resemblances between Kant’s syn- theses and those formulated by Deleuze and
Guattari, one diffe- rence is key: Kant’s syntheses are organized by a unified rational thinking
subject in order to produce stable knowledge of a fixed reality, whereas the syntheses of
desiring-production are largely unconscious, and operate in order to produce reality itself (in
con- nection with social production) as well as our experience of it. And since the syntheses of
desiring-production are largely unconscious, it is not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari should
draw on psy- choanalysis for their formulation of them.
Humans don’t have the compulsion to repeat in a conservation fashion and
attain the same object of desire, but rather open themselves up to a repetition
of differences and limitless modes of satisfaction.
Holland 12 (Eugene W. Holland is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University,
USA. Holland specializes in interdisciplinary social and critical theory. In addition publishing
articles in journals such as Culture, Theory and Critique, Symposium, South Atlantic
Quarterly, Cultural Logic, Strategies, Angelaki, and SubStance on topics in poststructuralist
theory and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he is the author of Readers Guide to A
Thousand Plateaus [Bloomsbury/Continuum 2013], Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market
Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike [University of Minnesota Press 2011], Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis [Routledge 1999], and Baudelaire
and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism [Cambridge UP 1993],“Deleuze and
Psychoanalysis” in “The Cambridge Companion to DELEUZE”, 2012, Pgs 323-324)

Freud has his own version of this whole process: the repetition compulsion grounded in
Of course,

the death instinct induces humans to seek for the same objects of satisfaction that match the
memory traces of previous objects of satisfaction; since Freud assumes that the instincts are
“innately conservative,” human beings are governed by a compulsion to repeat that always
entails repetition of the same .19 For Deleuze, by contrast, the cosmos as a whole – but also and
especially the human being – is governed by the repetition of difference rather than identity ;
thus instinctual repe- tition in humans , far from being innately conservative, opens onto the

practically limitless variety of modes of satisfaction afforded by intelligence and institutions

operating with but beyond instinct. What potential would exist for the institution of culinary or erotic arts, for instance, if humans
remained exclusively ixated on the breast for nourishment, or for oral gratiication? The disjunctive synthesis usually works in tandem with the
connective synthesis in a continuous process of attraction, differentiation, and repulsion of drive–partial object relations to produce the staggering
variety of human experience. At one extreme – connection without disjunc- tion – you would have total fixation on an instinctually or habitually
predetermined object: obsessive-compulsive disorder or neurosis; at the other – disjunction without connection – you would have total withdrawal
multifarious modes of satisfaction – produced by the
from contact with reality: catatonia or psychosis. Third degree:

anti-productive force of inclusive disjunction in the opening in human being between instincts
and institutions, and registered on the BwO – get qualified in and by social representations as
good or bad; as taboo, permitted, or required. Anti-production here arises not from satiation or distraction, but from
repression proper – what Deleuze and Guattari call speciically “social repression” – and it therefore entails not inclusive but exclusive disjunction: no
This is the form of repression that for Freud (and Lacan)
longer “this or that, or ... whatever” but “this and not that!”

creates “the” unconscious. But for schizoanalysis, the operations of both the connective and the
disjunctive syntheses are themselves already unconscious, regard- less of whether they suffer
social repression – unless and until their results get recognized through the third synthesis, the
conjunctive synthesis of consumption–consummation. Hence the tremendous importance of the BwO – and especially
of the ambivalent makeup of the BwO – as recording apparatus and site or scene of “the” uncon- scious for Deleuze & Guattari : desiring-

production registers multi- farious images of objects of satisfaction on the BwO as reminders
of potential future satisfaction, but some of them then get captured in and by censorious
social representations and are thereby repressed. This two-stage process of registration-representation on the BwO cor-
responds approximately to Freud’s notions of primal repression and proper repression – yet places unconsciousness in schizoanalysis on a footing very
different from that of psychoanalysis: one
that, in line with structuralism and post-structuralism, mobilizes the
critique of representation to understand repression and the unconsciou s. One important by-product of this
critique: social representation of any kind – positive or negative, prescriptive or proscriptive –

constitutes a form of repression , and conversely, desiring-production would be completely free

only if it could escape from the codes of social representation entirely: at the limit, this is the
decoded form of desire Deleuze and Guattari call “schizophrenia.”

The Oedipus Complex of the nuclear family becomes trapped in social

representations that help stabilize subjectivity and production, destroying the
potentiality for flux and anti-capitalist formation.
Holland 12 (Eugene W. Holland is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University,
USA. Holland specializes in interdisciplinary social and critical theory. In addition publishing
articles in journals such as Culture, Theory and Critique, Symposium, South Atlantic
Quarterly, Cultural Logic, Strategies, Angelaki, and SubStance on topics in poststructuralist
theory and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he is the author of Readers Guide to A
Thousand Plateaus [Bloomsbury/Continuum 2013], Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market
Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike [University of Minnesota Press 2011], Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis [Routledge 1999], and Baudelaire
and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism [Cambridge UP 1993],“Deleuze and
Psychoanalysis” in “The Cambridge Companion to DELEUZE”, 2012, Pgs 331-334)

why familially constructed

Such delegation explains why the family can appear to be a micro- cosm, when it really is not;
subjects often seem on one hand so ill-suited to the specific content-requirements of social
production at any given moment of its development ; why on the other hand the family’s degree of
abstraction as an apparently separate reproductive institution produces subjects perfectly
suited formally to a system of social production in constant flux. For what they learn in the nuclear
family is simply to submit as good, docile subjects to prohibitive authority – the father, the boss, capital
in gen- eral – and relinquish until later, as good ascetic subjects, their access to the objects of desire and their
objective being – the mother, the goods they produce, the natural environment as a whole. Far from being autonomous, much
less originary, fundamental, or universal, the Oedipus Complex of the nuclear family appears as though it
had been “fabricated to meet the requirements of ... [the capitalist] social formation” (AO 101),
from which it in fact derives by dele- gation.26 And from the psychoanalytic perspective, to challenge or rebel against Oedipally
constituted authority would amount to ... committing incest! Hence the importance of the critique of representation to the
in delegating the formation of desire to the nuclear family
schizoanalytic critique of Oedipal psychoanalysis:
as system of reproduction– representation, capitalism manages to trap desiring-production in a
deceptive and misleading image of itself whose familial content is mostly irrelevant, even while the form of
that desiring-production ultimately echoes and reinforces precisely the kind of repression
exercised by capitalist social production itself: It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social
production is replaced by the repressing family , and that the latter offers a displaced image of
desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives . (AO 119, italics in
original) Desiring-production and social production are thus, in a descriptive sense, one and the same process, inasmuch as
schizoanalysis sees no need and no room to posit any independent, universal formation of desire such as Oedipus intervening
between one and the other: “social-production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions” (AO 29,
desiring-production and social production are different,
italics in original). Yet in another, critical sense,
inasmuch as schizoanalysis enables and expects us to judge any historical organization of social
production according to the immanent criteria provided by desiring-production itself, and
thereby expose “the repression that the social machine exercises on desiring-machines” (AO 54):
From the very beginning of this study, we have maintained both that social-production and desiring-production are one and the
same, and that they have differing regimes, with the result that a social form of produc- tion exercises an essential repression of
desiring-production, and also that desiring-production – “real” desire – is potentially capable of demolishing the social form. (AO
116) Such a distinction is made possible by the constitutive ambivalence of the disjunctive synthesis of recording on the BwO, as
Deleuze and Guattari construe it. Desire registers its satisfactions and frustrations as images on the BwO, as we saw, when primary
repression caused by anti-production suspends the activity of the connective synthesis. As a result, desire
is free to diversify
through the dis- junctive networks of images, but it can also become trapped in fixed
representations deriving from and propagating social repression proper. Delegation of social
repression under capitalism to the nuclear family thus makes it appear as if there were an
autonomous “psy- chic” repression originating in the Oedipus complex , which would only afterward get
extended to “social repression” in society at large, through processes of sublimation and transference. But here is where the political
implications of the Oedipal (mis)representa-tion of desire become clear, for “if psychic repression did bear on incestuous desires,”
Deleuze and Guattari explain, “it would gain a certain independence and primacy ... in relation to social repres- sion” (AO 113). And,
as they go on to say, accepting this primacy would constitute a “justfification for psychic repression – a justifi- cation that makes
psychic repression move into the foreground and no longer considers the problem of social repression
anything more than secondary” (AO 117). If psychic repression did truly target incestuous desires,
it would be justified by the natural necessity of the incest taboo, and social repression could be seen as
a mere extension or “sublimation” of that natural necessity for the sake of higher civilization (as
Freud claims). But such is not the case. Hence the importance of analyzing representation with three terms rather than two,
to foil the ruses of representation and refute the Oedipal apology for repression. Psychoanalysis considered psychic
repression in the Oedipus Complex to be primary and universal, and social repression to be
secondary and inevitable. Schizoanalysis, by con- trast, ascribes the potential for both psychic and social
repression to the registration of desire on the BwO in the first place, due to the primary
repression occasioned by anti-production .27 It is thus able to reverse the causal order proposed by psychoanalysis
and show that “psychic repression is a means in the service of social repression ” (AO 119), thereby
delegitimating social repression and making it a target for change.

Conceiving as the subject as a position within psychoanalysis merely is an

illusion that allows for repression and loss. A transition towards a semiotic
recognition of difference and contingency is key.
Holland 12 (Eugene W. Holland is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University,
USA. Holland specializes in interdisciplinary social and critical theory. In addition publishing
articles in journals such as Culture, Theory and Critique, Symposium, South Atlantic
Quarterly, Cultural Logic, Strategies, Angelaki, and SubStance on topics in poststructuralist
theory and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he is the author of Readers Guide to A
Thousand Plateaus [Bloomsbury/Continuum 2013], Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market
Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike [University of Minnesota Press 2011], Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis [Routledge 1999], and Baudelaire
and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism [Cambridge UP 1993],“Deleuze and
Psychoanalysis” in “The Cambridge Companion to DELEUZE”, 2012, Pgs 326-331)

Indeed, even to
speak of “the” subject in the singular is in a sense to have already succumbed to the
product–process reversal and the illusions of sovereign subjectivity , for even the last of the syntheses
produces a subject always different from itself . Just as much as the productive synthesis continually connects (and ... and ...
and ...) and the disjunctive synthesis continually differentiates (or ... or ... or ...), the conjunctive synthesis in turn generates, from the vast networks of
relations among organs–machines on the BwO, an indefinite ser- ies of constellations or states of intense experience, each of which gets recognized
and consummated ex post facto by a subject of that experience: “Thus the subject consumes and consummates each of the states [on the BwO]
through which it passes, and is born of each of them anew” (AO 41, translation modiied). When the forces of production and anti-production interact in
less rigid ways, forms of subjectivity emerge that remain closer to the continual, open-ended,
indefinite nature of the syntheses and therefore enjoy or suffer experi- ence with that much
greater intensity. Foremost among them, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the schizo, the protagonist of Anti-Oedipus, who affirms the forces of
both attraction and repulsion, and takes them to the limit: the connective syntheses, instead of being repelled or merely having their finished products
multi- ply their ramifications indeinitely,
registered, are continually brought back into play on a BwO whose disjunctive syntheses

thereby fueling the consumma- tion of a perpetually renewed, “ nomadic” subject always
different from itself – a kind of “permanent revolution” of psychic life. Having proposed this schizoanalytic
model of the psyche as an alter- native to Freud’s (and, by implication, Kant’s), Deleuze and Guattari are able to formulate a

vehement and detailed critique of Oedipal psychoanalysis by enumerating what they call (again
echoing Kant) the five “paralogisms” (fallacies) of psychoanalysis, three of which arise from illegitimate use of the
syntheses of experience we have just examined.21 This, too, echoes a Kantian operation: speaking from the perspective of unified reason, knowledge,
Kant had asserted that the conscious mind utilizes a specific set of processes (the
and morality,

syntheses of apprehension, reproduction, and recog- nition) to arrive at knowledge, and had
insisted furthermore that knowledge would have to conform to these processes or else stand
condemned as metaphysical.22 Of critical importance for Kant was the idea that, since these processes were constitutive of conscious
thought, they provided immanent criteria for judging knowledge as valid or metaphysical, depending on whether it was based on legit- imate or
that of desire and
illegitimate use of the three syntheses. In a similar way, but speaking not from the perspective of reason but from

especially schizophrenic desire, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the unconscious operates
according to a specific set of syntheses to process or constitute experience, and that
psychoanalysis must either be shown to conform to the immanent criteria provided by these
processes or else stand condemned as metaphysical .23 With respect to all five paralogisms, the fundamentally
ambivalent makeup of the BwO and the product–process reversal it fosters play a critical role: images of organ–machine connections register on the
BwO only when anti-production transforms the process of desiring- production into a finished, arrested, or repressed product, which has the disastrous
consequence that ixed properties of the finished product are misattributed to the differential process that produced it, obscuring its genesis entirely;
differences succumb to identity. And the disaster is this: genetic processes always harbor some potential to actualize differently, and
to thereby produce different end products. But the paralogisms of Oedipal psychoanalysis end up crushing

whatever critical political force (of counter-actualization) psychoanalysis may have contained,
by replacing the productive indeterminacy of process with the fixed being of what is (and the
nihilism of the reality principle). We start with the paralogism of disfiguration or displacement, which we have already discussed in terms of the post-
disfiguration amounts to mistaking the distorted image of desire (the
structuralist critique of representation:

signified) promulgated by a prohibition (the repressing signifier) for the referent that image
displaces: the actual desire getting repressed. Repression on this view is an effect of representation – a view schizoanalysis
shares with Lacanian psy- choanalysis, which similarly defines repression in terms of desire that is unable to traverse the “defiles of signification.”
Deleuze and Guattari will also agree with Lacan that the unconscious is struc- tured – but not
like a language: as an open-ended set of Problematic Ideas , instead (in the wake of Kant, Bergson, and Jung, as
we have seen). For Lacan, that the unconscious is structured like a language means that an unbreachable

bar separates bodily drives, which are substantial, from the universe of signification, which is dif-
ferential: there is therefore an irreparable and tragic loss of any direct contact between
consciousness and drives. But for Deleuze and Guattari, there is no such loss, and for two complementary reasons. First of
all, the structure of the unconscious is semiotic without being strictly linguistic: the chains of this

semiotic sys- tem are a-signifying, and are said to “resemble ... a succession of characters from
different alphabets in which an ideogram, a picto- gram, a tiny image of an elephant passing by,
or a rising sun may suddenly make its appearance ” (AO 39); a semiotic system contain- ing pictograms and images of
elephants cannot be purely differen- tial in the way a (phonetic) linguistic system is. Conversely, bodily drives for Deleuze and

Guattari are not purely substantial (as they are for Lacan): drives repeatedly differentiate themselves
under the impetus of institutions and intelligence and the Problems they give rise and respond
to, well beneath the level of representation, solu- tions, and conscious awareness. What’s more,
immanent criteria exist to evaluate solutions and representations according to their use or abuse of the syntheses of experience, and it is to them that
we now return. Illegitimate use of the connective synthesis (the paralogism of extrapolation) is global and specific instead of partial and non-spe- cific –
Kleinian, in a word, rather than Nietzschean. Klein was on the right track, according to Deleuze and Guattari, in her elucida- tion of partial objects, but
went astray in considering them merely a temporary “pre-Oedipal” stage en route to the integration of instincts and drives under the aegis of a unified,
sovereign ego. For Nietzsche and schizoanalysis, the unified ego is an illusion and an epiphenomenon, and
objects remain partial in correlation with the partiality of the unconscious forces warring for
temporary domin- ance in the psyche. In this respect, a specific (illegitimate) use of the connective
synthesis involves selecting one element of a connective a-signifying chain – the phallus, say, or reason or
money – and ele- vating it permanently to a place or role of privilege over and above all the other

elements. Finally, the other thing to be said about the abuse of the connective synthesis is that it usually occurs as an effect of (or at the very least
in tandem with) the illegitimate use of the disjunctive synthesis. Abuse of the disjunctive synthesis (the paralogism of the dou- ble bind) is exclusive and
restrictive rather than inclusive and non- restrictive. This difference underlies the crucial ambivalence of the BwO, which as we have seen allows for the
differentiation of drives beyond instinct and habit but also their capture in social repres- sion and neurosis. Inclusive disjunction generates an
indiscrimin- ate plurality of modes of satisfaction for the multifarious drives it thereby differentiates, whereas exclusive disjunction restricts the range
and form of possible satisfactions to binary pairs and then forces an either–or choice between the paired terms: one must iden- tify as man or woman,
gay or straight, and so on. While there is much to be said (practically, everything to be said) in favor of full
civil rights for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered, and queers in general, each of these
legitimate categories of civil representation can become reductive and repressive as an instance
of illegitimate molar representation of fixed identities vis-à-vis the differentiating drives of the
molecular unconscious. Illegitimate use of the conjunctive synthesis (the paralogism of
application), meanwhile, bears primarily on the constitution and recognition of identity, and is
segregative and bi-univocal rather than nomadic and polyvocal. The segregative use involves
defin- ing the fixed identity of an individual, a family, a clan, race, tribe, nation, etc. in terms of
its superiority to others, whereas schizo- phrenic or nomadic subjectivity, as we have seen,
defines identiica- tion by remaining constantly in flux, and identifies temporarily (if it does so at
all) always with the inferior or subaltern other : “I am of a race inferior for all eternity ... I am a beast, a Negro” (AO 105,
quoting Arthur Rimbaud). Related to the attribution of a unitary fixed self-identity to what is in fact a

process of plural and nomadic subjectivity is the attribution of a single ixed meaning to experi-
ence that is in fact polysemous or polyvocal. The retrospective “So that’s what that was” gets applied outside the therapeutic
context to the psychoanalytic interpretation of socio-historical phenomena and translated into “So that’s what that means” – so that (Oedipus)

is what that (everything) means. This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “bi-univocalization”: the reduction
of the real complexity of the unconscious to an expressive relation between a tenor that is held
constant, on one hand – the Oedipus – and on the other hand a vehicle – comprising all the
socio-historical material – that varies substantially but for psychoanalysis enjoys no explanatory
power whatsoever. Hence the tiresome, mechanically repetitive quality of most psychoanalytic studies of culture and society:
everything amounts to the Oedipus (for Freudians); to lack, castration, or the phallus (for
Lacanians); or to some “kernel of surplus-enjoyment” (for Žižek). The fifth paralogism seems in a sense to compensate for the abuse of bi-
univocalization; Deleuze and Guattari call it the paralogism of the afterward. Here, the importance of real social and historical

factors in psychic life is granted, but only insofar as they are under- stood to come after the
familial factors, which form Oedipal subject- ivity during childhood first. Real social relations are
then construed merely as so many “sublimations” of Oedipal relations, which are supposed to
be primary, and therefore universal as well : “the child is father to the man,” as the saying goes. But for schizoanalysis, it is not
the child but the boss who is father to the man, so to speak, and only then is the man father to the child.24 Oedipal relations are

neither primary – inasmuch as they derive, by delegation to the insti- tution of the nuclear
family, from the structure and dynamics of cap- ital accumulation – nor universal – inasmuch
as the nuclear family is a historically contingent, specifically capitalist institution. Oedipal
psychoanalysis embodies all five of the paralogisms diag- nosed by Deleuze and Guattari. It presupposes that the product- five synthesis makes specific
whole-object connections to global persons in the family alone instead of general partial object con- nections to the natural and social environment at
large; that the conjunctive synthesis first constructs subjects within a segregated field of restricted identifications instead of from the entire field of
social relations; and that the disjunctive synthesis, positing a closed either–or alternative, effectively excludes society from the enclos- ure of the
 the family is a social
nuclear family altogether. But the family is not separ- ate, not an autonomous and self-contained microcosm;

institution, and the nuclear family is in fact a capitalist institution.25 And it is delegated the
function of reproduction under capitalism as an apparently separate institution so that social
pro- duction can proceed to develop and continually revolutionize itself without regard for the
reproduction of subjects and the direct man- agement of their desire.
 Spivak
Spivak misreads Deleuze – doesn’t understand discrepancies between Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of difference and her own.
Burns and Kaiser 12 – (Lorna – professor of University at St. Andrews, Birgit - Associate Professor of
Comparative Literature at Utrecht University ,
file:///C:/Users/kybb2/Downloads/Introduction_to_Postcolonial_Literatures.pdf, June 2012, “Introduction Navigating
Differential Futures; Unmaking Colonial Pasts” Pgs. 2-3)/

In the first essay of Deleuze and the Postcolonial, Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey do much to clear a way beyond
Deleuze and Guattari in works such as Anti-Oedipus and A
Spivak’s critique, arguing that Deleuze and, indeed,
Thousand Plateaus, base their analyses on a philosophy of difference and repetition distinct from
Spivak’s Lacanian-Freudian reading of the subaltern . As Robinson and Tormey argue, Spivak’s
critique turns upon a misreading of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of desire,
subjectivisation and representation . While Spivak does usefully draw attention to the problematics of a
postcolonial discourse that speaks for or about the subaltern within a register that risks reinscribing the dominance of
hegemonic (Western) structures of thought, her assertion that Deleuze works within a Western
conceptualisation of oppression – ‘deploy[ing] an essentialised subject of oppression’, a ‘universal subject of
oppression’ (Robinson and Tormey 2010: 22) – crucially ignores the important distinctions between a
Deleuzian philosophy of difference-initself and Spivak’s own Lacanian-Freudian
understanding of difference based on an ontological lack . As a result, Spivak’s attempt to locate
a ‘subject of power and desire’ in Deleuze (Spivak 1988: 280) fails to recognise that, for Deleuze,
desire is never simply the desire of a particular subject, nor is it the sole ground upon which
a subject is constructed. Rather, as Robinson and Tormey point out, desire is ‘a matter of flows and
becomings which traverse the entire social, and indeed material or ecological field (2010: 22).
What Deleuze and Guattari term ‘desiring-production’ , therefore, reaches far beyond the limits
of the sovereign subject and, crucially, while certain majoritarian (not a numerical determination, but
signifying a state of standardisation, domination, or continuity) flows of desire can produce determinate
subjects or identities, there is always also, in opposition, a flow of desire characterised as
minoritarian (again, not a marginal subjectivity, but a singularity, a process of becoming
rather than fixity). It is this polarisation of the majoritarian subject and minoritarian
process of becoming that is crucial for understanding how Deleuze and Guattari, particularly in
A Thousand Plateaus, conceive of the position of both the subaltern and the intellectual (the two foci
of Spivak’s critique). Since the figure of resistance must be identified as minoritarian, the so-
called subject of desire must be one that follows minor lines of becoming, employs
rhizomatic strategies of thought and operates within ‘smooth’ spaces that escape the
‘striations’ of power. ‘Hence’, Robinson and Tormey argue, ‘ the agency of the oppressed, the voice of
the subaltern, is not characterised by true representation or self-presence. Rather, it
contains original production, an expression of the primacy of desiring-production over
social production’ (2010: 24).
 State Good/Statephobia
Permutation: do both – the attempt to use the necessity of macropolitical
action as guilty blackmail to shut down micropolitical experimentation
eviscerates radical potentiality.
Massumi and McKim 08. Brian Massumi, professor of communication science at the
University of Montreal, and Joel McKim, professor of film, media, and cultural studies at the
University of London, Birkbeck (UK), “Of Microperception and Micropolitics,” Micropolitics :
Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. No. 3. October 2009.
www.inflexions.org, 19-21

JM: One of the things that I think is interesting about the approach is that it is both concerned
with the creative limitations required for producing an event, and also concerned with how
various events resonate with each other and amplify each other. This seems to bring us back to
the problem we discussed earlier regarding how an affective politics may have a global
presence, or work up to a scale larger than a single event. BM: Yes, a micropolitical event can
have broad range. What qualifies it as micropolitical is the way it happens, not the dimensions it
takes. By micropolitical we mean returning to the generative moment of experience, at the
dawning of an event, to produce a modulatory commotion internal to the constitution of the
event. It’s a question of reconnecting processually with what’s germinal in your living, with the
conditions of emergence of the situations you live. The idea is then to find a mechanism to pass
that reconnection forward. Not impose it, not even suggest it as a general model. Rather, to
give it as a gift, a gift of self- renewing process. This question of event-propagation, of
processual seeding as part of a gift economy of revivifying experience, is the problem of a large-
scale micropolitics. The process itself has to be self-valorizing. It has to have a value in itself
because the situation of the world, Obama notwithstanding, is not overall one of hope. The
situation of the world is desperate. There’s no rational ground for hope. If you look at things
rationally, if you look at the increasing disparities of wealth and health in the world, if you look
at the spreading environmental destruction, if you look at the looming disasters in the
foundations of the economy, if you look at the the energy crisis and the food crises affecting the
globe, and especially if you look at the way they interrelate, if you look at the virulence of
renascent nationalist sentiment and of the culture of war, there is no hope. So the
micropolitical question is how to live more intensely, live more fully, with augmented powers
of existence, within the limits of that desperate situation, while finding ways to continue
nevertheless, chipping away at the macro problems. There’s a certain incompleteness to any
micropolitical event, like the events I was talking about. A lot of things that you feel were on the
verge of taking shape didn’t quite happen. Potentials that you could just glimpse didn’t come
into focus. The goal is not to overcome the incompleteness. It’s to make it compelling.
Compelling enough that you are moved to do it again, differently, bringing out another set of
potentials, some more formed and focused, others that were clearly expressed before now
backgrounded. That creates a small, moveable environment of potential. The goal is to live in
that moveable environment of potential. If you manage to, you will avoid the paralysis of
hopelessness. Neither hope nor hopelessness—a pragmatics of potential. You have to live it at
every level. In the way you relate to your partner, and even your cat. The way you teach a class
if you’re a professor. The way you create and present your art if you’re an artist. If you
participate in more punctual events like the ones I was describing, this will provide a continuous
background for what comes of those events to disseminate into and diffuse through. A
This is not to
symbiosis of the special event and the day-to-day, in creative connivance.
say that operating in a more macro, top-down manner, is wrong
or should not be undertaken. It’s just to say that if it’s done to
the exclusion of micropolitical activity it’s mortifying, even when
it’s done for survival’s sake. Sometimes there is no alternative but to centrally
impose certain enabling constraints. For example, I’d be very happy if the transition to a
renewable energy future or a global redistribution of wealth or a non-growth paradigm were
imposed on the capitalist system. But high-level solutions of that kind are only part of the
political equation, and it’s not the part that the affective politics we’ve been talking about
specifically addresses. Micropolitics is not programmatic. It doesn’t construct and impose
global solutions. But it would be naïve to think that is separate from that kind of macro-activity .
Anything that augments powers of existence creates conditions for micropolitical flourishings.
No body flourishes without enough food and without health care. Micropolitical interventions
need macro solutions. But success at the macropolitical level is at best partial without a
complementary micropolitical flourishing. Without it, the tendency is toward standardization.
Since macropolitical solutions are generally applicable by definition, by definition they act to
curtail the variety and exuberance of forms of life. Macropolitical intervention targets minimal
conditions of survival. Micropolitics complements that by fostering an excess of conditions of
emergence. That inventiveness is where new solutions start to crystallize. The potentials
produced at the micropolitical level feed up, climbing the slope that macropolitics descends.
Micropolitical and macropolitical go together. One is never without the other. They are
processual reciprocals. They aliment each other. At their best, they are mutually corrective. Even
macro solutions designed to curtail micropolitical activity often end up feeding it by making it a
necessity to invent new ways of getting by and getting around. Creative variation is the only
real constant of politics. Deleuze and Guattari often made this point, for example in their slogan
that that the State is built on what escapes it. It has become a commonplace recently to say that
we are in a situation where the end of the world is now imaginable—but the end of capitalism
isn’t. That is definitely one “solution” that is not likely to come programmatically, top-down—
given who’s on top. The dismantling of capitalism is a “corrective” that will only come from a
breaking of the reciprocity I was just talking about between the macro- and micropolitical. The
prevailing operating conditions of macro/micropolitical reciprocity should not be taken to imply
that the symmetry is never broken, that a bifurcation can never occur. The complementarity can
be broken in both directions. When macrostructures miniaturize themselves and work to usurp
the ground of the micropolitical with scaled-down versions of the dominant generalities, that
is fascism. When micropolitical flourishings proliferate to produce a singularity, in the sense of
a systemic tipping point, that’s revolution. The ultimate vocation of micropolitics is this:
enacting the unimaginable. The symmetry-breaking point, the point at which the
unimaginable eventuates, is but a cut, “smaller” than the smallest historically perceivable
interval. That is to say, qualitatively different. A moment of a different color, one you never see
coming, that comes when it’s least expected. Inevitably, a next micro/macro complementarity
will quickly settle in. But it will take a form that could not have been predicted, but is now
suddenly doable and thinkable. Micropolitics is what makes the unimaginable practicable. It’s
the potential that makes possible.

Resist the impulse to enclose the possibility of a people to come within the
striated state form. We should refuse the illusion of “we the people” proffered
by their evidence.
Lambert 10. Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the humanities at Syracuse University, The
War Machine and “a people who revolt,” Theory & Event, Volume 13, Issue 3, muse

This nostalgic and essentially Romantic image of “a people who is missing” has, as its natural
double, the Messianic image of “a people still to come.” This latter image has a long history and
is usually ascribed to religions and to the story-telling function of subjugated and colonized
peoples, but it also has an abstract representation in contemporary post-Marxist philosophy. For
example, it is the image of a people—minus the tragic aspects of suicide and self-destruction—
portrayed in Hardt and Negri’s conception of “the Multitude’ ; one can never imagine “the
Multitude” as having any relation to the war-machine , except metaphorically, that is, since all
the contradictory and potentially violent traits have been stripped away and essentially
“humanized” (i.e., Catholicized). Hence, the figure of the militant that emerges in the final pages of Empire bears no
resemblance to real militants, or what they define as “the sad, ascetic agent of the Third International whose soul was deeply
were not Deleuze and
permeated by Soviet state reason,” but rather to the portrait of St. Francis of Assisi.7 And yet,
Guattari also talking about real peoples, and is there not something essentially risky and
inherently contradictory in the concept of a people; even though, it seems, many contemporary
theorists want to ignore this contradictory and often volatile aspect in their portrait of a people
who are either found to be missing, or still to come? Either we have the sad and tragic image of
an oppressed or colonized people, or the saintly and other-worldly image of a super-
proletariat. In other words, all the possibilities of real violence are subtracted as the condition of
both representations; either a people are purely subjected to violence of the State form (i.e.,
homo sacer), or they are composed of another nature (i.e., post-human) like creatures in a
Science Fiction. By contrast, what I am suggesting is that the image of “a people” that we find
in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings bears the same bi-polar characteristics that they also
ascribed to the war-machine. We might propose this equivalence in the following manner: just
as the State has no war-machine of its own, since it is of “another species, another nature,
another origin than the State apparatus,” as Deleuze and Guattari state repeatedly in defining
this relationship, we can also say that the State has no people of its own—that is, it is an “empty
form of appropriation.”8 We can find the above hypothesis confirmed when we realize that the
State-Form entertains a relationship with the people that runs parallel to the predicament it
faces with its own war-machine, one of exteriority and occasionally extreme volatility. First of
all, the people are always posited as being “outside” the State-Form and, in some sense,
precede its arrival and accompany the stages of its development all the way to the future in
which the people are yet to actually arrive. Second, just as in the case of the war-machine, the
State does not create “a people,” but rather attempts to internalize already existing peoples ,
even though this existence may be purely virtual and nomadically distributed across an open
space or territory that precedes the arrival of the State form . It is the specific mythology
created by the State form that attempts to reverse this precedence (of the people outside the
state) by making the people an “idea” that first occurs in the mind of those subjects who are
already found to be internal to the State-Form. (This is the myth of the Founding Fathers, for
example, when they say “We, the people …”. ) This may be one way of truly understanding the
problem of idealism: the failure of a people to truly arrive , because of the internalization of the
people into the form of the State. This was equally the problem of fascism as it is of the
idealism of the democratic state; consequently, it should not come as a surprise that Hitler
ordered the German people to join him in an act of suicide for their failure in realizing the
form of the Reich. By contrast, in a democratic form, the state entertains a fundamentally
ambivalent relationship with its own people , one that is often prone to become extremely
volatile. There are too many resisting elements, too many numbers; moreover, the people are
always failing the ideals of the State, always found to be lacking, or exhibit a tendency to go a
little insane, to return to religion and to the family , and if pushed to the extreme limit, to
become terrorists or serialkillers. 9
Afro-Pessimism
 Bignall

Refuse to recognize FACES—a primary point of privilege is the ability to be

recognized coherently as a FACE in the first place. It is NOT ENOUGH to hold up
alternative faces and say that SIGNIFICATION should WORK in a different way
because that FORFEITS the question of whether or not signification should
EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE. They are still measuring themselves in gradations
away from the normative White Man Face rather than erasing that face
entirely. The impact is all other regimes of oppression that rely on recognition,
such as heterosexism, masculinism, and capitalism
Bignall 12. Simone Bignall, Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Philosophy at
the University of New South Wales, “Dismantling the White Man Face,” Deleuze and Racism,
Online/google books

For Deleuze and Guattari, the face takes a particular form - it is a 'concrete assemblage' - but is
always produced by an 'abstract machine of faciality' (ibid.: 168). The face takes shape
alongside the 'ensemble of material connections in which bodies and things are drawn . . .
People become facialized nor because of ideology, repression, or texts, but because of their
commingling with places, tools, and each other' (Saldanha 2007: 100-1). Habits of connectivity
draw constituting elements into regular assemblages or arrangements, thus establishing
structures of coherence. In the process of facialisation, the function of the subject is to
establish the rhythm of coherence that organises various interpretations of such arrangements
into a consistent worldview. Thus, facialisation relies upon the interpretive work of the subject ,
who is responsible for reterritorialisation - the selection and consolidation - of a privileged set
of significations from a range of possible alternatives, and the perpetuation of these meanings
through the ongoing repetition of a given mode of expression . In this sense, the face is a
'territory' that is carved out from a broader 'landscape' - the collection of diverse orders of
meaning that form any given social, political and discursive milieu (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
172-3}. The face expresses a dominant outlook and mode of understanding; it encodes a
particularly powerful regime of signs. A face is powerful for as long as its expression remains
fixed: that is, for as long as the regime of signs it expresses repeats regularly and persuasively
through time. Its resistance to transformation ensures its continuation in its given form. Patricia
MacCormack (2004: 137) comments:

the face is a landscape. The faced landscape is rigid, changeable only in relation to a set of
predictable variances. The landscape is also cultivated by a certain set of people, who own, run
and map the land. The land is recognised in a certain way.

As Hage (1998) illustrates, this facial landscape is recognised from the privileged point of view of
a political aristocracy.
The face is, then, an apparatus of capture which records and organises events and concepts
into meaningful sequences and structures of expres sion that serve the interests of a political
aristocracy. It is comprised of 'a general space of comparison and a mobile centre of
appropriation' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 444). The 'white wall' of the signifier acts to 'define
zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralises in advance any expressions or
connections unamenable to the appropriate significations' (ibid.: 168). The 'black hole' of
subjectivity constitutes a perceptive and interpretive centre, which draws in, assimilates and
transforms alterity, encompassing and internalising various interpretations within an existing
structure of significance and comprehension. Together, the 'white wall' of the signifier and the
'black hole' of subjectivity effect the operation of representation . In this process, difference is
compared and measured in terms of its recognised resemblance to a given or established
representative form; this privileging of similitude and resemblance categorises inassimilable
difference as 'unruly' or 'outcast' and reproduces an expanding principle of identity or
sameness in the process of signification . Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, faciality privileges the
conceptual cluster of identity, resemblance and analogy that underscores the possibility of
representation and the politics of recognition underlying the management and hierarchical
distribution of identities within a political space, such as that described by a nation.

The facial system produces an abstract model of identity that is generalised and standardised;
the face enables a 'computation of normalities' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 178). MacCormack
(2004: 136) explains that, as a consequence, 'when we are facialised, we are made visible only
within one dominant system and in the only manner that the dominant system
understands . . . certain bodies are read and valued according to how they differ from the
majoritarian face.' Faciality corresponds with a politics of representative identity,
in which the recognition of difference is achievable only in relation to that identity:
'the face is a politics' resting upon technologies of normalisation and discipline
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 181). The facial structure thereby describes a general system of
representation that underscores the possibility of a generalised politics of capture, which may
be mobilised in a range of concrete circumstances in specific bodily practices and techniques of
is therefore not the only mode that can be taken by
control. Racism
facialised politics, which in fact extends to all majoritarian practices of
power, including, for example, masculinism, capitalism and heteronormativity.
However, Deleuze and Guattari identify racism as one privileged example of facial politics,
which 'operates by degrees of deviance in relation to the White- Mail face' (1987: 181, 178).

In general, then, 'the face brings the body of that which varies from the majoritarian into
comprehension for dominant culture . . . they always exist in comparison with the majoritarian
face' (MacCormack 2004: 136). Or, as Bogue comments: 'the face of despotic-passional power
identifies, classifies, recognizes , . . the facialized object is recognized, pinned to the wall, or
stuffed in a hole, imprinted with a look that it returns as a reverberation of the force that
shapes it (2003: 104-5). In fact, as is evidenced by the example of the reportage of the events at
Palm Island - which focused on disorderly, rioting Aborigines and deflected public attention
 maintains its majoritarian
away from rhe causal factor of police violence - a facial regime
form by attributing a negative value to any fragments of signifiance that
threaten to elude capture:

In a signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system
of signs: it is charged with everything that was 'bad' in a given period, that is, everything that
resisted signifying signs ... finally, and especially, it incarnates the line of flight the signifying
regime cannot tolerate . . . the regime must block a line of this kind or define it in an entirely
negative fashion . . . Anything that threatens to put the system to flight will be killed or put to
flight itself. Anything that exceeds the excess of the signifier or passes beneath it will be marked
with a negative value. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 116)

The Palm Islanders protesting against the violent treatment of their people held in custody
became scapegoats, negatively identified in dominant news discourse and social discussions
that maintained emphasis on the riots and thereby refrained from scrutinising the inciting
violent behaviour of the white police officer. This framing of the events and the actors implicitly
upheld whiteness as an unremarked category of social 'normality against which Australia's
internal 'others' are represented as 'unruly', measured as deviant and finally 'managed' within
the space of the nation.

How to dismantle a face (who does the face think it is?)

Bignall 12. Simone Bignall, Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Philosophy at
the University of New South Wales, “Dismantling the White Man Face,” Deleuze and Racism,
Online/google books

Thus, dismantling the face involves locating the points at which meaning shifts and becomes
unstable: searching for the points in a col lection of social discourses where meaning is
contradictory, or the points in one's own identity where one occupies multiple and
contradicting classifications. One may be simultaneously altruistic and selfish, active and
passive, free and constrained, willful and aimless, friend and lover, parent and professional, and
so forth. A police officer simultaneously may be a protector of society and an embodiment of
white state violence. In finding such points of ambiguous identification,one is poten-
tially able to apply pressure to the signifying system in which identities
are embedded, perhaps provoking an 'uncertain moment' where conventional
significations collapse and established meanings shift (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 189).

At such moments, the abstract machine of faciality that shapes the emergence of particular and
concrete facial assemblages may become (partially) transparent. The increased visibility of the
constructive mechanisms underlying a set face undermines its pretensions to inevitability and
stability. This can have the effect of destabilising the face, potentially
enabling a critical line of flight from established structures of
representation and a recomposition of meaning according to an alternative
constitutive process that defines an alternative regime of signs . This process
requires complementary critical and constructive movements, which at once deconstruct the
established power of the face by destabilising its territory and simultaneously attend to the
composition, or reterritotalisation, of alternative structures of meaning that we can rely upon to
make sense of our worlds and ourselves. However, in reterritorialising meaning, the challenge is
not simply to recreate the territory that has been dismantled, but to invent a process of
composition enabling an entirely new form of sensibility, a new framework of understanding for
a 'new people and a new earth': 'beyond the face lies an altogether different humanity (ibid,:
190).

For Deleuze and Guattari, key to this complex destructive-creative process is the invention of a
'probe-head' capable of penetrating an opaque or self-evident regime of signs and forcing it to
transform. The concept of the 'probe-head' is best understood in light of their Spinozist ontology
of the complex relational individual, which enters into multifaceted processes of transformation
during encounters with others (ibid.: 253-60; on Spinozan embodiment, see Gatens 1996). In
fact, for Deleuze, an individual entity is an emergent, multilevelled, complex union of parts. The
structure takes form when the relations of desire binding its parts into a loose collective become
habitual and consistent relations of power, lending rhe entity a regular structural organisation
and investing it with an interest in maintaining its existence as such. The structure is complexly
relational, since its composing elements are drawn together from a contextualising
environmental milieu and furnished through the relations it forms with other individuals and
structures within rhis milieu. For example, a national identity such as rhe Australian 'mate1 is a complex individual
discourse. It is recognisable because it enjoys a structural unity which is defined by rhe consistent inclusion of certain composing
elements ('white male bonding', 'fair-go tolerance1, 'tough altruism', 'classless egalitarianism', and so forth) and their regular
organisation in relationships that privilege the dominance of some elements in relation to others (shared sameness over divisive
difference, masculine identity over feminine, tolerance over prejudice, toughness over gentleness, and so forth).

However, the composing parts are selectively drawn from a relative context, in which diverse structures provide alternative
elements that may compete for privileged inclusion in the discourse of national identity. For example, the virtue of 'tolerance1 is
much lauded in the version of Australian nationalism presented above, but also forms a significant part of an alternative discourse of
national identity and nationhood defining 'multicultural Australia'. Furthermore, as Ghassan Hage (1998: 94) persuasively argues, the
politics of tolerance is often mobilised in discourses of anriracism, but can also serve to reinforce rhe managerial power of a
dominant white national elite, which in being tolerant is not required to give up its position of power but is merely asked to refrain
from exercising it in acts of racist exclusion. Shared dimensions of similarity and divergence create complex and uneven forms of
relationship between various national identities. This can become apparent as the discourses come into affective contact with one
another during the course of public conversation and practice, sometimes reinforcing one or both, but at other times prompting
subtle transformations and mutual becomings in each, potentially leading to a radical shift in powerful public conceptualisations and
imaginaries.

Accordingly, an individual structure is always also a multiplicity; it is 'defined not by its

elements, nor by a center of unification or compre hension. It is defined by the number of
dimensions it has' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 249). The 'number of dimensions' enjoyed by an entity is
determined by the complexity of its affective relations; these include not only the internal relations between the composing
elements that give the individual a certain structural definition, but also the range of external relations that the individual forges
with multifaceted aspects of its neighbouring bodies.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the relational nature of complex entities entails that 'each multiplicity
is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and ... a multiplicity is constantly
transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its doors and thresholds'
(ibid.: 249). Sending out a probe-head is one way in which a multiplicity experiments with the
possibility of forging new symbiotic relations with neighbouring bodies, thus altering its
dimensions of complexity and changing in nature according with shifts in its affective
connections. Complexly relational individuals have 'shifting borderlines', because their
composing elements form 'passages and bridges', 'doors and thresholds', when they are shared
individual
by neighbouring individuals (ibid.: 252, 249). As they come into contact,
entities can enter into processes of becoming-otherwise, either when they
absorb new elemental influences from the encounter, or when the
encounter causes a shift in the power relations binding elements into
coherent forms of order.

Through encounters with others an entity is transformed, not necessarily in entirety, but more
often in piecemeal and selective ways at particular sites of elemental affection . The probe-head
describes a technique of transformation an entity may engage or be engaged in, when brought
into proximity or intimacy with other structures, in ways that are receptive to rhe formation of
new elemental connections. The possibility of self-transformation through the creation of novel
combinations with other individuals is facilitated initially by the identification of those sites of
structural vulnerability: those 'moments of uncertainty' in which a self may be redefined . In
such moments, a 'probe-head is that which explores the terrain beyond the face , the terrain
from which the face is nothing more than an extraction or a crystallisation. Probe-heads are in
this sense a move into chaos' (O'Sullivan 2009: 254).

In sending out a probe-head to the interstirial space or rhe chaotic plane of consistency beyond
the face, the structure accordingly engages with the primary, chaotic force field of desiring-
production where bodies are caused to form and transform in accordance with their fluid
dynamics of association and coexistence. The propulsion of the probe- head involves an act of
desire, prompting the sort of relational effort called for by Fanon: to 'touch the other, to feel
the other, to explain the other to myself' (1967: 231). Careful observation of the nature of
one's affective engagements allows a developing understanding of the ways in which new styles
of community might be forged, supporting new forms of individuality along with new modes of
interpretation and structures of signifiance.
The discovery of new and alternative possibilities for relationship increases an individual's dimensions of complexity and so invents
the potential for processes of structural transformation. Thus, between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the
two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events
and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 253)

Dismantling the face involves exploring this interstitial space 'between

substantial forms and determined subjects'. The following section considers whether a
privileged emphasis on destabilising and transforming the face, as part of a political sensibility
concerned with the 'undoing of the regularities of signification and subjectification' (Bogue
2003: 105), can open up spaces for new kinds of counter-racial thinking.

We control the internal link to MEANING itself, which short circuits most of
their offense—even if anti-blackness is the fulcrum of facialization’s violence,
questioning the nature of WHAT BLACKNESS MEANS is logically prior—their
TOTALIZING DEPICTION of revolution means they JUST DRAW ANOTHER FACE
rather than rupturing the presumed universality of that face to begin with.
Dismantling the face is a prior question and DOES NOT EXCLUDE anything in the
1AC but FOREGROUNDING IT means a NEG ballot is necessary
Bignall 12. Simone Bignall, Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Philosophy at
the University of New South Wales, “Dismantling the White Man Face,” Deleuze and Racism,
Online/google books

A complex mixture of various semiotic regimes forms a milieu or landscape that furnishes
material for the constitution of the sense of a particular body, identity or event . The milieu
constitutes an exterior context in which a dominant organisation of meaning subsists. At its
points of contact with this milieu, a representation is fundamentally unstable, as its elements
combine, shift, transfer and pass between other regimes of sense. Thus, there are possible
passages between regimes of signs, enabling movements of destratification or the mixing and
translation of established regimes of signification. The face depicts a systemic collection of the
dominant representations that comprise a majoritarian order of sense. Whereas the semiotic
regime of the signifier and the subject works to capture and reduce diverse meanings to a
limited version of 'truth' that masquerades as uniform and universal, excluded alternative and
polyvocal regimes of sense and expression are always possible (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 136;
see also Deleuze 2004). However, the potential for discovery of these alternative and contesting
regimes of sense 'requires a rethinking of the majoritarian face and a willingness to envisage
more than one system of comprehension and function for the face (MacCormack 2004: 138).
Deleuze and Guartari suggest:

when the face is effaced , when the faciality traits disappear, we can be sure that we have
entered into another regime, other zones infinitely muter and more imperceptible where
subterranean becomings-animal occur, becomings molecular, nocturnal deterritorialisations
overspilling the limits of the signifying system. (1987: 115)

In his early reflection on his experiences with racism and resistance, Frantz Fanon writes:

I am not a prisoner of history . I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should
constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence . In
the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself . I am a part of Being to the degree
that I go beyond it. (1967: 229)
Repression occurs when calls for acknowledgement of a group's just political concerns - such as
those voiced by the Palm Island rioters - are confronted by a 'white wall' of signification, which
responds only by bouncing back given structures of meaning and is not capable of recognising
creative inventions of sense or differences that depart from the majoritarian perspective .
Racism constructs an empire of uniformity and digs a 'black hole' of subjectivarion in
accordance with an established or normative model of identity , in which the minoritarian self is
imprisoned or buried. Deleuze and Guattari accordingly ask a question relevant for antiracist
strategising: 'How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall? How
do you dismantle the face?'(1987: 186).

YOU SOLVE NOTHING WITHOUT DISMANTLING FACIALITY ITSELF—think of this

as a circumvention argument: the existence of THE WHITE MAN’S FACE as a
COHERENT ENTITY is one that the MEDIA will exploit grand scale to undo any
lasting impact to voting AFF
Bignall 12. Simone Bignall, Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Philosophy at
the University of New South Wales, “Dismantling the White Man Face,” Deleuze and Racism,
Online/google books

In his work on cinema, Deleuze's discussion of the roles of 'fhe face' (1986: 99) mainly explores
the affective dimensions of the encounter between particular or individual faces, primarily those
of the viewer and the face on the screen (see also Conley 2005; Rushton 2002). However, in A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari identify the face as 'the white wall / black hole
system' (1987: 167). Here they use the term 'face', nor in concrete reference to a particular
visage, but rather to imagine an abstract process of sense-making and the consolidation of an
emergent structure of sense. The concept of 'faciality' conveys the idea that language functions
as an ordering device, operating at the nexus of the signifier and the subject . Ronald Bogue
explains rhat, for Deleuze and Guattari,

language's purpose is less to communicate than to impose order. Language enforces a

codification of the world according to orthodox categories and classifications, its various
speech-acts shaping, guiding, and policing thought and behaviour. Hence the regular patterns
of socially sanctioned practices effected by language may be said to constitute a regime of
signs, a power structure that forms individual subjects and places them in social and political
relation to one another. (2003: S3)

The operation of the news media as an ordering device, working through language to reproduce
the structures of signification and under standing that institutionalise and normalise the 'White-
Man face', could be clearly observed during the reportage of the events at Palm Island (Hoi lings
worth 2005). The role of news media in framing Australian race relations came under scrutiny in
1991, when the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Human Rights
Commission National Inquiry into Racist Violence each found rhat media representation exerts a
powerful influence on community attitudes and behaviours towards indigenous people. Despite
the recommendations made by these reports, with the aim of reducing incarceration rates and
improving the material experiences of indigenous Australians in gaol and in society, there has
been little improvement noted since that time. Media representations of indigenous affairs have
remained stereotypicallv negative, and incarceration rates for indigenous Australians have in
fact increased; recent statistics indicate that indigenous adults are thirteen times more likely to
be imprisoned, and indigenous youths twenty-eight times more likely to be held in juvenile
detention, in comparison with non-indigenous Australians (Cahna 2009).
 Kline

Afro-Pessimism’s structural critique eliminates the possibility of micro-political

resistance. To conflate macro-political structures with ontological reality
mystifies the complex history of anti-blackness, destroys more pragmatic
modes of resistance, and flattens the experience of 35 million black people
living in the US with an essentialist notion of ‘social death.’
Kline 17 David Kline, Ph.D. candidate in Religion at Rice University, “The Pragmatics of
Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political Ontology,” Critical Philosophy of
Race Vol. 5, Issue 1
Wilderson’s critique of Agamben is certainly correct within the specific framework of a political ontology of racial positioning.
His description of anti-Black antagonism shows a powerful macropolitical sedimentation of
Black suffering in which Black bodies are ontologically frozen into (non-) beings that stand in
absolute political distinction from those “who do not magnetize bullets ” (Wilderson 2010, 80). In the
same framework, Jared Sexton, whose work is very close to Wilderson’s, is also right when he shows how biopolitical thought—
specifically the Agambenian form centered on questions of sovereignty—and its variant of “necropolitics” found in Mbembe has so
Locating the reality of anti-Blackness wholly
often run aground on the figure of the slave (see Sexton 2010).5
within this account of political ontology does provide an undeniably effective analysis of its
violence and sedimentation over the modern world as a whole. However, in terms of a
general structure, I understand Wilderson’s (and Sexton’s) political ontology to remain tied in
form to Agamben’s even as it seemingly discounts it and therefore remains bound to some of
the problems and limitations that beset such a formal structure, as I’ll discuss in a moment. Despite the
critique of Agamben’s ontological blind spots regarding the extent to which Black suffering is non-analogous to non-black suffering,
Wilderson keeps the basic contours of Agamben’s ontological structure in
as I’ve tried to show,
place, maintaining a formal political ontology that expands the bottom end of the binary
structure so as to locate an absolute zero-point of political abjection within Black social death.
To be clear, this is not to say that the difference between the content and historicity of Wilderson’s social death and Agamben’s bare
life does not have profound implications for how political ontology is conceived or how questions of suffering and freedom are
posed. Nor is it to say that a congruence of formal structure linking Agamben and Wilderson should mean that their respective
Rather,
projects are not radically differentiated and perhaps even opposed in terms of their broader implications and revelations.
what I want to focus on is how the absolute prioritization of a formal ontological framework
of autonomous and irreconcilable spheres of positionality—however descriptively or
epistemologically accurate in terms of a regime of ontology and its corresponding macropolitics
of anti-Blackness—ends up limiting a whole range of possible avenues of analysis that have
their proper site within what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the micropolitical. The issue
here is the distinction between the macropolitical (molar) and the micropolitical (molecular)
fields of organization and becoming. Wilderson and Afro-pessimism in general privilege the
macropolitical field in which Blackness is always already sedimented and rigidified into a political
onto-logical position that prohibits movement and the possibility of what Fred Moten calls
“fugitivity.” The absolute privileging of the macropolitical as the frame of analysis tends to
bracket or overshadow the fact that “every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a
micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 213). Where the macropolitical is structured around a
politics of molarisation that immunizes itself from the threat of contingency and disruption, the
micropolitical names the field in which local and singular points of connection produce the
conditions for “lines of flight, which are molecular” (ibid., 216). The micropolitical field is where
movement and resistance happens against or in excess of the macropolitical in ways not
reducible to the kind of formal binary organization that Agamben and Wilderson’s political
ontology prioritizes. Such resistance is not necessarily positive or emancipatory, as lines of flight name a contingency that
always poses the risk that whatever develops can become “capable of the worst” (ibid., 205). However, within this
contingency is also the possibility of creative lines and deterritorializations that provide
possible means of positive escape from macropolitical molarisations. Focusing on Wilderson, his
absolute prioritization of a political onto-logical structure in which the law relegates Black being into the singular
position of social death happens, I contend, at the expense of two significant things that I am
hesitant to bracket for the sake of prioritizing political ontology as the sole frame of reference
for both analyzing anti-Black racism and thinking resistance within the racialized world. First, it
short-circuits an analysis of power that might reveal not only how the
practices, forms, and apparatuses of anti-Black racism have historically
developed, changed, and reassembled/ reterritorialized in relation to
state power, national identity, philosophical discourse, biological
discourse, political discourse, and so on—changes that, despite
Wilderson’s claim that focusing on these things only “mystify” the
question of ontology (Wilderson 2010, 10), surely have implications for
how racial positioning is both thought and resisted in differing historical
and socio-political contexts. To the extent that Blackness equals a singular ontological
position within a macropolitical structure of antagonism, there is almost no room to bring in
the spectrum and flow of social difference and contingency that no doubt spans across Black
identity as a legitimate issue of analysis and as a site/sight for the possibility of a range of
resisting practices. This bracketing of difference leads him to make some rather sweeping and
opaquely abstract claims. For example, discussing a main character’s abortion in a prison cell in the 1976 film Bush Mama,
Wilderson says, “Dorothy will abort her baby at the clinic or on the floor of her prison cell, not because she fights for—and either
wins [End Page 58] or loses—the right to do so, but because she is one of 35 million accumulated and fungible (owned and
exchangeable) objects living among 230 million subjects—which is to say, her will is always already subsumed by the will of civil

What I want to press here is how Wilderson’s

society” (Wilderson 2010, 128, italics mine).

statement, made in the sole frame of a totalizing political ontology

overshadowing all other levels of sociality, flattens out the social
difference within, and even the possibility of, a micropolitical social field
of 35 million Black people living in the United States . Such a flattening reduces
the optic of anti-Black racism as well as Black sociality to the frame of political ontology where
Blackness remains stuck in a singular position of abjection. The result is a severe analytical
limitation in terms of the way Blackness (as well as other racial positions) exists across an
extremely wide field of sociality that is comprised of differing intensities of forces and
relational modes between various institutional, political, socio-economic, religious, sexual,
and other social conjunctures. Within Wilderson’s political ontological frame, it seems that
these conjunctures are excluded—or at least bracketed—as having any bearing at all on how
anti-Black power functions and is resisted across highly differentiated contexts. There is only the
binary ontological distinction of Black and Human being; only a macropolitics of sedimented
abjection. Furthermore, arriving at the second analytical expense of Wilderson’s prioritization of political ontology, I suggest that
such a flattening of the social field of Blackness rigidly delimits what counts as legitimate
political resistance. If the framework for thinking resistance and the possibility of creating
another world is reduced to rigid ontological positions defined by the absolute power of the
law, and if Black existence is understood only as ontologically fixed at the extreme zero point
of social death without recourse to anything within its own position qua Blackness, then there
is not much room for strategizing or even imagining resistance to anti-Blackness that is not
wholly limited to expressions and events of radically apocalyptic political violence: the law is
either destroyed entirely, or there is no freedom. This is not to say that I am necessarily against
Nor is to say that I think the
radical political violence or its use as an effective tactic.
law should be left unchallenged in its total operation, but rather that
there might be other and more pragmatically oriented practices of
resistance that do not necessarily have the absolute destruction of the
law as their immediate aim that should count as genuine resistance to
anti-Blackness. For Wilderson, like Agamben, anything less than an absolute overturning of
the order of things, the violent destruction and annihilation of the full structure of antagonisms,
is deemed as “[having nothing] to do with Black liberation” (quoted in Zug 2010). Of course, the desire for the
absolute overturning of the currently existing world, the decisive end of the existing world and the arrival of a new world in which
“Blacks do not magnetize bullets” should be absolutely affirmed. Further, the severity and gratuitous nature of the macropolitics of
anti-Blackness in relation to the possibility of a movement towards freedom should not be bracketed or displaced for the sake of

The question I want to

appealing to any non-Black grammar of exploitation or alienation (Wilderson 2010, 142).

pose, however, is how the insistence on the absolute priority of framing

this world within a rigid structure of formal ontological positions can only
revert to what amounts to a kind of negative theological and
eschatological blank horizon in which actually existing social sites and
modes of resisting praxis are displaced and devalued by notions of
whatever it is that might arrive from beyond. It seems that Wilderson, again, is close to
Agamben on this point, whose ontological structure also severely delimits what might count as genuine resistance to the regime of
sovereignty. As Dominick LaCapra points out regarding the possibility of liberation outside of Agamben’s formal ontological structure
of bare life and sovereignty, A further enigmatic conjunction in Agamben is between pure possibility and the reduction of being to
mere or naked life, for it is the emergence of mere naked life in accomplished nihilism that simultaneously generates, as a kind of
miraculous antibody or creation ex nihilo, pure possibility or utterly blank utopianism not limited by the constraints of the past or by
normative structures of any sort. (LaCapra 2009, 168) With
life’s ontological reduction to the abjection of bare
life or social death, the only possible way out, it seems, is the impossible possibility of what
Agamben refers to as the “suspension of the suspension,” the laying aside of the distinction
between bare life and political life, the “Shabbat of both animal and man” (Agamben 2003, 92).
It is in this sense that Agamben offers, again in the words of LaCapra, a “negative theology in
extremis . . . an empty utopianism of pure, unlimited possibility” (LaCapra 2009, 166). The
result is a discounting and devaluing of other, perhaps more pragmatic and less
eschatological, practices of resistance. With the “all or nothing” approach that posits anything
less than the absolute suspension of the current state of things as unable to address the
violence and abjection of bare life, there is not much left in which to appeal than a kind of
apocalyptic, messianic, and contentless eschatological future space defined by whatever this
world is not.

Blackness is a rhizome, a dynamic, creative, and desiring counter-force in which

lines of flight present possible modes of freedom and sociality in excess to
political ontological positioning. Our argument is not a form of coalition politics
nor is it a call for liberal multiculturalism. We call for opening and breaking
through closures and lines of flight that mark a multiplicity of encounters and
possibilities within forces.
Kline 17 Kline. “The Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political
Ontology.” Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 5, no. 1, 2017, p. 51., muse-jhu-
edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/645848/pdf. – Hebron AL

As I’ve argued, Wilderson’s flattening of Black social heterogeneity and the narrowing of any
possibility of resistance outside the total apocalyptic destruction of the existing world is a result
of his political ontology and macropolitics of racial positions revolving around the formal poles
of Master/Human and social death. The delimitation of social and political possibility happens
both in terms of Black and non-Black resistance to the structure of the racialized world. Of
course, I do not want to argue for a coalition politics or any kind of reconciliatory framework
that would find a solution to anti-Blackness in some form of liberal multiculturalism or
“colorblindness” that ignores the real and particular violence of white antagonism. I do,
however, want to argue for the sheer possibility of opening or breaking through the closure(s),
of lines of flight that mark a multiplicity of encounters and possibilities between forces,
technologies, bodies, and what Foucault calls dispositifs that run across varying positions and
social sites that are not wholly reducible to fixed ontological positions and which potentially
provide connections and flows that break through to an outside of political ontological
sedimentation. Focusing on how the dispositifs of biopolitical forms of governance—as opposed
to the legal and formal ontological structure of sovereignty—take into account “processes of
life” as the basis for governance, Foucault theorizes what he calls the “aleatory” body that is the
target of biopower and exists prior to any imposition of governance or domination. Appealing to
the “freedom” of the aleatory body is not some kind of idealized notion of the body that ignores
the macropolitical fact of Black suffering’s undeniable gratuitous nature. This is not an appeal to
what Sexton calls the “in spite of the terror” argument, where notions of Black freedom are
understood merely as a kind of concession to the deeper realities at hand (Sexton 2010, 35).
Rather, it is to start with the basic fact of the material body in space and time and the idea that
“resistance comes first” (Foucault 1997, 167). This point is particularly salient within the
biopolitical frame because, as Deleuze puts it, “when power becomes biopower resistance
becomes the power of life, a vital power that cannot be confined within species, environment or
the paths of a particular diagram” (Deleuze 1988, 92). In other words, resistance is the
micropolitical force of life that can never be fully confined or contained within a political
ontological frame (or diagram) of antagonisms.6 In terms of Wilderson’s ontology of social
positioning, we might say, following Foucault and Deleuze into Fred Moten’s Black optimism,7
that Black (aleatory) life always already precedes the gratuitous violence of an antagonism.
Blackness, then, is not wholly reducible to a political ontological position, but rather is the
movement prior to and against the imposing force of any violent constitution—or, as Nathanial
Mackey says, that “insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion” (Mackey
1986, 34). Even though an antagonism functions as the political ontological constitution of a
Black being as socially dead in relation to civil society, there is still an even deeper level that
precedes ontological constitution itself: the movement and resistance of Black life.8 In In the
Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Moten makes inseparable Blackness and
resistance with this provocative opening sentence: “the history of blackness is a testament to
the fact that objects can and do resist” (Moten 2003, 1). Flowing in the vein of Adorno’s anti-
identitarian negative dialectics and its prioritization of the object, Moten reads the history of
Blackness, which for him is nothing other than a history of certain performativity as
improvisation, as a history of the object’s absolute objection to the capture of identity, the
fugitive drive towards freedom where an untraceable, stateless, and ungoverned life of
“improvisational immanence” is always becoming (ibid., 255n1). Not ignoring or bracketing the
problem of political ontological antagonism (although he does reject describing it in terms of
social death), he nevertheless opens the frame of analysis and social possibility to the aleatory
field of life itself, or, micropolitics. Tracing the Black radical tradition through everything from its
poetry to its music to its banal everydayness, Moten shows Blackness as a counter-force sparked
into movement by the imposing and regulating force of anti-Black power. In critical yet
sympathetic opposition to Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists, Moten rejects the notion that a
full analysis of Blackness should be reduced to the imposition of social death. Or, to put it
another way, Moten rejects the notion that Blackness is reduced to a fixed ontological position
within a macropolitics that has no recourse to forms of life that might resist and evade the
imposition of an antagonism. Rather, Blackness is a counter-force to ontology itself. As he puts
it, blackness [is not (just)] ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is
supposed to have brought it into existence but . . . blackness is prior to ontology; or in a slight
variation of what [Nahum] Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal displacement of
ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the
irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space. (Moten 2014, 739) Here, Moten is riffing
on Chandler’s idea of “paraontology,” which is in specific distinction from political ontology.
Paraontology, as Moten describes it, is “the transformative pressure blackness puts on
philosophical concepts, categories, and methods” (Moten 2008, 215n3). Rather than an account
of being that seeks to uncover an essence or totalizing account of a particular social or political
position, paraontology describes the mode of being that is always already resisting the imposing
logic of (political) ontology. Chandler articulates this phenomenon through Du Bois’ double
consciousness, honing in on the “in between” of its double identity. As he says, ”between”
would delimit any simple notion of its spatiality or presupposed relationality. It would instead
accede to the most general disruption of boundaries. . . . “[B]etween” dissipates any simple
notion of inside and outside, of above and below. . . . Du Bois’s inscription may be understood to
name the opening of the sense of space, of spaciality, rather than confirm it. (Chandler 2014, 6–
7) Chandler is describing the way Blackness—in all of its social scope and complexity—overflows
or breaks open the boundaries of any formal imposition, the way Blackness cannot be reduced
to a frame of abjection or the irreconcilable position of an antagonism. From this perspective,
Blackness is a rhizome, a dynamic, creative, and desiring counter-force in which lines of flight
present possible modes of freedom and sociality in excess to political ontological positioning. As
a paraontological phenomenon, Chandler and Moten understand Blackness as a unique and
specific exertion within modernity—which might also be called the historical regime of racial
political ontology—that challenges every schema of formalization and positional fixity. In this
way, from this vantage, the history of Blackness is read as a history of a certain performativity of
the drive towards a freedom not determined by the terms or boundaries of ontology, as a
history of the object’s absolute objection to the macropolitical capture of identity. This
paraontological movement of Black fugitivity, as Moten has coined it, calls into question the
framing of Blackness wholly within a political ontology that seeks to index and describe Black life
in terms of pure abjection.

Our argument solves – it is a form of pragmatics that conceptualizes blackness

through a lack of staticity but a contingency on social structures.
Kline 17 Kline. “The Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political
Ontology.” Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 5, no. 1, 2017, p. 51., muse-jhu-
edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/645848/pdf. – Hebron AL

Finally, I suggest this kind of pragmatics is what Moten and Harney describe as “fugitive planning
and Black study,” what Jack Halberstam characterizes simply as “reaching out to find
connection” (Moten and Harney 2013, 5). Pragmatics finds a footing in the highly dynamic and
shifting terrain of power relations and its multiplicity of conjunctures that signal the condition of
movement and connection. It finds its enactment in sites such as “the little Negro’s church and
logos and gathering, this gathering in and against the word, alongside and through the word and
the world as hold, manger, wilderness, tomb, upper room, and cell” (Moten 2014, 775). Within
these and other sites of micropolitical connection and the practices that take place in them,
there is flight, resistance, and the creation of something new and productive. The inclusion of
these sites and practices within the analytical frame and critique of anti-Blackness provide a
much wider set of resources for thinking the complexity of the full scope of the political field
that exists in excess to the political ontological frame, and, in the same way, orients the fight
against anti-Blackness in practical (though potentially no less revolutionary), rather than
apocalyptic, terms. This, I argue, does not have to mitigate or pass over Sexton’s call that
“slavery must be theorized maximally if its abolition is to reach the proper level” (Sexton 2011,
33). The maximum theorization of slavery and anti-Blackness does not need be completely
hedged in by a political ontological frame. However, analytical expansion beyond the political
ontological frame does mean locating a positive emphasis on what Sexton disparagingly
identifies as a tendency towards “forces of mitigation that would transform the world through a
coalition of a thousand tiny causes” (ibid.). Taking Sexton’s (and Wilderson’s) call of a maximum
theorization of slavery/anti-Blackness with full seriousness, I wonder what the proper level of
abolition could possibly mean other than a pragmatic coalition—or a micropolitics—of a
thousand tiny causes. As I’ve argued, thinking what this might mean would certainly necessitate
an expansive analytics of power relations flowing over a highly complex field of forces,
intensities, technologies, and dispositifs that together form a micropolitical field far in excess of
sovereign power and the political ontological frame. Out of such an analytics, a pragmatics that
finds its possibility in the micropolitical field of movement and flight emerges as the condition
for an ongoing life of resistance, connection, and a movement toward freedom.
 Koerner

Thinking blackness through ontology and structuralism locks it within pre-

determined grids of intelligibility – only an approach that emphasized the
formed nature of identity through assemblage theory can map a line of escape
Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape: Gilles
Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg. 161-64

The force of Jackson’s line in Deleuze’s books—considered as an insinuation of blackness in the

sense discussed above—is intensified when we consider the historical circumstances that drew
Soledad Brother into Deleuze and his col- laborators’ orbit (the links between prison struggle in
France and in the United States, the GIP’s interest in Jackson, Genet’s involvement in the
publication and translation of Soledad Brother). And this force becomes even stronger when we
consider the deeper trajectories of black resistance it carries. It is here, however, with respect
to the question of history and of blackness’s relation to history, that a serious problem asserts
itself. Each time Jackson’s name appears in Deleuze’s work it is without introduction,
explanation, or elaboration, as though the line were ripped entirely from historical
considerations. There is a temptation to dismiss this use of Soledad Brother as an ahistorical
appropriation of Jackson’s thought by a European theorist or , worse, a decontextualization that
effectively obscures the intolerable social conditions out of which Jackson’s letters were
produced. But to do so would perhaps miss the way blackness claims an unruly place in
philosophy and philosophies of history.

In “The Case of Blackness” Moten (2008b: 187) perceptively remarks, “What is inadequate to
blackness is already given ontologies.” What if we were to think of blackness as a name for an
ontology of becoming? How might such a thinking transform our understanding of the relation
of blackness to history and its specific capacity to “think [its] way out of the exclusionary
constructions” of history and the thinking of history (Moten 2008a: 1744)? Existing ontologies
tend to reduce blackness to a historical condition, a “lived experience,” and in doing so
effectively eradicate its unruly character as a transformative force. Deleuze and Guattari, I
think, offer a compelling way to think of this unruliness when they write, “What History grasps
of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience , but the event in its
becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self- positing as concept, escapes History” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 110). To bring this relation between blackness and becoming further into the
open—toward an affirmation of the unexpected insinuation of blackness signaled by the use of
Jackson’s line as an “event in its becoming”—a few more words need be said about Deleuze’s
method.

The use of Jackson’s writing is just one instance of a procedure that we find repeated
throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where we constantly encoun- ter unexpected
injections of quotations, names, and ideas lifted from other texts, lines that appear all of sudden
as though propelled by their own force. One might say they are deployed rather than explained
or interpreted; as such, they produce textual events that readers may choose to ignore or pick
up and run with. Many names are proposed for this method—“schizoanalysis, micropolitics,
pragmat- ics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 94)—
but the crucial issue is to affirm an experimental practice that opposes itself to the
interpretation of texts, proposing instead that we think of a book as “a little machine” and ask
“what it functions with, in connection with what other things does it or does it not transmit
intensities?” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 4).8 Studying how Soledad Brother functions in
Deleuze’s books, connect- ing Jackson’s line to questions and historical issues that are not
always explicitly addressed in those books, involves one in this action. And further, it opens new
lines where the intensities transmitted in Jackson’s book make a claim on our own practice.

This method can be seen as an effort to disrupt the hierarchical opposition between theory and
practice and to challenge some of the major assumptions of Western Marxism. In an interview
with Antonio Negri in the 1990s, Deleuze (1997: 171) clarifies that he and Guattari have
“remained Marxists” in their concern to analyze the ways capitalism has developed but that
their political philosophy makes three crucial distinctions with respect to more traditional
theoretical approaches: first, a thinking of “war machines” as opposed to state theory ; second, a
“consideration of minorities rather than classes”; and finally, the study of social “lines of flight”
rather than the interpretation and critique of social contradictions. Each of these distinctions, as
we will see, resonates with Jackson’s political philosophy, but as the passage from Anti-
Oedipus demonstrates, the concept of the “line of flight” emerges directly in connection to
Deleuze and Guattari’s encounter with Soledad Brother.

The concept affirms those social constructions that would neither be determined by preexisting
structures nor caught in a dialectical contradiction . It names a force that is radically
autonomous from existing ontologies, structures, and historical accounts . It is above all for this
reason that Deleuze and Guattari insist that society be thought of not as a “structure” but as a
“machine,” because such a concept enables the thinking of the movements, energies, and
intensities (i.e., the lines of flight) that such machines transmit. The thinking of machines forces
us not only to consider the social and historical labor involved in producing soci- ety but also the
ongoing potentials of constructing new types of assemblages (agencement).

One of the key adversaries of this machinic approach is “interpretation” and more specifically
structuralist interpretations of society in terms of contradictions. According to Deleuze and
Guattari ([1980] 1987: 293), structuralism persisted in the “submission of the line to the point”
and as a result produced a theory of subjectivity, and also an account of language and the
unconscious, that could not think in terms of movement and construction. Defining lines only in
relation to finite points (the subject, the signifier) produces a calculable grid, a structure that
then appears as the hidden intelligibility of the system and of society generally . Louis
Althusser’s account of the “ideological State apparatus” as the determining structure of
subjectivity is perhaps the extreme expression of this gridlocked position (an example we will
come back to in a later section). Opposed to this theoretical approach, diagrammatism (to
invoke one of the terms given for this method) maps vectors that generate an open space and
the potentials for giving consistency to the latter. 9 In other words, rather than tracing the
hidden structures of an intolerable system, Deleuze and Guattari’s method aims to map the
ways out of it.
The impact to our argument is the revolutionary line of flight of the 1AC
becoming a line of death – this is the moment in which revolutionary
movements turn inward and destroy themselves, the passion for complete
abolition.
Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape: Gilles
Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg. 164

Writing

On the first page of the provocatively titled essay “On the Superiority of Anglo- American
Literature,” Jackson’s line is once again deployed, but here it is in reference to the idea that the
“highest aim of literature” is to escape (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 26). An interesting
convergence occurs here between political and aesthetic practices , suggesting an
indiscernibility between the two insofar as both effectuate becomings. Genet had already made
a similar point in describing Soledad Brother as a “poem of love and combat,” but deploying
Jackson with respect to the question of literature as such, this essay invites us to rethink a more
profound relation between blackness and writing.

At some distance from traditional Marxist theory, Deleuze and Parnet insist we reject any
account of literature as an “imaginary representation” of real conditions (literature as ideology)
in order to consider writing as a production at the level of real conditions .10 Writing, which is to
say the unleashing of the creative force of becoming in language (a line of flight), is not finally
reducible to already existing historical conditions, because such an act involves the production
of new conditions. Literature, as they underscore, is driven by a desire to liberate what existing
conditions seek to govern, block, capture; as such, it asserts a force in the world that existing
conditions would otherwise reduce to nonexistence.

Such formulations enable a radical assertion: Soledad Brother, insofar as Jackson’s letters defy
the prison system and the arrangement of a social order defined by the criminalization and
capture of blackness, escapes what would otherwise be thought of as the historical conditions
of its production. Jackson’s writing gains its real force by a total refusal to adjust to existing
conditions of capture, enslavement, and incarceration. And it does so concretely by rejecting
the subjectivity produced by the structures of what Genet, in his introduction to the letters,
called the “enemy’s language” (Jackson [1970] 1994: 336). Jackson (ibid.: 190, 305) himself
underscores this dimension of the letters several times, remarking, “I work on words,” and
more precisely describing an operation by which the intensities of black resistance come to be
expressed in writing: “We can connect the two, feeling and writing, just drop the syntax” (ibid.:
331). The specific feeling invoked here is linked first to Jackson’s total rejection of the terms of
captive society—“the feeling of capture . . . this slave can never adjust to it” (ibid.: 40) — but it
further affirms a connection to the “uncounted generations” of enslaved black labor: “I feel all
they ever felt, but double” (ibid.: 233). In dropping the syntax, Jackson describes a method for
rearticulating the relationship between the historical experience of capture (and the multiplicity
of feeling carried across the passage) and the feeling of that experience.

In his introduction to Soledad Brother, Genet focuses almost entirely on how Jackson’s use of
language could be understood as a “weapon” precisely because Jackson’s lines were shot
through with such violent hatred of the “words and syntax of his enemy” that he “has only one
recourse: to accept this language but to corrupt it so skillfully the whites will be caught in his
trap” (ibid.: 336).11 In corrupting the “words and syntax” of domination, one directly attacks
the “conditions that destroy life,” because language is here considered a mechanism by which
one’s thought, agency, relations, and subjectivity are “caught” by Power. As can be seen, this
idea is not one that Genet imports into Soledad Brother . Rather, these are ideas that Jackson
himself has already emphasized. Jackson’s “minor use” of a standard, major language thus
contributes to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of literature. This is to say that, while
commonly associated with Franz Kafka, the very notion of “minor literature” is also linked to the
encounter between black radicalism and French philosophy in the early 1970s.

The connection forged between writing and feeling in Jackson’s letters sug- gests that the
production of resistant subjectivities always involves a dismantling of the dominant order of
language. To “drop the syntax” names a strategy for forcibly rearranging existing relations . But
such a strategy also implies that one releases something else, specifically the affective force of
what resists those relations. Writing here becomes the “active discharge of emotion, the
counterattack” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 400). Or put differently, writing becomes a
weapon.12

When Deleuze (1997: 143) states that “in the act of writing there’s an attempt to make life
something more than personal, of freeing life wherever it’s imprisoned,” he seems to refer to
something exceedingly abstract, but Jackson’s letters concretely assert writing as a freeing of life
—of blackness—from the terms of racist imprisonment. As we will see, Jackson twists and pulls
on the joints of language itself, quite literally seizing on the standard syntax until it breaks . In
doing so, what Jackson describes as his “completely informal” style makes language an open
field shot-through with fugitive uses (Jackson [1970] 1994: 208). Writing becomes an
expression of thought on the run , a way of mapping escape routes and counterattacks that
cannot be adequately understood in terms of structure or an understanding of language as an
invariable system.

But escaping the existing dominant social order on “lines of flight ” — given the volatile
intensities they assert in the world — carries a real danger. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and
Guattari ([1980] 1987: 229) note the risk of “the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the
black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence,
turns to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition.” Here, a restricted
concept of abolition, understood simply as the destruction of the existing social order, runs the
risk of transforming the “line of flight” into a line of death. For this reason the issue of escape
must not stop at negation “pure and simple” but become one of construction and the
affirmation of life. And it is for this reason that the effort to connect “lines of flight” and to
compose consistencies across these lines becomes a matter of politics: an affirmation of a
politics of reconstruction as the immanent condition of abolition. Jackson ([1970] 1994: 328)
 mistake this as a message from George to Fay.
wrote from prison: “Don’t
It’s a message from the hunted running blacks to those people of this
society who profess to want to change the conditions that destroy life.” A collective
imperative determines the reading of these letters—namely, the necessity to put them in
connection with other lines. The circulation of these letters in France during the 1970s offers a
compelling example of how Jackson’s message insinuated itself into what would seem an
unlikely arrangement of French philosophy in the 1970s. Yet it is precisely in understanding that
moment in French thought as an effort to “change conditions that destroy life” that we gain a
sense of how Jackson’s book arrives at its expressly stated destination . In making the connection
between Jackson’s line and the lines of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and his coauthors
can be said to have gotten the message.
 Saldanha

By taking the fixity of race as its object, the they subtly re-center racial
overdetermination rather than challenging it – this is the problem with
dialectical, binaristic, or phenomenological approaches to identity, which can
only diagnose the status quo as it is rather than escape it. Acceptance of the
facialized position in relation to the dominance of the White Man Face is always
already a concession to power.
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 194

My disagreement is not with Fanon’s and Martín Alcoff’s insistence on embodiment and
emotion, but with their reliance on a Hegelian notion of recognition to explain encounter .
Because of this they tend to treat white and nonwhite not only as a dyad, but as almost
naturally opposed entities. There is, then, little attention paid to the complicated processes
whereby some racial formations become dominant , that is, how racial formations emerge
from material conditions and collective interactions, which greatly exceed the spatiality of self
versus other. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality is not based on an intersubjective
dialectics enlarged to world-historical scope. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari strongly distance
themselves from phenomenology and psychoanalysis. First of all, for them, it isn’t consciousness
but an abstract machine of faciality that arranges bodies into relations of power . And second,
faciality constantly invents new faces to capture deviant bodies, multiplying possible positions
far beyond any binaries such as black/white (though binarization can be an important effect) .
That is precisely its strength. There are thousands of encounters, thousands of trains. Deleuze
and Guattari believe faciality’s imperialism arose with institutional Christianity. Being imposed in
lands populated by different phenotypes, faciality became a matter of imperialist racialization.
That faciality originated in Renaissance humanism and depictions of Jesus seems a plausible if
one-sided interpretation. It is less relevant than Deleuze and Guattari’s unusual theory of
contemporary racism: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White
Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man,
men in the second or third category. They are also inscribed on the [white] wall [of signification],
distributed by the [black] hole [of subjectivity]. They must be Christianized, in other words,
facialized. European racism as the white man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the
designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped
as an “other.” Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the
White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric
and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a
given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s
an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic . . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there
are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it
is not to be. 5 For Anjuna’s psy-trance parties, there were “no people on the outside.” Locals,
domestic tourists, charter tourists, and beggars would join the white Goa freaks on the dance
floor, sometimes even in Nine Bar. In fact, as with the United Colors of Benetton, it will be
remembered that the rhetoric of PLUR demonstrated faciality’s inclusiveness— the parties were
supposed to be open to all. But immediately, the faciality machine would place all bodies in
relation to the Goa freak standard, both spatiotemporally and subjectively, measuring their
acceptability through increasingly meticulous signs: sociochemical monitoring, scene savviness,
chillum circles, sexual attractiveness. Many nonfreaks felt uneasy being pigeonholed like this—
especially domestic tourists, who would retreat to the darker corners. The result was viscosity,
bodies temporarily becoming impenetrable— more or less. It
would seem to me that
to understand the intricate hierarchies of racism, a framework that allows
for gradual and multidimensional deviances is preferable to a dialectical model. Faciality
also explains why after colonialism, with television and tourism, there is scarcely place left for
any “dark others.” Everyone is included; everyone is facialized. At the same time, Euro-
American ways of life continue to spread, and White Man (Elvis Presley, Sylvester Stallone,
David Beckham) remains the global standard against which all other faces are forced to
compete. What this account of racism has in common with the Fanonian is that whiteness is the
norm, even in our “post”-colonial era. Where it differs, however, is that deviance is based not
on lack of recognition or negation or annihilation of the other, but on subtle machinic
differentiations and territorializations. The virtual structures behind racial formations don’t
look like formal logic (a/not-a); they continually differentiate as actual bodies interact and
aggregate. Racism, then, can’t be countered with a Hegelian sublation into the universal.
They have failed to account for a position of white people in their politics.
Whiteness is a machinic assemblage, and it can be freaked, queered, used
against itself. Whiteness thrives on displacing its external limit internally,
limitedly deterritorializing itself such that whites have differential access to
becoming-otherwise with respect to their racial others. But that does not mean
that whiteness is a lost cause: this propensity of whiteness to “freak itself” can
be turned like a gun to the head of racial supremacy itself as this propensity to
freak or to queer can be taken further, utilizing white bodies to undo the
naturalized link between whiteness and privilege.
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 198

“In no real sense did the hippies become Indians or poor blacks, or prostitutes or tramps— or
only in a guilty disingenuous sense — but they found their own significance in what they took
these groups to be: a significance to be understood against the dominant society and with
respect to their own special awareness,” says the ethnographer Paul Willis. 11 Seeing blacks,
Mexicans, and Indians as more authentic, because relatively untouched by mainstream white
modernity, the counterculture transformed white modernity by appropriating some of that
authenticity. But it is that very appropriation that betrays white privilege and that spawns new
tropes of subcultural (and potentially racist) snobbism . A creative movement turning in on
itself, becoming paranoid and reactionary, is what Guattari called “microfascism.” Psychedelics
clearly turned microfascistic in Anjuna, accompanied as it was by arrogance, segregation, noise
pollution, corruption, exploitation, and psychosis. If whiteness is defined by its lines of flight,
microfascism becomes as interesting to the study of whiteness as Nazism. Psychedelics— travel,
music, drugs— is whiteness accelerating, whiteness stuttering: either a deeper entrenchment
into economic and cultural exploitation, or a shedding of privilege, at least here and now. On the
whole, the Goa freaks of Anjuna do not follow the lines of flight of whiteness to critique their
own position as whites. In this sense, they were hardly “freaking” the racial assemblage . Recall
the proposition of Rachel Adams and Leslie Fiedler of appropriating freak as a critical category:
[F]reaks cannot be neatly aligned with any particular identity or ideological position. Rather,
freak is typically used to connote the absence of any known category of identity ....I am drawn
to freak because, like queer, it is a concept that refuses the logic of identity politics , and the
irreconcilable problems of inclusion and exclusion that necessarily accompany identitarian

A true freaking of whiteness would grasp its lines

categories. 12

of flight not for fascism but for a future where paler-

skinned bodies have no privileged access to economic
and cultural capital and to happiness. Freaking whiteness is problem-
based, coalition-led, and self-critical; it would try to understand what biophysical and
technological forces subtend it (computers, HIV, floods, radiation). Humanism and
cosmopolitanism are severely limited if the struggle against racism is defined only in human
terms.

So: race should not be abandoned or abolished , but

proliferated. Race’s energies are then directed at multiplying racial differences, so as to
render them joyfully cacophonic. What is needed is an affirmation of race’s virtuality. When
racial formations crumble and mingle like this, the dominance of whiteness in the global racial
assemblage is undermined as the faciality machine finds it increasingly difficult to take hold of
bodies. It is not that everyone becomes completely Brownian (or brown!), completely similar, or
completely unique. It is just that white supremacism slowly becomes obsolete as other racial
formations start harboring the same creativity as whites do now, linking all sorts of
phenotypes with all sorts of wealth and all sorts of ways of life (sedentary, touristic, ascetic) .
When no racial formation is the standard , race acquires a very different meaning: The race-
tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers;
there is no race but inferior, minoritarian ; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by
its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and
mixed-blood are the true names of race. 13 When no racial formation is clearly hegemonic,
perhaps there will be no need anymore for the term “race.” Although there will always be
phenotypical variation and relations of power, perhaps sometime in the future they won’t be
correlated at all. Unlikely, but possible. Until then, however, there seems little point in trying to

Race is
stop talking about race, as antiracists such as Paul Gilroy suggest we do. 14

creative, and we can heed its creativities against itself .

Challenging the global faciality machine encompasses the transformation not just of prejudice,
tabloid journalism, and Unesco, but of the pharmaceutical industry, farm subsidies, seismology,
the arms trade, income tax policy, and the International Monetary Fund. In contrast to what
many antiracists and advocates of political correctness prescribe, the sites where the most
urgent battles are to be fought are not culture and language, but trade and health. Freaking
whiteness is no easy task. A good start for social scientists, however, is to acknowledge the
persistent materiality of race. It is important that the real barriers to mobility and imagination
that exist in different places be taken into account. Cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not
imposed. Taking responsibility and activism will only follow from both understanding and
feeling the intensive differences that exist between many different kinds of bodies : between a
Jew and a black soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman on Wall Street, between a
Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist.
Race should be understood as a machinic assemblage – dialectical approaches
to race which first attempt to perfectly delineate racial formations get this
problem backwards, as the important question is the in-between, the
movements between supposedly fixed racial categories. Such a move makes
possible understanding the interplay of non-human agents in the creation of
race and a machinic geography of phenotype to de-link whiteness from
privilege. Only charting the possibilities of moving between historical
thickenings of matter that produces raced bodies offers the possibility of flight
from the racial geography of the now. Race can be over proliferated, to undo
the oppressive nature of racial formation itself.
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 190

“Racial formation” has become a widespread term, especially in the United States, to grasp how
the reality of race is based not only on ideology and prejudice, but on institutional practices,
divisions of labor, jurisdiction, and education. 15 The term has not received the philosophical
attention it deserves. I’d like to propose that racial formation should be understood with
Deleuze’s ontology and Guattari’s concept of the machinic assemblage. Race is machinic. Not
stirrups, knights, and courtly poetry, but skin color, fear, and segregation are components of the
machinic assemblage of race. If the crusaders are important for the feudal assemblage, so are
the colonists and migrants for the racial assemblage. Feudalism and race overlap historically and
conceptually, of course. What matters is not perfectly delineating social machines, but the
movements between them. It is movement, of whatever scope, that integrates an assemblage,
perhaps especially race. At one point, Deleuze and Guattari in fact seem to claim that the
psychic and nomadic intensities of the modern period are inherently oriented toward racial
formation: The first things to be distributed on the body without organs are races, cultures and
their gods. The fact has often been overlooked that the schizo participates in history; he [she*
this is a translation from French] hallucinates and raves universal history, and proliferates the
races. All delirium is racial, which does not necessarily mean racist. It is not a matter of the
regions of the body without organs “representing” races and cultures. The full body does not
represent anything at all. On the contrary, the races and cultures designate regions on this body
— that is, zones of intensities, fields of potentials. Phenomena of individuation and
sexualization are produced within these fields. We pass from one field to another by crossing
thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and
departing becomes as easy as being born or dying. 16 Beneath the differences between actual
cultural and racial formations, there teems an infinity of microscopic differences that gradually
lock together to produce the distinctions we talk about in everyday life: this is Dutch, that is
German, she looks sub-Saharan, this smells typically Goan. We can now start comprehending
the power of Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual discussed in the beginning of this book. On the
enormous “body without organs” of the human species, tens of thousands of years of
migration, miscegenation, culture contact, isolation, and adaptation have gone into producing
local thickenings of differences until more travel and invention dissolve them. Insofar as
phenotypical difference mattered to interaction and power relations, we can speak of racial
formations. Racial and cultural identities emerge. Emergence is not an essentialist concept,
because a population is a social machine: it remains a multiplicity of individuals, practices, and
territories. If a population only “is” by connecting to other populations and becoming
something different, there can be no static Platonic-type of essence directing it. But neither is
emergence an antiessentialist concept, because the entity is granted a positive force of its own,
namely, the entity’s virtual capacities, that does not depend on any negation, but on an active
folding in of the exterior to develop the interior. Thinking in terms of emergence elides being
completely for or against essences. It is nonessentialist. Instead of the antiessentialism and
oppositional relationality of many prevalent theories of racism, such as Edward Said’s and
Frantz Fanon’s, a Deleuzian understanding of relation allows for many kinds and scales of
difference, and constant differentiation. From a machinic perspective, race is not something
inscribed upon or referring to bodies, but a particular spatiotemporal disciplining and charging
of those bodies themselves. Bodies collectively start behaving like situationally distinct
aggregates— racial formations, racial clusters. These clusters emerge immanently, without
external blueprint, through the corporeal habits and connections with the environment that
bodies necessarily engage in. Racial formations are much more than discursive categories.
This, of course, doesn’t preclude coercion. Especially in modern times, racial formation
has gone hand in hand with gross violence and lasting inequality. As seen in Anjuna, racial
clustering emerges through embodiment, face, and location. Each of these points toward the
fact that phenotypical encounter, particularly in a contact zone like Anjuna, is dense with prior
historical geographies of colonialism, religious conversion, and capitalism. The physical
characteristics of bodies are made to matter by processes that exceed what is conventionally
called social or even human. The clustering of white bodies in Anjuna comprised anything from
ways of talking, feeling, smoking, dancing, and sunbathing to the mats at parties, fashion,
musical form, law, motorbikes, pharmacies, Ecstasy tablets, Shiva, psytrance Web sites, foreign
currency, the Goan press, airplanes, the sea, the sun, and more. Whiteness emerged
corporeally, machinically, ecologically, within the interactions between “the most varied
components (biochemical, behavioral, perceptive, hereditary, acquired, improvised, social,
etc.).” 17 In no way could phenotype be the cause, or in Marxian terms the base, of racial
differentiation. But neither was it incidental. The heterogeneity that is race is strictly
irreducible to any of its components. The conception of race I’m suggesting has nothing to do
with dividing humans into “races.” All whites can be considered one racial formation, but so can
the Italians in New York, or Congolese-born naturalized Belgians. Racial formations comprise
multiple spatial scales and continually change over time. My concept of race is not meant for
taxonomic ordering but for appraising the evolving, multilayered, contested, temporary
differentiations between populations. Populations exhibit viscosity, not clear-cut boundaries.
Whatever distinctions we can draw between populations is entirely contingent upon the present
geographic situation. Machinism is a kind of realism, but it understands that reality is far too
complicated to be transparent. Anjuna also showed that local cultural exigencies, such as
sociochemical monitoring and a visual economy centered on style and territory, are also
relevant in the differentiating between phenotypes. This was no simple question of “othering.”
There was an abstract machine that distributed bodies according to degrees of deviance from
the virtual pole of the standard (white) Goa freak. Racial difference is tendential, not dialectical
or contradictory. The occurrence of nonwhite freaks, and charter tourists and backpackers who
were not aspiring to freak status, only confirmed the malleability of race. If I sometimes had
difficulties, both while in the field and while writing, in convincingly delineating what was
“white” about the practices of the Goa freaks, it was because I held on to a model in which race
was given rather than an effervescent and largely implicit effect of myriad physical events. No
body was ever completely part of a racial formation; no one actualized the virtual category “Goa
freak” perfectly; there is no such thing as pure whiteness. A Brahmin often has lighter skin than
an Israeli freak. Sometimes domestic tourists dared to dance in Nine Bar even back in 1998. As a
problem for investigation and thought, whiteness becomes interesting precisely there where it
becomes indiscernible, in its estuary, where it flows into— and is disrupted by— nationality,
gender, subcultural capital, economic disparity, mysticism, and moral panic. The concepts of
viscosity and machinic assemblage reveal the profoundly geographic imagination that is
required to appreciate the materiality of race. From the perspective of viscosity, as Deleuze
noted in his reading of Spinoza, a “body” such as race can be mapped with some precision. 18 A
machinic geography of race maps the physical connections that constitute racial differences,
and considers language, attitude, feeling, and media representations only in their properly
spatial functioning. Although my ethnography applied the term “viscosity” only to human
bodies, it should be clear that humans only become viscous through nonhuman things and
forces in their midst. When many bodies become viscous, they together acquire what Deleuze
called a kinetic and dynamic dimension, that is, an aggregate’s way of holding together, and its
capacity to affect and be affected. In the kinetic dimension, freak viscosity on South Anjuna
Beach, for example, was held together through the tan, Goa trance playing in the shacks, and
familiarity. In the dynamic dimension, the viscosity was relatively unaffected by bus tourists, and
continued to affect younger freaks with its mythical aura. Race, in order to exist at all, must
weave together biology, behavior, things, and circumstances. It sets them free, only to
recapture them in racial clusters. Race is always multiplying. It is the plasticity, the creative
potential of race, that is important, not its rigidity. “In effect, what holds an
assemblage together is not the play of framing forms or linear causalities but, actually or
potentially, its most deterritorialized component, a cutting edge of deterritorialization .” 19
Racial difference is oppressive, but its power lies in continually surpassing itself through
devious machinic connections— which means that it can undo itself too.
Their affective perspective relies on the logical of informational
commodification, buying and selling material pleasure and feeling absent a
strong democratic politics with which to orient it, which means the 1AC can be
redeployed in light of racialized media practices
Saldanha 10. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Environment and Planning A 2010, volume 42, pg. 2420

When affects add up without the disobedient heterogeneity of multitude , we get the same old
consumerism, patriotism, and patriarchal religion. It has always to be remembered that these
regimes too work through the adding of affects. In particular, what Maurizio Lazzarato (no date)
calls `immaterial labor' deals primarily in affects (services, media, education, health, public
relations, consultancy, tourism, televangelism, etc), creating profit no longer by selling things
but by providing social capital, information, or instantaneous pleasure. Though they might
overstate the importance of immaterial labor within `postmodern' capitalism, Hardt and Negri
attempt to show they are not unduly celebrating affect in any easy way. As in Fanon's
psychopathology of colonialism, the addition, multiplication of affects certainly solidifies
inequality and oppression. Again, much of this solidification is racializing: the racial division of
labor, the commodification of hiphop, the multiculturalism of MTV and Gap. Still, capitalist
racializations can never completely dominate the interstitial fluidities, which might – if
gathered – compose a new and genuinely `democratic' flesh outside the world's ossified body
politic.

Hardt and Negri's rewriting of Spinoza is indispensable for beginning to grasp human affect on
the planetary scale. Yet most of Empire and Multitude does not read any more `fleshy' or
`ethological' than most globalization literature. What needs to be refined is precisely the
corporeality of aggregation, the four-dimensional many-bodiedness. To repeat, how to imagine
– to visualize, calculate, diagram – all these affects adding up, knowing they are only
retrospectively localizable events? An important step, partially taken by Hardt and Negri
themselves, is drawing from computer science and the physics of complexity , which have
developed notions like emergence, network, criticality, path dependency, organization, swarm
intelligence, and so on, mostly through mathematical experimentation (eg Ball, 2004;
Surowiecki, 2004). Insofar as simulation tries to explain what unexpected results come from the
interactions of many units moving reciprocally and unevenly over space and time, it can provide
inspiration. This is far from saying that simulation can predict how humans will aggregate,
though some patterns found in traffic and urbanization deserve more philosophical attention.
The conception of the gradual and fraught aggregation of bodies has simply few other
imaginative sources.

What conventional sociological and geographical conceptions of `class', `company', and

`racism' lack is a sense of how these are glued together by bodies – bodies which could
theoretically all be mapped by mobile global positioning systems. Imagine time-geography not
for one body, but for thousands simultaneously, and in real time. Then imagine all these
trajectories colored, with gross simplification, according to the affects fuelling them: famine,
pleasure, fear, heroism. The trajectories rapidly become entangled, creating local
concentrations of hue, hazy and dynamic like clouds. The impossibility of representing planetary
complexity like this should not keep us from theorizing what exactly makes it impossible:
simultaneous mass embodiment. Of course, human bodies connect continents through media
and transport technologies in highly unevenly ways, as Doreen Massey (2005) points out,
leading to definite spatial patterns, with the trillions of dollars circulating at the speed of light
making some decadent and others hungry: a planet-wide racialization of life.

Perhaps this biogeographical, even physicalist, interpretation of Spinoza is not necessary for
understanding collective affect and the racial body politic. In a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework
what matters most is perhaps not `tracing' bodies in Euclidian space , but `mapping' the virtual,
nonphysical intensities that body encounters engender (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 [1980],
page 12). As Hardt and Negri might say, or John Allen (2003), the key question of globalization is
topological, not topographical. Topologically (ie in virtual terms) what matters is not only
longitude and latitude (the position on Earth of the gluing of bodies) but also one's ever-
changing position on the myriad axes of power and one's proximity to the chaotic edges of
social systems (where there is ungluing). If geography wants to understand the networks of
affect constituting phenomena like racial formation, it needs an imagination both topological
and topographical, building a physicalism complex and engaged enough to explore the
intensive distributions that lie beneath the physical. This largely rules out the econo- metric
studies of happiness and fear across countries, markets, and cities, as these venture decidedly
away from an aggregative schizoanalysis of affect, reducing affect to sayable, countable, sellable
representations. A Guattarian physicalism for the left understands there are serious limits to
any quantitative description lacking a committed explanation of how distributions and
trajectories persist.
Freaking out is one of the only effective ways of shredding one’s own privilege –
yet this is not easy, it is a process which must be exercised carefully, so as to
avoid the white line of flight becoming a line of death
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 53

The ethical imperatives of modern embodiment were well known to sixties subcultural leaders
such as Frank Zappa. Ethics is the relationship a body has to itself , the problematization of
what a body can do in a given environment. When you freak out, you become conscious about
the confines of your embodiment, about how you’re forced to behave and feel and listen.
Zappa implores you to become someone different, a freak. Dance, drugs, dress are vehicles for
getting out of your conventional place, into spaces of the future wherein national and racial
belongings no longer hold and everything mutates into a monstrous communism. Freaking out
one’s racial embodiment raises issues of social marginality and transcendence: how is it possible
to disavow one’s particularity, one’s privilege? What Zappa calls freaking out is what I called
psychedelics, the countercultural experimentation with what a white body can do. In the
language of Deleuze and Guattari, freaks follow the lines of flight inherent in white modernity,
and thereby challenge it. But freaking out, unfortunately, is more complicated than Zappa
thinks. Central to this book is that freaking out can lead to snobbish ritualism and the danger of
becoming isolated— to viscosity. It’s true that hippies transform themselves into freaks of
whiteness by virtue of challenging the holding together of white modernity. But, as Deleuze and
Guattari warn over and over again in A Thousand Plateaus, lines of flight all too often close in on
themselves while being actualized, becoming “ microfascistic,” paranoid, regressive, suicidal.
And perhaps white lines of flight are especially prone to breeding microfascism. The hard core of
Anjuna’s tourists have often called themselves the “Goa freaks.” Freak has some relation to the
Old English frícian, to dance. The word possibly had early connotations of festivity and
improvization, but how it came to stand for “capriciousness” is uncertain. What is certain is that
in the early nineteenth century the Latin lusus naturae was translated as “freak of nature,” later
abbreviated to “freak” in the American sideshows of human beings with morphological
peculiarities. Slang connotations of homosexuality, fetishism, and simply social deviance were
added in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, Aleister Crowley offered that
“Great men seem to enjoy going about with freaks.” 2 The word also began to be used to signify
great enthusiasm for something: cocaine freak, nature freak, Jesus freak, Goa freak. In the early
1960s the word was appropriated by the counterculture to exploit exactly this sense of deviance
and enthusiasm. In naming themselves freaks, white youths immediately called attention to
their desire for the escape from normality and from the past. For situating freakishness
historically, Leslie Fiedler will again be helpful. In Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, he
traces the West’s fascination with the abnormal body from Pliny to medicine, ethnology, and
science fiction. 3 He argues that postwar popular culture in the United States, most
spectacularly in sixties underground comics, continued the tradition of the early-twentieth-
century freak show: the exhibition of what “we” don’t want to see but yet are so forcefully,
nearly erotically, drawn to. Fiedler is rather enthusiastic about the rebellious adoption of the
term “freak” by the hippies. Rachel Adams agrees that “any contemporary understanding of the
history and culture of freaks is inevitably filtered through our knowledge of [the sixties].” 4 She
rightly criticizes Fiedler for his nostalgia, as well as his ambiguous views on women and
sexuality. Fiedler did show that what is required for freakishness is the intense psychocultural
coding of bodily specificity (height, weight, hair, skin, genitals, extra limbs, conjoined bodies)—
so much so, that freaks in their sheer physical difference defy the definition of Man that helped
shape Euro-American history. “Only the true Freak challenges the conventional boundaries
between male and female, sexed and sexless, animal and human, large and small, self and
other, and consequently between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth,”
he writes. 5 Adams demonstrates that the display of freaks in American sideshows played out
important political anxieties among the white middle-class public in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Because freaks are staged as special objects for horror and perverse
delight, they can also reveal strategies for disrupting the identity of the spectators and even the
possibility of categorization itself. In Elizabeth Grosz’s words: “The freak confirms the viewer as
bounded, belonging to a ‘proper’ social category. The viewer’s horror lies in the recognition
that this monstrous being is at the heart of his or her own identity, for it is all that must be
ejected or abjected from self-image to make the bounded, category-obeying self possible.” 6 In
analogy with queer theory, Adams argues that freak, as label, and freaking, as critical practice,
enable us to conceive race, gender, sexuality, class, and able-bodiedness as reiterative
performances instead of essential characteristics. Just as “queering” has come to mean
deconstructing (hetero)sexist and technocapitalist regimes, “freaking,” in Adams’s scheme,
entails the laying bare of a multitude of corporeal differences and a shifting politics of
solidarity. Slaves, savages, monsters, women, queers, dykes, immigrants, the poor, the disabled,
and animals all suffer from condescending spectatorship. There are many oppressions, many
corporeal differences, but insofar as they are predicated on a desperate attempt to draw
boundaries between the normal and the abnormal, they all share a fundamental instability,
which is the possibility of politics. Although their theoretical tools diverge, Adams, Grosz, and
Fiedler approach freaks with a self/other model I would like to avoid. What needs to be explored
more precisely is not just that hippies at least nominally identify themselves with sideshow
exhibits and the disenfranchised, but how in that very act they demonstrated their continuing
stickiness to a dominant culture. Hippies, backpackers, punks, ravers do subvert white culture,
and, like circus freaks, they become spectacular exhibits of difference. Hippies and psy-trancers
in Goa, for example, push the limits of whiteness, class, gender, sexuality, home, health, and
reason. It is nonetheless an empirical matter whether the potential for freaking in Adams’s
politicized sense is actualized. Instead of identifying some bodies as freaks, I’d like to treat it as a
virtually real tendency. In this way, some bodies (on drugs, or with rare shapes) have the
potential to transform into something very different, and, in the same moment, criticize the way
some bodies are exploited, hurt, and displayed. Insofar as they can become differently white,
I’m going to call these bodies freaks in the sixties sense.

The question is only ever one of affective capacities, and we must attend to this
intricacy – it’s a question of use
Saldanha 10. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Environment and Planning A 2010, volume 42, pg. 2417
Guattari does not disagree with Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism that heterosexist society
meddles with the upbringing and molding of vulnerable bodies, but he theorizes the processes
differently, understanding the unconscious as already machinic instead of waiting for the social
to transform it. What a boy can do should not be defined as patriarchal (or patricidal) unless
other determinations are taken into account than his little penis. Updating Freud's critique of
the Judeo-Christian and bourgeois family, the Guattarian concept of the machinic unconscious is
required for qualifying the Spinozist concept of affect. This critical edge tends to be somewhat
lost if the nonorganic and the unspeakability of relationality are foregrounded as essential to
the theorizations of affect. Human affects inevitably implicate (enfold) configurations of
gender, age, class, and race, mostly unconsciously, but possibly consciously. For the machinic
unconscious implies that there is also a machinic consciousness, from which intentional
rearrangements of social configurations can emerge.

With an understanding of the machinic unconscious nature of affect we are better equipped to
tackle the tendency toward representationalism legible in Fanon. If subjectivity and the
expression of it through language are not ontologically separable from the bodies that sustain it,
attention has to turn to those corporeal interminglings (which sometimes result in emotions,
thoughts, words) that keep the discrimination on the basis of skin color in place . It is therefore
not that intentions and discourse are irrelevant, but they are to be analyzed while emerging
from and acting amid the play of material forces. The epidermal schema is effective insofar as it
is abstract, a real possibility in every encounter between a dark and a light body after, say, the
18th century; here I agree with Fanon. But abstraction requires, not shuts away, the materiality
of skin and flesh. Race is the very process of the constitution as feeling and living body subjects
within racist systems. The ontological site of the epidermal schema is analogous to that of
affect: not a split between body and mind, between skin and consciousness, but a parallel,
actual-virtual transformation of both. Antiracist politics cannot therefore focus on language,
identity, or paintings alone, but has to negotiate their more obscure moorings in the planes of
affect and the global economy.

An ethics of whiteness is possible – white bodies can assume responsibility in a

Levinisian encounter with the other.
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 117

A white body needs to decide how to take responsibility for being rich and foreign on a third-
world beach. As neither Deleuze and Guattari nor Goffman adequately theorize responsibility, I
have had to rely on Emmanuel Levinas to complete my conception of face. Levinas starts
philosophy from the Other, and not from an ontologically primary first person perspective. For
Levinas, ethics even precedes ontology: you can only be for another person. Ethics consists in
letting yourself be destabilized by the radical alterity of the other , in seeing his or her
difference not as a threat but as a resource to question your own position in the world . To
reinforce my earlier Deleuzian approach, the gap between yourself and an other is an intensive
difference, containing possibilities for contagion, mutual transformation, and love.
Understanding that self and other contingently and asymmetrically emerged from a multitude
of processes (genetic, behavioral, economic, cultural) demands an ethical engagement with
one’s specificity of being. Engagement is effectively following the lines of flight virtually present
in all asymmetry, all interpersonal interaction. More than Deleuze, Levinas stresses the
constituting role that vulnerability plays in the encounter with an other, especially a subaltern
other. The refugee, the orphan, and the abnormal, by facing you in their “naked” difference ,
challenge your efforts at detachment and make you discover your own vulnerability and
dependencies. This encounter Levinas calls “the face,” or, better, for my purposes, the “face-to-
face”: The face in which the other— the absolutely other— presents himself [herself] does not
negate the same, does not do violence to it as do opinion or authority or the thaumaturgic
supernatural. It remains commensurate with him [her] who welcomes; it remains terrestrial .
This presentation is preeminently nonviolence, for instead of offending my freedom it calls it to
responsibility and founds it. As nonviolence it nonetheless maintains the plurality of the same
and the other. It is peace. 17 In the face-to-face, you take responsibility toward the other’s
suffering because you recognize that his or her suffering is irretrievably imbricated in your own
privileged position, your freedom. In the face-to-face, the self embraces a relatively powerless
other, not to exploit or appropriate him or her into “the Same,” but to give and to care for . This
generosity is not a rational choice, but an immediate response to an imperative without any
self-righteousness or expectation.

Becoming is always a possibility – can reterr on the face of the other

Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 183

To avoid a pessimistic reading of Deleuze and Guattari, it needs to be stressed that bodies
facialize themselves and therefore leave space for negotiation. On the beach, ritualized
interactions between whites and Indians follow from mutual stereotyping and lead to
segregation. Occasionally, however, face-work leads to a temporary face-to-face in which
tourists and seasonal merchants or locals simply enjoy each other’s presence. The sharp
asymmetry in life chances, upbringing, appearance, and mobility— intensive differences—
draws these bodies into reciprocally caring for each other, attaining a peep of a different world,
and coming out of the encounter slightly changed. Economic and phenotypical difference is not
transcended, as some might wish for, but acknowledged as unjustly interconnected. In my
experience, by and large, it’s shorter-staying whites— that is, charter tourists and backpackers
rather than Goa freaks— who are more inclined to this Levinasian ethics. It seems that staying
longer means a more thorough enmeshment in the machinic processes of faciality. Of course,
Anjuna’s materiality of race cannot be studied without reference to how and why there were
different bodies in the first place. Location is the impact on a person’s capacities of wider
histories and geographies of class, race, colonialism, nation-state, and geopolitics. An embodied,
machinic framework needs to include the politics of location to understand what goes on in a
place under conditions of globalization. By bringing together bodies from different places for
different lengths of time, “contact zones” are especially prone to highlight a body’s location. An
ecology of differential speeds of Anjuna shows that by being or having been on the road and by
socializing with certain people in certain spaces (private parties, the flea market, Nine Bar,
guesthouses; in Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Antwerp), Goa freaks stick together, separate from
Goans and domestic and charter tourists. Meanwhile, by being identified by Goan intellectuals,
activists, and judges as bodies out of place and therefore dangerous to Anjuna’s cultural and
ecological equilibrium, the Goa freaks gain solidarity in their irritation about moral panics and
subsequent police action against them. Goa’s infamous party bans have long since made parties
unpredictable and infrequent, and all locals making money off the parties complain each year
about the declining number of foreign tourists. The freaks start going elsewhere; they can.
Uneven geographies of mobility interlace with economic disparity that in turn interlaces with
racial viscosity: this is the point I’ve been laboring to establish . At the flea market, for example,
hippie elders trade in textiles tailor-made in Malaysia, which they also sell in other countries.
The majority of Indian merchants do not have that option. If a white drug dealer or smuggler
gets caught, she or he probably has enough cash for bail and a lawyer, and, by virtue of being
foreign, exhibits a certain haughtiness in the face of Indian bureaucracy. Not so for Kashmiris or
Rajasthanis. As with visual economy and sociochemical monitoring, economic disparity is at its
most acute at parties during the morning. The intensive difference between young whites on
extended holiday, spending hundreds of rupees on Ecstasy and overpriced mineral water, and
Indian mothers with babies begging, seldom leads to any genuine interaction. At almost all
times, whites in India have to deal with the fact they are white, the fact they have more money
and attract attention and can return home at almost any time. Quickly, to enjoy the holiday,
they learn to feign indifference. If one considers representations alone, this fact of whiteness
risks going unnoticed. Anjuna shows that the materiality of race is embodied, machinic, and
ecological. This makes racial difference messy, both physically and conceptually entangled with
the differences of gender, eroticism, class, and age. How is it possible to think racial difference
as simultaneously fluid and fixing, at once relational and discrete, at once productive and
constraining, and always supported by a bewildering array of physical components?
There is still some possibility of face to face ethical encounter between races
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 175

Any interaction between freaks and poor Indians in Anjuna’s contact zone is heavy with the
politics of location. The distribution of wealth and mobility over phenotypically differentiable
bodies seems to disallow any mutual relationships. There are feelings of annoyance, anger, and
indifference on the part of the foreigners. But the contact zone also contains the possibility for
other feelings, for explicit involvements with economic and phenotypical otherness, and this
possibility does sometimes erupt. In these involvements, whites feel (as opposed to analyze)
that their own privilege depends on the subjugation of other people. They stop taking their
sameness, their location, their face, their subjectivity for granted. It isn’t that they “recognize”
the other, but they enter a field of intensive differences in which identities don’t hold.
Although being friendly to poor Indians might be part of being psychedelic or frantically
enthusiastic, there is in these intimacies and playfulness at least the sense that the dance floor is
never populated by rich, white, foreign bodies alone. Although being white in India makes most
freaks ignore “the stranger, the poor one,” a cosmopolitan, Levinasian ethics would start with
these ambivalent encounters.

We need to reposess the state from the forces of racist faciality in order to
resolve these problems – the crucial problem with their argument is that its
dogmatism eschews possible weapons from the activist tool box – this
INCLUDES using the state
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 204

My hopes for a reorganization of race may seem utopian, open-ended, or anarchistic.

Machinism is pragmatic and empirical, however. Perhaps unlike what Deleuze and Guattari
would wish for, I think that ending racism will have to include state intervention, as well as
statistical surveys, unionization, urban planning, and social critique. Perhaps the indications
just outlined of what a pragmatic politics and ethics against racism could consist of in Anjuna will
make the project of freaking whiteness look a little more concrete. The creative materiality of
race means that it cannot be deliberately abolished . Antiwhite moralism, identity politics,
hybridization, and multiculturalism are political strategies not irrelevant, but insufficient to
breed the multiplication of racial formations . Never has there been any proper attempt to
rearrange Anjuna’s racial assemblage; it has, traditionally, been left to teem into more and more
microfascism and faciality. The critical question now is how to make it teem, how really to freak
it out— how to prevent it from repeating the same old habits of white modernity. I have now
fleshed out the theoretical and political conclusions to be drawn from a materialist ethnography
of rave tourism in Goa. Race emerges corporeally, machinically, and ecologically, amid the
interactions of bodies in the cultural, economic, and artifactual environment of Anjuna. Race can
therefore be reconceptualized ontologically as a machinic assemblage. This take on race differs
from the dominant social-constructionist race concept in that it does not disavow the
materiality of race, but places it at the heart of theorization . Building on an emergentist and
pluralist conception of difference, I want to emphasize the creativity of race, particularly of
whiteness. Combating racism thus needs to grasp not just the rigid boundaries and
contradictions, but the virtual realm of race by virtue of which it continually rearranges itself.
Treating race as social construction alone directs politics away from what can be done to
prevent racial subordination on scales from the Goan village to the deeply unjust planet.

Re-claiming the freaking whiteness may be our only hope – we can lodge
ourselves on the state assemblage and attempt to freak it
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 210

This study also situated the Goa freaks within the quest for “Elysium,” but its conclusion was
rather different. The freaks did feel free. But they felt free as whites. Hence, the freaks weren’t
exactly free from white modernity, but had, being white themselves, understood its potentials.
The paradox was that they used these potentials to re-create a smaller replica of the society
they thought they had abandoned. It was precisely the pride in having fled and the conviction
that Anjuna was the place where you could “do your own thing,” that brought new stigmas and
stickiness. The political significance of Anjuna then becomes apparent: it embodies both the
hope of a future egalitarian society and the sad repetition of yesterday’s divisions. The
Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of microfascism—the unintended self-defeat of creative flux
owing to an all-too-easy following of lines of flight—is remarkably applicable to Anjuna. In
contrast to many commentators, what I would like to retain from Deleuze and Guattari is not
their anarchic and avant-garde tendencies, but their frequent call for a cautionary and realist
ethics. Judging from Anjuna’s microfascism, there might be less need for rebellion, for an
aggressive negation of everything that modernity, whiteness, or even capitalism stands for,
than for a pragmatic taking care. If one understands the differences that embodiment, face, and
location make, stratifications can be changed only step by step and collectively:

Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the worst than can happen ; the worst
that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented [nonsensical] or suicidal collapse ,
which brings them back down on us heavier than ever . This is how it should be done: lodge
yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place
on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization , possible lines of flight, experience them,
produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by
segment, have small plots of new land at all times.

Guattari thus hoped that what he called “molecular revolutions” would replace the class
struggle. Earlier, Timothy Leary had preached:
TWO COMMANDMENTS FOR THE MOLECULAR AGE

I. Though shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow man.

II. Though shalt not prevent thy other man from altering his own consciousness.

It is true that Goa freaks found their “advantageous place” on the stratum of white modernity
and experienced its lines of flight. Yes, freaks did experiment and go molecular, to use Guattari’s
word for a loose, centrifrugal, and open-ended kind of organization. And there is no doubt that
Leary, Ken Kesey, Abbie Hoffman, and their entourage were creative and revolutionary.
However, as this study suggested, freaking or molecularizing whiteness has a strong liability to
microfascism if it happens carelessly. Few countercultural intellectuals acknowledge the molar
realities of sociochemical monitoring, visual economy, and the politics of location. Molarity is
the necessary conceptual counterpart of molecularity: viscous, oppressive, predictable
organization as in faciality. Leary’s conception of the “molecular” (he refers, of course, to the
LSD molecule) is naïve in that it fails to approach molecules and oppression as potentially
intertwined. Nothing in his commandments prevents molarity from seeping in through the
back door.

This is where many modern mystics, hippies, and ravers are at odds with Deleuze and Guattari .
In my opinion, there can be no molecular revolution without understanding how the molecular
and the molar are mutually imbricated. Psychedelic whiteness tends to molecularize carelessly
and ends up reproducing what it escapes. Lines of flight are riskier than viscosity. But given
affective commitment and informed deliberation, they can be understood and harnessed
against the structures of racism, capitalism, and sexism. A molecular age might well be very far
off, but, as Guattari understood in the wake of May 1968, molecular forces are definitely real.
They’re everywhere, waiting to resonate.

Whitness not the presence of absence but rather has a materiality – just as for
Fanon there is a fact of blackness, there is, too, a fact of whiteness – the refusal
to theorize the making of whiteness and simply say it is “the norm” obfuscates
the question and makes resistance far more difficult.

Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,

Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 196

But although it’s true that whiteness gains its power from being invisible as a racial formation,
the analysis should not stop here. In a sense this leaves whiteness as something in itself empty
and ungraspable and leads to the problems identified with the formalism of post-Hegelian
antiessentialism. That whiteness is central to contemporary race relations is a geohistorical
accomplishment, not a question of formal logic in the unconscious. Even the literature on
faciality tends not to analyze the positive and properly machinic workings of whiteness. Through
slavery, cartography, guns, urban morphology, the regulation of reproduction, cultural
representations and new circulations of nonhuman life (viruses, rats), Europeans profoundly
altered the face of the global racial assemblage . 9 They deepened race’s virtuality. It seems
that whiteness is race’s most energetic instantiation— even though, of course, much of its
material and imaginative energies were tapped from other racial formations. Seen through a
Deleuzian– Guattarian framework, whiteness is a force whose strength, as I said about race in
general, lies in its concurrent implicitness and plasticity. If for Fanon the fact of blackness lay in
the impossibility, imposed by whites, of blacks defining themselves, what can be called “the
fact of whiteness” is that whites continually overcome themselves: becoming spirit, exploring,
becoming richer and smarter than one’s parents, conquering the world and one’s body, going
native, psychedelic transformations of self. Seemingly more than any other racial formation
(even the warrior and shamanic tribes that Deleuze and Guattari cite as the heroes of
deterritorialization), the white racial formation is defined by movement, by its urge to become
different— especially during the period called modernity. Except for Leslie Fiedler, few
commentators have taken this creative if parasitic fact of whiteness seriously . Of course, this
does not deny other cultures and formations their creativity; it only stresses the
unprecedented range and industriousness of white self-transformation. The great viscosities of
capitalism, colonialism, and White Man emerged out of the many tiny desires to escape the
viscosity that tied white bodies to their birthplace and traditional identity. In short, whites
became dominant not simply by constructing an unbridgeable divide between white and
nonwhite, as, for example, Edward Said would have it. It is crucial that the point I’m making is
not taken as Eurocentric self-aggrandizement in the face of postcolonial theory . What I want to
argue is, I hope, uncontroversial: that whites have been squarely in the business of producing
and rearranging racial difference, whether it was through relatively benign exoticism and
adventurous anthropology or state-sponsored genocide and apartheid laws. Marie Louise Pratt
points out that it was certain white bodies who dominated this exercise— influential urban men.
10 But these explorers, generals, merchants, and missionaries were the vanguard of a
subsequent globalizing whiteness. The fact of whiteness to a very large extent determined the
shape of today’s globalization, and most of globalization’s injustices cannot be examined
separately from it.

A materialist theory of race as machinic assemblage is necessary to unsettle the

overdetermined racial categorizations.
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 184

Microfascism, faciality, flow, deterritorialization, rhizome, abstract machine, becoming woman,

the molecular, strata: most of the evocative concepts in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative
work were Guattari’s. As he wrote: The capacity of human societies to escape from alienations
territorialized in the ego, the person, the family, the race, the exploitation of labour,
distinctions of sex and so on depends on a conjunction between the semiotics of consciousness
and those of de-territorializing machinisms. 1 Particularly important to the Capitalism and
Schizophrenia endeavor was, I think, the mutual recognition that Guattari’s political concepts
matched Deleuze’s ontological ones. 2 Guattari’s “schizoanalytical” understanding of the
unconscious displayed a strong urge to get rid of the Hegelianism of psychoanalysis and the
traditional left, just as Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition sought to break out of Hegelian
dialectics and all “representational” thought on a metaphysical plane. 3 Guattari called his
materialist, collective view of the unconscious “machinic” to distinguish it from the signifierand
family-obsessed psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. What I want to discuss in the closing chapters
of this book is how Guattari’s machinism helps me make both political and ontological sense of
the emergence of race relations, first in Anjuna, and then in general. I want to propose a
materialist theory of race, for I do think I can generalize from Anjuna. Perhaps it is the sheer
possibility that the psychedelic lines of flight of white modernity are simultaneously
concentrated and nullified in Anjuna that allows for the generalization. My fieldwork in Anjuna
showed me, I think, the virtuality of race. Ethnography, as I stated at the outset, is thought.

We should work to render race as unpredictable, freaking whiteness in order to

dissociate it from a privileged position in global modernity.
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 206

In the last chapters, I criticized the dominant paradigm for understanding race— social
constructionism— for focusing on race’s linguistic and cultural components at the expense of
its more extensive (and intensive) materiality. In particular, the work that phenotype does in
the racial machine has been all but left out of much social theory. From a machinic perspective,
race is simultaneously discursive, genetic, neurochemical, technological, economic, aesthetic,
and more. It is thus defined not simply by boundaries between self and other but by the lines of
flight of its components: for example, the capacity of phenotype to connect to music, or the
capacity of music to connect to phenotype. What can and does frequently precipitate from all
these connections is viscosity, bodies slowing down, sticking together, and collectively becoming
impenetrable. “Slowing down” means that the connections endure, not necessarily that bodies
decelerate in Euclidean space. Thus power-geometries of mobility are viscous in that
businessmen keep connecting to airplanes and the stock exchange. The way out of viscosity,
out of racism and the privilege white bodies enjoy in this world, is not to abolish race but to
multiply it, to use its lines of flight toward a situation wherein skin color, genitals, AIDS,
hunger, obesity, beauty, wealth, and speed connect in less predictable ways than they do now .
One component of race that I think hasn’t received the attention it deserves is drugs.
Psychedelics was defined as the use of pleasure (mainly of drugs and music) in order to escape
one’s imprisonment in white modernity. Hippies and Goa freaks were psychedelic insofar as
they were escaping the regimes of home, education, work, consumerism, and the state, using
the intensive difference that drugs and music offered to transform themselves. Overcoming
whiteness was always virtually ingrained in white modernity itself. The hippies were building on
older traditions of white romanticism, occultism, and travel. “The fact of whiteness,” as it was
called in the preceding chapter, consists precisely in this urge for more, further, higher, faster.
Other social formations have had this urge too. But it is the structural presence of lines of flight
among modern whites that make whiteness quantitatively different from earlier social
formations and other racial clusters. Whites reached the planet’s poles, climbed Mount Everest,
appropriated Buddhism, named the planet’s creatures, landed on the moon, invented TV and
science fiction as well as the United Colors of Benetton and “world music.” Within this
generalized thirst for transcendence, it is no coincidence that LSD became popular among
whites. Perhaps whiteness is psychedelic. However, when seen in the material workings of
embodiment-facelocation, psychedelics is on the whole not transcendent but regressive,
ultimately reinforcing the white cluster. I’ve discussed many ways in which Anjuna’s psychedelic
transformations of self did not overcome whiteness: the capacity to experience Goa as a
psychedelic paradise was mainly a white privilege; the sociochemical monitoring accompanying
drug ritualism favored long-staying whites; the discourse around the trance-dance experience
and techno-shamanism reworked old European exoticisms and fantasies of transcendence; in
India-psychosis, there was a “thickening” of the whiteness and foreignness of freaks. Similarly,
Anjuna’s visual economy kept white bodies firmly in certain places at certain times. This viscosity
emerged through anything from clothing to sunrise and voyeurism on the beach. The white
purity of the freaks was attained, consciously or not, as an effect of a host of subcultural rules. In
a broader scope, viscosity also follows from the politics of location, that is, from the conflicts
over placements of bodies in global geographies of mobility, wealth, and national belonging .
Whether a body speaks Danish or Hindi, or knows deejays, or imports jewelry from abroad to
sell at the flea market, or has a family who would pay for bail, are questions one needs to ask
when evaluating what that body is capable of in Anjuna. Globalization can therefore be
appreciated as a planetary ecology of differential speeds, in which the phenotype of human
beings matters for how they are positioned within that ecology. In the end, embodiment, face,
and location are three aspects of the same social process. There are some disconcerting
political and ethical problems of psychedelic whiteness in Goa. They include noise pollution, the
deliberate indifference of freaks toward Indian poverty, the profound corruption, the moral
panic about cultural imperialism in the Goan press, the party bans and their effect on the
livelihood of Anjunkars. All these problems correlate with the politics of location and phenotype,
as they reflect the intensive difference between white and wealthy freaks and India as a third-
world country. But the struggle against white privilege should not confine itself to antiwhite,
hybrid, or multicultural politics, as each of these misses the complicated and unpredictable
materiality of race. Understanding how phenotype matters in social formations and interactions
can thus be the first step toward a situation in which phenotype can be appreciated outside of
the entrenched racist configurations now in place. An ontological approach to racial formations
asks how they emerge as physical aggregates , how what Guattari would call the molarity of
race comes about, rather than merely how race is known or represented . 1 Again, research
into the discourses and ideas of race is relevant and necessary, but it should not shy away from
the question of what race then “is,” of how it works as a material force , not merely as a fiction
or opinion. Race’s continuing significance in cultural, political, and scientific hegemonies
demands from philosophy and the social sciences a rigorous engagement with its multifarious
realities, rather more than what the widespread injunction “race is a social construction” allows
for.