Series: The TNR Alphabet? (A-B)
"What a pleasure it is to have done this. Posthumous! Posthumous!"
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its supposed successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history via a mythic reading of Modernity itself.
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“What comes to the rescue is the following condition: should any of this be worth using, it will be aired only after my death.”
From 1988 to 1989, Gilles Deleuze participated in L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, a French television programme featuring himself and Claire Parnet, over 26 letter-themed episodes about 26 assorted topics. The series was filmed several years before his death in 1995, and was released posthumously in 1996. It remains a wonderful insight for those wishing to learn about Deleuze, especially who he was outside of his writings.
In other news, The Nostomodern Review is currently taking its time to review the chapter-based structure and the overall vision for the project going forward. We have learnt a lot this year, and there are several alterations we already have made to the existing sub-chapters. Part of this has been a complete decimation of Chapter 01 about a month ago, and the rewriting of the project timeline to include 7 chapters altogether.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this new series we are starting. We hope it will guide you through difficult philosophical terms we had to learn this year, and provide you with some comfort in knowing that someone else is looking out for you. We still, however, suggest that you read the works themselves eventually, no matter how much we quote them here. You cannot look at the memes forever.
A B C D E
A is for Assemblage
To understand what is an Assemblage, it helps to know what is a Multiplicity, what is a Plateau, and what is a Rhizome. For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a Multiplicity is a potentiality—there are more than one ways to interpret something; there other ways for it to travel and its definition is plural.
As they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), on the Oedepidalising tendencies of Sigmund Freud, “Salvador Dali, in attempting to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about THE rhinoceros horn; he has not for all of that left neurotic discourse behind. But when he starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the presence of madness. Is it still a question of a comparison at all? It is, rather, a pure multiplicity that changes elements, or becomes. On the micrological level, the little bumps "become" horns, and the horns, little penises. No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work bringing back molar unities, reverting to his familiar themes of the father, the penis, the vagina, Castration with a capital C... (On the verge of discovering a rhizome, Freud always returns to mere roots.)”
The key phrases here are “molecular multiplicities” and “molar unities”. For Freud, everything harkens back to the “familiar” images of psychoanalysis. We can only think in terms of these images; we can only imagine the world in one way, value relations in one way, and to do otherwise is a path to madness. As they summarise, “A bone or a skull is never alone. Bones are a multiplicity. But Freud wants the dream to signify the death of someone.”
To form “molar unities” is to become Oedipalized; and to de-Oedipalize and thus to reclaim “molecular multiplicities” is to reject General Freud and his dictatorial psychoanalysis. It means to free up the notion of things—to deterritorialize by means of decentered schizoanalysis—and thus reterritorialize them as multiplicities without having “to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model.”
Now, onwards to the subject of Rhizomes. As outlined in A Thousand Plateaus, a Rhizome is “a map and not a tracing.” What do they mean by this? “Make a map, not a tracing.” For Deleuze and Guattari, the case study of an orchid and a wasp illustrates this relationship—this mapping.
“The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged "competence."”
A map is a representation of a territory; and yet, it demands no particular means of traversing the terrain. It does not establish a single entryway—a single approach—and hence is related to a performance or production via the map, such as the experience of the journey itself; unlike the tracing, which returns to the dominant shape of its subject in “competence”, whose shape becomes the only territory to approach.
As for orchids and wasps, “the orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.).”
A rhizome is a connection—a line drawn across a map—and not a static tracing of a relationship. It is said that orchid flowers are meant to resemble wasps, sometimes in both shape or scent, and that this resemblance is what attracts wasps to pollinate them. This is what they mean by “reproducing its image in a signifying fashion”.
They continue: “But this is true only on the level of the strata—a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying. Rimy Chauvin expresses it well: "the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other."”
In botany, rhizomes are more likened to stems than roots; this is to say, while stems grow vertically above ground, rhizomes grow horizontally underground and contain nodes from which roots and new stems may form. If there is sufficient nutrients, entire plants can arise from these nodes and grow vertically to add onto the larger plant system. Or new root systems can grow to help stabilise the plant and help increase nutrient intake. Bamboos and ginger expand via rhizomes; in particular, bamboo is considered a grass and not a tree, and expands vigorously in some species. Unlike tree-root dichotomization—or likewise the psychoanalytic object and subject—rhizomes are multiplicitous by comparison, and whose nature invokes no top-down relation but only horizontal expansion and connection to form new roots, plants and systems.
Even A Thousand Plateaus is a rhizome, or at least its intention was to be. I do not know where Deleuze ends and Guattari begins; I cannot guess who is writing a passage and who might be editing it and vice versa. There are no tracings of their individual characters. There is only a line passing through their words, which tie each word within a plane of consistency, over various plateaus without order, to form a mapping and not tracings of objects, subjects and so on. As they write, “we evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.”
But speaking of plateaus, “a plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.” To elaborate, A Thousand Plateaus is an attempt to write a book as a mapping and not a tracing, and the book itself is used to illustrate the concept of plateaus. Instead of a book with definite “culmination and termination points”, as per chapters and sections, A Thousand Plateaus can be “read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau.” Avoid approaching this book with a conventional (or aborescent) top-down, front-to-back relation. Imagine instead a horizontal series of plateaus, each one starting out as nodes, domains or multiplicities expanding along a shared rhizome. The misleading veneer of page numbers, contents pages, and even book binding are “only for laughs.”
Hence, even the general structure of this essay is broken. It was easier to explain rhizomes first than to explain plateaus, especially since this was its order of appearance in A Thousand Plateaus. Otherwise, the order of appearance should have been Multiplicity to Plateau to Rhizome to Assemblage. But finally we are within sight of what is an Assemblage, which amusingly, is what this essay is too.
As they write, “an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world.”
Throw away the “tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author).” Instead embrace “a rhizome-book, not a dichotomous, pivotal, or fascicular book. Never send down roots, or plant them, however difficult it may be to avoid reverting to the old procedures.”
For Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus is an assemblage of plateaus, of rhizomes, and of multiplicities in which each of them can be accessed in no particular order beyond their mappings, which is to say, the lines which connect through them and between them mutually. In other words, “make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point!”
So when you read A Thousand Plateaus for yourself, read it from end to beginning, or from end to middle or from middle to beginning. Chop it up and read each plateau as a randomised apparatus. Trace a line through them all, and note that “these lines, or lineaments, should not be confused with lineages of the arborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure.”
Instead, think of it as a “map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite.” And hopefully, this essay shall form the Assemblage-Becoming-Rhizome which connects you to understand and begin A Thousand Plateaus for yourself.
B is for Biopolitics
As Michel Foucault writes in The History Of Sexuality (1976), “by power, I do not mean "Power" as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power take.”
For Foucault, power is not something which emanates from a sovereign source of divine-right, nor is it necessarily a coercive system which could be symbolised by a straightforward top-down power relation. Instead, “power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.”
Not only is “power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere”, it is also “not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”
As he explains in both Madness And Civilization (1961) and Discipline And Punish (1975)—via his historiographies of lazar houses to mental asylums, schools and their similarities to prisons—power is not coerced by the institutions themselves but rather by ourselves and our own self-disciplining behaviours made under the influences of legitimacy, expertise and administration.
More specifically, in the case of Discipline And Punish, we are given the examples of military camps, hospitals and school buildings as structures meant to both reflect and propagate a mechanism of power for purpose, or as he summarises, “a whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf, the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control—to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them.”
In the case of military camps, “the short-lived, artificial city, built and reshaped almost at will; the seat of a power that must be all the stronger, but also all the more discreet, all the more effective and on the alert in that it is exercised over armed men. In the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation; each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power. The old, traditional square plan was considerably refined in innumerable new projects. The geometry of the paths, the number and distribution of the tents, the orientation of their entrances, the disposition of files and ranks […] For a long time this model of the camp or at least its underlying principle was found in urban development, in the construction of working-class housing estates, hospitals, asylums, prisons, schools: the spatial 'nesting' of hierarchized surveillance.”
In the case of hospitals, “The old simple schema of confinement and enclosure—thick walls, a heavy gate that prevents entering or leaving—began to be replaced by the calculation of openings, of filled and empty spaces, passages and transparencies. In this way the hospital building was gradually organized as an instrument of medical action: it was to allow a better observation of patients, and therefore a better calibration of their treatment; the form of the buildings, by the careful separation of the patients, was to prevent contagion lastly, the ventilation and the air that circulated around each bed was to prevent the deleterious vapours from stagnating around the patient, breaking down his humours and spreading the disease by their immediate effects.”
In the case of schools, “the school building was to be a mechanism for training. It was as a pedagogical machine that Paris-Duverney conceived the Ecole Militaire, right down to the minute details that he had imposed on the architect, Gabriel. Train vigorous bodies, the imperative of health; obtain competent officers, the imperative of qualification; create obedient soldiers, the imperative of politics; prevent debauchery and homosexuality, the imperative of morality.”
However, it is important to note that for Foucault, power is not wholly negative nor deleterious. As he writes in Discipline And Punish, “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', it 'censors', it 'abstracts', it 'masks', it 'conceals'. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.”
Hence, what he describes above is a radical notion of power that is irrevocable, either by revolutionary praxis or structural transition, and opposed to prior definitions of power as being coercive from a sovereign down. Instead, to be human is to live within power itself—to be “disciplined”—and to act is to mimic this enforcement. Power has not been infiltrated by the hand of big government or by its surveillance over individuals per se; instead consider day-to-day life as an expression of power too. In other words, Foucault challenges us to not think of power according to its old or cliched definitions, but now to embrace a new conception of power as pervasive, immanent and necessary at the basic level of society.
For Foucault, to resist or reject such power is not to seek and find some transcendent truth, nor to unravel as many layers of power as possible, such that nothing remains or that some basic form is discovered—to do so would be impossible. Instead it is to appreciate the notion of power and hence to decouple the idea of a pristine truth from the various institutions and structures that seek to peddle it as such.
Power is a double-edged sword—borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, it can both deterritorialize and reterritorialize—and so we must learn to live more clearly with it.
But while it is inescapable at a basic level, this does not preclude that states do enact power over individuals by juridical, administrative or political means, among other types and institutions, for the sake of technological “technique” and through “networks” and so on; albeit, these sources of power are not rigid either and are not without their own flux. More importantly, to the point, this is where biopolitics (and biopower) can come in.
In Society Must Be Defended (1976), Foucault writes that, “unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species. To be more specific, I would say that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and if need be, punished. And that this new technology that is being established is addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on. So after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species [...] the emergence of something that is no longer an anatomo-politics of the human body, but what I would call a "biopolitics" of the human race."”
This is to say, biopolitics is the arrangement of biopower via collectives and not over individuals per se. Previously, the instruments of “discipline” were the prisons, the schools or the asylums. They affect individuals, shaping them by subtle coercion of their very presence, of their pedestalled legitimacy; by the fact of a lack of alternatives.
Foucault goes on to clarify the new mechanism of biopolitics: “The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. [...] The mortality rate has to be modified or lowered; life expectancy has to be increased; the birth rate has to be stimulated. And most important of all, regulatory mechanisms must be established to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this generation population and its aleatory field. In a word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life. Like disciplinary mechanisms, these mechanisms are designed to maximize and extract forces, but they work in very different ways."
These biopower mechanisms are “regulatory” by comparison. If disciplinary measures, in the example of urban planning, include “localizing (one to a house) […] individuals (one to a room)”, then regulatory measures includes “health insurance systems, old-age pensions; rules on hygiene that guarantee the optimal longevity of the population; the pressures that the very organization of the town brings to bear on sexuality and therefore procreation; child care, education, et cetera".
In other words, the state has vested interests to promote procreation and to influence the sexuality of individuals. This interest is expressed in the planning of cities and suburbs, in the availability of monetary incentives for married couples and the focus on demographics such as ageing populations. These measures influence social norms towards a certain end—as a certain expression of power—and eschew unproductive sexual differences, such as the queer especially, and unproductive lifestyles such as lifelong bachelorhood. For Foucault, sexuality is where “the body and the population” meet.
Even racism is a potential expression of biopower and a form of biopolitics: the Nazi regime is the ultimate expression of disciplinary and regulatory measures thus far. For the Nazis, war is not simply “a way of improving one's own race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way of regenerating one's own race.”
This new racism, “modeled on war”, combines the classical notion of state sovereignty—as being derived from a social contract between the sovereign and its individual citizens—with Foucault’s new mechanisms of discipline and regulation; namely, that together the Nazi state operates on the “sovereign right to kill” towards its own citizens too, and that to bring about its “definitive regeneration”, the entire population must be exposed to “universal death” in a new synthesis of power and control.
In other words, the endpoint of racism is a perpetual war machine, which subjugates other races with either extermination or slavery, but also subjugates its own population insofar as they too must support this eternal war and obsessive quest of the state for ethnocultural regeneration. If the classical sovereign held “the right to take life or let live [...] this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die” on the level of biopower.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2021. All rights reserved.