[Buchanan is on video
delivering a lecture, like all the speakers in
this online journal. God it's dull]
We should use Deleuzian
concepts not just to name or recognise things but
to analyse them.We’re going to analyse the Internet in this
case.The
Internet’s been important in affecting a number of
transformations, especially of the body, identity
and the notion of place, which used to be rooted
in sociological and historical dimensions— for the
enthusiasts, all this has been broken by the Net.
In Thousand Plateaus,
we are told that we find segmentation in dualistic
forms, and relations operating from neighbourhoods
to global circles [better discussed in Dialogues in my
view].Bodies
get captured by the incorporeal, as in the Society of Control piece.The old
divisions of class and race, for example, are
breaking down and being replaced by a
classification based on debt.
However, it would be premature
to think of the Internet as a body without organs.The work
on the society of control already implies that we
have already developed a digital body one that is
not the same as our physical bodies.Foucault,
in Discipline and
Punishment, a book dedicated to AntiOedipus,
argued that the sovereign already had two bodies
(physical and social), and so did the condemned
man as well.This is the origin of the modern notion of
the soul, for Foucault, which emerges from the
technology of the body—it is real, an effect of
power.
With the notion of the body
without organs, Deleuze and Guattari go beyond
Foucault here in developing this notion of the
social body, or the soul.The
notion of a collective body without organs can be
seen as a plane of consistency. Foucault sees this
notion as underpinned only by coercion, whereas
Deleuze and Guattari focus on the voluntary
submission to power [and the cognitive and
ontological necessities as well?].
Although Artaud is often
referenced as the source of the notion of body
without organs, his conception actually had only a
small influence,a prephilosophical
one in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terms: he
described the symptoms, but never developed the
concept.His
notion is still too individualistic. The real
influences were Lacan, Spinoza, with his notion of
longitude and latitude and Marx, with the concept
of mode of production [for what it’s worth I
disagree with this—see my comments below].We might
take the Marxist approach as expressing the real
priority, one which subsumes the others.The mode
of production displays a constellation of partial
objects and organises desire, and brings into
being production through various molecular
elements.This
replaces Freud and the oedipal mechanisms.The body
without organs also expresses Spinoza’s immanent
substance, and again the partial objects belong to
it.
The whole analysis makes sense
in terms of Marxist discourse, seen explicitly in
Anti Oedipus, where desiring production is
connected to social production.The
concept of desire expresses the real, but is best
seen as an heuristic.There
are elements of anti production in both its social
and personal forms. The socius
[rather obscure term, normally stands for the
social body?] Is the presupposition of labour for
Marx, the surface on which productive forces roam,
the quasi cause of those forces, in Deleuze’s term
[and a very odd term it is—see Logic of Sense].
In Thousand Plateaus,
the principle of analysis follows two phases,
first how things are constituted, and second how
things actually happen.Butler
has a similar idea with gender that is both a
transforming and a quasi causal element.So is
race and class.The point is that it’s impossible to avoid
having a gender [so it constitutes us], but it is
also a rigged game, where one gender turns out to
convey superiority in a number of important areas
[how things actually happen].Butler
tries to argue this by suggesting that sex is the
biological underpinning of gender, its quasi
cause.The
whole system is a mechanism for power.It seems
natural, but its origins are concealed.
The body without organs works
like this too by constituting actual bodies and
then concealing their origins.In this
constitutive sense, it produces a whole plane of
desire and immanence.The
point is that this is difficult to grasp by
ordinary thought [no-one can do it, outside an
elite French university of the 1970s].
So how might we access and
analyse the body without organs?One
approach is to ask what ought to be.In the
case of the Net, what sort of network should it
be—distributing, facilitating consumerism, or
connections?At the moment, it’s still not clear which
one of these dominates. In the
early 1990s, for example it was seen as being
rather like TV a service to be regulated to avoid
the obvious dangers.In Australia, they took the expensive
decision that access to TV ought to be free,
available to all, with only the information
restricted by a quota system [so much news, so
much children’s television]. But the Net was seen
as something different, subject only to specific
forms of legislation, for example to prevent child
pornography [but still a Good Thing to have
universal access to?]
Defenders have always argued it
should be freely accessible, and some enthusiasts
see the Net as a body without organs, a classic
source of freedom.However, the issue might be, as Guattari
suggests in Chaosmos, what actually is produced
and what circulates on it.The
notion of freedom tends to be discussed in a
rather limited way, for example by looking at
Google’ s problems with the Chinese government.Lurking
in the wings is the liberal concerned for the
freedom of business to operate a and for free
speech.Google
actually defended their decision to compromise
with the Chinese government, by saying that the
denial of any access would be worse [a
rationalisation, Buchanan implies].
In fact, Google has always only
been interested in access to markets, and
providing it for multinational corporations.The
enthusiast’s view of the Net is therefore a
fantasy: it has never developed as a ‘commons’.Indeed
if it is a commons, it is rapidly being enclosed
by multinationals such as Amazon [and there used
to be a lot of concern about corporations
developing their own intranets, rather like
universities have done.I wonder
if Buchanan’s university has got one?].Take the
recent interest in the convergence of mobile
technology with Net access.Google
sees the potential of this development to allow
underdeveloped countries to participate, where
there are no land lines, and ownership of PCs is
low.This
would be liberating, democratic for Google, and
would end the digital divide.It would
provide a population with alternative sources of
information enabling political debate.
However, these are abstract
freedoms, and they ignore the issue of content.Google
is pursuing a market strategy.It
already offers substantial surveillance of its
customers, and publishes regional data on usage
patterns, for example.Curiously,
the national press in Britain sees this as just
very interesting, and raises no objections about
customer surveillance or snooping.
The Net has been seen as a
rhizome, and this is one way in which Deleuze has
become rather popular in the ICT community.For
example Poster has seen the Net as non
hierarchical, with no central ruler, rhizomatic
precisely in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari in
Thousand Plateaus.There
[?] Deleuze and Guattari offer certain
criteria—a rhizome offers maximum
interconnectivity, available at any point; it
cannot be reduced because it consists of
dimensions rather than actual elements; it cannot
be altered at any point while remaining the same
in other points; it varies and expands rather than
reproduces; it is infinitely modifiable, acentred
and acephalous; there is no structural or
generative model [I have paraphrased here].
However, we should not look at
connectivity in principle without looking at
intentions [which reintroduce the notion of the
human subject or agent—see below].Before
Google and other search engines came along, people
supplied their own forms of connectivity—they
surfed, going from point to point between useful
sites, which were often listed and circulated on
paper; there were no user friendly domain names in
those days either.
The Net then could certainly not be
described as multidimensional, akin to cyberspace,
or a multiplicity, and it was much limited in
size.However,
expansion has not brought about the change in
itself.Other
issues remain—is the Net a matter of dimensions,
or actual units?Is each site a new dimension?Will the
removal of one element change the whole network?[A
question that invites the answer no—sites come and
go all the time]. Does the Net vary and expand or
reproduce?Here
again, actual intentions are important—is the
population of users dynamic or conservative?
The Net is getting simplified,
as businesses and consumerism dominate it.Much of
the activity is about finding out things,
contacting businesses, and accessing readymade
content such as podcasts and downloads.The Net
has absorbed elements from television and
magazines as well as providing new interactive
possibilities: it is now the master text for
communication, it simplifies and colonises.
Perhaps the most important
issue is whether the Net is infinitely modifiable.Deleuze
and Guattari do not go very far in their
explanation of this potential of the rhizome, but
is it is supposed to be providing the potential
for experiment rather than revealing some
structure or unseen path which connects people.The
rhizome produces the unconscious and therefore new
desires.[So
does the Net do this?]
The issue is how people choose
to use the Net.Can choices prevent the Net becoming
acentred and acephalous?The
reality of use suggests a different possibility,
that potentials are not realised, that arboreal
tendencies are still strong, that communication
goes some point to point rather than pursuing a
line of flight.Google searches reflect interests rather
than dimensions, and the activity is heavily
commercialised.Google searches provide a kind of
stability, or hierarchy of choices in rank order.The
searches also operate on a snapshot of the Net
taken the day before, they are never live.Google
indexing can be seen as a kind of centring, and
this activity can be manipulated by advertisers.
So, we need a reformulation of
the problem rather than just trying to analyse the
Net by analogy with the concept of the rhizome.The Net
could be a global body without organs, but we need
a new interrogation that sees maximum
connectedness only as an ideology, while searching
is the dominant activity.Consumer
demand drives use.The phenomenal growth of the Net and its
corresponding computing power derives from the
commercial benefits of searching and buying.
[What a strange and paradoxical
article, or rather lecture, starting out by
promising to use Deleuze and Guattari to actually
analyse the Net, but then having to introduce
serious modifications to Deleuze and Guattari to
get anywhere.First of all, we have to suggest that
Deleuze and Guattari are Marxists, and this is
only partially true—they say they are, but they
also reject a number of fundamental Marxist
concepts, including the notion of social class and
its reproduction, the notion of ideology, and the
surface/depth or base/superstructure model.Marxism
is heavily modified in AntiOedipus to
become a kind of minor analysis of linguistic
overcoding and territorialization.The
postscript on the society of control doesn’t seem
to be Marxist, since there is no [class] agent
interested in controlling people to meet its own
interests:like Foucault {another deathbed
marxist}, D and G have broken with class politics
and extended politics so much that it is
everywhere and nowhere.
Having shoehorned Deleuze and
Guattari into Marxism, we can then pursue a pretty
standard Marxist analysis of the Net as dominated
by commercialism and consumerism, at least once we
have reduced the Net to the activities of Google.Buchanan
actually uses the forbidden term ‘ideology’ in
this analysis.Strangest of all, however, is his
insistence on agency, intention and active use,
and all of these are severely rebuked in Deleuze
and Guattari, or at least in Deleuze’s analysis of
subjectivation and individuation, collective
utterances and all the rest of it.So who
is doing the intentions and the agency?
I think the whole analysis
shows that Deleuze and Guattari cannot be
‘applied’, at least not without adding all sorts
of concepts that don’t really belong to them.This is
hardly surprising.Deleuze sees philosophy as different from
science and social science, operating with
concepts that are not supposed to be just applied
through dubious processes of recognition or
analogy. The
rhizome is a good example—what a bizarre and
abstract pure network it has turned into in D's
and G's hands, far more interconnected, acentred
and acephalous than any actual rhizome or network.
In fact, it is not at all clear why philosophers
want to develop concepts of this bizarrely
abstract kind at all, but it’s probable that it
won’t do social analysts much good to follow them.
In an old phrase of
Althusser’s, the point of (Deleuzian) philosophy
is to produce (Deleuzian) philosophical
knowledges.This
article by Buchanan, and the very interesting book
by Delanda on the
war machine {and Semetsky who applies Deleuze
mostly by turning him into Dewey}shows that
applying Deleuzian philosophy actually means
largely forgetting Deleuzian philosophy altogether
and getting on with something far more specific
concrete and interesting.]