Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction Space as a Critical Concept
- 1 Henri Lefebvre: Lived Spaces
- 2 Michel de Certeau: Anthropological Spaces
- 3 Jean Baudrillard: Media Spaces
- 4 Marc Augé: Non-Places
- 5 Paul Virilio: Speed Space
- 6 Deleuze and Guattari: Space and Becoming
- 7 Bruno Latour: Common Spaces
- 8 Etienne Balibar: Fictional Spaces
- Conclusion: Future Spaces
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Deleuze and Guattari: Space and Becoming
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction Space as a Critical Concept
- 1 Henri Lefebvre: Lived Spaces
- 2 Michel de Certeau: Anthropological Spaces
- 3 Jean Baudrillard: Media Spaces
- 4 Marc Augé: Non-Places
- 5 Paul Virilio: Speed Space
- 6 Deleuze and Guattari: Space and Becoming
- 7 Bruno Latour: Common Spaces
- 8 Etienne Balibar: Fictional Spaces
- Conclusion: Future Spaces
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.
Deleuze, NegotiationsPaul Virilio shows how the explosion of the information bomb has direct repercussions on humans and their experience of the nation-state, of the city and of world-space. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw repeatedly on Virilio when they declare that every critical relation, no matter what discipline it uses or represents, has to be treated in view of the world he describes. As Virilio put it, when addressing what he calls Deleuze and Guattari's “poetic or nomadological understanding of the world,”
[t]oday's world no longer has any kind of stability; it is shifting, like the polar ice-cap, or “continental drift”. Nomadology is thus an idea which is in total accordance with what I feel with regard to speed and deterritorialization. So, it is hardly surprising that we clearly agree on the theme of deterritorialization. (Virilio 2005a: 40)
Spatial consciousness is ubiquitous in Deleuze and Guattari's writings. It informs their theory of an event, which Virilio employs in a catastrophic sense, insofar as a sensation of space often becomes the event as it “takes place” and is as quickly abolished. It also subtends their politics, which in their lexicon means creating openings that will enable becomings. Becomings engage what so far has been called existential territorialization.
Extensive and Intensive Space
Written in the aftermath of the events of May 1968, Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, was a spirited attack on capitalism, the state and tributary institutions that included the family, school, religion and, especially, psychiatry. It argued that the contemporary world finds its subjects imprisoned in spaces that are at once stratified and striated, everywhere riddled and cut through by locative coordinates that plot the ways that the world can be thought of. Under the cloak of normalcy in the sphere of capitalism humans are molded into obedient subjects whose docility upholds the social order into which they are born. The “state” and its economic machinery employ what the authors call order-words (“mots d'ordre”) to define the character of communication and commerce, which administrate obedience and docility. Order-words tell their receivers what they must do, how they must behave and where and how they must consume.
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- Information
- Spatial EcologiesUrban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory, pp. 95 - 111Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012