Lecture 10// Deleuze and Guattari and Creativity..

Sessions aims//
 - To examine how Deleuze and Guattari draw emphasis to the constructed and contingent nature of social reality.

Objectives//

1. To contrast models of creative, 'rhizomatic' thought with traditional 'tree-like' models of thought based in sequential argumentation.

2. To examine Delueze and Guattaris interpretations of processes of social change and development.

3. Consider how they propose individual people might transform themselves.

4. To contextualise these theories of change and development in relation to the concepts 'the virtual' and 'the actual..'


 - Deleuze and Guattari were a philosopher and psychiatrist who worked together in France in the 1970s and 1980s, and who have been hugely influential in numerous fields, including (but not restricted to) art practice, theories of music, geography and sociology.

- Against this dominant tradition Deleuze and Guattari conceived of an alternate structure for thought that privileges difference, play and creativity.

- They called this rhizomatic thought.
- We're going to look at A Thousand Plateaus, and the concepts developed within it: the rhizome, assemblage, subjectivation, schizo-analysis, the body without organs, and the virtual and the actual.

- Each chapter (or, as they put it, plateau, meaning a particular set of circumstances brought together in an intensive relationship) resists reduction to a goal-oriented argument. Instead multi-disciplinary practices are brought into a state of play, and concepts are re-contextualised and reverberate together.

Rhizome//

- A rhizome is an underground stem that grows horizontally and pushes up lateral shoots- like a ginger plant.

- Delueze and Guattari form alternative model of thought to the tree-like structure that they associate with traditional philosophy.

- Delueze and Guattari emphasise that concepts 'are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies.. They must be invented, fabricated or rather created.'

- Rhizome builds relationships between objects, places, people and ideas, generating unanticipated commonalities between seemingly disparate entities. Rhizomes are inherently creative and may be produced intentionally or unintentionally.

- Isa Genzken's sculptures as rhizomatic artworks. Her works reflect the chaos of the urban landscape, yet often read as small scale skyscrapers. In these works, objects, images and poured paint collide, creating formations that suggest future architectural production shaped in relation to the city's own detritus. Materials, images and ideas drawn from diverse sources collide, suggesting possibilities for the transformation of urban space. 

- Their usage derives from the French agencement, the meaning of which emphasises processes of arranging, organising and fitting together. Assemblages emphasise the convergence of heterogeneous elements such as food, furniture, and people in recognisable structures, such as a dinner party.

- An example of an assemblage with which we are all familiar is the place we make our home.A home is a way in which we make a space express comfort to us. Deleuze and Guattari describe a child, alone and afraid in the dark. The child hums or sings a tune as a way of bringing familiarity to the place.

- So, assemblages of all kinds operate, and they operate within a territory. And territory is not simply a place, it's also a process.

- Hoodies create an assemblage in a supermarket, people feel threatened by them. They turn the space from a supermarket car park to a social space. They re-territorialise the space.


- De-territorialisations and re-territorialisations occur within assemblages in accordance with the flows in which their component parts move at different speeds. Different social constructions change at different rates. The status of teenagers in society, for instance, can change very quickly, while the
status of the military is very embedded and static and slow to change. This effects how assemblages form and shift.

 - Deleuze and Guattari go further, though. As individual bodies are buffeted around these social assemblages - from school, to home life, to church, and to work, and in a continual immersion in social activity - reading other people's approval or disapproval, being gendered, by selecting interests and passions or having them prescribed by others - a subject is produced.

- Consider the working day. One is shocked out of dream fantasies by the alarm clock, jostled into the role of commuter, thrust into the tasks of wage labour, and then, back at home, required to perform as a parent, and finally show the sensitivity of a lover. All this in one day. Each different situation makes a series of unique demands upon the individual, to which they must conform, at the risk of castigation.

- Real object is ascertained. James Williams notes 'A mountain exists as real with all the ways it has been painted, sensed, written about and walked over.' This traditional notion of 'the real', where something is real as opposed to something imaginary, or copied, no longer holds. Every object we understand in relation to its brute materiality is only ever known from a given perspective.

- The actual refers to states of affairs, bodies and individuals, whilst the virtual refers to what these entities imply and what in fact brings them into existence.

- The virtual is the unsaid of the statement, the unthought of the thought.

Conclusion//

- Between creative rhizomatic constructions, social assemblages,  individual re-programming, and questioning accepted notions of thought, Deleuze and Guattari developed a series of tools for strategic thought and action. These provide a set of tools for those who wish to challenge order that exists for its own sake, and a way of understanding how we today exist in relation to an ever changing, and ever more complicated modern world.