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Deleuze: History and Science.
1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements. 2
Assemblage Theory and Human History. 3
Materialism and Politics. 29
Assemblage Theory and Linguistic Evolution. 51
Metallic Assemblages. 67
Materialist Metaphysics. 81
Intensive and Extensive Cartography. 115
Deleuze in Phase Space. 141
2 Deleuze: History and Science.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.
Some of the essays that make up this book are published here
for the first time, but some have appeared in other publications in
modified form. The publishers acknowledge that some material has
been previously published in the following collections:
Deleuzian Social Ontology and Assemblage Theory. In Deleuze and the
Social. Edited by Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen.
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.)
Deleuze, Materialism, and Politics. In Deleuze and Politics. Edited by
Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2008.)
Molar Entities and Molecular Populations in History. In Deleuze and
History. Edited by Jeffrey Bell and Claire Colebrook. (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009.)
Deleuze in Phase Space. In Virtual Mathematics. Edited by Simon
Duffy. (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2006.)
Deleuze: History and Science.
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Assemblages and Human History.
We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once
existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no
longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of
evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous
bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that
are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various
separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize
them; it is a unity of all those particular parts but does not unify them;
rather it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.
1
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The Anti-Oedipus.
A crucial question confronting any serious attempt to
think about human history is the nature of the historical actors
that are considered legitimate in a given philosophy. One can, of
course, include only human beings as actors, either as rational
decision-makers (as in micro-economics) or as
phenomenological subjects (as in micro-sociology). But if we
wish to go beyond this we need a proper conceptualization of
social wholes. The very first step in this task is to devise a means
to block micro-reductionism, a step usually achieved by the
concept of emergent properties, properties of a whole that are
not present in its parts: if a given social whole has properties that
emerge from the interactions between its parts, its reduction to a
mere aggregate of many rational decision makers or many
phenomenological experiences is effectively blocked. But this
leaves open the possibility of macro-reductionism, as when one
rejects the rational actors of micro-economics in favor of society
as a whole, a society that fully determines the nature of its
members. Blocking macro-reductionism demands a second
concept, the concept of relations of exteriority between parts.
Unlike wholes in which “being part of this whole” is a defining
characteristic of the parts, that is, wholes in which the parts
cannot subsist independently of the relations they have with each
other (relations of interiority) we need to conceive of emergent
4 Deleuze: History and Science.
wholes in which the parts retain a relative autonomy, so that they
can be detached from one whole and plugged into another one
entering into new interactions.
With these two concepts we can define social wholes,
like interpersonal networks or institutional organizations, that
cannot be reduced to the persons that compose them, and that, at
the same time, do not reduce those persons to the whole, fusing
them into a totality in which their individuality is lost. Take for
example the tightly-knit communities that inhabit small towns or
ethnic neighborhoods in large cities. In these communities an
important emergent property is the degree to which their
members are linked together. One way of examining this
property is to study networks of relations, counting the number
of direct and indirect links per person, and studying their
connectivity. A crucial property of these networks is their
density, an emergent property that may be roughly defined by
the degree to which the friends of the friends of any given
member (that is, his or her indirect links) know the indirect links
of others. Or to put it still more simply, by the degree to which
everyone knows everyone else. In a dense network word of
mouth travels fast, particularly when the content of the gossip is
the violation of a local norm: an unreciprocated favor, an unpaid
bet, an unfulfilled promise. This implies that the community as a
whole can act as a device for the storage of personal reputations
and, via simple behavioral punishments like ridicule or
ostracism, as an enforcement mechanism.
The property of density, and the capacity to store
reputations and enforce norms, are non-reducible properties and
capacities of the community as a whole, but neither involves
thinking of it as a seamless totality in which the members’
personal identity is created by the community. A similar point
applies to institutional organizations. Many organizations are
characterized by the possession of an authority structure in
which rights and obligations are distributed asymmetrically in a
hierarchical way. But the exercise of authority must be backed
by legitimacy if enforcement costs are to be kept within bounds.
Legitimacy is an emergent property of the entire organization
even if it depends for its existence on personal beliefs about its
source: a legitimizing tradition, a set of written regulations, or
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