The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary

Eugene B. Young

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441104397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two of the most important and influential thinkers in twentieth-century European philosophy. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all their major sole-authored and collaborative works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Deleuze and Guattari's groundbreaking thought. Students and experts alike will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Deleuze and Guattari's writings and detailed synopses of their key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on their major philosophical influences and key contemporaries, from Aristotle to Foucault. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying these seminal thinkers or Modern European Philosophy more generally.

A–Z dictionary

Abstract machine

Unlike everyday technical machines, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that ‘abstract’ machines involve the manner in which human beings (or other ‘matters’) are caught up within, or are a part of, ‘mechanical’ processes. When machines function in a technical sense, they are abstracted, or separate from, their milieu (that is, the domain in which they have an effect), and are thus ‘self-destructive’, or cannot truly maintain themselves; this is in fact the initial sense of the term provided in their text on Kafka (which also appears indirectly in Anti-Oedipus in terms of the distinction between technology and assemblages). However, the term shifts to signify the manner in which ‘machines’ can be considered in an ontological sense rather than an everyday technical sense in the conclusion to the Kafka text (the term retains this sense in A Thousand Plateaus), such that they function to actually disrupt rather than maintain their separation from actual assemblages. In this manner, human beings are not part technical-machine (à la cyborgs), but part abstract-machine; that is, we are machines in the sense that our desire is inextricably bound up with machines (it is ‘machinic’), and machines must be connected (or immanent) to non-technical processes of desire in order to truly function (see desiring-machines).

1.a. In D&G’s reading of Kafka and analysis of social constructs of desire, in an initial sense, a technical and physical construct that operates on bodies and social or concrete assemblages according to symbolic and transcendent imperatives (producing mechanical effects); that which territorializes and captures desire by limiting it to concrete forms.

The abstract machine is that of the [penal] colony, or of Odradek or Blumfeld’s ping-pong balls. Transcendent and reified, seized by symbolical or allegorical exegeses, it opposes the real assemblages […]. [K 86]

b. In an ultimate sense, an immaterial element that disassembles any transcendent or symbolic function of technical, concrete, or social assemblages (producing machinic effects). [K, TP]

In another sense of abstract (a sense that is nonfigurative, non-signifying, nonsegmental), it is the abstract machine that operates in the field of unlimited immanence […]: the concrete assemblages are no longer that which gives a real existence to the abstract machine […]—it’s the abstract machine that measures the mode of existence and the reality of the assemblages […]. [K 86–7]

2. A set of breaks, interruptions, or cuts that are effectuated in concrete assemblages, but are themselves indifferent to and independent of those assemblages because they have neither a predetermined function nor deal with formed substances, but establish becomings and engender intensities (which are singular).

Abstract machines consist of unformed matters and nonformal functions. Every abstract machine is a consolidated aggregate of matters-functions (phylum and diagram). This is evident on a technological ‘plane’: such a plane is not made up simply of formed substances (aluminum, plastic, electric wire, etc.) or organizing forms (program, prototypes, etc.), but of a composite of unformed matters exhibiting only degrees of intensity (resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or delay, induction, transduction…) and diagrammatic functions exhibiting only differential equations or, more generally, ‘tensors.’ [TP 562, 511]

3.a. In D&G’s cosmology, that which either unifies the composition of strata (Ecumenon) or diagrams the plane of consistency within strata (Planomenon).

Either the abstract machines remain prisoner to stratifications, […] Or, on the contrary, the abstract machine cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes […] [TP 62, 56]

b. That which is responsible for both conflating and organizing the relationship between forms of content and forms of expression, and for deterritorializing the flow of desire by allowing it to trace an abstract and unlimited line which is immanent to concrete assemblages.

the abstract machine […] constitutes and conjugates all of the assemblage’s cutting edges of deterritorialization.[…] A true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency, which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and reterritorializations. [TP 156, 141]

a machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and has been freed through deterritorialization. [TP 367, 333]

- E. B. Y.

Action-image

The action-image, along with perception-images and affection-images, is one of the three major types of movement-images in Deleuze’s taxonomy of the cinema. This image is most responsible for engendering a large or global sense of realism, namely, by situating our perception of affects (embodied in behaviors of characters) within a milieu (or environment), which then compete with other forces that change the situation and instigate action (forming a ‘set’). Deleuze also shows, however, that there are smaller forms of the action-image which begin with inferences of situations that create anticipation or tension to arrive at an actual situation; a straightforward contrast is between the crime genre, which moves from a situation towards an action or duel, and back to a situation—SAS, and the detective genre, which moves from ‘blind actions’ to ‘obscure situations’, and back to actions—ASA (C1 168, 164). Deleuze also explores more complex sequences that navigate between these small and large forms.

1. That which, in the sensory-motor interval of the movement-image, organizes possible responses to perception.

The more the reaction ceases to be immediate and becomes truly possible action, the more the perception becomes distant and anticipatory and extracts the virtual action of things. […] This is therefore the second avatar of the movement-image: it becomes action-image. [C1 67, 65]

2.a. On the one hand, the perception of actualized affects within a milieu; in Deleuze’s cinematic schema, the synsign. On the other hand, the image of competing forces which compose the actual situation; in Deleuze’s cinematic schema, the binomial.

Already, in the milieu, we distinguish the power-qualities and the state of things which actualizes them. The situation, and the character or the action, are like two terms which are simultaneously correlative and antagonistic. The action in itself is a duel of forces, a series of duels: duel with the milieu, with the others, with itself. Finally, the new situation which emerges from the action forms a couple with the initial situation. This is the set [ensemble] of the action-image, or at least its first form. [C1 146, 142]

b. Images that function as symbols for possible behaviors or actions in potential situations; in Deleuze’s cinematic schema, the impression.

It is nevertheless true that the emotional handling of an object, an act of emotion in relation to the object, can have more effect than a close-up in the action-image. […] In its most general definition, the impression is the inner, but visible, link between the permeating situation and the explosive action. [C1 163, 159]

3.a. The inference of situations or circumstances that are not immediately apparent based on actions that are apparent, generating general anticipation; in Deleuze’s cinematic schema, the index of lack.

This action-image seems to have become particularly self-conscious […]. The situation is thus deduced from the action, by immediate inference, or by relatively complex reasoning. […] [T]he index here is an index of lack; it implies a gap in the narrative […] [C1 164, 160]

b. The inference of two contradictory situations or expectations based on what is given, generating a sense of tension; in Deleuze’s cinematic schema, the index of equivocity.

There is a second, more complex type of index, an index of equivocity, which corresponds to the second (geometrical) sense of the word ‘ellipse’ […] It is as if an action, a mode of behaviour, concealed a slight difference, which was nevertheless sufficient to relate it simultaneously to two quite distant situations, situations which are worlds apart. [C1 166, 161]

4. The sequence of images which engenders the sense of all possible situations and th...

Table of contents

• FC
• Bloomsbury Philosophy Dictionaries
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• A–Z dictionary
• Bibliography
• Index