Day: March 29, 2025

Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy Resists Simplification and Demands Pedagogical Nuance

Deleuze and Guattari’s work is conceptually rich but complex, resisting tidy overviews. Grossberg acknowledges the challenge in teaching it due to their fluid vocabulary and intertextual structure: “You cannot say that the various appearances of concepts like assemblage or territorialization are simple repetitions” (p. 3). Their ontology is rooted in immanence, multiplicity, and a refusal of transcendence, privileging relations of exteriority over fixed identities (p. 2).

Three Discursive Frameworks: Assemblages, Lines, and Machines

Grossberg identifies three interwoven but distinct discourses in Deleuze and Guattari’s work:

• Assemblages: Assemblages conceptualize collectivities as “multiplicities rather than as unity” (p. 4). Three forms—arborescent, radicle, and rhizomatic—represent hierarchical, deconstructed-yet-still-unified, and fully non-hierarchical organization respectively. The rhizome “has no centre, hierarchy or teleology” and is a map for creative experimentation (p. 5).
• Lines: Fundamental to their ontology is becoming, expressed through lines of intensity and transformation. These include connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive lines, describing relations that respectively create, differentiate, and amplify (p. 6). Lines of flight express deterritorialization, resisting structure and signification (p. 8).
• Machines: Machines mediate the actualization of the virtual. Unlike mechanistic devices, abstract machines, coding machines, and territorializing machines organize and produce realities without requiring human intention (p. 9). “Reality is produced… through a series of machines” (p. 9).

Risks of Misusing Deleuze and Guattari in Cultural Studies

Grossberg critiques the uncritical adoption of Deleuze–Guattarian ideas in cultural studies, warning that many interpretations turn concepts into totalizing frameworks. Diagnoses of “biopower,” “affect,” and “the society of control” often prefigure their conclusions, using theory to overshadow empirical analysis: “Empirical realities do make their appearance, but their promise is almost always guaranteed in advance” (p. 13).

Conflating Ontological and Political Discourses Undermines Analysis

Grossberg argues that collapsing distinctions between concepts like rhizome, virtual, and deterritorialization reduces Deleuze–Guattarian theory to an ethics of refusal or pure resistance. This “fetishizes particular kinds of resistance…isolating it from questions of adequacy and effectiveness” (p. 15). A refusal to engage with institutional structures can lead to politically impotent or nihilistic positions.

Cultural Studies Should Use Deleuze and Guattari as Tools, Not Templates

Instead of viewing their philosophy as cultural studies, Grossberg argues for their use as conceptual tools within the conjunctural method. “Ontology does not guarantee the truth or utility of its descriptions, and critical work is never simply a matter of offering ontological assertions” (p. 17). Cultural studies must “analyse the configurations of the actual and describe the processes…by which it…is being actualized” (p. 17).

Multiplicity and Immanence Are Vital, But Must Be Concretely Engaged

Grossberg highlights Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on multiplicities, both in structure and in thought, as essential to escaping binary logics: “Wherever we think there are singularities or binaries, we need to think multiplicities” (p. 19). The political and analytical task is to map, not merely diagnose, complexity—working toward actionable transformation.

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Assemblage Theory (Rhizomatic Structure)
  • The novel operates as a rhizome, weaving memory, trauma, and identity without linear chronology.
  • Characters like Sethe exist at the intersection of multiple temporalities and subjectivities (Grossberg, p. 4–5).
• Affect and Desire
  • The unspeakable trauma of slavery is expressed through affective intensities rather than rational discourse (p. 6).
  • Beloved (the character) emerges as a becoming–ghost, embodying both absence and presence.

2. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

• Lines of Flight and Becoming
  • Clarissa’s wandering through London represents a “line of flight” – a deterritorialization of bourgeois domestic identity (p. 7–8).
  • Septimus’s mental state embodies the molecular and the affective, escaping Oedipal and rational structures.
• Smooth and Striated Space
  • The novel shifts between smooth experiential time (Bergsonian durée) and the striated order of societal expectations (p. 9).

3. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

• Territorialization and Deterritorialization
  • Saleem Sinai’s narrative maps the shifting territorial identities of postcolonial India (p. 8–9).
  • The novel deterritorializes linear national history, producing an assemblage of fragmented cultural narratives.
• Multiplicities and Virtuality
  • Saleem’s telepathic connection to other “midnight’s children” exemplifies virtual relationality – a field of unrealized potential (p. 7).

4. The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

• Abstract Machines and Stratification
  • The poem acts as a coding machine that stratifies language and culture through fragmentation and quotation (p. 9–10).
  • The interplay of expression and content challenges the reader to reconstruct meaning across multiple strata.
• Rhizomatic Poetics
  • Rejects arborescent structure; the poem connects heterogeneous voices and traditions, forming a cultural rhizome (p. 5).

• Introduction of Cultural vs. Communicative Memory

• The authors distinguish cultural memory from communicative memory: “We define the concept of cultural memory through a double delimitation that distinguishes it: from ‘communicative’ or ‘everyday memory’… and from science, which does not have the characteristics of memory as it relates to a collective self-image” (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995, p. 126).
• Communicative memory is “based exclusively on everyday communications… characterized by a high degree of non-specialization, reciprocity of roles, thematic instability, and disorganization” (p. 127).

• Characteristics of Communicative Memory

• It is limited in temporal scope: “this horizon does not extend more than eighty to… one hundred years into the past… three or four generations” (p. 128).
• It lacks formal structure and permanence: “The communicative memory offers no fixed point… such fixity can only be achieved through a cultural formation” (p. 128).

• Transition from Communicative to Cultural Memory

• The authors challenge Halbwachs’ view that objectified culture loses its memory function, asserting instead that memory persists through “objectivized culture and organized or ceremonial communication” (p. 128).
• They introduce the idea of the “concretion of identity”—the stabilization of group identity through memory embedded in cultural forms (p. 129).

• Cultural Memory as Structured, Durable, and Identity-Forming

• Cultural memory has a long temporal horizon: “Cultural memory has its fixed point; its horizon does not change with the passing of time” (p. 129).
• It is anchored in symbolic forms: “texts, rites, monuments… form ‘islands of time,’… into memory spaces of ‘retrospective contemplativeness'” (p. 129).

• Six Key Features of Cultural Memory

1. Concretion of Identity
   • Cultural memory shapes group identity through selection and opposition: “defined through a kind of identificatory determination in a positive (‘We are this’) or in a negative (‘That’s our opposite’) sense” (p. 130).
2. Capacity to Reconstruct
   • Memory is shaped by the present: “What remains is only that ‘which society in each era can reconstruct within its contemporary frame of reference'” (p. 130).
3. Formation
   • Memory requires objectification: “The objectivation or crystallization of communicated meaning… is a prerequisite of its transmission” (p. 131).
4. Organization
   • It relies on institutional structures and specialized roles: “Cultural memory… always depends on a specialized practice, a kind of ‘cultivation'” (p. 131).
5. Obligation
   • Cultural memory has normative power: “engenders a clear system of values… which structure the cultural supply of knowledge and the symbols” (p. 132).
6. Reflexivity
   • Memory is self-aware and interpretative: “Cultural memory is reflexive in three ways: practice-reflexive, self-reflexive, and reflexive of its own image” (p. 133).

• Conclusion: Cultural Memory and Society

• Cultural memory allows a society to see itself and project an identity: “Through its cultural heritage a society becomes visible to itself and to others” (p. 133).
• The selection of what is remembered reveals cultural values: “Which past becomes evident in that heritage and which values emerge in its identificatory appropriation tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society” (p. 133).

• Cultural Memory as a Framework for Understanding Texts

• The article introduces cultural memory as a central mechanism for transmitting collective identity through literary and cultural forms.
• “Cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society… whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image” (p. 133).
• This concept allows literary theory to consider literature as a medium of cultural self-representation and historical continuity.

• Expansion of Intertextuality through Memory Studies

• Assmann and Czaplicka broaden the scope of intertextuality by rooting textual relationships in cultural memory practices rather than purely aesthetic traditions.
• Literature participates in a broader cultural memory: “The entire Jewish calendar is based on figures of memory” (p. 129), which also informs religious texts and narratives.

• Reinforcement of Reader-Response and Reception Theories

• The concept of reconstructive memory aligns with reader-response theory, emphasizing how cultural context affects interpretation.
• “Cultural memory works by reconstructing… every contemporary context relates to these [memory figures] differently” (p. 130).
• This supports the idea that meaning is not fixed in texts but re-actualized in different cultural moments.

• Contribution to Post-Structuralist and Identity Theories

• By linking memory to identity, the article supports post-structuralist critiques of stable subjectivity, showing identity as narratively and culturally produced.
• “Cultural memory preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity” (p. 130).
• Literature thus becomes a site of ideological negotiation and identity construction.

• Canon Formation and the Politics of Memory

• The work engages indirectly with canon theory, highlighting how cultural memory legitimates certain texts and suppresses others.
• “The relation to a normative self-image… structures the cultural supply of knowledge and the symbols” (p. 132).
• Literary canons can be seen as expressions of collective memory’s obligation to reinforce identity.

• Literature as Mnemonic Energy

• The concept of mnemonic energy—how cultural forms like texts preserve emotional resonance over time—bridges aesthetic and historical analysis.
• “In cultural formation, a collective experience crystallizes, whose meaning… may become accessible again across millennia” (p. 129).

• Overemphasis on Cultural Stability

• Critics argue that the concept of cultural memory may overstate the coherence and continuity of collective identities.
• It tends to idealize how memory is preserved, potentially underplaying conflict, rupture, and transformation within cultures.

• Insufficient Attention to Power and Exclusion

• The theory may neglect how cultural memory is shaped by hegemonic forces that determine which memories are preserved or suppressed.
• It does not fully explore how marginalized groups challenge dominant cultural narratives.

• Ambiguity Between Memory and History

• Despite distinguishing cultural memory from historical knowledge, the theory sometimes blurs the boundary between remembering and historical reconstruction, leading to conceptual vagueness.

• Limited Engagement with Trauma and Forgetting

• The framework prioritizes preservation and transmission, but pays less attention to processes of forgetting, repression, or traumatic memory, which are central in memory studies.

• Essentialist View of Identity

• The link between memory and group identity can risk reifying identity as static or homogeneous, rather than recognizing its dynamic and contested nature.

• Underdeveloped Role of the Individual

• The theory primarily focuses on collective structures and institutions, potentially neglecting the subjective, personal, and emotional dimensions of memory.

• Application Bias Toward Canonical Texts and Traditions

• The theory is often applied to religious, national, or monumental traditions, which may limit its effectiveness in analyzing non-hegemonic or ephemeral cultural forms.