“Cultural Studies And Deleuze–Guattari, Part 1” by Lawrence Grossberg: Summary and Critique

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).