“Guattari, Deleuze, and Cultural Studies” by Stephen B. Crofts Wiley & J. Macgregor Wise: Summary and Critique

🎒 Theory as Toolbox: Cultural Studies and Deleuze–Guattari

🔧 Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are not rigid ideologies but flexible tools, echoing Foucault’s notion of theory as a “toolbox” (Foucault, 1977; Wiley & Wise, 2018, p. 2).
🎯 Cultural Studies should return from theory to context — theory is a detour, not a destination (Hall, 1992).

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🌏 The Journal as Actor-Network

🧵 Using Latour’s actor-network theory, the journal Cultural Studies is seen as a node connecting scholars, institutions, translations, and concepts (Latour, 2005, p. 68).
📚 Why Deleuze and Guattari were read often depends on institutional networks, educational access, and editorial translations (Morris & Muecke, 1991, p. 77).

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🕰️ Chronology of Conceptual Trends

📍 1980s – Nomadism

🏕️ “Nomad” emerged as a postmodern subject and metaphor for deterritorialized knowledge (Morris, 1988; Grossberg, 1988).
⚠️ Critics warned against romanticizing marginality (Muecke, 1992; Wolff, 1993).

🗺️ 1990s – Territory and Deterritorialization

🌐 Reflecting the spatial turn, cultural theory engaged territories and flows (Grossberg, 1991).
🎵 Music became a metaphor for affective spatial structuring.

🧠 2000s – Control and Affect

🎛️ The “control society” gained traction via Postscript on Control Societies (Deleuze, 1992) and Hardt & Negri’s Empire (2000).
💓 Affect became a lens to study bodies, pedagogy, shame, and everyday life (Massumi, 1995; Probyn, 2004).

🧩 2010s – Assemblage

🧬 Assemblage (agencement) emerged in response to the “material turn” and offered a model for theorizing non-human agency and complexity (Slack, 2008; Grossberg, 2014).
🧱 It emphasized dynamic construction of relations, rather than fixed structures.

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📚 Most-Cited Works and Concepts

📘 A Thousand Plateaus tops the citation list, followed by Anti-Oedipus, and What is Philosophy? (Wiley & Wise, 2018, p. 7).
🔑 Frequently used concepts:

• ❤️ Affect
• 🌍 Territory
• 🔁 Deterritorialization/Reterritorialization
• 🧩 Assemblage
• 🌀 Becoming
• 👁️‍🗨️ Control

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🧠 Reimagining Cultural Studies through Deleuze & Guattari

🛠️ Eight landmark essays redefined cultural studies using Deleuze and Guattari’s frameworks (Seigworth & Wise, 2000; Grossberg, 2014).
⚡ Theory must be used creatively, not religiously. Concepts are to be invented, not just applied (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 27).

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🛠️ Doing Cultural Studies with D&G’s Concepts

🔍 Articles applied Deleuzoguattarian tools to diverse topics:

• 📹 Surveillance (Wise, 2004)
• 🎵 Music and politics (Grossberg, 1991)
• 🧑‍🏫 Pedagogy (Albrecht-Crane, 2005)
• 🎤 Affect and identity (Keeling, 2014; Probyn, 2004)

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🧳 Underused Concepts & Future Potentials

🕳️ Despite their richness, some Deleuzoguattarian ideas are underexplored:

• 🌀 Body without Organs
• 🧬 Sense and Sensation
• 📐 Diagram and Fold
• 🧠 Schizoanalysis and Desire

🌿 Guattari’s solo works — The Three Ecologies, Chaosmosis — are beginning to reshape new directions in cultural studies (Grossberg & Behrenshausen, 2016).

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🌱 Concept Creation as Cultural Practice

🌟 Cultural studies must invent new concepts that meet the needs of the moment — echoing D&G’s call to “create concepts for problems that necessarily change” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 28).
🔭 Instead of following theoretical trends, the field should create new possibilities for thinking and acting.

🔁 Poststructuralism & Deconstruction

• 🧷 Destabilization of Meaning
  Challenges representational and structuralist readings by emphasizing fluidity, assemblages, and deterritorialization.

“The concept of the minor… making this seem like a productive, yet underutilized, concept” (p. 14).
Also emphasized in Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense, and the anti-representational critique of affect (p. 15–16).

• 🕳️ The Rhizome as Anti-Structure
  Rhizomatic thinking subverts hierarchical structures in texts, suggesting a non-linear, multiplicities-based model of interpretation.

“Concepts… are not eternal… they bring forth an Event that surveys us…” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 27–28).

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🔮 Affect Theory

• 💓 Centering Affect over Representation
  Proposes a non-discursive, bodily dimension of meaning, expanding literary critique beyond semiotics.

“Affect should not be understood as a separate, fetishized force… but in its contextual formations” (Grossberg & Behrenshausen, 2016, p. 6).
See also: Boler (1997), Probyn (2004), Seigworth (2000).

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🧩 Postmodernism

• 🏞️ Nomadology and the Fragmented Subject
  Applies the Deleuzoguattarian nomad to postmodern identity and critique of grand narratives.

“The 1980s: all we hear about are nomads” (p. 7).
Essays by Grossberg, Morris, Radway, Wolff engage this postmodern figure.

• 🎭 Multiplicity over Identity
  Undermines fixed subject positions in literary characters and readers; favors processual becoming.

“What is the philosophical form of the problems of a particular time?” (p. 2, Deleuze & Guattari, 1994).

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🧱 Spatial Literary Theory / Geocriticism

• 🧭 Territorialization and Reterritorialization
  Literature seen as mapping spatial production of meaning; connects with Doreen Massey, Henri Lefebvre.

“Culture as an active agent in the production of places and spaces” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 27).
“Rock, Territorialization and Power” (Grossberg, 1991, p. 364).

• 🧳 The Minor and the Margin
  Texts/literatures from marginal cultures conceptualized through Kafka’s minor literature.

“Minor” literature used in works on Yiddish, postcolonialism, and Hong Kong cinema (p. 14).

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🗺️ Cultural Materialism

• 🔧 Theory as Toolbox
  Echoes Foucault and Deleuze’s claim that theory should be applied, not revered.

“Theory as a toolbox… What concepts are useful for this particular conjuncture?” (p. 2).

• ⚙️ Assemblage as Literary Formation
  Texts seen as events or agencements, not static forms, shaped by material and semiotic processes.

“Culture itself should be understood as a production of assembled agency” (Wiley, 2005, p. 11).

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🧬 New Materialism / Posthumanism

• 🌐 Post-Anthropocentric Literary Analysis
  Encourages critiques of texts that move beyond human-centeredness, embracing material agency.

“Bodies do not exist outside discourse, but cannot be reduced to it” (Slack, 2008, p. 11).
Guattari’s Three Ecologies and Schizoanalytic Cartographies mentioned (p. 5, 16).

• 🛠️ Semiotics Beyond Language
  Guattari’s “mixed semiotics” implies that signification operates across bodily, affective, and machinic registers.

“Shift the ground of argument from affect to the broader question of expression and signs” (Grossberg & Behrenshausen, 2016, p. 19).

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📦 Literary Pedagogy

• 🧑‍🏫 Affective Pedagogy and Minor Modes of Teaching
  Redefines the classroom as a site of affective assemblages, challenging linear learning.

“Pedagogy as friendship… a model of encounter as affective and multiple” (Albrecht-Crane, 2005, p. 9).

🔍 Overemphasis on Citational Presence

While the authors admit the limitations, the method still privileges explicit citation over implicit influence, potentially ignoring nuanced or indirect incorporations of Deleuzian-Guattarian thought.
📌 “Explicit citations in a published journal article are only one kind of trace” (p. 6)

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📉 Neglect of Guattari’s Solo Work

The article critiques this itself, but doesn’t deeply address the imbalanced focus on Deleuze or co-authored works over Guattari’s independent theoretical contributions, such as The Three Ecologies or Schizoanalytic Cartographies.
📌 “Guattari’s solo-authored work is cited infrequently” (p. 7)

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🌀 Conceptual Redundancy in Cultural Studies

Some may argue the frequent use of concepts like assemblage, affect, and territory risks becoming buzzwords rather than truly transformative tools in cultural analysis.
📌 “What this work can do is shift some of the questions we ask” (p. 17) – but do they?

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📚 Lack of Engagement with Literary/Cultural Texts

The paper is more meta-theoretical than applied—it maps usage patterns but doesn’t offer in-depth readings of actual cultural or literary texts using Deleuze & Guattari.
📌 The article is focused on Cultural Studies journal discourse, not on practical applications in literary or media criticism.

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🗂️ Archival vs. Analytical Imbalance

The study is strong on archival mapping but weaker on philosophical critique. There’s little interrogation of how Deleuze-Guattari’s ontology challenges or complicates key cultural studies assumptions (e.g., agency, representation).
📌 The philosophical depth is somewhat backgrounded in favor of taxonomy.

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📈 Limited Global or Intersectional Scope

While it notes the global spread of Deleuzian ideas, the primary focus remains Anglophone, particularly the U.S. and Australian scenes, with less attention to non-Western or intersectional adaptations.
📌 Brief nods to global circulation (e.g., Japan, Brazil) are not explored substantively (p. 17).

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🧩 Ambiguous Relation to Politics

Despite emphasizing “intervention” and “assemblage,” the paper offers limited concrete examples of political transformation through D&G’s theories in Cultural Studies praxis.
📌 It critiques theory fetishism but doesn’t show how to fully move from theory to transformative action.

Representative Quotations from “Guattari, Deleuze, and Cultural Studies” by Stephen B. Crofts Wiley & J. Macgregor Wise with Explanation

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🔧 1. “Theory is a toolbox”
🟠 Explanation: Echoing Foucault and Deleuze, theory is not an end in itself but a set of practical tools used to intervene in specific conjunctures.
➤ Highlights cultural studies’ emphasis on utility over abstraction.

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🌱 2. “Follow the concepts!”
🟢 Explanation: A call to trace how Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts evolve across time and texts, adapting to new historical and social problematics.
➤ Encourages genealogical and contextual analysis of theory.

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🌐 3. “Cultural studies is not driven by theory (or at least it shouldn’t be).”
🔵 Explanation: A reminder that theory should serve practice, not dominate it — a Hall-inspired critique of over-theorization.
➤ Reinforces practice-based, politically grounded scholarship.

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🧰 4. “What concepts are useful for this particular conjuncture?”
🟡 Explanation: Emphasizes situational relevance in selecting theoretical tools, mirroring Guattari’s schizoanalytic approach.
➤ Encourages responsiveness to context and specificity.

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🧭 5. “We see this chronology of concepts, citations, and deployments as notes for a future genealogy.”
🟣 Explanation: The authors propose a historical mapping of intellectual influence, not as closure but as an invitation to continue tracing conceptual trajectories.
➤ Promotes open-ended scholarly inquiry.

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📡 6. “The journal itself as a node… a relay… a point of articulation.”
🔴 Explanation: A Latour-inspired view of the journal as a network hub connecting diverse actors and intellectual exchanges.
➤ Situates academic publishing within dynamic actor-networks.

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🌀 7. “Cultural studies itself should be understood as a production of ‘assembled agency.’”
🔵 Explanation: Applies the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage to the academic practice of cultural studies.
➤ Positions scholarship as collaborative, emergent, and political.

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🔥 8. “The 1980s: all we hear about are nomads… The 2000s: all we hear about is affect and control.”
🟤 Explanation: Identifies shifting thematic focuses across decades using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts as cultural barometers.
➤ Reflects how key concepts reflect broader sociopolitical concerns.

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💬 9. “Philosophy often becomes a grazing ground for those seeking theoretical tools.”
🟢 Explanation: A caution against superficial or selective use of theory without deep engagement.
➤ Calls for ethical and intellectual responsibility in scholarship.

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🪐 10. “What this work can do is shift some of the questions we ask…”
🌈 Explanation: A humble proposition — not to provide answers, but to redirect thought and inquiry.
➤ Reframes the task of theory as generative, not conclusive.