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N G I V I N G T H I S S P E C I A L issue the title of Deleuze and Guattari in Cul-


tural Studies, there is no sense in which we are really trying to fool anybody.
After all, its not as if Deleuze and Guattari are not already here. Cer tainly, then,
this issue is not going to make any grandiose claims about cultural studies needing
to take them on board. That would be a silly and very tardy pronouncement: just
pick up many of the writings by Lawrence Grossberg, Dick Hebdige, Meaghan
Morris, Stephen Muecke, Elspeth Probyn, McKenzie Wark, and others and you
will nd an ongoing and active engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guat-
tari. Or, further, ip over their A Thousand Plateaus and you will see it referenced
on its back cover as Philosophy/Cultural Studies. This offers a rst clue
Deleuze and Guattari in cultural studies might require us to ask fresh questions
about the place of philosophy in cultural studies. To make it a slightly more
Deleuzean question, of what use is philosophy to cultural studies? What is it
that cultural studies do with philosophy?
There is, of course, the snide answer to this latter question, which tends to
come most often from outside cultural studies: In cultural studies, philosophy is
there for window dressing. Philosophy serves to add a dash of color to the average
cultural studies essay Lets see, hmmm, a Nietzschean oor covering, an
Althusser-inspired armchair, and a brightly colored Benjamin drape. Maybe a
vase from the Hegel dynasty, with a trendy Zizek bouquet, and the room is com-
plete. Or, philosophy arrives in cultural studies with an elliptical oomph
There we go: that weighty, closing quote from Foucault on power coupled
with the opening epigraph from Adorno should seal my essay off from any
simple-headed critique. In fact, this special issue began its life as a pair of con-
ference panels organized for the 1997 International Communication Association
conference as an initial response to this very viewpoint. On the chief Deleuze
and Guattari discussion group on the World Wide Web, a one-line snickering
joke bounced around, disappeared, and per iodically resurfaced throughout
Gregory J. Seigworth and
J. Macgregor Wise
INTRODUCTION
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI IN
CULTURAL STUDIES
CULTURAL STUDI ES 1 4 ( 2 ) 2 0 0 0 , 1 3 9 1 4 6
Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 pr int/ISSN 1466-4348 online 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/09502386. html
several months in 1996. The joke, such as it is, read: sometimes I think that
cultural studies is full of fr ustrated interior decorators. Subsequently, a fair
number of responses arrived to afrm the statement, each one essentially offer-
ing assent: ha ha good one, absolutely, etc. No one mounted a serious coun-
tercharge in defence of cultural studies; although someone, the son of interior
decorators, did write in to defend his parents and their profession from such an
untoward comparison.
The answer that tends to come from inside cultural studies is a bit different
but may be, in the end, just as problematic. Cultural studies plays practice to
philosophys theory. Philosophy thinks. Cultural studies acts. When one tries to
nesse such a knowingly troublesome mind/body split, it goes something like
this: philosophy thinks acting while cultural studies puts thought into action.
Philosophy is cultural studies in its quiet, reective moments: when its not
running and jumping and knocking things over. But the dichotomous rhythm of
such a conceptualization leaves a lot to be desired. The apparent movement from
reection to action, no matter how well rehearsed and nuanced, is bound to be
a little bit jerky. Perhaps that slashing line between philosophy and cultural
studies at once, cutting and connecting on the back cover of A Thousand
Plateaus is not there to be continually leaped over (jump over there and reect
for while/jump over here to take action) but, rather, it is a line upon which we
must place ourselves.
What better way to place ourselves on the line than in squaring up to the
most commonplace response to the question of philosophys use within cultural
studies, namely, cultural studies detour through theory. The detour through
theory has long been one of the core organizing tropes of cultural studies and,
along with the idea of articulation, is considered central in distinguishing its
project (at least in its British and Amer ican congurations). Cultural studies have
never been simply critical political practice, and neither has it been simply the
theorization of culture. As most usually described, the detour through theory is
an eminently pragmatic methodology that begins in the specics of a situation
(on the ground, as it were), and then theorizes about that situation (the detour).
However, all such detours must return to the original road eventually and the
key element of the detour through theory is the return to the concrete with the
theory as a political tool, intimately connected to that circumstance in question.
Therefore, as Stuar t Hall has written, cultural studies are concer ned with the
politics of theory. Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of con-
tested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dia-
logical way (1992: 286).
Philosophy often becomes a grazing ground for those seeking theoretical
tools, but in so doing, the distinctiveness of philosophy itself as a practice col-
lapses. But, if we follow Deleuze and Guattari, we might see interesting and pro-
ductive parallels between cultural studies and philosophical practice. In their nal
collaborative book, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) argue that philosophys project
C U L T U R AL S T U D I E S 1 4 0
is the production of concepts. Concepts are not universals, and, as Hall wrote
about theory above, are not about a search for truth. Concepts are events,
organizations against chaos, cuts in uxes of movement, passages of intensity.
They are not representative, not propositional, and because they singularly
belong to their own unique situation they do not articulate cleanly with other
concepts. That is, concepts as situationally circumscribed intensities are always
the product of particularly local circumstances, historically and geographically
bounded (even if they range across the globe); they are, as Lawrence Grossberg
has described cultural studies, radically contextual. Deleuze and Guattari write,
Of course, new concepts must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above
all, to our becomings (1994: 27).
Concepts are not descriptors of events, but they are crucial in giving shape
to events. Concepts do not so much combine the stages of the detour through
theory, theory-tussle, and return to the concrete, as they cut across these stages
transversally. The tidy linearity of detouring is interrupted and thrown out of
any recognizable sequence. Travelling by concept is, to begin with, an incorpo-
real transformation of the context from within the context. Concepts are movement
in place: a hop, a skip, and a jump without departure. The task of philosophy
when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an event from things and
beings, to set up the new event from things and beings, always to give them a
new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events (1994: 33). There
are, of course, signicant differences that should be marked between philosophy
and cultural studies (these are different projects, after all). But Deleuze and
Guattari point to a presumption that quite often goes unacknowledged in the
detour through theory. In its presumption of the detour through theory as a
practical necessity, it is not so much that cultural studies does not know in
advance what theory is, nor even what theory might be of use. But rather, in the
detour through theory, the implicit assumption is that cultural studies knows
where theory is. The spatial trajectory and temporal stages of the detour assumes
that theory (concepts) are elsewhere and not already in the context or situ-
ation/event; the detour through theory is then a transcendence of the situation
(literally leaving the ground to take to the air), whereas Deleuze and Guattari
argue for a single plane of immanence: utter univocally the concept speaks the
event (1994: 21). Concepts are not arrived at, then, through a departure from
the immanent space of an event, and so there is no need to go elsewhere (making
this truly radically contextual).
Perhaps it is that concepts and contexts (events/situations) arrive with a
simultaneous kind of halation-effect. Halation is what happens when the bright-
ness-intensity of a photographic image exceeds the boundaries of its object. A
concept emerges not as separable or external thing but, rather, as that which is
intagliated or extruded and, thus, can serve to unfold the real but near-imper-
ceptible atmosphere of these sorts of effects. The concept, thus created, enters
the picture in the overbloomed space of an halation: still in the situation and
I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 4 1
working in the context of its (the events) about not unlike the way in which
an incorporeal vapour hovers over a battle. This is what Deleuze and Guattari
mean when they ask for a concept that is equivalent to the event. Concept-
creation is something that takes place on the same processual line as the event
but always from within the events bloom-space: offering a way of sustaining it,
keeping alive, so that it can be relayed further down the non-linear line. This is
Deleuze and Guattaris vitalism of the concept. But there are also those moments
when concepts die or when a concept deser ves to die (although generally
Deleuze and Guattari choose to go for supercession or teasing away from other-
wise tired or weary concepts): like the concept of the subject. As Deleuze notes,
a concept dies when new functions in new elds discharge it. This is also why it
is never very interesting to criticize a concept: it is better to build the new func-
tions and discover the new elds that make it useless or inadequate (1991: 94).
A concept will live as long as the bloom that gave it its rise is still vibrant.
None of this is meant to argue that cultural studies should become a philo-
sophical project, or vice versa. But rather to say that a Deleuzo-Guattarian phil-
osophy of both the generation and discovery of concepts, following them as they
moult and shift, traversing strata and space-time, can nd a useful resonance in
cultural studies work.
One of the primary presumed dangers in cultural studies ir tation with
theory or philosophy is that of seduction: the seduction of ideas and discourses
about ideas. This is the danger that comes with a certain theoretical glibness
one that views itself as eminently transferable into various different situations:
an explanatory grid that one lifts up and presses down upon a world that wrig-
gles beneath it. But a concept should never remain still for to be adequate to
its event or its context, it must be prepared to meet the world (its world) wriggle
for wriggle. Hall (1992) writes that theory should be a struggle, and points out
the profound danger s of theoretical uency. And Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
argue that philosophy is not about discourses or discussions (Every philosopher
runs away when he or she hears someone say, lets discuss this (p. 28)), but
rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussable problem posed (p. 28).
This is one of the reasons Deleuze disliked travelling, especially to conferences.
He says, humorously, that academics travel by hot air and that:
[I]ntellectuals are wonderfully cultivated, they have views on everything.
Im not an intellectual because I cant supply views like that, Ive got no
stock of views to draw on. What I know, I know only from something Im
actually working on, and if I come back to something a few years later, I
have to learn everything all over.
(Deleuze, 1995: 137)
Sometimes, then, while the life span of a concept often extends no further than
the width of its emergence into context, it can also begin its fade along the
C U L T U R AL S T U D I E S 1 4 2
leading edge of the rst shadow that falls across memory. May be, though, the
most enduring concepts are those that persist across the gaps in forgetting, rising
up to shake off their lm (or even layers) of sediment and only half-remember-
ing what they had said before but, just as well, since in each new instantiation,
their language would have to be stuttered anew.
This is why Stuart Halls other metaphor for theoretical work: the metaphor
of struggle, of wrestling with angels (1992: 280) suits us better. Rather than
maintaining a slashing line (that severs more than it connects) between
theory-building and political action, Hall offers a more positive inection by
describing it as a necessary (and, we will add, mutual) tension that exists, within
cultural studies, between its political project and its theoretical work. It is a
tension that Hall says has something to do with the conditions and problems of
developing intellectual and theoretical work as a political practice . . . [C]ultural
studies as theoretical practice [and not a detour into one!] . . . must go on and
on living with that tension (1992: 281282). Whereas Hall draws on Antonio
Gramsci and his concept of the organic intellectual as a way not to resolve this
tension but to live with it (to keep it alive as motivating force), Walter Benjamin
makes this tension even more explicitly productive. In The Author as Producer,
Benjamin (1978) describes the author as an individual with two chief duties: rst
to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus
at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to
turn into producers that is, reader s and spectators into collaborators (Ben-
jamin, 1978: 233). This is to argue, then, that the writer of cultural theory and
criticism is never merely an interpreter or a translator of culture into discourse
but is, instead, someone who acts as an integral part of a relay (who, by neces-
sity, will transform what is transmitted as well as alter the apparatus of trans-
mission) in an always open-ended circuit of cultural theory/practice.
Gilles Deleuze conceives of the relation between theory and practice in a
very similar manner. In an interview with Michel Foucault (1972/1977), he
argues that:
From the moment a theory moves into its proper domain [always local and
related to a limited eld], it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and block-
ages which require its relay by another type of discourse (it is through this
discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set
of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from
one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encoun-
tering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall.
(Foucault, 1972/1977: 206)
Practice, for Deleuze, should not be under stood then as the direct application of
theory onto a par ticular set of circumstances. The theoretical does not evaporate
into its instantiation in the practical. Instead, they maintain a cer tain degree of
I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 4 3
co-existence: always present one within the other at the same moment. What
needs to be emphasized is this: No matter how differently embodied or deployed,
one does not wholly leave the practical to detour through the theory (nor vice
versa). Theory and practice, as Halls alternative metaphor suggests, exert a
mutual tension that can never be separated out to offer a point for completely
transcendentalist departure. Instead of cutting and separating, Deleuze looks to
what is connected or shared in this relation: namely, that both theory and prac-
tice are forms of action, means of overcoming, ways of moving. And both can
provide ways of being moved (affectively/emotionally) maybe this is what still
needs to be further unlocked along the line that joins cultural studies and phil-
osophy: how movement enters the world (a world, a life) and how to assure its
continued wriggling.
In a cultural studies that reconceives its relationship with philosophy as such
not as a detour into theory but as a struggle with angels the earlier formu-
lation of concept-creation inhabiting the bloom-space of a halation could be
slightly redirected. Thus, cultural studies is less about concept-creation (lets,
indeed, leave that task for the most part to philosophy) and more about strug-
gling with angels and stealing halos. Halos, writes Giorgio Agamben
(1990/1993), are inessential supplements added to perfection something like
the vibration of that which is perfect, the glow at its edges (p. 56). Arriving like
a gift after a beings possibilities have been all but consumed, a halo is an indi-
cator of the most minute of differences, revealing that a change has entered the
world gradually and very small, but there nonetheless as potentiality.
Certainly, there are moments when, in the midst of all kinds of everyday
struggles (and not just those with angels), cultural studies feels a cer tain futility
or despair about its potential to affect change. As Hall states:
Anyone who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice,
must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it
registers, how little weve been able to change anything or get anybody to
do anything.
(Hall, 1992: 285)
At these times, the answer to the question of what cultural studies should do with
philosophy becomes clearer. Philosophys usefulness for cultural studies is to be
found in its innite patience (or, ironically, what Brian Massumi calls in his essay
here: the bloom of philosophys glowing uselessness), the innite patience (of
millennia and not just decades) that must always transpire alongside and in the
midst of those more giddy moments of running and jumping and knocking things
over.
Although the essays that follow do run, jump, and dance, they are, even more
so, movements in place or stationary journeys; that is, they make themselves at
home in the various banalities of everyday life patiently accreting and folding
C U L T U R AL S T U D I E S 1 4 4
out layers of affect, conjugating often subtle lines of force, and calling into atten-
tion those becoming-indiscer nible zones where a politics nds the fullest reson-
ance for its effectivity. Reading through these essays, we follow the workings of
machines that cut through strata and institutions and watch concepts as they
wriggle and transform both themselves and the strata from which they arise. All
told, they represent trajectories through the space of cultural studies.
So, why these essays? They are, to say the least, diverse in form and content.
They are also diverse in their apparent engagement with either cultural studies
or Deleuze and Guattari. That is the point. Each essay is a trajectory, a line of
ight. Some are rather direct engagements with Deleuze and Guattari (Bogards
smoothing machines, Wises musings on home and territory), other s are projects
where Deleuzo-Guattarian thought is so deeply ingrained as to not to appear an
explicit engagement (Massumis essay on science, philosophy, and ar t, Seig-
worths on banality). Some are more direct engagements with cultural studies
(Massumis critique at the end of his essay, questioning whether cultural studies
may have lost a crucial opportunity to become a different kind of inter vention-
ist project; Seigworths call for a rethinking of a place for banality in cultural
studies; Stivales engagement with French Cultural Studies and the becomings at
the intersection of intellectual work and dancing bodies). Crucially, none of the
essays is about Deleuze and/or Guattari or Cultural Studies per se. Explication
was never the point for this issue. We take Deleuze and Guattari and cultural
studies along as travelling companions, like the bobbing bead that accompanies
Greg Wise on his journeys between work and home.
Deleuze and Guattaris work forces us to attend to the very processes and
effects of cultural studies research itself. Their work is not a solution for cultural
studies troubles, and their work in itself is not going to be redemptive. But what
this work can do is to shift some of the questions that we ask, and offer new ways
of engaging with those movements and halations that sometimes rise and fall
along the edges of our attention.
References
Agamben, Giorgio (1993[1990]) The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt, Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Benjamin, Walter (1978) The Author as Producer, Reections, trans. E. Jephcott,
London: New Left Books: 22038.
Deleuze, Gilles (1991) A Philosophical Concept . . ., in E. Cadava, P. Connor and
J.-L. Nancy (eds) Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge: 945.
(1995[1990]) Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Columbia University
Press.
and Guattari, Flix (1994) What is Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson and G.
Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.
I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 4 5
Foucault, Michel (1977[1972]) Intellectuals and Power, Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, Ithaca: Cornell University Press:
16596
Hall, Stuart (1992) Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies, in L. Grossberg, C.
Nelson and P. Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge: 27786.
C U L T U R AL S T U D I E S 1 4 6

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