Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes
of Deleuze and Guattari
Edited by Patricia Pisters 2001,
Amsterdam University Press www.aup.nl
ISBN 90 5356 4721, paperback, 302 pages
Reviewed by Michael
R. Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University,
University Center MI 48710 USA
mosher@svsu.edu
Twenty years ago, many San Francisco leftist intellectuals and
artists were reading 'Anti-Oedipus' by the antiauthoritarian European
philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The crowd that created
anti-gentrification graffiti and poetry readings, marched in demonstrations
supporting Central American liberation, painted community murals, and
assembled found-footage films picked up their copies of the philosophers
text at Modern Times Bookstore and pondered its links between capitalism
and schizophrenia. 'Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes
of Deleuze and Guattari' is a volume that explores the impact of Deleuze
and Guattari's ideas on media studies. The twelfth book of a series
'Film Culture in Transition', it is a collection of philosophical articles
coupled to analyses of film and other expressions of contemporary culture.
The contributors that editor, Patricia Pisters, has assembled most often
cite Deleuze and Guattari's later work on cinema, 'A Thousand Plateaus',
and 'What is Philosophy?'
Catherine M. Lord rereads Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", using
Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of cultural theory as something distinct
from artistic practice. Their explorations of immanence--a pheonmenon
existing only in the mind of its believers--is basic to her arguments.
Lord notes moments in Woolf's work of intersection between philosophy
exisiting on the plane of immanence, and art inhabiting the the plane
of composition
Eva Jorholt analyzes biolgical horror films written and directed by
David Cronenberg. Cronenberg's movies, she claims, are "existential
dramas" of the interfaces between biology and technology, whether
in the computer game as in the film "EXistenZ" or malevolent
television transmissions in "Scanners" and "Videodrome".
Cronenberg has compared the imagination to a disease, and favors an
art that shakes and shapes its own reality into the realm of the "socially
unacceptable". In his movies Jorholt finds examples of Deleuze
and Guattari's concept of the Body Without Organs (BwO), a desire-producing
machine inhabiting late capitalist society going beyond the boundaries
of the organism.
Other authors also find 'deleuzeguattarian' concepts in recent Hollywood
and continental movies. Patricia Pisters examines protagonists' BwO,
psychic disturbances and fugitive identities in 'The Net' and 'Fight
Club' and the novel Glamorama, works that illustrate 'schizophrenic'
surplus value and anti-production. Sasha Vojkovic detects territories
and deterritorializations among Nazis and Jews in Steven Spielberg's
movie 'Schindler's List'. Richard Banbook locates the philosophers'
liberatory ideas twisted into 'the California Ideology' of cybersex
and the cyberspace-boosterish magazine WIRED, yet also in the punk DIY
(do it yourself) ethic and the development of LINUX. In an essay that
departs from cinema, Maaike Bleeker juxtaposes the work of three duos,
the dancers Galili and Hanna, the cognitive scientists Lakoff and Johnson,
and Deleuze and Guattari.
How will artists of an activist bent value this collection? Some of
the essays in the book, while peppered with insights, have a plodding
academic quality tasting more of the seminar room than the city street.
Unsurprising, since Guattari's own early 1980s experiments in a community
radio station called "Frequency Libre" were unsuccessful,
as the project was conceived only to deliver stentorian lectures rather
than create a two-way (or more) street of discourse. Marlene Busk asks
if Deleuze and Guattari are the heirs to Marx, yet to these philosophers--whose
hopes were once raised then dashed by the events of 1968--the era of
utopian political systems is past and the best that can be hoped for
it a careful description of the world's micro-politics. The world has
moved from a society of discipline to a society of control. Capitalism
and philosophy are both immanent systems overcoming their own limits.
According to Deleuze we must detect and nourish not Revolution but a
state of "becoming-revolutionary" amongst a people.
In one of the book's clearest contributions, Laleen Jayamanne investigates
Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" and his Forty Acres and a
Mule Filmworks. As film is a speech act with micropolitical power, Lee
articulates a new vocabulary of the BwO and its unbridled flow of intensity,
its nexus of relationships between cinema, the body, brain and thought.
The film is rooted in a specific location in the Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood of Brooklyn, which the director Lee painted and fixed up
(such that one of Jayamanne's Australian students thought it looked
"like Sesame Street"). Jayamanne notes the rhythm and interplay
of characters, odd moments like the black female police officer pushing
aside the angry Korean grocer in the riot after the movie's climactic
death of Radio Raheem. The recurrent sonic blocks of Public Enemy's
"Fight the Power" are analyzed with a "rhizomusicology"
developed by Ronald Bogue after Deleuze and Guattari.
Much of 'Micropolitics of Media Culture' reads as exercises in specialized
philosophical language hammering their way into the soundstage of film
criticism and trying to make useful inroads there; Jayamanne's essay
has found the most effective balance. It is informed by Deleuze and
Guattari's philosophical concepts and their vocabulary, yet they are
relied upon most lightly and appropriately. This essay features the
author's own careful and close reading of the film in question, and
it shows positively. A Body without Organs is one useful tool with which
to negotiate our world, but a film critic needs eyes and ears.