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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.

 

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