the footnote to which nathan I think might be referring is page 530-1 n39 of
_ATP_ and it is not as simple as opposing power and resistance to lines of
flight. The pertinent section:
"Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which
are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization."
As Alliez and others have noted 'desiring machines' in _AO_ become 'assemblages' in the terminology of _ATP_. In _AO_ D&G argue that desiring machines are defined by how they break down. The 'breaking down' of a desiring machine I suspect becomes the 'line of flight' in assemblage speak. I am speculating here. This is the movement between assemblages or the creation of new assemblages. To shift registers again, in Whitehead's terminology an assemblage would be a 'society' (D&G's desire becomes 'prehensions'). Whitehead talks about how a 'society' is defined by how it incorporates contingency. The movement of a prehension between societies (or the concrescence of a new society) would be a line of flight, not the contingencies (of desire or prehensions) which a society incorporates from its environment and which would involve stratifications of power (territorializations).
Another way to think about this is in terms of the evental nature of assemblages, and the event necessarily being of a level involving the distributions of interest (or '4th person singular', beyond interest, ala the battlefield example of _TLoS_, etc). Each distribution of interest requires a subject position and perspective. Assemblages of desire are actualisations of prepersonal singularities, but as soon as perspective is introduced so then is interest distributed involving relations along which power can be realised.
Ciao,
glen.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Nathan Widder" <n.e.widder@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Mailing-list'" <foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 8:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] foucault and deleuze
"Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which
are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization."
As Alliez and others have noted 'desiring machines' in _AO_ become 'assemblages' in the terminology of _ATP_. In _AO_ D&G argue that desiring machines are defined by how they break down. The 'breaking down' of a desiring machine I suspect becomes the 'line of flight' in assemblage speak. I am speculating here. This is the movement between assemblages or the creation of new assemblages. To shift registers again, in Whitehead's terminology an assemblage would be a 'society' (D&G's desire becomes 'prehensions'). Whitehead talks about how a 'society' is defined by how it incorporates contingency. The movement of a prehension between societies (or the concrescence of a new society) would be a line of flight, not the contingencies (of desire or prehensions) which a society incorporates from its environment and which would involve stratifications of power (territorializations).
Another way to think about this is in terms of the evental nature of assemblages, and the event necessarily being of a level involving the distributions of interest (or '4th person singular', beyond interest, ala the battlefield example of _TLoS_, etc). Each distribution of interest requires a subject position and perspective. Assemblages of desire are actualisations of prepersonal singularities, but as soon as perspective is introduced so then is interest distributed involving relations along which power can be realised.
Ciao,
glen.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Nathan Widder" <n.e.widder@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Mailing-list'" <foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 8:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] foucault and deleuze
You are right to be suspicious: Deleuze's reading here (repeated with
Guattari in an endnote in A Thousand Plateaus) is quite wrongheaded and,
unsurprisingly, it disappears by the time he writes his book on Foucault.
I don't know the Foucault Live interview, but Foucault says something
similar (along the lines of power presupposing freedom) in "The Ethic of
Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom." You may be interested in a
piece I've written in the European Journal of Political Theory (Dec., 2004)
entitled "Foucault and Power Revisited," which reads the ideas of power and
resistance off the thesis of dispersion in the Archaeology.
(By the way, Laclau and Mouffe's reading of dispersion in Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy is also, I think, rather suspect).
Best wishes,
Nathan
Dr. Nathan Widder
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory
Royal Holloway, University of London
Department of Politics and International Relations
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
United Kingdom
Web page: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/politics-and-IR/About-Us/Widder/Index.html
Genealogies of Difference: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s02/widder.html
-----Original Message-----
From: foucault-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:foucault-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sean Saraka
Sent: 19 February 2007 21:07
To: 'Mailing-list'
Subject: [Foucault-L] foucault and deleuze
Does anybody out there feel like commenting on the differences between
Deleuze and Foucault? In particular, I'm interested in the claim (made by
Deleuze himself in "Desire and Pleasure"?) that whereas for Foucault it is
power that engenders resistance, for Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari, lines of
flight are primary.
I've seen this claim repeated in a number of places, primarily in Deleuzian
literature, and I've come across a number of passages in Foucault recently
that make it seem a bit tenuous. First of all, my students keep reciting a
passage from the interview "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity" (in
Foucault Live) back at me, where Foucault says, "[I]f there was no
resistance, there would be no power relations." Secondly, I just read the
second chapter of Archaeology of Knowledge in conjunction with a rereading
of Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where Foucault
defines the consistency of a discourse in terms of a regularity of
dispersion.
Both of these points (perhaps the first more than the second) seem to
suggest to me that the difference between Foucault and Deleuze on this issue
may not be so clear as all that. Any thoughts?
Cheers,
Sean
-----
Sean Saraka, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Mount Allison University
144 Main Street
Sackville, NB E4L 1A7
Phone (506)364-2206
Fax (506)364-26
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