Animations of Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

Reviewed by: Animations of Deleuze and Guattari Eugene W. Holland Slack, Jennifer Daryl, ed. Animations of Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. 230. Anthologies are notoriously difficult to review, and this volume is no exception. It does have one huge advantage, for reviewer and anthology alike: its clear, consistent focus on the question of what can be done with conceptual tools developed by Deleuze and Guattari. Yet even more than most anthologies, this one is extremely uneven. One essay (thankfully found toward the end of the collection) needed a great deal more editorial input and revision before being published; it verges on the unreadable. At the other end of the spectrum lies one of the most beautifully and rigorously constructed essays on music, affect, and childhood from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective that I have seen. Content varies widely—ranging from Jennifer Slack's study of The Matrix ("Everyday Matrix" [9-29]), to Slack and Christa Albrecht-Crane's examination of the implications of affect for pedagogy ("Toward a Pedagogy of Affect" [191-216])—and it varies in quality almost as much as it does in style. One of the risks of forging connections between conceptual tools and novel materials, as Charles Stivale puts it toward the beginning of the volume, is that "the conceptual framework and terminology used here might seem to obscure rather than clarify" the diverse topics under consideration. (Happily, this is not true in his "Feeling the Event" [31-58], where richly detailed accounts of Cajun music-dance spaces and events serve nicely to illuminate a carefully chosen set of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts.) But obscurity may be only the most dramatic risk in this kind of enterprise. Ideally, concepts and topics provide mutually enhancing illumination; but a difficult philosophical concept can be carefully deployed without shedding enough light on the topic being considered to justify its deployment. The topic, in turn, may not engage or enrich the concepts in any significant way. Several of the essays included here unfortunately succumb to one or the other of these two misfortunes, in that their topics, while perhaps interesting in their own right, don't really contribute to or benefit from the animation of specifically Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts. The collection opens with a concise and useful Introduction (1-8) both to the volume and to the thought of Deleuze and Guattari by Lawrence Grossberg, although there are a couple of slips where "plane of consistency" (6,7) gets substituted for "plane of organization" (page 42 gives a better sense of the plane of consistency, quoting Deleuze and Guattari themselves). Of particular value is his gloss on the notion of [End Page 156] "animation" itself, first developed by Stivale, as Grossberg notes (2), in The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. As Grossberg explains, these essays do not involve the mere application of ready-made concepts to new things, but a process of creative conceptual development occurring "in between" (to use one of Deleuze and Guattari's favorite expressions) the concepts they have bequeathed to us and the diverse materials with which some of those concepts are brought into contact here: the new materials animate (or re-animate) the original concepts as much as those concepts animate or illuminate the materials under consideration. I wouldn't agree that Deleuze and Guattari are focused on "some metaphysical plane of immanence" to the exclusion or subordination of politics, as Grossberg suggests they are (7). The plane of immanence is what puts and keeps philosophy most productively in touch with political problems in the real world. I would say, however, that Deleuze and Guattari don't see philosophy itself as "solving the problems we face" (2) so much as experimenting with various innovative articulations of those problems, which it is then up to political practice itself to test out—to prove or disprove, as it were. This is the sense in which philosophical experimentation serves as a relay between an older practical orientation to the world that no longer satisfies and the generation of new ones that one hopes may prove more satisfactory. Stephen Wiley's essay on "Nation as Transnational Assemblage" (129-62) nicely demonstrates how...

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