Deleuze Aff v Newark

R5 Aff Sacred Heart High School

AC

The standard is embracing rhizomatic multiplicity, defined as a continuous engagement with flows of desire unhindered by structure or hierarchy. Desires should reflect a process without a pre-defined center or end. 3 warrants.

First, desiring-production

Desire is socially conditioned and social structures rely on our continued investment of desire into them. This challenges the psychoanalytic view of desire that it is the expression of a fixed subject who lacks an object. Deleuze and Guattari 83 writes1

In point of fact, if desire is the lack of the real object, its very nature as a real entity depends upon an "essence of lack" that produces the fantasized object. Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production of fantasies,

has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis. On the very lowest level of interpretation, this means that the real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a "dreamed-of object behind every real object," or a mental production asbehind all real productions. This conception does not necessarily compel psychoanalysis to engage in a study of gadgets and markets, in the form of an utterly dreary and dull psychoanalysis of the object: psychoanalytic studies of packages of noodles, cars, or "thingumajigs." But even when the fantasy is interpreted in depth, not simply as an object, but as a specific machine that brings desire itself front and center, this machine is merely theatrical, and the complementarity of what it sets apart still remains: it is now need that is defined in terms of a relative lack and determined by its own object, whereas desire is regarded as what produces the fantasy and produces itself by detaching itself from the object, though at the same time it intensifies the lack by making it absolute: an "incurable insufficiency of being," an "inability-to-be that is life itself." Hence the presentation of desire as something supported by needs, while these needs, and their relationship to the object as something that is lacking or missing, continue to be the basis of the

productivity of desire (theory of an underlying support). In a word, when the theoretician reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, he is content to exploit to

the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, rather than a process of production, of "industrial" production. Clement Rosset puts it very well: every time the emphasis is put on a lack that desire supposedly suffers from as a way of defining its object, "the world acquires as its double some other sort of world, in accordance with the following line of argument: there is an object that desire feels the lack of; hence the world does not contain each and every object that exists; there is at least one object missing, the one that desire feels the lack of; hence there exists some other place that contains the key to desire (missing in this world)."29If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive synthes es that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive

syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is , rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks

a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. Hence the product is something removed or deducted from the process of producing: between the act of producing and the product, something becomes detached, thus giving the vagabond, nomad subject a residuum. The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself.* There is no particular form of existence that can be labeled "psychic reality." As Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but passion, as a "natural and sensuous object." Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that desire produces. Lack is a countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within a real that is natural and social. Desire always remains in close touch with the conditions of objective existence; it embraces them and follows them, shifts when they shift, and does not outlive them. For that reason it so often becomes the desire to die, whereas need is a measure of the withdrawal of a subject that has lost its desire at the same time that it loses the passive syntheses of these conditions. This is precisely the significance of need as a search in a void: hunting about, trying to capture or become a parasite of passive syntheses in whatever vague world they may happen to exist in. It is no use saying: We are not green plants; we have long since been unable to synthesize chlorophyll, so it's necessary to eat. . . . Desire then becomes this abject fear of lacking something. But it should be noted that this is not a phrase uttered by the poor or the dispossessed. On the contrary, such people know that they are close to grass, almost akin to it, and that desire "needs" very few things—not those leftovers that chance to come their way, but the very things that are continually taken from them—and that what is missing is not things a subject feels the lack of somewhere deep down inside himself, but rather the objectivity of man, the objective being of man, for whom to desire is to produce, to produce within the realm of the real. The real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real everything is possible,

everything becomes possible. Desire does not express a molar lack within the subject; rather, the molar organization deprives desire of its objective being. Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are content to be objective, merely objective: they know that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense because

1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 1983. http://1000littlehammers.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/anti-oedipus-fixed.pdf


it has few needs. And never mind those who believe that this is very easy to say, or that it is the sort of idea to be found in books.

"From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. . . . The phantasmal world is the world which has never been fully conquered over. It is the world of the past, never of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain."30 The true visionary is a Spinoza in the garb of a Neapolitan revolutionary. We know very well where lack—and its subjective

correlative—come from. Lack (manque)* is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of

antiproduction;the latter falls back on (serab at sur) the forces of production and appropriates them. It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack (manque). It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production.f The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy. There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other. The only connections that could be established between these two productions would be secondary ones of introjection and projection, as though all social practices had their precise counterpart in introjected or internal mental practices, or as though mental practices were projected upon social systems, without either of the two sets of practices ever having any real or concrete effect upon the other. As long as we are content to establish a perfect parallel between money, gold, capital, and the capitalist triangle on the one hand, and the libido, the anus, the phallus, and the family triangle on the other, we are engaging in an enjoyable pastime, but the mechanisms of money remain totally unaffected by the anal projections of those who manipulate money. The Marx-Freud parallelism between the two remains utterly sterile and insignificant as long as it is expressed in terms that make them introjections or projections of each other without ceasing to be utterly alien to each other, as in the famous equation money = shit. The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any

psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. Even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction are produced by desire within the

organization that is the consequence of such production under various conditions that we must analyze. That is why the fundamental

problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread!"? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an

explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.

Rejecting the psychoanalytic view of desire would entail an ethics that seeks to remove obstacles to creative expressionSpangenberg 9 writes2

Intensity and intensification will be capable of delivering us from morality based on representation, only after they have freed themselves from subjectivity and from all objectal coordinates or ensembles. In this regard, Deleuze’s understanding of desire is informative. In contrast to the psychoanalytical concept of desire as belonging to a subject and being directed at an object, Deleuze conceives of desire as a process. Instead of setting up a ‘lack’ as its mode (and then seeking an object to fill this lack), desire unrolls a plane of consistency or a field of immanence. To put this differently,

desire in the Deleuzian sense, doesn’t belong to a subject and it is not directed toward an object . On the

contrary, desire is only attained at the point where someone is no longer searching for or grasping an object any more than he grasps himself as a subject (Boundas

2006). What needs to be reduced, in other words, is the self on its way to becoming-imperceptible. This is the kind of becoming that carries with it its own pre-personal and pre-subjective intensities – the ‘affects’, that is, intensities, modifications and expressions of our power to be – the vis existendi of Spinoza’s conatus and Deleuze’s

desire (Boundas 2006: 15). Once this reduction is done, desire will be able to assert

itself as the creative and original energeia of life . Desire, in Deleuze’s work, is not a source of phantasms;

it does not originate, once again, from an image based on objectification and representation. Rather, Deleuzian desire is virtual and indistinguishable from its object. Whereas virtual or creative desire is immediately productive of its object and thus lacks nothing, desire [in the psychoanalytical sense] is castrated when it is configured as desire for an object and of a subject. At the same time that desire is detached from its object, its subject becomes

2 Yolanda Spangenberg (Department of Philosophy, University of Pretoria). “‘Thought without an Image’: Deleuzian philosophy as an ethics of the event.” Phronimon, Volume 10. 2009.


the subject of this lack (Hallward 2006: 67 & 68). In so far as Deleuzian desire is not defined by

the intentionality of a subject ‘wanting to have’ – the subject of such a lack - it is capable of producing connections and relations that are real and that are regenerating in their rhizomatic multiplicity. Following Spinoza, Deleuze conceives of desire as an act that is enhanced by joy and that facilitates the formation of adequate ideas. Desire, in this sense, is the striving towards more and better encounters (Boundas 2006). In his distinction between good and bad encounters, Deleuze stays clear of the measuring rod of transcendent norms and values. Rather, encounters are being evaluated in terms of their ability to invigorate the power to be. “There are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life” (Gilles Deleuze in Boundas 2006: 16). The ‘intensification of life’ and the ‘tenor of existence’ are, however, capable of grounding an ethics of joy or desire only in so far as

they are calibrated according to their alliance with the virtual. It is in the light of this that we need to reach a better

understanding of Deleuze’s claim that ethics must be an ethics of the event - that is, an ethics of the virtual. Events, for Deleuze, are not reducible to actual bodies or states of affairs. For this reason, we need to insert between events and states of affairs, a process of ‘counter-actualisation’; “it is this process that reveals the true meaning of ‘becoming worthy of the event’ – the spinal cord of Deleuze’s ethics” (Boundas 2006: 17). It is the counter-actualisation of the actual that empowers the inherent virtual or pure event to be thought and willed. And to ‘become worthy of the event’, then, means to discover ways of aligning ourselves with the creative

processes that work through us. Or to put this differently, in order to affirm the unlimited creative

power of the virtual, we need to dissolve whatever might restrict its

flow and expression . For Deleuze, the most serious and persistent obstacle to creation is posed by the reactive fiction of a

thinking self or subject. Personality, identity, subjectivity, consciousness, signification: these are our primary obstacles. An adequate vehicle for creation must therefore become: impersonal or anonymous; unconscious, or

asignificant … (Hallward 2006: 91). Ethics, in this sense, is a question of willing the event in such a manner or to such an extent that the quality of the will itself is transformed and becomes affirmation. “As far as actual thinkers are concerned, then, absolute or unconditional affirmation is again always a matter of being-affirmed or being-infused. To think is to allow thought to work through us” (Hallward 2006: 137). This transmutation in the quality of the will is achieved by means of the concept and it is in this sense, that the creation of concepts is redemptive, liberating and ultimately transformative. Philosophy, for Deleuze, is the discipline through which creative events can be expressed in pure thought. Conceptual creatings are always independent of the actual configuration of situations and the work of philosophy is precisely to extract a concept from the circumstances of its actualisation. [P]hilosophy posits a new, still virtual world as the counter-actualised correlate of creation itself. … A redemptive philosophy will therefore seek to demonstrate, after Leibniz, that ‘everything has a concept!’, or in other words, that only the singular ‘individual exists and it is by virtue of the power of the concept: monad or soul’. (Hallward 2006: 142).

Second, metaphysics

Static conceptions of metaphysics are flawed—the best understanding of reality is one where we creatively engage itLundy 14 writes3

[20] Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze also argues that the ethical life is one in which we seek to operate through active forces rather than reactive forces. [7] Reactive forces do not allow us to realize our potential, since one remains dominated by external forces, or dominated by purely reactive forces working against our own power and potential. Active forces

dominate rather than submit to domination, freeing us to explore the very limits of what we can do. [8] Here the creative, affirmative, productive power of will and desire is unfettered. Just as you can never predict how a stroll will turn out, what the good life looks like cannot be prescribed in advance. One could only say that the good life is a life capable of sustaining an active experimentation conducted with the desiring machines that are ourselves, and an exploration of the limits, in every direction, of our will. [21] For Deleuze, reactive forces negate difference, where the affirmative, active forces would celebrate and enjoy difference. This

is far more radical than it sounds. According to Deleuze, traditional metaphysics has prioritized being. Therefore, even if one agreed with the thesis that difference is to be affirmed, the agreement with Deleuze would be trivial, provided one is still operating within the standard metaphysical paradigm of being. What prioritizing being means, insofar as difference is concerned, is that difference is understood as a measure of relative sameness. For example, we might talk about different beer. [9] This one is dark and bitter, that one is light and crisp, and another is copper and a bit sweet. But, we can talk about these differences because they all belong to a group of things that have a fundamental sameness: they are all beer, a beverage made from water and fermented grain. For Deleuze, reactive forces negate difference, where the affirmative, active forces would celebrate and enjoy difference. This is far

3 John Lundy. “The Stroll: Reflections on Deleuzian Ethics.” Rhizomes. 2014. http://www.rhizomes.net/issue26/lundy.html


more radical than it sounds. According to Deleuze, traditional metaphysics has prioritized being. Therefore, even if one agreed with the thesis that

difference is to be affirmed, the agreement with Deleuze would be trivial, provided one is still operating within the standard

metaphysical paradigm of being. What prioritizing being means, insofar as difference is concerned, is that difference is understood as a measure of relative sameness. For example, we might talk about different beer. [9] This one is dark and bitter, that one is light and crisp, and another is copper and a bit sweet. But, we can talk about these differences because they all belong to a group of things that have a fundamental sameness: they are all beer, a beverage made from water and fermented grain. [22] If we want, we can even compare beer with very different things like octopi, planets, courage, or justice, because all these things belong to one huge all- encompassing universal

grouping called "being." In this perspective, everything exhibits a fundamental preexisting sameness, called being. This view is certainly intuitive. We normally use difference merely as a relational term. We might say "Dolphins are different than fish because they are mammals," or "Dolphins are different from galaxies because they are smaller," etc. Often, the relationality is only implied. If I simply say, "Larry is different," I mean he is different than most other people. If I say, "My pencil is different," it naturally invites the question, "Different from what?" It is just as if I said "My pencil is ten feet away," which invites the question, "Ten feet away from what?" With respect to the last question, it would certainly seem nonsensical if I were to reply, "It's not that the pencil is ten feet away from anything, it's simply that it possesses the inherent property of ten-feet-away-ness." But that is exactly the sort of radical shift Deleuze wants to make with respect to difference. In order to understand or experience the difference of my pencil we do not need to contrast it with some other fundamentally similar

thing. Deleuze's thinking is a philosophy of pure difference, which stresses the

fundamental and irreducible uniqueness and particularity of every aspect of reality. Instead of a fundamental underlying being there is only becoming—the unique development of diverse singularities. [10] Realizing and affirming uniqueness—the primary character of reality as difference and becoming—requires freeing our senses from established

tendencies. I believe this would mean orienting ourselves to the world, as much as possible in a stroll-like fashion, wherein we

strive to free ourselves from organizing schemes , extricate ourselves from

purposive/rational teleology, slow ourselves down, and allow ourselves to experience the

particularity of things and events. [23] Imagine you walk past a certain building every day on the way to work. The building is nothing to you; it is simply that unremarkable building you walk by every day. Or rather it is something very specific; its the signal that you are two thirds of the way there. Now imagine that one day you happen to stroll past that building. For the first time you encounter the building outside the context of your daily routine. Since it's no longer a point on a route, you are now in a state of greater receptivity to the difference of the building. It might strike you that this familiar building is particularly beautiful or particularly ugly, or that it reminds you of a building that you worked in before, etc. That is why, for

me at least, my camera helps me move into the strolling spirit. It helps force me to break my senses out of habitual tendencies, and see things in new ways and see new connections between things. This relates to what

Deleuze calls rhizomatics, the idea that there are always multiple entries to the world . [11] An

object or a thought can be approached in multiple ways and be connected in multiple ways with others. And third, objectivity

Views of morality which seek out transcendental representations of the world are based on a flawed objectivitySpangenberg 9 writes4

What, precisely, is an ‘ethics of the event?’ In order to give this question an appropriate consideration, we need to, first of all, establish what ethics is not. Deleuze draws a very clear distinction between ethics and morality. Morality, as we know, implies that we judge ourselves and others on the basis of what we pre-suppose we are and should be. In contrast to this, Deleuzian ethics implies that we do not yet know what we might become. In short,

morality is problematic in so far as it is rooted in an objectifying, representational or dogmatic ‘image of thought.’ Distinct ‘images of thought’ may be defined by reference to the presuppositions which define the nature of thought and which, in this way, provide the plane of theoretical consistency for how life is perceived, experienced and understood. Deleuze criticises thought defined in terms of identity in recognition and representation by showing what that definition is falsely ignoring or excluding. According to Deleuze, such definitions are always already objectifying and presupposing what they seek to exclude. In chapter three of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (2004) describes and criticises the representational image by showing how the presuppositions of

such an image inevitably make us miss the ‘essence’ of difference. One of the presuppositions Deleuze severely criticises is the

assumption that there are certain, common sense facts that ‘everybody knows.’ This element consists … of the presupposition that there is a natural capacity for thought endowed with a talent for truth or an affinity with the true, under the double aspect of a good will on the part of the thinker and an upright nature on the part of thought

(Gilles Deleuze in Williams 2005:115). This presupposition is moral in so far as it is assumed that it is how thinkers and thought, in principle, ought to be, regardless of how they are. The point of

Deleuze’s criticism here is that the representational or dogmatic ‘image of thought’ perpetuates the



common sense illusion that there are moral laws, while in fact, there are only morally established habits. A possible response to Deleuze’s critique regarding presuppositions could very well be that philosophy, explicitly and out of necessity, ought to adopt these presuppositions or else it will fall into quietist despair. From a moralistic standpoint, the destruction of all presuppositions does not take account of social, political and moral values and this seems to be undeniably bad. Deleuze, although he is very much aware of this response to his critique, still insists on the ‘dangerous’ and possibly ‘immoral’ path of uncovering and destroying all presuppositions. A further response to Deleuze’s critique is: can presuppositions ever really be done away with? Should the proper and superior role of philosophy not be to select the right presuppositions, instead of seeking to do away with all of them? If presuppositions are really inevitable, Deleuze has merely missed the fact that he has ‘implicitly’ adopted pessimistic ones (Williams 2005). Deleuze’s response to all of these critical points turns on

the very familiar argument that even the most obvious, unequivocal and seemingly universal

moral values have, in the past, turned out to be restrictive, erroneous and divisive. Instead of presupposing and affirming any obvious or given values, the superior role of the philosopher is to criticise all emergent ‘obvious’ values or doxa. Deleuze knows that both Descartes and Kant are well aware of this since they claim that the presupposition of the good and shareable nature of thought is only

by right or in principle, and not in fact. For Descartes, as for Kant the good and shareable nature of thought is only formal; it does not concern specific empirical content. According to Deleuze, however, this line of thought still misses the way in which the supposedly empty form of thought continues to establish ‘obvious’ values and a doxa with an exclusive empirical content. In broad outline Deleuze argues that, if thought is, as it is claimed, good and shareable in principle, it should be able to create unity, not only within each individual thinker but also between different thinkers. This has the implication that different faculties must in principle, be treatable in the same way, and that different selves should be able to judge or know when thought is correct. So how, Deleuze asks, are the different faculties united by the single faculty of thought? And, furthermore, how are we able to judge different thoughts? According to Kant (Deleuze 2004) we are able to reflect on the various faculties, and we are able to actively think and talk about the object of each faculty, because we are able to recognise those objects. The identification of the proper object of each faculty depends on the transcendent faculty of recognition which is supposedly shared and has access to all the other faculties. But if the faculty of recognition is purely formal and empty of content why, then, does Deleuze still have a problem with it? Neither Descartes nor Kant (Deleuze 2004) is making any suppositions as to the specific content of recognition when they say that, in order to use the different faculties, we must be able to recognise their objects. In so far as recognition is a condition for anything to be registered as existing, how could it possibly be exclusive? According to Deleuze, a general category of things is necessarily still excluded due to the particular form of recognition. In other words, due to the fact that recognition proceeds by objectifying and comparing the new with what is already known or what has already been experienced. To put this differently, recognition operates by objectifying and referring difference back to that which has already been recognised and experienced. It discounts the new and virtual qualities of pure difference. For Deleuze, the problem with recognition lies in the fact that recognition necessarily depends on representation. To be able to recognize the object of a faculty, we have to consider the object in terms of an identity that we can conceive of, an analogy that we can judge, an opposition that we can imagine and a similarity that we can perceive (Williams 2005).

A philosophical method geared toward creativity challenges representational visions of moralitySpangenberg 9 writes5

The interconnections among Ideas, problems and events in Deleuze’s account of the transcendental conditions of thought demand a radically different conception of

philosophy away from representation . In What is Philosophy? Deleuze (1994), in collaboration

with Guattari, describes philosophy as the art of forming, inventing and fabricating

concepts. Like works of art (and unlike scientific theories), philosophical concepts do not refer to objects or states of affairs outside themselves. Rather, they are autopoetic, self-organising entities; they are defined not by their referential relations to things or states of

affairs but by the relations between their elements as well as their relations to other concepts. Concepts participate in a multiplicity of virtual relations with other concepts that constitute their ‘becomings.’ In this context, the term ‘becomings’ refers to the particular paths along which a concept might be transformed into something else (Patten 1996). For Deleuze, the philosopher’s superior task is to create concepts that express and thereby bring into consciousness

significant or important events. Every concept shapes and reshapes the event in its own way. The greatness of a philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts (Gilles Deleuze in Patton 1996: 13 & 14). Of primary importance in Deleuze’s theory of difference is the question of our stance towards the events that befall us. Philosophy, as the art of creating



concepts, is therefore serving an ethical rather than an epistemological purpose. I shall

conclude this paper with a few remarks on the ethical implications of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference.

Thus, I advocate that the right to be forgotten from Internet searches ought to be a civil right.

Contention 1 is Normalization

The Internet has ushered in the new era of normalization—it is increasingly relevant for how people are controlledBuchanan 7 writes6

There can be no doubt that the Internet has transformed practically every aspect of

contemporary life , especially the way we think about the body and its relation to identity and to place, once the twin cornerstones of social existence: in

social life you are always someone from somewhere, the son or daughter of so-and-so from such-and-

such town. These details of our existence, which are essentially historical,

although they may sometimes take a form biologists think belongs to their domain (i.e., gender, race, body shape), segment us in different ways, slicing and dicing us this way and that so that we adhere to the conventions and demands of the socius itself. We are segmented in a binary fashion, following the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men-women, adults-children, and so on. We are segmented in a circular fashion, in ever larger circles, ever wider disks or coronas, like Joyce's 'letter': my affairs, my neighbourhood's affairs, my city's, my country's, the world's . We are segmented in a linear fashion, along a straight line or a number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an episode or 'proceeding': as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin

another, forever proceduring or procedured, in the family, in the school, in the army, on the job.2 These segmentations

penetrate our being, they appear and even feel bodily, especially the apparently natural attributes of gender and race, but they are not for all that visceral. Deleuze and Guattari are very specific about this. They describe these

socially orchestrated captures of the body - gender, race, class, work, family, and so on - as 'incorporeal transformations'. If, today, as Deleuze

foresaw with typical acuity in his short paper on what he labelled 'the society of control', our credit card and social security numbers are more significant identity and place markers than the

colour of our skin or where we went to school, that isn't because the 'meat' of our bodies has lately been superseded in its cultural significance

by our bloodless digital 'profile'. Rather what has happened is that one incorporeal 'apparatus of capture' has been succeeded by another - the segmentations of

gender, race and class have been supplanted by the segmentations of debt and credit. "A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt."3 In effect, our body has been

replaced as the principal site of power by our profile. But this does not mean that the

age of the body has been succeeded by the age of the body without organs as many of the Internet-inclined have argued because the disciplined or segmented body was just as much a body without organs as is the ghostly profile government agencies and banks make of us and store in their databases for referral whenever we want a loan, a driver's license, or to leave the country for a vacation. It will no doubt come as a surprise to many that the clearest confirmation of this point, that the disciplined body is already a body without organs, is to be found in Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which is often read as a history of the body.4 Referring to Kantorowitz's influential thesis that the King effectively has two bodies, one that lives and dies and another that is immortal, Foucault writes: If the surplus power possessed by the king gives rise to the duplication of his body, has not the power exercised on the subjected body of the condemned man given rise to another type of duplication? That of a 'non-corporal', a 'soul', as Maby called it. This history of this 'micro-physics' of the punitive power would then be a genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern 'soul'. Rather than seeing this soul as the as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished - and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the Australian Humanities Review: Deleuze and the Internet by Ian Buchanan Page 2 of 19 http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December-2007/Buchanan.... 30/08/2012colonised, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives.5

6 Ian Buchanan. “Deleuze and the internet.” University of Wollongong. 2007. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2411&context=artspapers


Search engines in particular are normalizing through the process by which they store personal info. The question is how we can ‘degooglize’ ourselves to ensure our freedom through privacyJansma 10 writes7

Nowadays a lot of people are in some form represented on the internet. These virtual forms can include profiles on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also as writings on a personal websites and blogs. They have been labeled many names, including data double (Haggerty & Ericson,

2000), a databased self (Simon, 2005) and the one I like most: the dividual (Deleuze, 1992). As Deleuze tells us in his Postscript on

the Societies of Control, we “have become dividuals, and masses, samples, data, markets or “banks” (p:5), meaning we are

separated from our body and turned in a digital self, making a whole new way of control possible. But what exactly is the impact of this control on our privacy and is this feeling rightly? According to Deleuze and Foucault, control puts us in the role of subject. In Foucault’s disciplinary society control exists in the form of discipline and bodily monitoring, where in Deleuze’s control society this control is mainly focused on the dividual and exists in the form of modularity and codes (password etc.) (Deleuze, 1999, p:5). This control is being done by continuous communication between computers, monitoring our every digital move

and fed by data assemblage and shared surveillance (Simon, 2005). That’s where the internet comes in. An article in Dutch newspaper ‘De

pers’ brought forth the question of the possibility of a degooglization; a way to alter or make your digital self disappear from the internet and its powerful search engines. (De Pers, 2009) This question arose from the growing presence of our dividuals and the way we dealt with the information it was

made of. Because we are not just being monitored by institutions only, but also by everyone with access to the internet, it becomes more and more important to control this information. “Nominal freedom of action is canceled by the ubiquitous look of the other” (Mark Poster, 1990, p:90-91). By putting yourself on the web, you make yourself instantly searchable by search sites like Google or Bing, which can have both advantages and disadvantages. For example, it is sometimes said that, if you are not on the internet, you don’t exist. Self-exposion on the web, e.g. photo’s on Flickr, resumes on Linked-in and profiles on Facebook, can result in an acceptance of

other people and in a commodification of the self (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000). On the other hand, too much personal information can result in a need of privacy: harmful information can end up at places you don’t want them to

end up, for instance at your future boss, current enemies or commercial companies. This combined with the influence other people can have on its appearance and data, e.g. by tagging you in a picture or placing

photo’s and movies in comments, can make a dividual somewhat anarchistic and dangerous. All in all a paradox in privacy is at hand. Do we have to focus on privacy by not putting any information of ourselves on the internet, hereby avoiding a “dangerous” dividual but becoming “non-existent” to some, or should we focus less on privacy and become visible (but controllable) to the public, but make possible the

disclosure of sensitive information?

Online storage of personal information undermines biological processes of memory which are key to the creative formation of identity--studies proveMurata and Orito 10 write8

[Ellipses in original] Does the externalisation of human memory have any negative effect on human ability based on biological memory? Recently, it has been believed that the externalisation of human memory enables to facilitate the efficiency of human information processing and retrieval. For example, Thompson (2007) says ―I‘ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything, because I can instantly retrieve the information online. [...] by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely ‗human‘ tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming. What's more, the perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking.‖ In other words, storing information in biological memory is waste of time and energy and the utilisation of e-memory is far more effective than of biological memory in terms of human intellectual activities. Is this at all true? While

acknowledging it is not particularly surprising for many people to allege that computer databases provide an effective and even superior substitute for human biological memory, Carr (2010b) disagrees with such allegation based on the latest findings of

neurosciences and physiological researches . He suggests that a human brain is so malleable that it

can be evolved through interacting with its external environment. In contrast to computer memory which can

7 Sander Jansma. “The Privacy Paradox in a control society.” Masters of Media. September 24th, 2010. http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/09/24/the-privacy-paradox-in-a-control-society/8 Kiyoshi Murata (Centre for Business Information Ethics, School of Commerce, Meiji University, Japan) and Yohko Orito (Faculty of Law and Letters, Ehime University, Japan). “The right to forget/be forgotten.” 2010. http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/The%20right%20to%20forget%20(extended%20abstract).pdf


only store digital information, the human brain is able to continually conduct prolonged information processing during which the systems of biological memory are flexibly reorganised responding to the changing environmental context. Through this update process, old memory stored in the human brain is

maintained to be meaningful in the present context. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, human biological memory is living memory and is not just a storehouse of info rmation like computer memory. In addition,

based on the recent studies, he points out that biological memory of the brain is substantially infinite, and the intellectual activity of recollection is itself

helpful to create ideas and to enhance human learning ability. Hence, outsourcing of human memory to external digital memory devices would result in reduced human ability to appropriately organise and integrate information, which deeply relates to knowledge creation and learning. Then the Internet environment in which people can enjoy opportunities to access a huge amount of information may overwhelm the functioning of human working memory to integrate things stored in short-term memory into long-term memory. Utilisation of the Web is not necessarily useful to raise human ability in information processing. In this regard, Carr (2010b) describes that ―those who celebrate the ‗outsourcing‘ of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory‖ (191), and that ―we don‘t constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches‖ (192). The dependence on the Web technology entails danger to reduce human ability in information processing and intellectual power.

Carr (2010a) also points out that ― our most creative and conceptual thinking often emerged

from the complexity of the connections among the memories stored in our

mind . Biological memory is the seat of the unique self as well as the foundation of a

rich culture. If we outsource our memory to external databases, we begin to destroy that foundation.‖ His comment suggests the social significance of the right to forget/be forgotten .

Contention 2 is Solvency

RTBF is key to creative formation of identity—it reclaims our biological capacity for forgetting that has been undermined by digital storageMurata and Orito 10 write9

In a certain sense, memory and forgetting are two sides of the same coin. Heidegger (1927: 339) insists that remembering is possible only on the basis of forgetting. Ricoeur (2000) emphasises the close ties between memory and forgetting, and describes that forgetting is one of the conditions for memory. Human beings selectively perceive components of their environment based on schemata they have developed (Neisser, 1976; Anzai, 1985), and in order to develop sound personal identity, build successful human relationships

and enjoy normal intellectual activities, it is important for a person to make his/her own

personal story through selectively remembering/forgetting things which he/she has

experienced and constructing a well-organised structure of memory of them in his/her mind. In this study, forgetting is defined as an intellectual/mental state of a person where he/she doesn‘t recall a fact that (has) happened in the past or information that he/she knew in the past and/or images, feelings and sensations related to the fact or the knowledge. Glorifying a past event or having erroneous human memories, which doesn‘t necessarily imply failure of decoupling (Klein et al., 2004), is a kind of forgetting. As Ricoeur (2000)‘s categorisation of forgetting into forgetting through the erasing of traces and forgetting kept in reserve suggests, there is variety in the degree of forgetting. Anyone experiences a momentary lapse of memory and short-term or mild forgetting. In human brain‘s long-term memory which dynamically maintains a well-organised structure (Rumelhart, 1977), there are a lot of things which one never recalls even when relevant or trigger

information to them is provided to him/her. Forgetting is quite natural mentation for human beings. Whereas many

people suffer morbid forgetting due to aging or disease, anyone experiences wholesome forgetting more or less. This relates to maintenance of peace of mind and creation of spiritually affluent lives through surmounting fault, shame and PTSD,

for example; sound mental growth including self-transcendence; positive human relationship-building based on, for example, forgiveness (although it can be a far deeper and richer phenomenon than forgetting as Enright (2001) and Konstan (2010) suggest); and establishment of

personal identity. However, as a result of the development of an advanced

9 Kiyoshi Murata (Centre for Business Information Ethics, School of Commerce, Meiji University, Japan) and Yohko Orito (Faculty of Law and Letters, Ehime University, Japan). “The right to forget/be forgotten.” 2010. http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/The%20right%20to%20forget%20(extended%20abstract).pdf


information and telecommunication society, the wholesome functioning of forgetting has substantially become underestimated. We don‘t need to have an obsession with photographic memory, although many people seem to believe that human memory should be precise and the total recall is undoubtedly good. The vagueness of biological memory based on forgetting characterises humanity and the total recall based on e-memory would make people less human.

Hence, if people are in the technological environment in which forgetting is harmfully restricted regardless of whether they like it or not, an attempt to protect this

natural human mentation through conceptualising the right to forget/be forgotten would be socially justifiable as well as significant. Coerced Remembrance by Total Recall Technology People, at least in the industrialised countries, are now living in the environment where ICT has become prevalent in all areas of their lives and economy. They enjoy tremendous benefit provided by ICT-based information systems various organisations set up and operate. On the other hand, however, as the consequence of the widespread or ubiquitous availability of ICT, people seem to be forced to remember, for example, their past attitudes, behaviour and experiences and, in addition, even their lineage and genetic characteristics which they would forget if they didn‘t live in the current ICT-dependent society. In the business administrative context, Simon (1976) pointed out that human memory may be either natural or artificial, and for any kind of memory to be useful there must be mechanisms that permit the memory to be drawn upon when needed. Actually, organisational databases and the World Wide Web (WWW) are now considered to substitute a large part of human memory in a very precise, rapid and efficient fashion, over which memory subjects can hardly exert control. There are some Net users who wish to externalise their personal memory using online services provided by, say, My Yahoo! and iGoogle. Lifelogging technology (Allen, 2007) would promote the externalisation of human memory in a through and infallible manner. Thanks to the permeation of ICT centred on database and network technology throughout society, the artificialisation or externalisation of

human memory has progressed at rapid speed. However, every time people access some online data related to them involuntarily or by chance or receive unexpected personalised services based on their personal information stored in organisational databases, they may be coerced into refreshing their memory which may contains what they wish to forget. If this is the case, the wholesome functioning of

forgetting is seriously impeded. People lose the ownership of their own memory. Even a complete

stranger to memory subjects can stake a claim to their memory. Is this the inevitable fate of them or a price they have to pay in return for enjoying the benefit provided by ICT-based information systems? Why can‘t they require others (including both organisations and individuals) not to reminder them of what they forget on its own or wish to forget? Isn‘t it reasonable for them to expect that they can forget something about themselves and be forgotten by others appropriately? In the circumstances where, amongst the four modalities of regulation of human behaviour (Lessig, 1999), markets and technological architecture function so that people are not allowed to, even appropriately, forget the past of them and the existing social norms don‘t

hinder such function, the right to forget/be forgotten may have to be established as a legal

right , although forgetting is quite natural mentation for human beings.

RTBF is key to creative self-invention—it challenges electronic surveillance and targeted advertisingMurata and Orito 10 write10

Behind the study objectives is the authors‘ concern about negative impacts of the externalisation of human memory on intellectual activities and growth, personal identity development, happiness and dignity of each and every human being. The permeation of information and communication technology (ICT) centred on database and network technology throughout society has brought about the progress of artificialisation or externalisation of 193 human memory. Organisational databases and the Web are now considered to substitute a large part of human memory. This, with the global spread of

market-economy principles, caused a technology-driven social change from Foucauldian disciplinary society to Deleuzian environmental control society (Azuma

and Ohsawa, 2003; Foucault, 1975; Deleuze, 1990) which has resulted in the socio-economic and technological

environment where eternal, unambiguous human memory outside human brains,

which is continually updated by 24/7 electronic surveillance systems, is

relentlessly used for providing personalised services by business organisations and for public security and safety and people‘s reliable livelihoods by public organisations. In this environment, however, people are forced to refresh their memory or

prohibited to forget the past of them through being provided the personalised, paternalistic services based on digital records stored in the external human memory. Such services seem to presuppose that the future of people is an extension of the past of them. Of course, this is

10 Kiyoshi Murata (Centre for Business Information Ethics, School of Commerce, Meiji University, Japan) and Yohko Orito (Faculty of Law and Letters, Ehime University, Japan). “The right to forget/be forgotten.” 2010. http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/The%20right%20to%20forget%20(extended%20abstract).pdf


not necessarily true. People can get over their past and may desire to settle and forget

the unfortunate past of them. Actually, human beings have an ability to forget (or store memory) selectively. We have to look at the bright side of forgetting. In the current technological circumstances where the dream of the total recall will likely come true, if we fail to establish the right to appropriate forgetting/being forgotten, it would become difficult for us to construct our own identity and personal story at our discretion.

The role of the ballot is to embrace rhizomatic multiplicity. The role of the judge is to be a facilitator of rhizomatic multiplicity. This is a prerequisite to challenging oppressive social structures, that’s Deleuze and Guattari 83. The role of the ballot defines the role of the judge since the purpose of a judge is to sign their ballot.

1AR

Identity badVoisset-Veysseyere 11 writes11

In the Deleuzo-Guattarian text, gender is territory: mark, signature. A Thousand Plateaus makes no difference between gender and sex, according to the socius of any society from which the subject is territorialized as a preformed or fix – well-

constructed or defined – identity: “Sex with their own ghetto territorialities.”23 Gender belongs to code as a hierarchical category or as a classifying tool by which we can indeed imagine “real transexualities.”24 But even in the margins of the code, “deterritorialization (transcoding)”25 is only differentiation and reterritorialization. Regarding especially to the birth of instituted philosophy in the City, gender is the value for the male friends and rivals who are subjected to the identity injunction of a school; more generally,

people “are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or disperse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency, including personal identity.”26 Unity delineates the territory of a State

encoding of flow by law and empowering of desire in the guise of its alienation in repression: “State apparatuses of identity.”27 Because there is no identity without fabric of subjection [assujettissement] or without law – “the legislator and the subject”28 – and because law is the structure by which psychoanalysis “lays claim to the role of Cogitatio universalis as the thought of

the Law”29 at the same time it is signifying the subject, schizoanalysis liquefies all identity and explodes strata. Out of “the regime of subjectification”30 or subjection and against the

stratification of desire flow within a site of individuation, each of us has then to semiotize oneself: “Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the

‘not-doing’ of the warrior, the undoing of the subject.”31 No more self (ego) with its secrets (depth) could be a motto of thinking, at least a way of experimentation: “Where psychoanalysis says, ‘Stop, find your self again,’ we should say instead, ‘Let’s go further still, […], we haven’t sufficiently

dismantled our self.’”32 The image of subject (unity, identity, sameness versus otherness) is broken: “The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”33 Escaping is then proliferating, following a line instead of identifying or obeying; for we are not only made by segments: “Individual or group, we are traversed by lines…”34 Among different sorts of lines – “bastard line,” “orphan line of thinkers” (Massumi, p. ix-x) – and so on, there are lines of flight or of deterritorialization: “That is what multiplicity is.”35 Multiplicity – becoming: “Becoming and multiplicity are the same thing”36 – takes place in a non predictable universe; a subject cannot be attributed (subjugated) under the one, the object disappears with it: “A multiplicity has neither subject nor object,”37 no beginning nor end. “The multiple must be made”38 means then that we must go “beyond any opposition between the one and the multiple,”39 engages in a line by a go-between or a passing-through. Becoming and gender appear but opposite in regard to a schizoanalysis which is the theory of an opening subjectivity while psychoanalysis is the theory of “a linear proceeding of subjectivity,”40 of a determinate one. Psychoanalytical theory views desire as lack and identity as the mark of this lack in the name of Phallus, desire as conservative and not as revolutionary; on the contrary of the linguistic and psychoanalytic model, schizoanalytical philosophy theorizes the sense as creation, as becoming; we can imagine like this: “On the road to the asignifying and asubjective.”41 On the line as on a surface, we move beyond the signification and its segments.

Curry goes aff—he says that abstract and ahistorical morality is bad, but my aff rejects both Western metaphysics and representational morality. The rejection of both justifies facilitating rhizomatic multiplicity, that’s Spangenberg 9.

1. Perm, do both. 11 Cecile Voisset-Veysseyere. “Toward a post-identity philosophy: along a flight line with Gilles Deleuze?” 2011. http://www.revuetrahir.net/2011-2/trahir-voisset-veysseyre-post-identity.pdf


The aff’s method provides the best account of how modern racism operatesSaldanha and Adams 12 write12

To treat the question of race critically it is necessary, then, to engage the

image of thought, the identities, emplacements and forms of recognition that produce it, as well as those

creative moments of encounter that oblige us to think otherwise, to live

—to become. Such a critical approach to the question of race can be derived from three insights emerging from Deleuze’s thought and their implications for thinking about race-habits. First is the diagnostic of how racism works to be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of race, in the chapter ‘Year zero: faciality’ (1987: 167-91), as the product of faciality—that abstract machine of modernity that produces significance (the white wall) and subjectification (the black hole). The second and third insights emerge from Deleuze’s critical attitude toward habits and partialities and the ethico-political and aesthetic possibilities to be found in his experimentations with empiricist ethics and cinema, respectively. In each of these experiments, Deleuze points towards the promotion of lines of flight and encounters that interrupt the habitual individualities and moralising tendencies that impose a limit to life, experience and thought. Faciality and Empiricist Ethics: Reflections on A life... In presenting faciality as a non-dialectical

theory of racism, one that is not predicated on the notion of racial Others, Deleuze and Guattari invite an

appreciation of modern racism’s propensity to totalise rather than

exclude . According to Deleuze and Guattari, modern racism operates through the erasure of exteriority. The simple formula it presents works

by totalising, such that ‘there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be’ (1987: 178). As a product of faciality, racism operates on the logic of the same and ‘propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence)’. Consequently, faciality and racism do not operate through essentialising opposition marked by binary categories such as black/white or self/other. Instead, the faciality machine presents racial difference as a range of deviations from the dominant standard—the Christ, White-Man face. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic...)

2. Perm, do both. A politics of creative experimentation and fluidity is key to challenging racismSaldanha and Adams 12 write13

In presenting society as a set of ‘institutional inventions’, Deleuze provokes us to think about ways of arousing and maintaining becomings based on the protest against individualist principles. Drawing on Hume’s crucial discovery that ‘relations are external to their terms’ (Deleuze 1991), Deleuze points out that a consideration of the ‘exteriority of relations is not a principle; it is a vital protest against principles’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 55). Thinking the exteriority of relations presupposes departure from the

principles of identification and distribution used to organise the self and the world in racialised ways. It also privileges experimentation and flux, forcing ‘us’ to think that which ‘runs through life, but is repugnant to thought’ (ibid). Being cognizant of the limits to thought arising from the order of being, accompanied by hierarchies, norms and frames characteristic of racial signification

and subjectification, Deleuze spurs us always to ‘go further’. He suggests we ‘make the encounter with relations penetrate and corrupt

everything, undermine being, make it topple over’. He urges readers to create something new. ‘To substitute the AND for IS. A and B’—a crucial subtension of relations that ‘makes relations shoot beyond their terms and outside the set of their terms,

and outside everything that could be determined as being. One, or whole’ (ibid.). Such interruptions and conjunctions present ways of thinking and experiencing relations that undermine the stable

12 Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams. Deleuze and Race. 2012. http://books.google.com/books?id=gfQCbrC8IeEC&pg=PA251&lpg=PA251&dq=deleuze+AND+racism&source=bl&ots=evKfapoUei&sig=WfLt_eUZDRd6MGNN6FMSdUtsQws&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zm1uVMbsIMyqgwSTgoKwBg&ved=0CF0Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=deleuze%20AND%20racism&f=false13 Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams. Deleuze and Race. 2012. http://books.google.com/books?id=gfQCbrC8IeEC&pg=PA251&lpg=PA251&dq=deleuze+AND+racism&source=bl&ots=evKfapoUei&sig=WfLt_eUZDRd6MGNN6FMSdUtsQws&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zm1uVMbsIMyqgwSTgoKwBg&ved=0CF0Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=deleuze%20AND%20racism&f=false


categories and principles (essentialisms, reifications, reductionisms) that race-habits seek to maintain. For race operates through fixing and distributing attributes and functions. The White Man IS. The black man IS—his hair, his skin, his nose. As such, the relations that they enter into are seen as being internal to the names Negro, White Man, Arab or Jew, and serve as the basis for placing bodies in their proper positions within the grand scale of being. The denigrations and approbations of these categories are taken as a given and mobilised as basis for mediating estrangement.

3. Perm, do both. Challenging Internet normalization is key. It outweighs race-based categorization and only my evidence is comparative, that’s Buchanan 7.

Documents

Deleuze Aff v Newark