Deleuze & Guattari + Geography

Question 1

Although D&G make no statement to the academic discipline of Geography per se, what do they note?

Answer 1

• They would presumably characterize much of it as Royal science serving States by producing ‘tracings’
• Notion of geography as intensive cartography (ATP: 261) means they oppose geography to history, calling the former ‘untimely’
  
  • Thus, nomads are said to have no history, only geography (ATP: 393)

Question 2

How does D&G frame geography in WIP?

Answer 2

• Geography entails a focus on becoming:
• “Geography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency” (p. 96)

Question 3

How do D&G adopt geological and geographical terms?

Answer 3

D&G adopt geological and geographical terms to create new philosophical terms that challenge the orthodoxy of not only geography but also philosophy

Question 4

What do D&G help us to break free of?

Answer 4

• Of conceptual deadlocks
• Circumvent crises of representation and the textualist trap
• Over-come imposed dichotomies (e.g. ‘human’ vs. ‘physical’)

Question 5

Why is Deleuze’s work not be designed as an anarchists’ cookbook?

Answer 5

It does not provide recipes to copy but rather acts as an n-dimensional ‘rhizome’ of entangled lines of inquiry whose ‘plateaus’ can be plugged into productively for nonlinear geophilosophical inspiration

(Bonta and Protevi, 2004)

Question 6

How is place conceived for D&G?

Answer 6

• Concept of place as a site of concentration of forces, a stopping-point along a trajectory
• Specific places find themselves increasingly disembedded, unhinged and scattered to the wind (Doel, 2000)
  
  • A place is both NowHere and NowWhere

Question 7

How should space be viewed in D&G’s work?

Answer 7

• Idea of the articulation of space through spacing (verb rather than noun) (Woodward et al., 2009)
  
  • Spacing as an action, an event, a way of being
  • Post-structuralist spatialization can be stated as an open fold -> not an ‘is’ but an ‘and’

Question 8

What do Bonta and Protevi (2004) argue about space?

Answer 8

Argue that D&G suggest there is no Space with a capital S as something that precedes bodies and awaits them as a container

Question 9

What do the tools of Geophilosophy allow us to map?

Answer 9

• Map the transformations of entangled complex systems
• Assert that spaces are complex

Question 10

What is straited space?

Answer 10

Space that has been gridded, measured, demarcated and controlled by state powers

Question 11

What is smooth space?

Answer 11

• Deterritorialised, without borders, uncontrolled and heterogeneous (ATP, 1987: 482)
• Predicated on two fundamental concepts of Deleuze: difference and multiplicity
• Space as immense and sprawling, defined through movement, lines and trajectories (Elden, 2009)

Question 12

Why does smooth space only appear to be free from striation?

Answer 12

• In practice they are continually entwined (Elden, 2009)
• Useful in understanding the smooth space of global networks imposed over striated spaces of modernity

Question 13

What opportunities haecceities offer?

Answer 13

• Haecceities offer endless opportunities for the emergence of new materials that irrupt from multitudinous points and ripple across landscapes (Bonta and Protevi, 2004)
• These irrupting, smoothing forces need to be mapped and described, and even exploited (by the activists amongst us), for the state is never and should never be the last or only word in any landscape

Question 14

How can you argue that Dr Seuss was “wonderfully Deleuzian” according to (Doel, 1990)?

Answer 14

Practicing of nomad thought, psychoanalysis, rhizomatics, and becomings of every persuasion in The Cat in the Hat​

Question 15

What cannot resist the disarranging force of the Cat in the Hat?

Answer 15

• Nothing can resist the disarranging force of the Cat in the Hat, apart from the Glunk, a perfect enactment of immutable oneness, identity and the presence that just is
• And as everyone knows, the metaphysics of presence and the ontology of being cannot be “un-glunked”
  
  • What is a philosopher of difference to do?

Question 16

What happens when it comes to un-glunking?

Answer 16

• When it comes to un-glunking the active figure is never one; rather the active figure is the interval, which by habit splays things out
• The affective power of join-action; of space and spacing; of ‘and…and…and…’ that demarcates a new threshold

Question 17

How is pointillism a ‘Glunk’?

Answer 17

• Sticky and tricky in its own way
• Geographers are hung up on points: sites, places, nodes, identities, the self, the same, the other and so on and so forth
• Undoing of pointillism opens up and splays out what it has sought to repress: the differential relations of expressionism
• Fixity gives way to fluidity

Question 18

What is Deleuze the un-glunker of?

Answer 18

• Deleuze as un-glunker of pointillism, of the metaphysics of presence and of the essentialist ontology of being
  
  • The figure ‘One’ – of identity, presence, being essence and the same – no longer holds together
  • Only the interval, the joint and the ‘and’ are capable of holding together
  • Hereinafter, constancy lacks consistency

Question 19

What does Deleuze note about the discourse of the ‘is’?

Answer 19

• The discourse of the ‘is’ should be locked away
• No beings (iss), just becomings (ands)
  
  • Real consistency takes hold when ‘is’ becomes a deterritorialised term

Question 20

In simplying to the extreme what is post-structuralist geography?

Answer 20

• Post-structuralist geography amounts to the un-glunking of pointillism in geography
• Joyful realisation that oneness simply lacks consistency

Question 21

What does Doel (1999) note about Deleuze’s ‘difference-producing’ thought?

Answer 21

• Thought has radicalised geographic notions of situated knowledge
  
  • Nothing is predetermined, and spaces only exist in so much as they are brought in being through folds of consistency

Question 22

How is geophilosophy a kind of cartography?

Answer 22

• Geophilosophy as a kind of cartography that takes place on a plane of immanence
  
  • Connections are made and re-made horizontally, immanently rather than (only) as a result of vertical hierarchies (Ringrose and Coleman, 2013)

Question 23

How for Ringrose and Coleman (2013) can geophilosophy be understood and put to work in geography?

Answer 23

• Offers ‘clusters of ideas’; conceptual mapping to help us understand time, space and movement differently
• Inventive methods as in part always orientated towards making a difference (Coleman, 2013)
• Inventive insofar in its capacity to be both specific and ‘beyond’ its situation, singular and multiple, actual and virtual
• Here it is important to harness the Deleuze’s understandings of concepts as becomings
  
  • Inventive methodology to bring about ‘more to the world’ (Massumi, 2002)