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. Richard Banbook examines the film
"Fight Club" and its protagonist's BwO, finding it very much
like cybersex. Sasha Vojkovic detects territories and deterritorializations
among Nazis and Jews in Steven Spielberg's movie "Schindlers
List". Franz-Willem Korsten locates in Lars von Trier's "Breaking
the Waves" what he calls "the California Ideology" of
cyberspace-boosterish magazines like WIRED. In an essay that departs
from cinema, Marie Bleecker 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 "beoming-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.