Mapping Philosophical Landscapes: Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari

In the vibrant intellectual landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, as the structuralist paradigm dominated academic discourse, an intriguing shift began to emerge, quietly re-centring the often-overlooked discipline of geography within the social sciences. While traditional historical analyses had long sought the origins and diachronic evolution of phenomena, a new emphasis on synchronicity and spatial relations began to take hold. This profound re-evaluation saw thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari harness spatial language to forge novel perspectives on a world grappling with a crisis of historicity, moving beyond Hegelian-Marxist teleology towards an approach that illuminated the diverse facets of what Deleuze would term the 'plane of immanence'.

This intellectual ferment signalled a pivotal moment, challenging established modes of inquiry and offering a fresh lens through which to understand human experience, power dynamics, and the very fabric of society. It was a period of radical conceptual innovation, where the map became as significant as the timeline, and the exploration of interconnected spaces offered profound insights into the nature of existence.

Foucault and the Geographic Turn: Unearthing Power in Space

Michel Foucault, a towering figure in 20th-century thought, surprisingly found himself at the heart of this geographic awakening, despite geography's historical absence from the major structuralist debates. His work, often perceived as a 'zero-degree of thought' by some, gained authority when the journal Hérodote invited him to engage with geographers. This convergence was not accidental; Foucault’s oeuvre was rich with a broad 'geographicité', employing a profusion of spatial metaphors such as 'positions', 'displacements', 'place', 'field', and more explicitly geographical terms like 'territory', 'domain', 'soil', 'horizon', 'archipelago', 'geopolitics', 'region', and 'landscape'.

Foucault often operated as a stratigrapher of discursivity, meticulously charting its discontinuities. He borrowed heavily from geological vocabulary, speaking of 'erosion', 'beaches', 'sheets', 'shocks', and 'layers' in his seminal work, The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses). He famously stated, "It is to our silent and naively immobile soil that we restore its ruptures, its instability, its faults; and it is it that trembles beneath our steps." The very notion of the episteme – conceived as a vast, transversal bedrock that doesn't evolve but rather topples under seismic shifts, or gives way to another layer – finds its direct analogue in the geologist's approach. This geological metaphor underscores a crucial shift from historical genesis to a synchronous, spatial orientation, focusing on the horizontal rather than the genetic.

Indeed, Foucault’s analyses extended to what he termed an 'imaginary geo-politics' of the carceral city when discussing Bentham's Panopticon in Discipline and Punish. His consistent focus on the dialectic between knowledge and power, grounded in notions of strategies and tactics, naturally resonated with geographers who argued that geography's primary function was to "make war." Foucault himself acknowledged this synergy, confessing to his interlocutors, "I realise that the problems you raise concerning geography are essential for me... Geography must indeed be at the heart of what I am concerned with." This profound recognition cemented geography's critical role in understanding the intricate mechanisms of power and knowledge.

Deleuze & Guattari: Rhizomes, Assemblages, and the Labyrinth of Thought

Concurrently, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were developing their own revolutionary concepts, notably in their 1975 essay on Kafka, which served as a testing ground for ideas later expanded in A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux). This collaboration introduced key concepts that would profoundly influence new geography and philosophy alike.

The Rhizome: A Model of Multiplicity

The concept of the rhizome emerged as a powerful alternative to hierarchical, arborescent models of thought. Inspired by Kafka's labyrinthine works, which present multiple, uncodified entry points, the rhizome describes a non-linear, horizontal growth system, devoid of a central root or fixed point. It offers a principle of multiple possible entries, with connections at every point carrying diverse meanings. This horizontal proliferation, in stark contrast to the hierarchical ramifications of a tree, became a potent weapon against psychoanalytic interpretation, which Deleuze and Guattari viewed as imposing a singular, pre-determined meaning. For them, the rhizome championed experimentation over interpretation, celebrating the open-ended, interconnected nature of reality.

Assemblage (Agencement): Connecting the Heterogeneous

Another pivotal concept to emerge from their work on Kafka was the assemblage (agencement). Evolving from the earlier notion of the "desiring-machine" in Anti-Oedipus, the assemblage broadened its scope beyond psychoanalysis to encompass all forms of connections, including those involving non-human elements. An assemblage simply brings together singular and heterogeneous elements, creating a particular configuration. This could be the wasp and the orchid, or the horse, man, and stirrup, or even the horse-man-bow. All combinations are possible between technical machines, animals, and humans, always oriented towards processes of subjectivation and individuation. This concept underscores the idea that there is no pertinent distinction at the level of assemblage connections between nature and artifice, prompting a re-connection between humans and nature.

Ethology, the study of animal behaviour, gained immense importance for Deleuze and Guattari as they sought to understand how animals construct their assemblages with nature and among themselves. The assemblage, a concept of boundless application, defines the interrelation of a set of material relations with a corresponding regime of signs. Far from being static, an assemblage is in constant motion, always affected by a degree of disequilibrium as it is tied to a field of desire. It represents the dynamic interplay of encounters and flux, challenging classical binaries such as individual/collective or signifier/signified.

Mille Plateaux: A Philosophy of Spatial Logics

Published in 1980, A Thousand Plateaus constitutes the second part of "Capitalism and Schizophrenia." It is a profoundly propositional and positive work that radically breaks with 19th-century historicism and its teleological chronosophy. Instead of an Hegelianisation of time, Deleuze and Guattari offer a spatialising approach to the multiple forces manifesting within it.

The book’s title itself, Mille Plateaux, signals its geographical orientation. A 'plateau' is understood as a flat zone, an indefinite horizon without limits, an intermediate, central, and intensive area. Deleuze humorously suggested the title reflected the landscapes of his Limousin homeland, the Millevaches plateau. More significantly, the plateau's lack of a beginning or end echoes Deleuze's frequent advice to "start in the middle." This 'betweenness' defines the essence of the plateau. Having shattered the rigidities of the family institution with Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari now ventured onto untrodden paths, lines of flight, and nomadic journeys to explore differences and unprecedented connections.

A Thousand Plateaus aims to construct a 'mechanosphere' capable of transforming our relationship with the world. It employs a resolutely constructivist and pragmatic method, starting with the delimitation of a 'plane of consistency' or plateau, then inscribing two series of points onto this plane, and finally asymmetrically connecting certain points from different series. This broken line then operates on another plane, or connected plateau, where it is subjected to the attraction of a new line of flight. This indefinite network of actions and reactions within the rhizome lacks predetermined finality, affirming the productivity of this diagonal of thought, this transversal action, resulting in a book of rare density and intellectual richness.

Territorialisation and Deterritorialisation: The Rhythms of Existence

Central to Deleuze and Guattari's spatial logics are the intertwined concepts of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, explored through various lenses, including the notion of the 'ritournelle' or refrain.

The Ritournelle: Marking Space and Time

The ritournelle, a recurring melodic or rhythmic phrase, serves a fundamental territorialising function. Bird songs, for instance, mark their territory, and similar functions are found in ancient Greek or Hindu systems. However, the ritournelle's functions extend beyond mere territorial marking, encompassing amorous, professional, social, liturgical, or cosmic roles: "it always carries earth with it." These rhythms that punctuate animal and human life are a means of countering chaos and its threats of exhaustion, giving rise to a "rhythm-chaos or chaosmos."

In common parlance, a ritournelle is a repetitive tune, a chorus, an eternal return that simultaneously fabricates time – the "implied time" of linguist Gustave Guillaume. Yet, it embodies a contradictory dynamic in its relationship to territoriality. It is simultaneously drawn back to a known territory to inhabit it and ward off chaos, as exemplified by Mahler's Song of the Earth. But the ritournelle is also a signal for departure, for deterritorialisation, a journey, enacting a constant back-and-forth between leaving and returning, defining the 'betweenness' of intertwined territories. Its very circularity suggests an absence of beginning or end, only infinite variations: "The ritournelle goes towards the territorial assemblage, settles there, and leaves." Each individual, group, or nation thus equips itself with a basic range of conjuratory ritournelles. This semiotisation of time, perceived by ethnologist Pierre Clastres in the solitary song of an Indian confronting the night, challenges the passing of time and the "subjugation of man to the general network of signs."

Territory as Act and the Contingency of Thought

Crucially, Deleuze and Guattari define territory not as a passive entity but as an act that affects milieus and rhythms, 'territorialising' them. This concept is fundamentally pragmatic, expressing an endogenous relationship between territory and rhythm: "The ritournelle is the rhythm and melody territorialised, because they have become expressive – and have become expressive because they are territorialising." Opposing this process of territorialisation is deterritorialisation, a release into the cosmos, to "open the assemblage onto a cosmic force." In every assemblage, the molar line interpenetrates with the system's line of flight through the molecular line of deterritorialisation.

This spatial approach challenges deterministic views, such as the idea that philosophy's birth in Greece was inevitable. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari connect the contingent encounter between the Greek milieu and the plane of immanence of thought. They view Hegel and Heidegger as historicists in their reading of Greek philosophy, positioning geography on the side of contingency, far from the Vidalienne geographical school or Braudel's use of geography to highlight permanence and long-term structures. For Deleuze and Guattari, geography "is not only physical and human, but mental, like the landscape. It tears history away from the cult of necessity to assert the irreducibility of contingency. It tears it away from the cult of origins to affirm the power of a 'milieu'." Thus, philosophy's birth in Greece was a result of pure contingency, not necessity.

They also identify national archetypes in philosophical thought: the French tend to reterritorialise on consciousness (the Cogito), while the Germans strive to reconquer the Greek plane of immanence by deterritorialising consciousness. The British, they quip, "in the trinity of Founding-Building-Inhabiting, the French build, the Germans found, but the English inhabit." Philosophical experimentation, they argue, arises from this tension between territorialisation and deterritorialisation.

Smooth and Striated Spaces: Navigating the World

Another fundamental polarisation in Deleuze and Guattari's spatial logics is between smooth spaces and striated spaces – the nomadic space versus the sedentary space. These spaces, though different in nature, exist only through their reciprocal relations. Smooth space is unpolarised, fundamentally open, immeasurable, and populated by singularities. Striated space, conversely, is overcoded, metric, and hierarchical. The former might be likened to a patchwork, with successive, unbounded additions of fabric, suggesting a heterogeneous yet fluid expanse. The latter resembles embroidery, with a central, defined motif. This opposition extends beyond terrestrial realms to the maritime, which, despite being an archetypal smooth space, has been increasingly subjected to strict striation.

This is not a simple binary. One can travel without moving, as Deleuze, the "immobile traveller," described himself. This tension defines two micro-political modalities and two aesthetics: the haptic, characteristic of smooth space, emphasising contact, touch, and immediacy; and the optic, belonging to striated space, involving distant vision and perspective. As Cézanne noted, the necessity of no longer seeing the wheat field, of being too close, of getting lost without bearings, lies in the smooth space. In A Thousand Plateaus, this tension between smooth and striated poles is primarily deployed in a micropolitical context, contrasting the war machine with the State apparatus.

The War Machine vs. The State Apparatus: Power and Resistance

Deleuze and Guattari consistently use binary oppositions not to endorse dualistic thinking, but to break it and introduce a thought of multiplicity traversed by pluralised binaries. Contrary to common belief that the war machine is a byproduct of the State apparatus, they insist on a radical difference in nature between the two. The war machine, they argue, does not originate from the State; its entire dynamic opposes State logic. Created by nomads, war machines were invented to resist and fight against the State apparatus, which they conceptualise as an apparatus of capture. These machines took shape in particular types of smooth spaces: deserts, steppes, and seas.

In their "Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine," Deleuze and Guattari define the war machine not primarily by war itself, but by three characteristics: its arithmetic composition of individuals (contrasting with the State's territorial organisation), its emphasis on 'free action' rather than regulated 'work' (the State's invention), and its definition by 'weapons' rather than the State's 'tools and signs'. The fundamental question for the State is how to appropriate and enslave the war machine, while the war machine strives to resist State logics and preserve its own dynamism. It embodies the ambivalence of the 'line of flight' – not simply fleeing a situation, but actively causing flight, exploiting lines of deterritorialisation. This exteriority of the war machine to the State implies that the State cannot be conceived without a relationship to an outside from which it feeds, even as the war machine thrives on a social assemblage whose matrixial model is nomadism.

Ethnologist Pierre Clastres' work supports these theses, demonstrating that the State is not an inevitable outcome of productive forces or political differentiation. It emerges abruptly, as a pure event, when a community reaches a certain threshold. He also shows that primitive societies are not merely "stateless" but actively "against the State," with their war machines controlling violence by confronting the State to maintain group segmentarity, whereas the State always needs to pacify to establish itself. The figure of the nomad, therefore, is not just about classical nomadism but represents a conceptual character that captures the singularity of the war machine – a space of mobilisation, not appropriation; one occupies it without settling, deploying without capitalising.

This exteriority of the war machine is also evident in epistemology, with the existence of 'nomadic sciences' that have persisted in a minor mode alongside and external to physics. These nomadic sciences are characterised by a hydraulic model (creating flux, not solid), a model of becoming and heterogeneity (not stability), a turbulent model in open space, and a problematic (not programmatic) approach. This binary highlights two opposing scientific traditions: sciences of repetition and iteration versus sciences of itineration, or 'ambulant sciences'. Creativity, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, resides with the nomadic sciences, which invent problems, while royal sciences are tasked with providing scientific solutions. This results in a potential complementarity, but one where the moment of innovation is quickly obscured by the efficiency of State science's procedures and solutions.

War machines also facilitate the circulation of meaning, transgressing limits and escaping enclosures through lines of flight in a literal drift. They must remain active because they confront the State, defined as an apparatus of capture. Rather than adopting the Marxist and Althusserian notion of modes of production, Deleuze and Guattari define social formations as "machinic processes." They distinguish primitive societies by their conjuration-anticipation mechanisms, State societies by their apparatus of capture, urban societies by their instruments of polarisation, and nomadic societies by their war machines. While the State strives to capitalise and appropriate, the war machine possesses a "power of metamorphosis." This notion of capture, inherent to State societies and rooted in Indo-European mythology, designates the pole of sovereignty. The State's propensity for capture and overcoding raises the problem of minorities, who must be capable of forming war machines to avoid disappearance.

The political stakes are high: the preservation of plural and resistant micropolitics to avoid dissolution into the State axiomatic. To regulate this tension between apparatuses of capture and war machines, and to define a new micropolitics at the juncture of ethics and politics, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the notion of the social contract. It is through the contract that the apparatus of capture advances, subjugating in an ambivalence that cannot be reduced to simple voluntary or forced dependence. This articulation of the self on an increasingly planetary scale necessitates rethinking a micropolitics that accounts for spatial logics, a geophilosophy capable of locating and conceptualising the multitude of points constituting the diverse life forces of the global rhizome. This calls for mapping these elements, not merely copying existing states of affairs, but experimenting and confronting social reality by multiplying access routes.

Contemporary Relevance and Geophilosophy

Manola Antonioli rightly highlights the pertinence and timeliness of Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial thinking in the era of globalisation. She argues that "thought must increasingly open itself to spaces, dimensions, territories, recognise its essential dimension of spacing, and no longer limit itself to a meditation on its history and the history of concepts." In a period marked by the end of certainties, we must inhabit our smooth and striated spaces differently, abandoning the imaginary of closed entities – whether individual, organic, natural, or State-based – to better understand that they are always open to an outside, possess only fragmentary reality, and an unpredictable becoming. "The openness of 'globality' will only be possible in an archipelagic world, a world with multiple interfaces, which multiplies exchanges, passages, and encounters." In this creative perspective, A Thousand Plateaus serves as a toolbox, whose essentially ethical and political value, as Antonioli notes, remains largely underexploited.

American philosopher John Proveti, in collaboration with geographer Mark Bonta, has applied concepts from A Thousand Plateaus to develop a geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Proveti is particularly keen on bridging the gap between the humanities and scientific culture. He finds the chapter "The Geology of Morals" most suggestive, as it expresses a desire to forge an ontology that can use the same concept to address physical, organic, and social systems. He has applied Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, such as the 'moment of emission of singularities', to analyse events like Hurricane Katrina, linking it to the American notion of 'pattern change'. In his geophilosophical analyses, the concept of reterritorialisation on the very power of deterritorialisation proves highly effective for understanding zones of instability, such as those along the Mississippi, vulnerable to regular cyclones. The focus is on identifying sensitive zones that maximise the potential for adaptive behaviours. Deleuze and Guattari enable the development of a 'political physiology', utilising scientific data within a non-mechanistic framework. Geography, in this context, becomes a non-deterministic resource, not assigned to simple causalities, because with virtual cartographies of social systems, there always remains an irreducible role for chance and the "emission of singularities." Proveti and Bonta integrate geomorphological, climatological, oceanographic, and socio-technical factors to study socio-political assemblages.

A Thousand Plateaus, therefore, presents itself as a generalised political pragmatics, whose transversal concepts form the basic elements upon which everything else depends. The micropolitics to be constructed must define the lines of flight that run beneath hard segmentarities to destratify them. As Mengue notes, "the model of micropolitics remains the events of May 1968." Mille Plateaux prioritises, over historical teleology, blocks of becoming anchored as molecular phenomena in their spatial environment, precisely what May '68 achieved: "May '68 in France was molecular and its conditions all the more imperceptible from a macropolitical point of view... All those who judged in macropolitical terms understood nothing of the event, because something unassignable was escaping." Philosophy, in Deleuze's view, thus fulfils its role of creating concepts, which geographers can then utilise as a toolbox to elucidate the political and cultural enigmas of an increasingly complex world, less and less reducible to binary oppositions. The entanglement of deterritorialisation mechanisms inherent in globalisation with reterritorialisation reactions, for instance, helps illuminate the current tensions in our world, fraught with potential catastrophes.

Linguistic Interlude: Understanding French Phrases

While delving into profound philosophical concepts, it’s worth taking a moment to clarify some common nuances in French language, specifically the usage of 'faire suite' and 'tout de suite'.

• Faire suite: This phrase literally means 'to follow immediately after' or 'to intervene the day after'. It implies a direct succession or consequence. For example, if someone says 'Il doit le faire tout de suite', it translates to 'He has to do it immediately'.
• De suite vs. Tout de suite: This is a common point of confusion for learners of French.
  • De suite means 'consecutively', 'in a row', or 'one after another'. For instance, 'Je l'ai vu trois jours de suite' means 'I saw him three days in a row'.
  • Tout de suite means 'immediately' or 'right away'. This is the correct phrase to use when you mean 'in the instant that follows'. So, 'J'arrive tout de suite' means 'I'm coming right away'. It is important to note that using 'de suite' in the sense of 'immediately' is considered colloquial and should generally be avoided in formal contexts.

Frequently Asked Questions About Spatial Philosophy

What is the main distinction between Foucault’s historical analysis and the spatial approach of Deleuze and Guattari?

Foucault, while using spatial metaphors, often focused on the historical conditions and discontinuities of discursive formations (epistemes). Deleuze and Guattari, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, explicitly break with 19th-century historicism, prioritising a synchronous, spatial understanding of forces and processes, often termed 'geo-analysis', over linear historical narratives.

How does the concept of the rhizome challenge traditional thinking?

The rhizome challenges hierarchical, tree-like models of thought that assume a single origin or a fixed structure. Instead, it proposes a non-linear, multi-directional network with no central point, allowing for constant connections, disconnections, and reconfigurations. This encourages a more fluid, experimental approach to understanding reality.

What is an 'assemblage' in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy?

An assemblage is a dynamic configuration of heterogeneous elements (material, social, linguistic, technical, human, non-human) that come together and interact. It’s a way of understanding how various components connect and produce effects, emphasizing process and relationship over static entities. It's not just a collection, but a functioning machine or system.

Can you give an example of 'smooth' versus 'striated' space?

A desert or the open sea can be considered a smooth space: open, unmeasured, facilitating nomadic movement. A city grid or a cultivated field, with its defined paths, boundaries, and regulations, represents a striated space. The distinction is not absolute; spaces can be simultaneously smooth and striated, or one can transform into the other.

What is the significance of the 'war machine' in relation to the 'State apparatus'?

Deleuze and Guattari argue that the war machine is fundamentally external to and distinct from the State apparatus. The State aims to capture, control, and territorialise, while the war machine, often nomadic in origin, represents a force of deterritorialisation, resistance, and creative becoming. The interaction between these two forces is a central theme in their political philosophy.

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