The main aim of this essay is to bring out some important distinctions between the work of Deleuze and Guattari and what has come to be known as ‘cybertheory’ or ‘cyberculture’. After looking briefly at some of the themes that characterise the imaginary of cyberspace, the essay will assess the significance of the cybernetic inheritance of much contemporary cybertheory, since, as several commentators have claimed, cybertheory is founded upon the informational and communicational paradigm that emerges out of cybernetics in the post-war era. The essay will then move on to look at the way in which Deleuze's concept of the ‘virtual’ can be distinguished from Pierre Lévy's attempt – taking Deleuze's concept as a starting point – to conceptualise a general dynamic of virtualisation which is at work in contemporary societies. The closing section of the essay will focus on Deleuze's resistance to the informational/communicational paradigm.

It is in many respects not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari's work has been identified with aspects of cyberculture. For one thing, they seek to undermine the molar organisation of the organism, with its clearly defined and delineated body, in favour of a molecular plane of disorganisation. In an apparently analogous way, cybertheory often talks in terms of disrupting or even transcending the limits of the body. Also, the dissemination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari has coincided with the growth of the Internet as a ubiquitous, global social practice.

In order to address the issue of contemporary political cinema I will propose that contemporary cinema should be conceived as a speech-act in free indirect discourse. I will depart from Deleuze's observation that in the time-image the whole of cinema becomes a free indirect discourse, operating in reality (Deleuze 1989: 155). But I will also propose a more polemical reading of Deleuze's cinema books, arguing that there is a dialectical shift between the movement-image and the time-image, or, between First, Second and Third Cinema.

Cinema and the Masses

As Walter Benjamin wrote in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, film, because of its mechanical reproduction and therefore its relation to the masses, is fundamentally related to politics (Benjamin 1999a). When Benjamin wrote this article, two main political currencies were dominant. On the one hand, fascism used cinema to give the people a feeling of strength and beauty born of a remythologisation of the present, while at the same preserving property relations and power structures. Fascism rendered politics aesthetic. Communism, on the other hand, Benjamin argued, responded by politicising art. Eisenstein's Russian revolution films like Potemkin (1925) and October (1928) Benjamin considered fine examples of such politicised art.

From this one can conclude that, in a way, cinema is always political: either it makes the masses ‘absent minded’ as in fascism, or it can be used as a weapon in the emancipation of the people in the communist tradition. Although in contemporary audiovisual culture it is no longer possible to make these oppositional distinctions (I will come to that later) I will take the communist approach of cinema as a political weapon for the emancipation of the masses as a starting point for my discussion of political film.

Interestingly, the words of Elkana hauntingly echo those in Deuteronomy, the selfsame phrase underpinning the activities in restless synagogues worldwide during the festival of Purim. When the name of Amalek's descendant – Haman – is sounded everyone boos, hisses, makes noise with a greggar (noisemaker) and stamps their feet (many have the name of Haman written on the soles of their shoes so that when they stamp his name is simultaneously erased). Asserting the complexity of history, both Elkana and Purim festivities position history between two irreducible differences: forgetting and remembrance. During Purim, memory is kept in circulation as a problem taken up anew by each generation; the problem is not one that can be reduced to either the blotting out of Amalek's name, nor the call ‘Do not forget’. Simply put, each generation probes history with the question: how can we be inspired not crippled by memory? And this question is largely a problem of how to deterritorialise the monumentality of history, concomitantly invoking the double becoming of ‘singular memory’.

The 2004 US presidential election caused hearts to sink everywhere in the world. Time will tell if this is to be another American century, as the Vulcans in Washington intend, or a Chinese century, as some are already predicting, but in the short term at least the re-election of Bush is discouraging for those with hopes that it might be a World or Multilateral century, to say the least. The bloody insurgency in Iraq only strengthened the position of the ‘War President’, who rallied the electorate to ‘stay the course in Iraq’, giving him greater licence to continue his campaign of terror there and by implication elsewhere. At the time of the election the death toll of US soldiers was nearing a thousand with the number injured seven times that. To which toll one must add the haunting fact that of the 500,000 plus US servicemen and women who served in the First Gulf War some 325,000 are now on disability pensions suffering a variety of acute maladies generally attributed to the toxic cocktail of radiation from depleted uranium munitions and other pollutant chemicals from the hundreds of oil fires they were exposed to during their tour of duty. Those who fight in Iraq today can scarcely look forward to a healthier future given that it is effectively twice as irradiated now as it was in 1991.

Is it possible for a compatibility to exist between Althusser's well-known doctrine of the interpellation of the subject by the ideological apparatuses of the state and the theses regarding the assemblages of the state propounded by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus? Is there, more generally, a recognisable political subject whose ontological shape and character is limned in A Thousand Plateaus, even as it is ‘undone’ by Deleuze and Guattari? And is there a fundamental connection between this subject and the traditional metaphysical-epistemological subject that is also unravelled in A Thousand Plateaus? At first sight, the answers to these questions are probably going to be negative, though our ‘no’ will almost certainly have to be somewhat less emphatic where the second and third questions are concerned.

There are only a couple of references to Althusser in A Thousand Plateaus, but what is there indicates explicitly that Deleuze and Guattari consider Althusser's notion of the constitution of social individuals as subjects to be profoundly mistaken. To quote them:

Although in previous writings on postzionism (Silberstein 1999), I drew my primary critical tools of analysis from Foucault, I had already begun to sense the importance of Deleuze and Guattari to my project. Applying such concepts as discourse, power relations, regimes of truth and power/knowledge, I analysed both Zionism and postzionism in terms of discourse and the debates between zionists and postzionists as a conflict of discourses. Over the years, however, I have increasingly sensed the inadequacy of that representation. Through a continued reading of Deleuze and Guattari, I have come to see ways in which their concepts move the discussion beyond the place enabled by my application of Foucault. Some of my own reservations have been cogently stated by Deleuze:

Colonisation was not a topic that figured largely in Deleuze's work. He made only occasional passing remarks about it, such as those in a 1982 interview with Elias Sanbar. Here, in discussing an analogy drawn between the Palestinians and Native Americans, he contrasts the position of colonised peoples who are retained on their territory in order to be exploited with the position of those who are driven out of their territory altogether. The Palestinian people, like the indigenous inhabitants of North America, are a people driven out (Deleuze 1998: 26). This analogy is limited in a number of respects. First, as Deleuze himself notes, the Palestinians, unlike the Native Americans, do have an Arab world outside of Israel from which they can draw support. Second, like indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, neither the Native Americans nor the Palestinians are completely in the situation of refugees. Rather they are peoples who are often displaced from their traditional homelands but who, whether displaced or not, remain captives of the colonial state established on their territories. In this sense, they are subject to ‘internal’ colonisation of the kind practised in North America, Australia and parts of Africa rather than the ‘external’ colonisation practised by European powers in other parts of Africa, Asia and the South Pacific.

I have argued elsewhere that, despite their relative lack of concern with colonial issues, Deleuze and Guattari do provide conceptual resources for thinking about the problems of internal colonisation and decolonisation (Patton 2000: 120–31). Their theory of the state as apparatus of capture is especially helpful in understanding the mechanisms by which new territories and peoples are subsumed under the sovereignty of existing states.

The fate of an oeuvre

The legacy of Duns Scotus' works is a complicated affair due to a number of different causes. His life was short. He studied and taught in all the theological faculties the universities of the thirteenth century possessed. He spent the last year of his life in the important academic center that Cologne had already become. The extraordinary brevity of his life is combined with a unique range of work. The specific nature of university education in these times, the stature of the University of Paris, the policy of the Franciscan Order and the academic legislation of the University of Paris transformed Duns Scotus' life. Unexpected events in his life led to the unique fact that he even acted as sententiarius in all the theological faculties he studied at. The period of Duns Scotus' theological productivity and his baccalaureate years (1297–1306) almost coincided. He died suddenly at Cologne, forty-two years of age. The world of the Franciscans was desolate. The early death of brother John in 1308 was felt in the whole of academic Europe. One of the brightest stars of the thought of mankind had gone dim.

The death of Duns Scotus was the end of an improbable individual history of thinking. His personal fate was an institutional disaster. The individual thinker John Duns managed to absorb the whole of the philosophia christiana and systematic theology but managed also to reconstruct it from a new semantic, logical and ontological perspective.

Introduction

In antiquity, ethical interests were different from what they are now in Western thought. In Greek philosophia, ethics is more something given than a set of problems and issues to be reflected on, because the connection between nature and customs, commands, precepts, or law is intrinsic. What is at stake here depends on the ontological impact of the ideas of being essential and reality. If natural law is invoked as a standard, what kind of rule is to be invoked? Does the validity of this rule consist in being invoked or is reality as such law-like and natural? The non-Christian type of natural law is clearly expressed by the Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43 BC): true law is right reason in agreement with nature. It is of universal application, unchangeable and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. We may put the key notions of law, reason, truth, and nature within the contexts of Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoic or Neoplatonist thought and we find that still the same pattern of absolute reality obtains, although the nature of this reality is interpreted in different ways.

The decisive point is whether being natural is seen as an ethical or political rule in its own right or nature itself is a kind of society and social reality truly natural. According to ancient thought, everything is necessary, law-like and natural.

Throughout the course of this book, I have stressed the importance of enabling citizens to shape their own relation to the polity. Correspondingly, I have also stressed the need to create representative institutions that are open and responsive to the full diversity of interests and opinions in society. This is not to suggest that these ideals can be met in all instances. In divided societies, the threat of violence will often mean that ethnic claims will have to take priority over other kinds of claims, at least in the first instance. However, in so far as the received view that democracy requires citizens to share a sense of common national identity is correct, greater space must be made in the longer run for alternative forms and avenues of political expression. That space allows citizens to engage politically along non-ethnic lines, if and when they choose to do so. This is not to deny the saliency of ethnicity to political life in divided societies. On the contrary, once ethnic groups have become highly politicised, once they have demanded rights and protections as an ethnic group, nothing short of an institutional solution will meet those demands. Nevertheless, the point remains that citizens will not be able to think of themselves as sharing a common national identity unless there is some common basis upon which they can engage with one another on non-ethnic terms.

Civil society provides one such basis. More specifically, the various voluntary associations that it contains enable citizens from a wide diversity of social, economic and political backgrounds to come together and deliberate about issues such as the provision of public services, gender equality, health care, education, the environment and so forth. Civil issues are different to ethnic issues in the sense that they cannot be reduced to the interests of some particular ethnic group, but instead pertain to citizens in general.

Introduction

Duns Scotus' philosophy has many ontological solutions which arise from theological dilemmas and the tension originates from the familiar modal limitations of conceptual structures at home in traditional thought. At the end of the thirteenth century, there is an innovative mixture of logica modernorum and theologia antiqua. John Duns' faith, the follower of the poverello from Italy, cannot be accounted for in terms of semantic, logical, and ontological presuppositions which are basic to any form of necessitarianism. When one sticks to such a type of logic, semantics, or ontology, the theory of divine properties and the doctrine of the incarnation become involved in glaring inconsistencies. The language games of Christian faith, philosophical theology, and church dogmatics are utterly incoherent if Aristotelian logics and ontologies were right. This is the general background of many philosophical digressions Scotus wove into his theological expositions. His theory of transcendent terms (transcendentia) is a major illustration.

Scotus' ontology, or metaphysics, is multifaceted. §7.2 discusses the subject matter of ontology. A host of themes are then reviewed separately: the main lines of his ontology of contingency (§7.3), the neutral proposition (§7.4), essence and existence (§7.5), real, rational, ideal and eternal relations (§7.6), universals (§7.7), conceptual univocity (§7.8), transcendent terms (§7.9), and, finally, the dilemma of rival interpretations of potentia (§7.10).

The subject matter of ontology

The motto of the Prologue in Duns' Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicae Aristotelis (Quaestiones Metaphysicae) is: All people desire knowledge by nature.

Now that we have identified the basic conceptual terrain within which this book is located, it is time to turn our attention to the central issue with which it is concerned. According to John Stuart Mill, a democracy cannot succeed unless its citizens share a common national identity. This chapter begins by highlighting two main reasons why this is so – in the absence of a common national identity, citizens (1) will not see themselves as bound by a single political authority or (2) be motivated to do their part in carrying the burdens of self-government. I argue, however, that although Mill's basic claim has troubling implications for divided societies aiming to make the transition from conflict to democracy, a more complete assessment of this issue needs to distinguish between two main forms that national identity can take – civic and ethnic. In some divided societies, the difficulty is not so much that citizens do not share a sufficiently strong sense of common nationality, but that they have not been able to balance the need to recognise competing ethnic identities with the need to create an over-arching civic allegiance to the state.

Although ethnicity is an enormously complex phenomenon, two major approaches to its study predominate: primordialism, which stresses ideas of kinship and descent, and constructivism, which stresses context and fluidity. Ontologically, constructivism is the more convincing view. In a world marked by increasing social diversity, constructivism also has the more normatively attractive consequences.