Order and Chaos

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari suggest that all thinking is a way of bringing order out of chaos, whether it takes place in the form of art, philosophy or science. Each of these distinct ways of thinking imposes its own kind of order in accordance with the different materials and methods it brings to the task: percepts and affects in the case of art, concepts in the case of philosophy, functions in the case of science. Order is what protects us from chaos. It enables us to recognise ourselves, each other and the world in which we live. In the absence of the order brought to our perceptions by the pure concepts of human understanding, Kant argued, we would be confronted with nothing more than a disorderly manifold or multiplicity of such perceptions. Order among our percepts and concepts enables us not merely to survive but to conceive and pursue projects which give meaning and purpose to our lives.

However, order can also imprison us in fixed and immobile patterns of thought and action, inhibiting creativity or change. Deleuze and Guattari cite a text of D. H. Lawrence on the source of poetry:

The aim of this chapter is threefold. First we wish to explicate our understanding of the Deleuzian understanding of ‘the social’. Then we employ our explication in an experimental mapping of the field of social theories by means of a diagram based on two orthogonal axes: a vertical continuum between order and chaos and a horizontal continuum between purity and heterogeneity. The result of this mapping is a mobile perspective on ‘the social’ and on social theories showing a dynamic field of ‘forces’ that strive to push social theories across their pre-established boundaries and to pull them back. Finally we turn to our third aim, which is to reflect on the following question: what happens to critique, when the mobile nomadism of Deleuzian critique seems to be captured by the control society of contemporary capitalism?

We hope that the chapter as a whole will convince the reader of the powers of a Deleuzian approach to transcend the limitations of the various visions of ‘the social’ provided by social theories as well as to plug these visions into each other.

The ‘Society without Organs’, Molar and Molecular Segmentation and Lines of Flight

The body without organs (BwO) is ‘what remains when you take everything away’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 150) from organised, articulated, stratified, functionally integrated bodies with differentiated organs. The BwO is ‘nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0’ (ibid.: 150).

Gilles Deleuze is a philosopher of revolution and may even be a revolutionary thinker. Revolution is certainly the milieu of his thinking, where he breaks things open.

Whatever their target, his critiques have nothing to do with understanding, nor with attentive or thoughtful action. Instead, Deleuze misunderstands things and these misunderstandings have rules – that is, they repeat. Repetition sets things in motion, transforming them, and Deleuze's metaphysics is constructed for this virtual context of movement and change.

Here understanding offers only a weak mode of thought because understanding is always bound to its historical contingencies. The concept of change, by contrast, which grounds Deleuze's critique, must be radically distinguished from the concept of history. It is in this difference that the effective revolutionary nature of his work may be found.

Revolution is Change

What characterises revolution? In one word: duration. And duration is always something that resists, something that endures. Resistance always has a poetic aspect. Duration goes beyond the limits of the linear or spatial conception of time. In this sense revolutions are monuments of collective action, they are aere perennius, but without spatial existence. There is no room for them. Revolutions exist only in memory, in time. This means that revolution never ‘is’ but rather ‘goes on’. It is an event in time. This temporal, enduring dimension of revolution is also its metaphysical dimension.

Demand the Impossible

We begin within a specific social field constituted by a process of organisational change, which was initiated by the current policy of deregulating the electricity industry in Europe. As we join the story, the quiet days of monopoly are coming to an end at ELEC, a Danish utilities provider. We focus on how employees are produced as subjects in such a context, how they become subjects. We have followed developments at ELEC during a three-year period; we have approached them from the perspective of the emotions, frustrations and struggles, the comments and hesitations of its casualties, which crowd the really affective movements of the change process. To address and analyse this social field, we want to produce an exploratory politics of change. Such a venture, as Brian Massumi has noted, is not without risk.

‘We pay a heavy price for capitalising on our basic animal mobility’ writes Edward Casey and that price is ‘the loss of places that can serve as lasting scenes of experience and reflection and memory’ (Casey 1993: xiii). This loss is usually blamed on the proliferation of generic spaces – or, ‘non-places’, to use Marc Augé's (1995) phrase – like malls, airports, freeways, office parks, and so forth, which prioritise cost and function over look and feel. Even so, Casey still wants to argue that transitory spaces like airports retain a certain ‘placial’ quality that gives meaning to contemporary existence. In contrast, writers like Augé (he is by no means alone – Augé himself attributes the key elements of his idea of non-place to de Certeau and Foucault) have in much recent writing on space sought to elucidate this new type of generic space's distinct lack of placiality. These two positions are, however, simply two sides of the same conceptual coin – Augé does not conceive of a new type of place, he uses a traditional model of place to decry the seemingly soulless transformations to the built environment he witnesses everywhere in the developed world. By the same token, Casey acknowledges that these new spaces appear placeless, but that is only because one isn't looking at them in the right way. His work then seeks to restore their seemingly lost placiality. The interest of bringing Deleuze and Guattari into this debate resides in the fact that they do not hold that the idea of place continues to be relevant.

The title of this chapter was suggested to me some time ago by my best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: Alain Badiou. The idea was to use the occasion to pursue our dispute – or chicane, to use a favourite expression of his – a dispute instigated by the publication in 1997 of Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1999).

Let it be noted in passing that this dispute prolonged a problematic that I had previously examined in a book-intervention entitled Of the Impossibility of Phenomenology: On Contemporary French Philosophy, published in 1995. With regard to the topic at hand, I argued that the philosophical field with a grip on our present – in other words, contemporary philosophy as a political ontology of the present – could be, and must be, thought starting from the idea of a maximal ontological tension between Deleuze and Badiou.

We have left behind the epoch of discipline to enter that of control. Gilles Deleuze described in a concise but effective way this passage from disciplinary societies to the societies of control (Deleuze 1990). He provided us with this historical reconstruction by setting out from the dynamics of difference and repetition, thereby generating new interpretations of the birth and development of capitalism. One of his most important theoretical innovations concerns the question of multiplicity: individuals and classes are nothing but the capture, integration and differentiation of multiplicity.

It is not only the phenomenological description of this evolution which interests me here, but the method employed. For Deleuze, the constitutive process of both capitalist institutions and multiplicity can be understood only by calling upon the concept of the virtual and its modalities of actualisation and effectuation. The passage from disciplinary societies to the societies of control cannot be understood by starting out from the transformations of capitalism. We must begin instead from the power of the multiplicity.

Marxists generally accept Foucault's description of disciplinary societies, provided that it is regarded merely as a complement to the Marxian analysis of the capitalist mode of production. But though Foucault acknowledged his debt to Marx (his theory of discipline was doubtless inspired by the Marxian description of the organisation of space and time in the factory), he understood the confinement of workers according to a very different logic.

In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault suggests that Deleuze and Guattari answer questions less concerned with why things might be so, and more concerned with how to proceed. The procession that he identifies is the employment of desire in political action against (at least) the ‘fascism in all of us, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (Foucault 1983: xiii).

Fascism comes in many incarnations. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) enumerate, this includes ‘[r]ural fascism and city or neighbourhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school and office’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 214). It is the fascism of the office and the organisation that we wish to address in this chapter. We understand this fascism to operate on what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a ‘molecular’ level. It is, in other words, a fascism that is already active prior to its organisation or normalisation on the ‘molar’ level of the state. It is, therefore, a kind of microfascism which Deleuze and Guattari understand as ‘cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 215). This does not, of course, entail that particular organisations cannot be ‘molar’ or normalising forces. It is rather to acknowledge also that in organisational settings fascism has its own rhizomatics.

The most critical question which a philosophical analysis of social ontology must answer is the linkage between the micro and the macro. Whether one conceives of these levels as ‘the individual and society’ or as ‘agency and structure’ or even as ‘choice and order’, an answer to the question of their mutual relations basically determines the kinds of social entities whose existence one is committed to believe. One family of solutions to the micro–macro problem relies on a reductionist strategy, either reducing the macro to the micro (microreductionism) or vice versa, reducing the micro to the macro (macroreductionism). The first strategy is often illustrated with classical or neo-classical microeconomics in which the key social entities are rational decision-makers making optimising choices constrained only by their budgets and ranked preferences. But the branches of microsociology born in the 1960s (ethnomethodology and social constructivism) are also microreductionist even if their conception of agency is quite different, based on phenomenology and stressing routine behaviour rather than rational choice (Garfinkel 2002; Berger and Luckmann 1967). Microreductionism does not imply disbelief in the existence of society as a whole, only a conception of it that makes it into an epiphenomenon: society is simply an aggregate or sum of either many rational agents or many phenomenological experiences shaped by daily routine. In other words, this macro entity does not have emergent properties of its own.

The concept of nomad citizenship developed here derives from the concepts of nomadism and nomadology expounded by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). As I have explained elsewhere, this concept of nomadism should not be understood primarily in reference to nomadic peoples, despite the familiar connotations of the term. Rather, nomadism as Deleuze and Guattari understand it can refer to a wide range of activities, including ‘building bridges or cathedrals or rendering judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology’ (ibid.: 366). In the same vein, I will in what follows discuss nomad science, nomad music, nomad games – and eventually nomad management and nomad citizenship. We begin with nomad science, since it is a concept Deleuze and Guattari develop at some length by contrasting it with what they call royal or state science.

Nomad Science

Much could be said about these two ‘versions’ of science; for our purposes, two points are essential. One is the difference between the principles of ‘following’ and ‘reproducing’ that characterise the two kinds of science; the other involves the social consequences that follow from this difference.

Royal science proceeds by extracting invariant (‘universal’) laws from the variations of matter, in line with the binary opposition of form and matter: matter is essentially variable, but ‘obeys’ formal laws that are universal. Reproducing the results of a successful experiment is crucial to establishing the veracity and universality of the hypothesised law that the experiment was designed to test.

In 1960 Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline coined the term cyborg to refer to (nothing less than) an ‘exogenously extended organisational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously’ (Clynes and Kline 1995 [1960]: 30–1). In so doing, they simultaneously heralded at least four decades of speculation on the post-human, and sought to close down this potentiality to effectuate a homeostaticrepetition of Homo sapiens. The exogenous extension of which Clynes and Kline spoke was the technological extension of a biological organism to enable its continued survival in the hostile environ of space. Whilst their first experiments involved the ubiquitous lab-rat, Clynes and Kline's ultimate goal was the merging of high technology and a human body to produce the ultimate astronaut. Whilst apparently radical, insofar as it broached the boundaries of the human body and took technics out of humans’ conscious control, at its core Clynes and Kline's work was conservative.

Deleuze has argued that with a few exceptions such as Bergson, philosophers, despite their concern with concepts, have neglected the concept of philosophy itself. If so, then this is even more true for organisation theorists, who have been obsessed with what organisations do, but have taken the concept of organisation largely for granted. Again with few exceptions (e.g. Cooper 1986; Cooper and Burrell 1988) they have rarely asked what organisation is, or questioned the ontological status of organisation. Yet although much of Deleuze's work, especially that with Guattari, is about organisation, especially the economic organisation of capital and the conditions of production and signification, much of this is implied or inferred, or at a remote level of abstraction. A search of the indices of critical commentaries on Deleuze yields only minimal reference to the concept ‘organisation’, if it appears at all. So the aim of this chapter is to progress the project of interrogating the ontological status of organisation, by rendering explicit the idea of organisation that can be read implicitly within – or read into – the work of Deleuze (cf. Knights 2004).

Certain commentators undertaking the task of ontological interrogation (e.g. Burrell 1997, 1998; Chia 1999) have argued that organisation is the opposite of change, with change as pure flow and process. They have argued against linearity as deathly, a stoppage of the innate vitality of process, and for non-linear conceptualisations of change, such as Deleuze and Guattari's (1983, 1984, 1987) rhizome and Bergson's durée.