Deleuze and the Physically Active Body 9781138676732, 9781315543789

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Deleuze and the Physically Active Body

This volume examines Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy as it relates to the study of the physically active body. It explores theoretical and practical examples of how the physically active body can be examined as a material, social, political, and cultural entity using a Deleuzian perspective. Examining topics such as, the formation of thought within a capitalist system; sport, exercise, and dance as cultural arrangements; researching the physically active body from a Deleuzian perspective; and Deleuze on Foucault, this book shows ways of investigating the moving body as an agent for initiating social change. This is fascinating reading for students and researchers working in the fields of the Sociology of Sport, Sport and Politics, and Sport and Social Theory. Pirkko Markula is Professor of Socio-­cultural Studies of Physical Activity at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include social analyses of dance, exercise, and sport in which she has employed several theoretical lenses ranging from critical, cultural studies research to Foucault and Deleuze. She is also a contemporary dancer and choreographer.

Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and Society

Gender Diversity in European Sport Governance Edited by Agnes Elling, Jorid Hovden and Annelies Knoppers Figurational Research in Sport, Leisure and Health Edited by Dominic Malcolm and Philippa Velija The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts Raúl Sánchez García Sport in Scandinavia and the Nordic Countries Edited by Ken Green, Thorsteinn Sigurjónsson and Eivind Åsrum Skille Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education How to Make a Difference Edited by Richard Pringle, Håkan Larsson and Göran Gerdin Soccer and the Amer­i can Dream Ian Lawrence Social Justice in Fitness and Health Bodies Out of Sight Laura Azzarito The World Anti-­D oping Code Fit for Purpose? Lovely Dasgupta Deleuze and the Physically Active Body Pirkko Markula

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/sport/ series/RRSCS

Deleuze and the Physically Active Body

Pirkko Markula

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Pirkko Markula to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-67673-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-54378-9 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

To Jim

Contents



Preface Acknowledgments



Introduction

viii xiv 1

1 The Strata: The Formation of Thought Within a Capitalist System

18

2 The Assemblage: Sport, Exercise, and Dance as Cultural Arrangements

39

3 The Rhizome: Researching the Physically Active Body from a Deleuzian Perspective

62

4 The Body without Organs: A Purely Intensive Body

83

5 Becoming: Beyond Identity Politics

104

6 Affect: Understanding Force

124

7 Connecting: Deleuze on Foucault

148

8 Topology of Deterritorialization: Deleuzian Approach to the Moving Body and Social Change

169



182

Index

Preface

I came to know Deleuze’s work through Foucault. As a Foucauldian scholar of the physically active body, I was intrigued by Foucault’s (1980) famous prediction that “[p]erhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian” (p. 165). Who was this thinker whom Foucault credited so very highly? I wondered. My initial fascination grew into a line of work that has evolved from a feminist critique of the narrow definitions of feminine and masculine bodies in physical activity to ethnographic works to change fitness industry practices. To recount how I decided to write an entire book on Deleuze, in what follows I briefly draw my trajectory in becoming a Deleuzian scholar of the physically activity body. As a feminist researcher, I was introduced more closely to Deleuze by feminist scholars Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, Dianne Currier, and Dorothea Olkowski. Their readings inspired my examination of feminine and masculine identity construction in sport. In my early work, for example, I (Markula, 2004) employed Deleuze’s concept of becoming-­woman to examine “the devalued otherness” of Victoria Beckham, the wife of famous English footballer David Beckham. I asserted that Deleuze’s theory offered “a positive site for the redefinition of female subjectivity within/through football” (p.  160). Through a media reading, I attempted to identify how Victoria Beckham diverted from “traditional” femininity to conclude that she became woman, not through who she was, but through what her performing body did: dancing and singing. Victoria further magnified her performative effect, I argued, by creating an assemblage with David’s performing body. With her rather “camp” performance style, I concluded, Victoria broke down the limitations of femininity. With Zoe Avner, I continued my feminist inspired work on identity formation with a reading of Finnish ski-­jumper Matti Nykänen, a fallen superhero (Markula & Avner, 2013). Inspired particularly by Tamsin Lorraine’s (2008) work, we used Deleuze’s concept of faciality trait to examine how Nykänen’s career was presented in the media. Our analysis demonstrated that Nykänen remained a media celebrity by oscillating between a masculine face (a dare-­devil competitive athlete with multiple marriages, heavy drinking, and jail sentences) and a feminine face (careers as a singer and striptease artist). Although not a “normal” masculine face, Nykänen continued to appear in the media aligned

Preface   ix

with the majoritarian line of masculinity. While illustrating my continued development as a Deleuzian scholar, both of these works were based on media readings. As an ethnographer, Deleuze’s belief that seeds for thinking differently can be found by examining the micro contexts of everyday life inspired me to experiment with how his rich, but complex, thought system might be used to inform research in such locations. As a socio-­cultural scholar of the active body, Deleuze’s concept, the Body without Organs (BwO), attracted my attention since my earliest acquaintance with his work. Involving the body more closely into the research process seemed to hold great potential for thinking differently about how physical activity can be practiced more ethically. I (Markula, 2004) introduced the BwO that I, at the time, understood to denote the body before it becomes defined by science into an “organism,” already in my study of Victoria Beckham. The BwO, for me, represented the dismantling of a feminine identity, yet I argued, this did not mean a rejection of femininity, but a sensitivity to its “micro-­destratifications” in society. Thus, my conclusion that Victoria, through her performance of a stylized appearance—a type of microstratification of femininity—broadened the definition of femininity in her cultural context. A deeper engagement with A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) guided me towards further complexities of the BwO. Invigorated by this expanded theoretical world, I began experimenting with the challenges of creating my own BwO. My first attempt at creating my own BwO was located within the context of contemporary dance. As a contemporary dancer, but also a researcher, I saw the potential for finding my BwO in dance choreography (Markula, 2006b). This was also my first attempt to unite these two separate identities in an examination of how research results can be represented through a dance performance. In this work, I attempted to broaden the limitations of feminine identity by employing the BwO to free myself from the bindings of what Deleuze’s termed the three dominant strata. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “steps” for building a BwO, I choreographed a solo piece that I then performed to several different types of audiences. Despite a mixture of reactions, some of which endorsed, quite closely, “traditional” femininity, I concluded that “discovering the possibilities of Deleuzian theory for feminist research served as a vital impetus for my reassessment of dance performance as research” (p. 23). My second attempt at creating my own BwO (Markula, 2006a) involved transcending the limitations of feminine identity in the world of fitness. As a certified Pilates instructor, I wanted to endorse different type of exercise practices from the oppressive search for the narrowly defined ideal body so common in the fitness industry. I first concentrated on theorizing how I, as an instructor, can build a BwO before finally attempting to teach a class informed by my Deleuzian approach. Instead of the BwO, however, I (Markula, 2011) now employed Deleuze’s concept, the fold. I had now read Deleuze’s (2006) book Foucault and deeply influenced by this reading, I was particularly drawn to the

x   Preface

concept of fold that engaged ways of thinking differently, not only affirming or critiquing the current situation. Folding, I believed, would help me to actually create different exercise practices and through them, change how femininity was endorsed in many Pilates classes. As I was a Pilates instructor and a feminist researcher, I planned to make the change myself. I designed a feminist intervention that would fold my theoretical thinking into my actual Pilates practice. To do this, I first problematized the disciplinary techniques—space, time, movement, and language practices—that I identified as constructing the ideal feminine body and then created different practices informed by my Deleuzian approach. Looking back now, this teaching experiment did enable me to instigate changes informed by social theory in the actual exercise context. However, the way I used folding appeared somewhat limited by my attempt to involve movement practices informed by social theory. This, nevertheless, was a start: Deleuze’s work, I felt, could help me include the material body into my research practice as a force for social change. I continued to experiment with fitness instruction, but now combined the works of Latour, Foucault, and Deleuze (Markula, 2014). The recent new materialist turn in the social sciences and humanities seemed to advance further connections between Deleuze’s thought and the physically active body. Consequently, I (Markula, 2019) have argued that a new materialist re-­reading of the moving body can provide avenues for transcending the limitations of humanism to explore various material processes through methodologies that capture their interaction with other elements of the social world. Consequently, I suggest that Deleuze’s work can occupy a central role in these analyses. Embracing Deleuze’s work has enabled me to problematize and expand my theoretical thinking about how physically active bodies have been divided based on identity categories. It has helped me to experiment with how social theory can be used to create different ethics for fitness instruction. Even more visibly, Deleuze’s work has facilitated my experimentation with alternative ways of representing research through several dance performance ethnographies. Currently, my graduate students are developing further standards for theory driven dance performance ethnography. Although I have benefited from Deleuze’s insights in several ways, I am, naturally, not the only one inspired by his work to examine the physically active body in contemporary society. It is exciting to see an increasing variety of readings, interpretations, and applications of Deleuze’s concepts into analyses that have broadened our horizons of what diverse sporting, exercising, and dancing bodies can do to illuminate the current cultural condition. Although delighted with these exploratory works, I felt a need for a further shared understanding of how Deleuze’s innovative philosophy can benefit multiple ways of investigating physical culture. In addition, the more familiar I had become with Deleuze’s work, the less I felt that I actually comprehended or fully appreciated the uniqueness of his thinking. In fact, I had become acutely aware of the shortcomings of my previous work. As my previous Deleuzian inspired research

Preface   xi

appeared in journal articles and book chapters, it, necessarily, was based on a few concepts instead of a more holistic account of Deleuze’s rhizomatic philosophy. As a result, I have realized that I have become acquainted with his tool kit by taking out and using one tool at the time. Consequently, while I offer some of my own work as examples of a Deleuzian approach to investigating the physically active body, I realize that they do not, by any means, represent a thorough understanding of how Deleuze’s concepts should have been used in connection with his entire rhizomatic thinking. In addition, although Deleuze intended his theory (and its concepts) to be used as investigative tools, he would be unlikely to endorse a careless application of his conceptual arsenal that was created for the very specific purpose of thinking outside of what he labelled traditional philosophy. As a result of these shortcomings in my own Deleuzian scholarship, I proposed an ambitious and high-­risk mission that was likely to entail an enormous amount of work and effort to comprehend Deleuze’s philosophical repertoire and then “translate” it for possible use for the socio-­cultural study of the physically active body. When my proposal was accepted, I knew little of the confusion, crises, and self-­critique that I would encounter during this process. For example, when I slowly negotiated my way through Deleuze’s philosophical arguments, I encountered several errors and saw many oversights in my own work. Despite a more thorough reading of Deleuze’s texts, I struggled to capture the meanings of many of his concepts—this presented a particular challenge as Deleuze encouraged his readers to let go of interpreting or understanding his work. How was I to render his work meaningful for researchers of the physically active body without understanding it myself? And what happened to my feminism? How could I continue to look to change the ideal feminine body when Deleuze seemed to advocate that the entire idea of identity construction is embedded in traditional philosophical thinking? At this point, Deleuze would probably have recommended that I take a break and laugh a little for laughing and dancing “beyond yourself,” Deleuze affirmed, means opening yourself up to forces of life that unsettle reactive formations (Beckman, 2017, p.  101). My process of choreographing Deleuze’s concepts and the physically active body, while exhausting, was well worth it in the end. Deleuze, of course, wrote several books himself. He also commented on his own criteria for writing a book that is worth reading. To be meaningful, a book, first, should address an error in previous thinking or understanding. As an example, Deleuze (1995) cited Foucault’s contention of the death of man that was misunderstood to mean a disregard of human rights at the time in France. This was one error that he aimed to rectify in his book, Foucault (Deleuze, 2006). Second, a worthwhile book should address a possible oversight in previous thinking or understanding. Deleuze often wrote about philosophers (e.g., Nietzsche, Leibnitz, or Bergson) whose work he perceived having been overlooked, yet deeply influential and profoundly useful. Finally, a book should introduce new concepts based on correcting errors and addressing oversights.

xii   Preface

When read against these criteria, Deleuze, in his own work, invariably developed new concepts that were needed to pave the way for more diverse ways of thinking. Although Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994) reserved creating concepts as the primary task for philosophers, as a social scientist, I, nevertheless, hope to continue benefiting from his conceptual tool kit in my analyses of the material and the social in the contemporary world. I further illuminate these possibilities throughout this book. My journey through Deleuze’s notoriously complex texts has been a labor of great discovery that has significantly increased my appreciation of his work. This closer acquaintance, however, has brought greater hesitation and caution of how his work can and should be used for social science examinations of the physically activity body. Following Massumi (1992), I have continued to ask throughout my writing: How can Deleuze’s thought system work for me, if at all? This is a question also endorsed by Deleuze: His empiricism was meant for use, but not without problematizing the dominant rational philosophical and humanist “doxa.” Only then can we be free to think differently to initiate social change. With this book, I invite readers to join my dancing beyond myself to become open to Deleuze’s transformative thought and examine how it can inform mapping, critiquing, and changing the social and cultural conditions in which physically active bodies practice.

References Beckman, F. (2017). Gilles Deleuze. London: Reaktion Books. Deleuze, G. (1995). Life as a work of art. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 94–101). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2006). Foucault. London: Continuum Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy. London: Verso. Foucault, M. (1980). Theatrum philosophicum. In D.  F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-­memory, practice (pp. 165–196). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lorraine, T. (2008). Feminist lines of flight from the majoritarian subject. Deleuze Studies, 2, 60–82. Markula, P. (2004). “Cute with vague feminist gender shift”: Posh and Becks united. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Manchester United: An interdisciplinary study (pp.  160–172). London: Routledge. Markula, P. (2006a). Deleuze and the Body without Organs: Disreading the fit feminine identity. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 30, 29–44. Markula, P. (2006b). The dancing Body without Organs: Deleuze, femininity and performing research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12, 3–27. Markula, P. (2011). “Folding”: A feminist intervention in mindful fitness. In E. Kennedy & P. Markula (Eds.), Women and exercise: The body, health and consumerism (pp. 60–78). New York, NY: Routledge. Markula, P. (2014). The moving body and social change. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 14(5), 471–482.

Preface   xiii Markula, P. (2019). What is new about new materialism for sport sociology? Reflections on body, movement, and culture. Sociology of Sport Journal, 36, 1–11. Markula, P., & Avner, Z. (2013). Bad landing: Charting the gold and criminal records of Finnish ski jumper, Matti Nykänen. In L. Wenner (Ed.), Fallen sport heroes, media and celebrity culture (pp. 120–134). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all my fellow scholars who encouraged and supported me during the process of writing this book. I would like extend my gratitude to Jim Denison whose patience, support, nourishment, intellectual curiosity, and impeccable editing skills made writing this book possible.

Introduction

Gilles Deleuze was born in 1925 in Paris, France. He was the second son of engineer Louis Deleuze and his wife Odette and his middle class family was later described as conservative, bourgeois, and even uncultivated by his biographers (Beckman, 2017; Dosse, 2010). While Deleuze did not consider discussions of his childhood “very rewarding” (Beckman, 2017, p.  17), we do have some details of his early years. When Deleuze was fifteen, France was occupied by the Nazis. While spending the war years in the relative safety of Normandy, these years also left a permanent mark on Deleuze whose older brother Georges fought in the Resistance, was captured by the Germans, and died on the way to a concentration camp. Hailed as a war hero by his parents, Georges’ memory constantly overshadowed Gilles. In Normandy, nevertheless, Deleuze, who previously had been “a bored young man” (Beckman, 2017, p. 17), became inspired by literary scholar Pierre Halbwachs. This interest in literature, however, was overtaken by a fascination with philosophy upon Deleuze’s return to Paris to attend high school. Deleuze continued his studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne. Although Deleuze descrined the atmosphere at the Sorbonne as “claustrophobic” and found himself being “bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy” (Beckman, 2017, p. 21), he completed his studies with a certificate to teach philosophy in 1948 (Dosse, 2010). In between his graduation and his doctoral defence, Deleuze held teaching positions at different high schools and universities before taking an assistant professorship at the Sorbonne in 1957. He remained there until 1960 when he was appointed as researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientific. In 1964, he began teaching at the University of Lyon. While teaching in Lyon, Deleuze prepared his doctoral thesis that he defended in 1968–1969 at the Sorbonne. In 1969, Deleuze gained a permanent position at the experimental Université Paris-­VIII in Vincennes where he gave weekly seminars until his retirement in 1987 (Dosse, 2010; Beckman, 2017). Deleuze married Denise Paul Grandjouan (“Fanny”) in 1956 and they had two children, Julian and Emilie. This sounds like an ordinary academic life, but then again, Deleuze (1995d) remarked that “[a]cademics’ lives are seldom interesting” (p. 137). In his lifetime, Deleuze was not an internationally celebrated scholar unlike his contemporaries

2   Introduction

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Deleuze seldom travelled and while Foucault and Derrida regularly taught at universities in the United States, Deleuze visited the United States only once. Neither was Deleuze a well-­known political activist like his collaborator Felix Guattari. While he supported student activities in 1968, he was a member the Prison Information Group with Foucault, and wrote several articles regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, Deleuze preferred to think of himself primarily as a philosopher who created political change by changing how thought is thought. “Philosophy,” he believed, “fights a war without battles, a guerrilla campaign” against the “powers” such as religions, states, capitalism, science, the law, public opinion, or television (Deleuze, 1995a, p. vii) to dismantle existing knowledge structures. Only through such critique can a different type of society emerge. To succeed in their battles Deleuze added, philosophers, nevertheless, should not appear as “wonderfully cultivated” “intellectuals” with “views on everything” (Deleuze, 1995d, p. 137), but focus only on what they are “actually working on” (p. 137). Despite his apparent ordinariness, Deleuze was, of course, exceptional in several ways. As a philosopher, Deleuze’s sharp intelligence was already acknowledged at high school (Beckman, 2017; Dosse, 2010). By the time of his Ph.D. defence, he was an established scholar having written several books. So much so that his examination committee was apprehensive about the event because Deleuze was a more advanced scholar than any of them (Dosse, 2010). In France, he was generally considered as one of the leading philosophical figures during his lifetime although it took the English-­speaking world several decades to embrace his work. In addition to being a brilliant and innovative philosopher, he (like Foucault) was a captivating and inspirational teacher whose lectures drew hundreds of students to watch the philosophical drama played by Deleuze in his classes (Dosse, 2010). Besides his dramatic and emotional delivery, Deleuze aimed to bring philosophy close to his students’ lives by using examples from everyday life including sport (Dosse, 2010). As a person, Deleuze was viewed as an affable man who did not lose his temper and to whom humour and laughter were extremely important (Beckman, 2017; Dosse, 2010). What contributed to Deleuze’s achievements as an exceptional thinker was possibly his (ill)health that also could have been added, painfully, to his interest in the body and health as philosophical problems. In his youth, Deleuze had suffered from tuberculosis that was thought to have been cured. He, nevertheless, suffered serious asthma attacks during his studies at the Sorbonne (Dosse, 2010). These did not stop him from chain smoking throughout his lectures when he, after graduating from the Sorbonne, taught at a high school in Amiens (Dosse, 2010). In 1968, Deleuze’s tuberculosis had returned and left a hole in his lung. He was consequently hospitalized and his doctoral defence was postponed for a year. After his successful defence, Deleuze had a serious operation during which one of his lungs was removed and thus, he lived with only one lung the rest of his life. He continued to suffer from respiratory problems that became gradually worse. In his later years, Deleuze had to be

Introduction   3

connected to an oxygen tank with “cursed,” yet life affirming tubes. Very seriously ill, Deleuze ended his life at the age of seventy, as Beckman (2017) described, “by throwing himself out of the window of his Paris apartment” (p. 108). At this stage, Dosse (2010) cited some friends wondering how Deleuze, so weakened by his illness, even made it to the window.

Deleuze’s Work Deleuze was a brilliant thinker whose own guerilla war derailed the direction of philosophy by profound critiques of Kantian, Hegelian, and Heideggerian philosophical traditions, psychoanalysis, and Marxism to create space for alternative ways of thinking and knowing. It is often noted that his extensive work can be divided into three periods (Beckman, 2017; Dosse, 2010; Deleuze, 1995d). Deleuze, educated as a historian of philosophy at the Sorbonne, devoted his earlier work to the history of philosophy (re)reading other philosophers: Hume (1953), Nietzsche (1962), Kant (1963), Bergson (1966), and Spinoza (1968). His second period is often considered to stem from his Difference and Repetition (1969) that was also his principal thesis for his doctorate and the subsequent Logic of Sense (1969). In these works, Deleuze critiqued the existing philosophical “doxa” to introduce his own thinking that he expanded with his collaboration with Felix Guattari. Following his doctoral defence, Deleuze dedicated an eight-­year period to teaching during which he, in his own words, “produced nothing more” (Deleuze, 1995d, p.  138). He also revealed that he had become an alcoholic believing at the time that alcohol enhanced his thinking (he later acknowledged that it actually made him not want to think at all) (Dosse, 2010). This “eight-­year-hole” (Deleuze, 1995d, p.  138) ended when Deleuze began to collaborate with Guattari whom he had already met in 1969.1 Their work culminated in the publication of Anti-­Oedipus (1972)—that was a huge success selling out in three weeks in France—and A Thousand Plateaus (1980)—both with the subtitle Capitalism & Schizophrenia—and finally, What is Philosophy (1991). During his final, third period, Deleuze focused his scholarly work on images in painting (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981) and the cinema (Cinema 1: The Movement-­Image, 1983; Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, 1985) to further develop his philosophical concepts’ percept and affect. He then returned to other philosophers’ work with books on Foucault (Foucault, 1985) and Leibniz (The Fold, 1988). Although I acknowledge Deleuze’s first period as an important grounding for his own philosophical thinking, my focus in this book is on his works from the last two periods. As these works introduce Deleuze’s own concepts, they, I believe, are more relevant for a book that in a limited space, is dedicated to Deleuze’s possible contribution to thinking about the physically active body. Before embarking on this journey through Deleuze’s work, I want to highlight his overall approach to philosophy. As a philosopher, Deleuze often described

4   Introduction

himself as a constructivist, pragmatist, and empiricist. When these terms appear in social science contexts, however, they carry different meanings from Deleuze’s position. It is, thus, important to shed light on his use of these concepts to fully engage with Deleuze’s philosophical oeuvre.

Deleuze’s Constructivism, Pragmatism, and Empiricism, When used by social scientists, constructivism often refers to Piaget and Vygotsky’s social psychology and its derivates, qualitative, interpretive research paradigms. Pragmatism, often associated with the work of Amer­ican philosopher Dewey, refers to the idea of letting go of paradigmatic and methodological conflict, contradiction, and disputes to engage in research that works in practice. Empiricism, in turn, can be used to describe a positivist science approach that regards only directly observable phenomena as truth. Deleuze, indeed, had some connection to these ways of understanding knowledge production. For example, he was fascinated by the works of the pragmatic philosopher William James and as an early admirer of Jean-­Paul Sartre’s work, was very familiar with phenomenology, a philosophical approach that, alongside psychoanalysis and Marxism, dominated France when Deleuze was a student. Deleuze’s work, however, does not follow these traditions of thought despite his use of familiar sounding terminology. For example, although Deleuze’s work has been aligned with phenomenology, he provided several critiques of it, particularly the focus on the internal, thinking, knowing self from which he strongly distanced himself. I return to this criticism later in the book. At this point, it is important to demonstrate that Deleuze’s constructivism, pragmatism, and empiricism took their own decisive turns away from the major strands of science and philosophy. Deleuze’s depiction of constructivism refers to philosophy that constructs concepts. This, according to him (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), should be the main task of philosophy. As Deleuze exclaimed: “you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them—that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p.  7). His constructivist philosophy, therefore, departs from the type of constructivism that relies on researchers’ (and their participants’) ability, through inner reflection, to interpret experiences and meanings. Such reflection, Deleuze (2007b) established, is embedded in “subjectivations, totalizations, and unifications” (p.  315) that, while appearing to produce multiple meanings, derive from dominant philosophical models that prevent creative thinking. What should take the place of reflection, Deleuze (2005) explained, is a constructionism that creates “subjectless” concepts, concepts that are not the result of a rational thought processes of a conscious individual endorsed by Cartesian philosophy. Deleuze’s constructivist philosophy is based on “multiplicities” “that do not presuppose unity of any kind, do not add up to a totality, and do not refer to a subject” (Deleuze, 2007b, p.  315). At this point, the important point to

Introduction   5

realize is the difference between his notion of constructivism (a process of creating concepts based on a thought process that Deleuze defines as a theory of multiplicities) and the constructivism that assumes individuals interpreting and making multiple meanings of the world through conscious reflection. I return to the concept of multiplicity several times in this book. Deleuze asserted that his constructivist philosophy is by nature pragmatic: its practice is to create concepts (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). At its core is the idea of examining how various elements, both material and discursive, come together to produce the social world of meanings and actions within specific contexts directed by various force relations. In this sense, Beckman (2017) described Deleuze’s philosophy “on thinking with, through practice” (p.  72). Consequently, Deleuze recognized both thinking and practice (human behaviour in its social and natural surroundings) as essential aspects of life to make sense of what is happening in the world. The importance of the analysis of practice is later illustrated in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage (see Chapter 2). Deleuze also emphasized the importance of studying the micro-­context of everyday life. According to Dosse (2010), this interest can be traced to Deleuze’s introduction to the sociologies of Durkheim and Tarde. Deleuze was critical of Durkheim’s insistence that social structures, first and foremost, caused individual behaviour and instead, unearthed Tarde whose microsociological stance inspired his later emphasis on the micropolitics of everyday life as an essential starting point for finding different thought. Deleuze’s constructivism and pragmatism unite in his empiricism that also reflects his stance against the rational philosophies of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. While I return to Deleuze’s critique of these philosophies later, at this point we can conclude that empiricism analyzes “states of things so as to bring out previously nonexistent concepts from them” (Deleuze, 2007b, p. 309). Empiricism, instead of aiming “to rediscover the eternal or the universal,” concentrates on “[t]he conditions under which something new is produced” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006, p. vi). This is a creative analysis of multiplicities that are not anchored to a pre-­existing reality. Drawing from Whitehead’s philosophy, Deleuze (2007b) further explained that his empirical concepts, as abstractions, do “not explain but must be explained” to search “for the conditions under which something new is created” (p. 309). His empiricism—that he further characterized as transcendental empiricism as opposed to the simple empiricism of positivist science that relies on what is directly observable and sensed as the true reality—thus, refers to exposing concepts (Deleuze, 2005). Deleuze’s empiricism is not governed by axioms and fixed rules of conventional philosophy, nor is it producing calculable predictions of conventional science. While it does have an “experimental relation” (Rajchman, 2005, p.  11), it is with sensation that is not yet turned into perception and then a representation of the reality (by the self ). Deleuze’s empiricism, nevertheless, attends to both the “in-­human” and social composition of individuals but by considering

6   Introduction

“singularities” that are aspects not yet enclosed in personal identity, subjectivity, or unified, rational reality. In other words, it adds an analytical element to existing experiences and meanings of individuals in society: the possibility of thinking differently by drawing from “intensities” that are not yet “solidified” into “reality.” Not limited to what is “real,” Deleuze moved towards changing existing thinking and resulting social conditions. As an empiricist philosopher, Deleuze wanted readers to have some use for his work. As he stated: “The question facing every writer is whether or not people have some use, however small, to make of the book, in their own work, in their life, and their projects” (Deleuze, 2007a, p. 180). In this book, I set out to examine some possible uses of his work for socio-­cultural researchers of the physically active body. Before introducing his empirical concepts, I want to briefly explore some conditions for employing Deleuze’s philosophy in social science.

Uses of Deleuze’s Work Deleuze often emphasized the idea of connection: thinking can take different directions through connections to other humans, environments, material elements, or states of things. The critical point is to realize these possibilities and have the analytical tools to then create new concepts and thus, knowledge. This analysis differs from the application of concepts. Such application is a familiar strategy to many social scientists including socio-­cultural researchers who examine how the physically active body is constructed within social relations. For example, we might take such concepts as heteronormativity, settler colonialism, or colour blindness and then apply them to different sport contexts to analyze how they (re)produce relations of dominance. I have definitely employed this approach in my examinations of how the fitness industry, for example, reproduces the oppressive fit, feminine ideal body. A Deleuzian approach departs from this strategy although many of his concepts, at first sight, might appear readily applicable to analyses of how different identities, meanings, and experiences are constructed, for example, within the globalized world of sport, the commercial fitness industry, or televised reality dance shows. Application, for Deleuze (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 1994), characterized an inactive and non-­thinking method, because it is a research approach already captured by the dominant models of thinking: if I apply ready-­made concepts, I will only affirm what has already been discovered by other thinkers instead of creating new knowledge. Although not necessarily creating new concepts—a task Deleuze assigned to philosophy—a Deleuzian approach to social science requires more active engagement than choosing an existing concept, applying it to one’s specific research context or field, and then analyzing how the concept captures the events in this context. Instead of application, Deleuze’s concepts that I introduce in this book can serve as a framework for the active mapping of how physical activity is practiced as an assemblage of both material

Introduction   7

and thought elements in specific force fields. Possible insights, concepts, and new knowledge should then emerge in this process. Physical activity practice as well as the practice of thinking are activities that should constantly change based on their specific contexts. A Deleuzian framework, instead of being made up of universally applicable concepts to be applied to multiple contexts, provides a thought system of finding previously non-­existent knowledge as it emerges from diverse situations. If Deleuze’s concepts are not readily applicable to conduct what can be conventionally understood as social science research, neither does he provide us with ready-­made connections to physical activity. As noted earlier, his illness prevented him from partaking in any rigorous physical activity during his adult life, although Beckman (2017) revealed that Deleuze played tennis until the age of fourteen and was a lifelong tennis fan. Dosse (2010) reported Deleuze sharing some of his friends’ enthusiasm for watching football (soccer) and as noted, he often drew from sport examples in his lectures. He also illuminated his philosophical work with examples from such diverse sports as tennis, swimming, sumo wrestling, martial arts, and surfing and created a concept “athleticism” that is discussed further in this book. Deleuze (1995c) further evoked sport to suggest that philosophers generate new thought by focusing on happens “in between” instead of tracing origins or analyzing events at the finish line (p.  132). Sport, Deleuze observed, has a quantitative element “of records that depend on improvements in equipment, shoes, vaulting-­poles” (p.  131), but he was more interested in its qualitative style: the ideas that led into transformations (e.g., Fosbury flop, McEnroe’s tennis serve or his style of play) that mediated new developments in sport. The sporting innovators, not necessarily the most celebrated sport figures, differ from imitators, “the copiers” who “get their results by capitalizing on moves made by others” (p. 132). The innovators, however, are the transformers without whom “the purely technological advances would have remained quantitative, irrelevant, and pointless” (p.  132). Therefore, sport is sporadically, but definitely, a part of Deleuze’s approach to thinking and I use his sport examples whenever possible in this book. While Deleuze seldom referred to anything that we might define as exercise (e.g., yoga), he mentioned dance, particularly the joy of dance, on several occasions. For example, Rothfield (2011) observed that “[a]ccording to Deleuze, dance is the spirit of lightness” that “affirms becoming and the being of becoming” (p.  221). As such, “dance has the power to transform heaviness into lightness, to transmute the weight of human thought into something other than itself ” (p. 221). Many dance scholars, indeed, have used Deleuze’s concepts in their works, some of which I have included in this book. Although Deleuze occasionally illustrated his philosophical thought using examples from sport and dance, he did not, as demonstrated earlier, endorse the direct application of his concepts in the same manner that social scientists tend to do. He did, nevertheless, look for allies, including sociologists, to share his philosophy:

8   Introduction

The question that interests us in relation to A Thousand Plateaus is whether there are any resonances, common ground, with what other writers, musicians, painters, philosophers, and sociologists are doing or trying to do, from which we can all derive greater strength or confidence. (Deleuze, 1995b, p. 27) Considering such an alliance, I now turn to how socio-­cultural scholars of physical activity have engaged Deleuze’s concepts.

Deleuze and the Socio-­C ultural Study of Sport In addition to dance studies, references to Deleuze’s conceptual framework have become increasingly visible in many social sciences including the socio-­cultural studies of sport and exercise and physical cultural studies. The recent new materialist turn in the social sciences and humanities has offered further connections between Deleuze’s thought and the physically active body.2 While currently relatively rare, there are scholars who have turned to Deleuze’s poststructuralism to look for innovative ways to theorize and understand sport and exercise in contemporary society. While many authors studying physical activity reference Deleuze’s concepts, I focus here on works that have substantially grounded their examinations on his theory.3 Many of them appear within sport sociology and thus, I highlight the current interest in Deleuze’s work through these analyses of sport. Two major strands characterize this Deleuzian inspired work. The first strand employs Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000) Deleuzian inspired concept, surveillant assemblage, to understand the control of sporting bodies in contemporary society. The second strand explores new ways of theorizing sporting and exercising identities in contemporary society. The scholars within the first strand, Sluggett (2011) and Manley, Palmer, and Roderick (2012), built on Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000) concept of “surveillant assemblage” that was developed by selectively drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical tool kit to break out from the spatial, structured confines of Foucault’s Panopticon. Haggerty and Ericson used the rhizome metaphor to emphasize two main attributes of their surveillant assemblage: “its phenomenal growth through expanding uses, and its leveling effect on hierarchies” (p. 614). In his work, Sluggett (2011) followed this framework to demonstrate how the surveillance practices of the World Anti-­Doping Agency (WADA) operate as a surveillant assemblage in sport. As WADA’s surveillance practices now extend beyond actual sport settings, Sluggett (2011) suggested that they are “produced through the continuous monitoring of information across a decentralized system of control” (p.  392). As a surveillant assemblage, WADA operates through a two-­part process. First, it collects and shares data from athletes’ bodies from multiple sources (police, doctors, custom agents, and biotech companies) to compile a biological profile

Introduction   9

for each athlete. Second, this information is compiled in specific information centres such as police stations, statistical institutions, the Anti-­Doping Administration, and Management System (ADAMS), an online data management tool that assists in identifying dopers by using athlete profile information. Within the WADA surveillant assemblage, athletes’ bodies turn into “coded bodies” of pure information that are used to identify “suspect bodies” of doping. As such, Sluggett demonstrated, the Deleuzian approach to surveillance can integrate recent developments within information technology in its analysis. In their study, Manley, Palmer, and Roderick (2012) used a combination of Latour, Foucault, and Deleuze’s concepts to examine how new and old forms of surveillance operate in the closed setting of professional sport academies. They found that while the athletes’ bodies were controlled directly through such disciplinary techniques as video surveillance, human observation, and physiological testing, a clear surveillance site was missing. Instead, the surveillance sites “multiplied” to include the coaches, managers, physiotherapists, teachers, and parents’ gaze to monitor the athletes’ development outside of the acad­ emies. The rugby academy that Manley, Palmer, and Roderick analyzed in their study, did not have a physical location where the players would have had direct contact with the staff or access to training facilities, but used Facebook to control athletes’ behaviour outside the academy. Manley, Palmer, and Roderick labelled this type of surveillance rhizomatic surveillance. Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome in this context illustrated how such multiple surveillance sites interconnected to function as net of dispersed surveillance of the athletes “either within or away from the academy” (p. 311). The rhizomatic surveillance, thus, provided a more relevant picture of surveillance that spread beyond the physical sites to extensive human networks outside the academies. If this strand of Deleuzian sport research examined the operation of surveillance of athletes’ bodies, the second strand of Deleuzian socio-­cultural sport research explores ways to understand athletes’ identity construction in contemporary society. Several feminist scholars have employed Deleuze’s work to rethink sporting femininity in the commercial world of sport where women athletes have gained increased visibility in the sport media. In her book on sportswomen in the media, Woodward (2009) drew from Deleuze’s work to move beyond reading athletes’ bodies as representations inscribed by social meanings. To focus on the lived experiences of material sporting bodies, Woodward employed Deleuze’s concept of “assemblage” to understand sport as a space of simultaneous semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows. In this space, material, physical bodies operate actively to create meanings instead of being passively signified by, for example, the media. Woodward further understood sport to be in a process of constant and unpredictable “becoming” that provides opportunities for interventions. In addition to assemblage and becoming, Woodward considered Deleuze’s concept of affect to engage the materiality of spectators’ bodies within the cultural analysis of the sport media. Woodward contended that “[B]odies are not central to Deleuze’s thought” (p.  132) and cannot, therefore, directly be

10   Introduction

involved in a cultural analysis, but act as an interface for intersecting material and symbolic forces through sensations of sensory experiences, the affect. Finding “considerable slippage” in the ways which affect is defined in sport research, Woodward concluded that there is “an overemphasis on the social and discursive at the expense of understanding feelings, emotions and sensation” (p. 134). Pringle (2016), similar to Woodward, was interested in affect in his analysis of Runners’ World magazine covers between 2013–2014. He focused particularly on the role of affect in destabilizing the construction of identity-­based inequality. In his analysis, the body is understood as an affective assemblage, through which “affects were a means that allowed bodies, and other things, to come together, ricochet, or blur” (p. 96). Parallel to Woodward, Pringle treated the mediated running apparatus as comprised of visible (the material) and enunciations (the text) both of which need to be included in an analysis. The visible images of Runners’ World covers reflected the joy of running in connection with nature and spirituality. The text constructed running as freedom to live an alternative lifestyle where pain was, nevertheless, inevitable. For Pringle, “running should not be thought of as a practice for select “identities” (e.g., young, fit, thin, black/white bodies) but simply as an affective practice done by the bodies that run” (p. 108). Similar to Pringle, Liao (Liao & Markula, 2016) examined the representations of athletes’ bodies in the media, but with a focus on women athletes. In her work, Liao (Liao & Markula, 2016) analyzed Amer­ican basketball player Diana Taurasi’s doping case in the U.S. print media and more specifically, how “Taurasi’s drug using body” (p. 169) was articulated in this process. The discussion was informed by Deleuze’s concept of assemblage and an analysis of its two axes: elements and relationships and structures that provide the overarching rules for creating the relationships. The results demonstrated, first, that Taurasi’s drug using body was constructed in relation to such elements as the drug Modafinil, Taurasi’s connections to the WNBA/Phoenix Mercury, USA Basketball, Turkey, Howard Jacobs (Taurasi’s lawyer), and the various drug testing procedures. Second, the structures that facilitated the relationships between these elements were professionalism as established by the WNBA, legalities of drug use in sport, and the exclusive and positive focus on the United States as a sporting nation. In this analysis, references to pre-­determined identity categories (gender, race, sexuality, class) were notably absent. Like Pringle, Liao credited the Deleuzian approach of moving beyond socially constructed identity categories to reveal what the athletic body can do in its social world. My own Deleuzian work (Markula, 2004, 2018; Markula & Avner, 2013) has followed a similar line to challenge the limitations of the masculine-­feminine binary in analyses of sporting, exercising, and dancing bodies. Although Deleuzian scholarship in the socio-­cultural studies of physical activity is relatively new, several researchers, as demonstrated in this chapter, have actively engaged with Deleuze’s work. The most commonly used Deleuzian

Introduction   11

concepts are assemblage and rhizome with further references to becoming, affect, and the control society. While these have been employed for diverse research projects, there appeared to be a general agreement among the various scholars that Deleuze’s rhizomatic philosophy provided tools to challenge previous theoretical frameworks within the socio-­cultural analysis of sport. For example, Sluggett (2011) and Manley, Palmer, and Roderick (2012) aspired to move beyond Foucault’s notion of Panopticon dominating surveillance studies. Similar to Liao and Markula (2016) and Pringle (2016), I sought to move beyond dominant critical theory framework of power relations between dominant-­oppressed groups to analyze sporting selves through a more flexible framework (Markula, 2004; Markula & Avner, 2013). In similar vein, Woodward (2009) desired to move beyond the binary of representational bodies-­ material bodies to argue for the importance of simultaneous analysis of both. She concluded that the cultural analysis of sport needs to consider both corporeal (the material body) and representational (the discursive) elements in constantly changing sport assemblages. While exploring the positive force of Deleuze’s philosophy, the sport researchers also discovered several limitations in his theory. Despite its potential, Woodward (2009), for example, found the Deleuzian approach neglecting difference and diversity: “Whatever the radical critique of philosophy which Deleuze proposes, assemblages of intersecting systems seem far removed from lived experience especially of those on the margins, and present limited scope for the voices of those who are excluded  …” (pp.  183–184). Sluggett (2011) similarly acknowledged that the surveillant assemblage model is limited, because it “tends to miss the operation of power relations by over-­emphasizing the democratic nature of monitoring in decentralized forms” and by obscuring the how new surveillance methods are embedded within, for example, state power (p. 399). Sluggett and Woodward, thus, suspected that Deleuze’s work does not provide tools to change the existing inequalities in the “real” world. In addition, Woodward contended that the body does not occupy a central role in Deleuze’s thinking and thus, can act only as interface for intersecting material and symbolic forces. Other researchers have similarly critiqued Deleuze for excluding the analysis of the material body (e.g., Evans, Davies, & Rich, 2009; Wainwright, Williams, & Turner, 2005). The studies introduced in this chapter provide a useful starting point for studying physical activity from a Deleuzian perspective as they ascertained how many of his concepts can be used to analyze sport in a constantly changing world. Noticeably, a large part of this existing Deleuzian research of physically active bodies has involved text-­based readings. These Deleuzian scholars, nevertheless, explored new research directions (e.g., the impact of affect) to open the study of physically active bodies to consider issues beyond the social construction of identity. As a result, they also interrogated how Deleuze’s ideas differed from critical social theories or phenomenological approaches to the sporting body. Appearing in journal articles or book chapters, these works often included

12   Introduction

selected concepts without locating them within the larger context of Deleuze’s thought. As such, they can be seen to employ Deleuze’s work selectively as a “tool kit.” Deleuze (Foucault & Deleuze, 1980), similar to Foucault, endorsed the idea of theory as a tool kit: theory, he asserted, “must be useful. It must function” (p. 208). If no one uses a theory, it is “worthless” (p. 208). In this sense, several sport scholars have put a number of Deleuze’s concepts to good use. However, Deleuze further emphasized that appreciating how the theory functions within the larger field of philosophical and social power relations is a necessary requirement for appropriate or effective use of the conceptual tool kit. While Deleuze’s philosophy is an instrument that opens up multiple ways to think differently from the dominant representational philosophy, there can be misunderstandings, or as Buchanan (2015) put it, “wrong” readings of his work. As a result, several, even contradictory, meanings can be assigned to Deleuze’s concepts when we aim to understand the material body or critique social inequalities in capitalist society. However, more systematic presentation of Deleuze’s philosophical framework can illuminate further paths to an innovative social and cultural analysis of the physically active body. In this book, consequently, I aim to introduce Deleuze’s complex rhizomatic philosophy more broadly and highlight how it can be used as a tool for understanding the physically active body within our current cultural condition. In a book devoted entirely to Deleuze’s philosophy, furthermore, it is possible to discuss his concepts in more detail to make a closer connection to Deleuze’s rhizomatic philosophy. This discussion, however, is also designed to illuminate the possible limitations of Deleuze’s work as it relates to the socio-­cultural analysis of physically active bodies. In addition to engaging with Deleuze’s abstract and notoriously complex thought system, I aim to provide theoretical and practical examples of how the physically active body can be examined as a material, social, political, and cultural entity using a Deleuzian perspective. Accordingly, I believe that Deleuze’s work offers several possibilities to investigate the role of the physically active body as a force to initiate positive social change within the present neoliberal, capitalist environment. However, and perhaps more importantly, Deleuze’s concepts can help to identify ways to think and know differently by accounting for the force of the physically active body as an active negotiator of social relations. In the following chapters, I aim to clarify the possibilities of Deleuze’s rhizomatic, pragmatic, and empiricist philosophy for the socio-­cultural analysis that addresses the physically active body in sport, exercise, and dance.

Deleuze and the Physically Active Body Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) encouraged us to begin in the middle for “[t]hings do not begin to live except in the middle” (p. 41). He added that “[i]t is never the beginning or the end which are interesting: the beginning and end are points. What is interesting is the middle” (p.  29). The middle is where

Introduction   13

r­ elations between things exist and relations are what is of interest in a Deleuzian analysis. Therefore, we continually have to start from the middle to give the elements under analysis new relations. While I did not necessarily plan to approach the writing of this book this way, I, rather accidentally, proposed to begin in the middle of Deleuze’s conceptual vocabulary. While Deleuze’s work has been seen as a progression of three periods, my approach here oscillates between his concepts in a way that allowed me to enter into his philosophical system. This has also resulted in some degree of repetition between the different chapters akin to Deleuze’s own texts. To further clarify my reading, I have concluded each chapter with suggestions of how Deleuze’s work can be used to analyze the physically active body. These include both existing work and where such work is scarce, my hypothetical suggestions for the type of research that can fruitfully employ a Deleuzian approach. Elsewhere in this book, to explain his concepts I draw mainly from Deleuze’s own texts or his work with Guattari as well as such established Deleuzian scholars as Brian Massumi and Ian Buchanan. In the following, I address more closely how I have organized the content of this book. Throughout his work, Deleuze aimed to move beyond existing thought systems to explore space for different ways of thinking about the world. His search, nevertheless, was anchored on clarifying how knowledge is currently organized in our segmented, capitalist society. Chapter 1 The Strata: The Formation of Thought within a Capitalist System introduces the strata, that Deleuze identified as the major articulations that organize previous unorganized matter into layers or belts. Engaging with the strata can also help researchers of physical activity to identify how we know about the environment, our bodies, our research, and ourselves as researchers as they are sedimented in the strata. In his work with Guattari, Deleuze identified three major strata: organic, inorganic, and anthropomorphic strata. In addition, they distinguished three further strata that segment the anthropomorphic stratum—organism, subjectification, and signifiance—and thus, stratify and segment the social organization of westernized societies. In this chapter, I examine the strata more closely to highlight how they, according to Deleuze, support the plane of organization, or the current formation of philosophical, cultural, and social knowledge. I further introduce the concepts lines of segmentation and lines of flight. These concepts can serve to highlight how Deleuze’s thought can be used to analyze the current social construction of the physically (in)active body. To begin to explore Deleuze’s philosophy further, I introduce assemblage, a concept related to the strata. Consequently, Chapter 2 The Assemblage: Sport, Exercise, and Dance as Cultural Arrangements focuses on assemblages that were at the centre of Deleuze’s thought system. These are territorial “arrangements” of two types of elements, expression and content, that assemble to direct individual behaviour in the micro context of everyday life enveloped by larger global contexts of capitalism. This chapter also introduces the abstract machine, a type of (social) force that connects certain expressions and contents in particular contexts.

14   Introduction

The rhizome is one of the most commonly cited of Deleuze’s concepts and Chapter 3 The Rhizome: Researching the Physically Active Body from a Deleuzian Perspective details rhizome as a type of root that multiplies in all directions without a single base. Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) used the image of a rhizome to think differently from the modernist philosophical “machine” that he labelled the “tree model” where all thought, while having multiple branches, is supported by one root. The tree model, Deleuze demonstrated, limits our thinking within the confines of the dominant strata. This chapter details Deleuze’s critique of modernist philosophy to present his alternative, rhizomatic thought. As the rhizome is commonly employed to inform qualitative analysis techniques, to conclude this chapter, I have included a discussion of the methodological implications of using the rhizome in qualitative research. Chapter 4 The Body without Organs: A Purely Intensive Body focuses on the Body without Organs (BwO), a concept that has led to a great deal of misunderstanding of Deleuze’s work. According to Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), the BwO refers to practices of thinking and practicing differently by reaching beyond the limitations of the strata. He urged each one of us to create a BwO on a plane for thought, the plane of consistency or what he later labelled as immanence. In this chapter, I aim to make sense of how researchers of the physically active body can make a BwO and what this can mean for our research practices. Chapter 5 Becoming: Beyond Identity Politics highlights how Deleuze found that examining hierarchically organized, binary molar identities (e.g., women/ men, Black/White, young/old, hetero/homosexual, ablebodied/disabled, lower class/upper class) confined thinking within the tree model. Deleuze advocated “becoming” as a way out of the binary organization of molar identities to move towards “molecular” ways of understanding who we can be. In this chapter, I explore what this can mean for the analysis and critique of oppressive/oppressed identities in physical activity. In recent years, socio-­cultural researchers have paid increasing attention to the emotions, feelings, and pleasures of physical activity. These are often gathered under the umbrella of affect. Affect was also a central aspect of Deleuze’s rhizomatics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), yet without reference to emotions. In Chapter 6 Affect: Understanding Force I examine how Deleuze’s understanding of affect as a bodily force can be used to examine the possibilities of physical activity to assist thinking beyond the tree model to initiate change in contemporary culture. Many researchers in sport sociology, coaching sociology, physical education, sport, and exercise have embraced Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist work much more eagerly than Deleuze’s philosophy. Foucault and Deleuze, however, believed that their poststructuralist works complemented each other across several levels. As a testament to this connection, Deleuze (2006) wrote a book titled simply Foucault to commemorate Foucault’s death. In Chapter 7 Connecting: Deleuze on Foucault, I connect Deleuze and Foucault to highlight the

Introduction   15

i­nspiration Deleuze drew from Foucault. This chapter focuses particularly on Deleuze’s reading of the discursive formation and the fold. In addition, it introduces Deleuze’s concept of the control society that he developed based on Foucault’s work. The book concludes with a holistic summary of Deleuze’s main concepts to further connect them with the conceptualization of the physically active body in society. By reiterating how Deleuzian thought can illuminate ways to create social change by practicing physical activity (research), this final chapter offers a topology of possibilities and limitations of a Deleuzian approach to studying the physically active body.

Notes 1. Deleuze worked closely with Felix Guattari, a psychoanalyst strongly influenced by Lacan and a political activist within the French communist party, to write two major works: The Anti-­Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze’s biographers credit Guattari for lifting Deleuze out of his eight years of non-­productivity following his doctoral defence. Deleuze (1995d) himself credited Guattari for rescuing him from psychoanalysis that they then strongly critiqued in The Anti-­Oedipus. According to Deleuze (2007a), Guattari was the one always creating concepts (e.g., diagrammatism, the desiring machine) that Deleuze then “tamed” into a more coherent system of thought. They worked together closely through exchanging letters and meetings to complete works in which it is not possible to attribute any specific parts to either author. This synthesis purposefully reflected Deleuze and Guattari’s stance on moving away from a rational philosophy that clearly assigns thought to a subject, the distinguished philosopher who originates thought. In this book, I refer to both Deleuze and Guattari when referencing their co-­authored books. 2. The new material turn in the social sciences and humanities has drawn attention to how the material interacts with the social in the world where both human and non-­ human actors produce power relations (e.g., Coole & Frost, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2017; MacLure, 2017; van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2012). Socio-­cultural research examining the physically active body can be located in this intersection as it has the potential to include both the material and the social in its analyses. Including the material objects and their environments, new materialists argue, requires a new onto-­ epistemology to overcome the limitations of the socially constructed binaries of the cultural/linguistic/representational turn (e.g., Barad, 2003, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2017; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). Many new materialist scholars already draw on Deleuze’s conceptual battery of affect, assemblage, event, and rhizome to illustrate the interconnectedness of the material and human worlds (e.g., Coole & Frost, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2017; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016). 3. I conducted several literature searches to identify the works for this section. First, I searched the websites of the main socio-­cultural journals (Sociology of Sport Journal, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Journal of Sport and Social Issues) using “Deleuze” as a keyword. Second, I used Google Scholar with “Deleuze,” “physical activity,” and “sport” as keywords. Finally, I searched the University of Alberta library website using “Deleuze,” “sport,” and “physical activity” as key words. My most recent search took place in January, 2019.

16   Introduction

References Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of matter becomes to matter. Signs, 28(3), 802–831. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe half way: Quantum physics and meeting the universe half way. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beckman, F. (2017). Gilles Deleuze. London: Reaktion Books. Buchanan, I. (2015). Assemblage theory and its discontents. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 382–392. Coole, D., & Frost, S. (2010). Introduction to new materalisms. In D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.). New materialism: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 1–43). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995a). Preface. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (p.  vii). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995b). On A Thousand Plateaus. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 25–34). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995c). Mediators. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 121–134). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995d). On philosophy. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 135–155). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2005). Immanence: A life. In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Pure immanence: Essays on a life (pp. 25–34). New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (2006). Foucault. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2007a). Eight years later: 1980 interview. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 175–180). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007b). Preface to the Amer­ican edition of Dialogues. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 309–312). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007c). Preface for the Italian edition of A Thousand Plateus. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp.  313–316). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy. London: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2006). Dialogues II. London and New York: Continuum. Dosse, F. (2010). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting lives. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Evans, J., Davies, B., & Rich, E. (2009). The body made flesh: Embodied learning and the corporeal device. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30(4), 391–406. Foucault, M., & Deleuze, G. (1980). Intellectuals and power. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-­memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault (pp. 203–217). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fox, N., & Alldred, P. (2017). Sociology and the new materialism: Theory, research, action. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Haggerty, K. D., & Ericson, R. V. (2000). The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605–622. Liao, J., & Markula, P. (2016). “The only thing I am guilty of is taking too many jump shots”: A Deleuzian media analysis of Diana Taurasi’s drug charge in 2010 Sociology of Sport Journal, 33, 169–179.

Introduction   17 MacLure, M. (2017). Qualitative methodology and the new materialisms. In N.  K. Denzin & M.  D. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry in neoliberal times (pp. 48–58). New York, NY: Routledge. Manley, A., Palmer, C., & Roderick, M. (2012). Disciplinary power, the oligopticon and rhizomatic surveillance in elite sports academics. Surveillance & Society, 10(3–4), 303–319. Markula, P. (2004). “Cute with vague feminist gender shift”: Posh and Becks united. In D.  L. Andrews (Ed.), Manchester United: An interdisciplinary study (pp.  160–172). London: Routledge. Markula P. (2018). “So You Think You Can Dance”: The feminine ballet body in a popular reality show. In P. Markula & M. I. Clark (Eds.), The evolving feminine ballet body (pp. 27–48). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Markula, P., & Avner, Z. (2013). Bad landing: Charting the gold and criminal records of Finnish ski jumper, Matti Nykänen. In L. Wenner (Ed.), Fallen sport heroes, media and celebrity culture (pp. 120–134). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Pringle, R. (2016). Disrupting identity: An affective embodied reading of Runner’s World. In W. Bridel, P. Markula & J. Denison (Eds.). Endurance running: A socio-­cultural examination (pp. 95–110). Abingdon: Routledge. Rajchman, J. (2005). Introduction. In G. Deleuze, Pure immanence: Essays on a life (pp. 25–34). New York, NY: Zone Books. Rothfield, P. (2011). Dance and the passing moment: Deleuze’s Nietzsche. In L. Guillaume & J. Hughes (Eds.), Deleuze and the body (pp. 203–223). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp.  1–28). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. St. Pierre, E. A., Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L.  A. (2016). New empiricisms and new materialisms: Conditions for new inquiry. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 99–110. van der Tuin, I., & Dolphijn, R. (2012). New materialism: Interviews and cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Wainwright, S. P., Williams, C., & Turner, B. S. (2005). Fractured identities: Injury and the balletic body. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 9(1), 49–66. Woodward, K. (2009). Embodied sporting practices: Regulating and regulatory bodies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 1

The Strata The Formation of Thought within a Capitalist System

Deleuze’s philosophy, first and foremost, aims to cultivate possibilities for alternative modes of thought and existence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). As such, Deleuze wanted philosophy to be in touch with contemporary reality, not confined in books tracing the history of philosophical thought. To do this, he argued, philosophy must facilitate creation of concepts instead of focusing on “given knowledge or representation” (p.  11) to be explained through philosophical analysis. Like all his concepts, the stratum was created for an analysis that facilitates new, multiple ways of understanding and knowing the world. To further understand the role of the stratum in Deleuze’s theoretical tool kit, a brief detour to his ontology of difference as well as his concept of the event is vital. Deleuze believed that previous philosophical thought, indeed, is limited in its scope to examine what already exists (the representations of reality), but is “incapable of creating anything new” (Taylor, 2014, p. 121). As Taylor (2014) explained, tracing existing knowledge can only give “an account of prevailing ways of living and rearticulate existing conditions for the possibility of more of the same” (p.  121). To offer alternatives to the current forms of thought, Deleuze advocated an alternative philosophy that could account for difference and thus, elucidate possibilities for multiple ways of living. In the representational philosophical thought that I return to in more detail in Chapter 3, reality is seen as a stable element of essences that philosophy is then to bring to light to understand the fundamental principles of existence. This philosophy aims for universal conceptualization of the nature of life, knowledge, and human existence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). In his review of Deleuze’s early work, Foucault (1977/1994) further illustrated that such previous attempts to explain existence as phenomenology or the philosophy of history have all failed, because, instead of universal truths, they provide only a partial view of the world’s diversity. Phenomenology, for example, has aimed to capture the meaning of existence, but has failed because meaning, for phenomenologists, exists only in human consciousness. Phenomenology, thus, only considers the world as a place that pre-­exists the body/self. The philosophy of history has failed to capture diversity because it has treated the present as framed linearly

The Strata   19

by the past, and the future as past present to establish clear order for world’s events. Deleuze found such “unbridled confidence” to provide a definitive account of the nature of reality and the following adherence to “a single way of making sense of the world” inadequate if one was to account for “new and unexpected ways of living” (Taylor, 2014, p. 126). Deleuze argued that it was time to replace the promise of universal explanations of nature of reality with a different logic. Instead of a reality that we can capture only as representations of the existing real, Deleuze advocated an ontology of difference. The ontology of difference cannot be captured or articulated by the traditional philosophical concepts, categories, or principles and thus, a whole set of new concepts is necessary for the use of ontology of difference. Deleuze’s philosophy, thus, continues to deal with reality, but it is based on a logic of multiplicities: an idea that reality, instead of something stable captured by philosophers through representations of its essential, universal nature, is a type of “flux.” In this flux, “singularities” generate “a proliferation of dynamic differences that stem from but do not replicate the reality from which they spring” (Taylor, 2014, p.  125). The singularities then turn into arrangements of “[m]ultiple manifestations of living” that “perpetually fold and unfold” (Taylor, 2014, p. 125). This constant movement of singularities is what Deleuze characterized as events. These events are unpredictable: they do not follow a causal chain, nor can they necessarily be explained through their historical contexts. How we the know and analyze these events is central to Deleuze’s philosophy. Foucault (1977/1994) already emphasized that the concept “event” was essential to Deleuze’s work throughout his career.1 The event, Foucault explained, is important because it is at the heart of our ways of trying to understand the world without resorting to historical linearity. The world is filled with unexpected and unpredictable events of which we aim to make sense of in one way or another. This is what knowledge is: explaining what takes place around us to make sense, one way or another, of the world. Deleuze’s work aimed to make sense of the world to consider reality without pre-­existing explanations that rely on notions of singular truth, meaning, subject, or order. This world, or reality, is more like a fundamental flow of difference or “chaos” (Beckman, 2017, p. 33). Nevertheless, Deleuze saw various forms, some more stable than others, emerging from this chaos. These stabilized forms Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) called strata. In strata, the flow of various singularities or differences has slowed down and thus, they become more recognizable layer beds on which various events evolve in multiple ways. In this chapter, I explore further how Deleuze illustrated the limitations of previous philosophical thought through his concept of the stratum. The failed explanations of how to know about the world, as explained by Foucault, set the background for Deleuze and Guattari’s later work where they further analyzed how thought is ordered in the world. To outline their scheme for making sense of world of difference, I first discuss the concept of stratum to illustrate how the strata segment geophysical, organic, and social reality.

20   The Strata

The Strata: Double Articulation The concept of a stratum conjoins Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of plane, force, stratification, and assemblage and thus, is not isolated from their rhizomatic philosophy that I elaborate on in Chapter 3. They described the strata as layers, belts, or articulations that stratify, code, and territorialize material. The strata establish order from the “chaos” of the universe as they stabilize various flows of matter. As such, strata “are acts of capture” as they organize previously unorganized matter (p.  40). They are types of sedimentations of matter into formed substances. Deleuze and Guattari distinguished between three major strata: physiochemical or inorganic, organic, and anthropomorphic or alloplastic (human). While it is evident that scholarly disciplines tend to be divided based on similar divisions, strata are not exactly created by individual researchers, but are, rather, types of “thickening on the Body of the earth” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  502). Characteristic of Deleuze’s philosophy, the strata have a force of their own, an abstract machine that aids in the capture and organization of particle flows. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari introduced their concept of the plane of consistency (or planomenon) where various elements float freely to be captured and sedimented into strata. They described this plane as “soup” of “prebiotic” or “prechemical” elements, a substratum, where the strata capture or “pinch” their material. Once established, we reflect the world and our lives against these articulations. Or as Yusoff (2017) explained: “strata are a material and affective infrastructure through which the social becomes embodied” (p. 109). While each stratum comprises its own belt, they also contain substantial diversity. I begin to illuminate their differences by explaining Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of double articulation that characterizes all the strata. Substance and Form/Content and Expression Deleuze and Guattari (1987) emphasized that the strata are constituted of double articulations of expression and content that each possess its own form and substance. While each stratum has its own expression and content they, nevertheless, are not entirely contained within one stratum. To further explain the characteristics of each stratum, I first detail what Deleuze and Guattari meant by double articulation of form and substance and how these then articulate with expression and content in the three main strata. The double articulation, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), establishes relationships, or the structure, between unstable units of matter or substances that are then given an order or a form. Once this order is established, the formed substances actualize in stable structures. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms: The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle flows, metastable molecular or quasi-­molecular units (substances) upon which it

The Strata   21

imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures (forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualized (substances). (pp. 40–41) They gave a more concrete example of how the double articulation actualizes in the physiochemical or geological stratum: the first articulation is the process of “sedimentation,” which deposits units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the “folding” that sets up a stable functional structure and effects the passage from sediment to sedimentary rock. (p. 41) Closer to home for researchers who study the physically active body, Deleuze and Guattari also included several double articulation processes of the organic body as it actualizes in the organic stratum. To clarify this process, I try to illuminate their point through a further example. We can think of the human body as a unit of cells (substance) that are then ordered statistically into, for example, fat cells (form). The second articulation sets up a stable functional structure as fat deposits in certain areas of body that can literally fold. While such an analysis of the double articulation may sound overtly detailed, particularly for socio­cultural researchers of the physically active body, attending to the formation of all the strata can benefit particularly those interested in new materialism that aims to account for the non-­human as well human presence in the world. After all, if we follow Yusoff (2017), the “social” is determined, in multiple ways, by the operations of all the strata. The human stratum, nevertheless, operates through the double articulation of organizing individual human bodies (the substance) into forms through various statistical measures, for example age or sex. The second articulation then sets up stable functional structures in society based on age or sex. It is also important to note that Deleuze and Guattari established the movement from molecular (metastable) units to molar (stable) organization— a conceptualization that they later employed to articulations of the anthropomorphic (or “human”) stratum. I continue this discussion later in this chapter. Each stratum has several layers that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) divided into parastrata and epistrata. Forms relate to parastrata where the process of coding (and decoding) takes place. Parastrata are internal to each stratum as the processes of coding populations suitable for each stratum take place on these layers. The population, thus, is the “subject” of each stratum: its subject of decoding. Once coded, the population, as a formed substance, can then take space, or territory, in the stratum. As a substance, the population, now moves on epistrata where it occupies territory. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987)

22   The Strata

summarized “that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into processes of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in movements of intensive territorialisation and reterritorialization” (p. 54). The epistrata are layers of intermediary states between the internal layers and the plane of consistency external to the strata. More movement, thus, is possible on these layers. Parastrata and epistrata, that are continually moving, sliding, shifting, and changing (p.  55), compose the strata and thus, provide its unity. Deleuze and Guattari described this unity as the Ecumenon of each stratum: the molecular materials, substantial elements, and formal relations that distinguish one stratum from the others. Despite a recognizable unified composition, [t]he strata are continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical soup  …), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of the abutting parastrata. (p. 55) In addition to the structures of formed substances, the strata are characterized by content and expression that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) modified from Danish linguist Hjelmslev’s work.2 In short, content refers to the material side, or the formed matter. Content has both substance and form. Deleuze and Guattari specified that formed matter has “substance, insofar as these matters are ‘chosen,’ and form, insofar as they are chosen in a certain order (substance and form of content)” (p. 43, italics original). Expression refers to “functional structures” that also have organization (form) and “compounds” (substance) (p.  43). Deleuze and Guattari specified that expressions have “the organization of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds (form and content of expression)” (p. 43, italics original). For example, nuclear sequences of the genes (content) determine “the compounds, organs, and functions” of a body (expression) (p. 43) on the organic stratum. In this system, the molecular content “has its own form corresponding to the distribution of elemental masses and the action of one molecule upon another” and the expression manifests in the form of “the statistical aggregate and state of equilibrium existing on the macroscopic level” (p. 57). Content and expression are always distinct from each other, but they interact or operate based on a mutual “reciprocal presupposition” that connects them. These presuppositions differ between the different strata. On an inorganic stratum, the content and expression connect inductively with relatively little influence by “exterior forces.” For example, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) illustrated how crystal turns into the macroscopic expression of a microscopic structure (different chemical categories) that take place on this stratum without much interference from the other strata or environment around it. Therefore, the expression is dependent on the molecular content and thus, has relatively

The Strata   23

little independence to resonate with the content. Expression on the organic stratum is more independent from its content as their interaction now depends also on the milieu where the organism exists. Deleuze and Guattari called their interaction linear: the expression, its form and substance, connect to the content with a line that distances and gives independence to the expression. As an example, they discussed the diverse species (expression) that have evolved from the same molecular content through a long linear line. The organic stratum enables more production—organisms are easier to copy and reproduce than crystals—thus, is characterized by “transduction.” These two forms, expression and content, are close to equal as determining forces in the inorganic and organic strata (Evans, 2016). The human stratum where expression dominates differs significantly from the other strata. The anthropomorphic or human stratum is characterized by translation that requires “a superlinearity of expression” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 72) manifested in the use of language. On the human stratum, the form of expression, thus, is linguistic. It operates with symbols that are comprehensible, transmittable, and modifiable from “outside.” Therefore, such things as technology and language, tools, and symbols become possible on this stratum. The superlinearity, unlike genetic linearity (the transduction) that is spatial, includes translation that is time specific. As such, the human stratum also represents the other strata: we talk and write about the inorganic and organic strata and call this the “scientific world.” This is, Deleuze and Guattari explained, how superlinearity “overcodes” substances (unlike the genetic code) from other strata. Consequently, also the epistrata and the parastrata of “language” operate differently from other strata, because all human action implies translation (technological content, semiotic or symbolic expression). In this context: Content should be understood not simply as the hand and tools but as a technical social machine that preexists them and constitutes states of force or formations of power. Expression should be understood not simply as the face and language, or individual languages, but as a semiotic collective machine that preexists them and constitutes regimes of signs. (p. 63) Language or the regimes of signs, as Deleuze and Guattari later labelled them, can also be understood as a stratum of its own. While the forms of expression dominate this stratum, the forms of content are not completely subordinate. As Evans (2016) explained: physical matter is always interrupting our most careful numerical formulas about nature, the things around us provoke our most evocative and novel lines of poetry, and our behaviour and thoughts transgress our deepest psychological speculations about ourselves and each other. (p. 88)

24   The Strata

Similarly, the physical matter of the body interrupts the best planned coaching or exercise program and can confuse the measurement of results. The body, then, is deeply invested in our speculations of ourselves and others as athletes, dancers, or exercisers. These are the experiences of physical activity about which we write in relation to larger social issues in contemporary society. The constantly intersecting “multiplicities” on the human stratum can be considered “discursive multiplicities of expression” and “non-­discursive multiplicities of content” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 67). The content and expression on the human stratum double articulate with substance and form like on the other strata. Following the same formation, substances, or the matter, first turn into forms during the double articulation. The substance of the content is this type of raw matter that is “chosen” to take a clear form through the imposition of coding. The coding connects these “unstable” molecular units of substance to “a statistical order” of succession. For example, various human bodies can be chosen through statistics to establish compact stable forms, for example, by measuring their fat content. The expression of the content refers to the function of the content to expressible structures such as social entities or compounds. For example, human bodies can be statistically classified based on their fat content. These statistics then form a classification of fat bodies and thin bodies. The substance of the expression, like the substance of the content, is what “embodies” the function. For example, the word, health, embodies the function of an expressible substance. The form of expression gives the order to these functions (Massumi, 1992). For example, bodies can be organized as healthy and unhealthy. In this process, the content, then, obtains an expressible meaning. For example, we can add that thin bodies are healthy while fat bodies are unhealthy. Furthermore, an unhealthy fat body now obtains a further classification as an obese body. This relationship, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) emphasized, is not causal: content does not cause the meaning making or meanings do not cause the emergence of certain content, practices, or bodies. While all this might appear unnecessarily complex, the important point is to consider both the material aspect (content) and the meanings given to the content (expression). Both the content and its expressed meanings have forms: functions specified by the stratum. When we aim to understand, to know, what is taking place around us, it is important to consider both material content and expressed meaning(s) and their respective forms and functions. It is also important to consider the different reciprocal presuppositions—the way content and expression interact—of each stratum. Consequently, their functions are not identical and cannot be analyzed in a uniform manner. All the strata, nevertheless, effect on our lives and yet, the anthropomorphic stratum dominates the ways humans operate in the world. As Yusoff (2017) explained: “while the earth produces flows in all directions, social strata ‘locks in’ these intensities and flows of earth into social, political and economic apparatus” (p. 111). Thus, also social movements are subtended by movements in inorganic and organic strata rather than

The Strata   25

being purely products of social thought. For example, Yusoff demonstrated how capitalism is currently interlocked with the organic stratum as it is largely based on the utilization of fossil fuels. Similarly, capitalist ideas of healthy citizenship are intertwined with the organic stratum of bodies that are often sedentary due to their work conditions, but are then urged to take on physical activity to retain their effectiveness. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) devoted significant effort to detail the anthropomorphic stratum further by dividing it into regimes of signs with two “strands”—signifiance and subjectification—and organism. Each of these are now considered as a stratum of its own: “the principal strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection” (p. 134). Sharing the same unifying characteristics of the anthropomorphic stratum, organism, significance, and subjectification differ in their expression and content. I now detail how Deleuze and Guattari characterized these three strata. Organism The stratum of organism derives from the organic stratum. It articulates the human body through several levels of double articulation. One is the double articulation of molecular level bodily elements (substance) and their further articulation into organs, the overcoding into form. This takes place at the level of content. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) further observed that the expression, the functionality, of this stratum does not have a distinct form and substance and therefore, the function of the organism is dependent on its content. In this sense, the organism stratifies the human body into the structure of cells and organs and their determined functions. The human body, its skin as its limit, then interacts with its environment, gains territory, by sensing it. The stratum of organism, through its coding of bodies into organism, stratifies bodies based on their function. The stratum of organism, then, expresses how we know about the human body. Signifiance In truth, signifiance and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other words, humankind’s fundamental neurosis. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 114) Both signifiance and subjectification are primarily located on the expression side of the human stratum. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) included them in a larger group of regimes of signs that, in turn, constitute a semiotic system (of which the “semiology” of sign formation is one). Although both signifiance and subjectification belong to the regimes of signs, they also differ from each other. Signifiance, “the signifying regime of signs” (p. 114), is structured by the formulation

26   The Strata

of signified and signifier that we might recognize from structuralist semiotics. Deleuze and Guattari visualized the signifying regime organizing signs “emitted from every direction” (p. 114) into circles. While the circle provides a centre, the signifying regime is also “tasked” to continually expand the circle into a spiralling fashion. These enlarged spirals offer the interpretations for the original sign without the sign itself having to change. These interpretations, thus, help fix the meaning of the sign: they make the sign or group of signs “knowable” (p. 114). The expression of signifiance as the meaning-­making stratum, like all strata, has both substance and form. The signifier functions to form a substance that Deleuze and Guattari name as “faciality.” It actually points to the human face, but not as an organ or a physical feature, but something that is already formed or interpreted through language. The face “is what gives the signifier substance; it is what fuels interpretation, and it is what changes, changes traits, when interpretation reimports signifier to its substance” (p. 115). I return to the concept of “face” later in this chapter. As Deleuze and Guattari indicated, there are several other semiotic systems besides the signifying regime, among them the postsignifying regime of subjectification. Subjectification Subjectification is the postsignifying regime of signs that attributes ideas and thinking to an individual. This then creates authority figures of “thinkers,” but also attributes each individual as an originator of ideas and truths that are unique and freely chosen. These truths and ideas become carved as universal truths of which value and validity are judged by the knowing subject. Subjectification, then, refers to the internalization of individuals as authority figures of the ideas of origin and thus, traces the linear line of thought to an originator. The thinking self is capable of originality that then creates universal truths “swept over subjects” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  127). The gratification of an authentic, original thinking self also means that no change, addition, or commentary should deviate from what is established as original thought. In everyday events, subjectification is, in many ways, intertwined with signifiance. However, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also clarified some differences. First, if signifiance is concerned with ideas and meanings, subjectification is concerned with how an individual turns into a subject in the knowledge system. A strong component of subjectification is passion and its expression in emotion. Therefore, the expressive substance of the stratum of subjectification is the self (or the consciousness, the cogito) while passion gives the self (cogito or consciousness) an expressible form as a subject. Second, if signifiance “collected” signs to its circle of ideas, subjectification needs a decisive external occurrence, based on which “a postulate” or “concise formula” is created that then serves “as a point of departure for a linear series or proceedings that run its course” (p.  120). With these features, the regime of subjectification is subjective and passional, yet an authoritarian regime of linearity.

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On the stratum of subjectification, self-­expression is always traced to an origin and thus, unlike signifiance, subjectification needs a clear starting point, a point of subjectification. Anything, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explained, can serve as such a starting point for this regime. Some individuals follow authority figures (e.g., religious figures or dominant scholars such as Descartes, Freud, or Marx), others find starting points that define their understandings of their selves. Anything, any passion, can serve as a point of subjectification in our consumerist capitalist society: food, shoes, yoga, pole fitness, or marathon running can enable an individual to understand him or herself as a subject in capitalist society. Subjectification, thus, creates subjects who think within the confines provided by its own boundaries. They become normal subjects following a starting point clearly located within a regime of signs. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) continued that “[t]he various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving toward a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal” (p.  129). For example, a fitness enthusiast can begin with 5K road races, but then gradually move toward untramarathons or Ironman racing considering that such a passion is a normal way of understanding oneself within contemporary society. Deleuze and Guattari explained how “normalcy” is traced on the stratum of subjectification. Owing to subjectification, the “original statements” by authority figures have turned into the dominant reality for the self who is now subject to these statements. The self is bound in conformity to these statements through which s/he has become a subject: “subjectivity effects an individuation, collective or particular. Substance [the self] has become subject” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 129). Subjectification, or “normalization” to the dominant expression of the self, has taken place. Owing to this process, we also begin to believe in ourselves as the originators of our ideas, decisions, and behaviours. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) continued: the more you obey the statements of the dominant reality, the more in command you are as subject of enunciation in mental reality, for in the end you are only obeying yourself! You are the one in command, in your capacity as a rational being. A new form of slavery is invented, namely being slave to oneself, or to pure “reason,” the Cogito. (p. 130) The stratum of subjectification subjects the self to the domination of the original thinking self through one’s passion whether it is food for an anorectic, shopping for a consumer, or endomorphines for a marathon runner. This results in the normalization of individualism that dominates capitalist society. As Massumi (1992) concisely summarized: “Our humanity is … an objective illusion” (p. 47). On the strata of organism, significance, and subjectification, thus, certain contents and expressions are formalized into sets of knowledges. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) summarized:

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It is on the strata that the double articulation appears that formalizes traits of expression and traits of content, each in its own right, turning matters into physically or semiotically formed substances and functions into forms of expression or content. Expression then constitutes indexes, icons, or symbols that enter regimes or semiotic systems. Content then constitutes bodies, things, or objects that enter physical systems, organisms, and organizations. (pp. 142–143) Massumi (1992) further clarified that content or what Buchanan (2015) characterized as actions, bodies, and things, is what is “overpowered” and expression (or functional structures, affects, words, ideas if we follow Buchanan) is what overpowers. Despite resembling the notions of signified and signifier, we have to be careful not to make direct equations between these two ways of understanding meanings. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) emphasized that their concepts have nothing to do with signified and signifier: “A form of content is not a signified, any more than a form of expression is a signifier” (p. 66). Or in other words, their ideas of content and expression should not be confused with equating semiotic theory’s words as signifiers and things as signified or the Marxist notion of the signified or superstructure (expression) and base (content). In Deleuze and Guattari’s model, the two terms do not form stable meanings. Rather their relation is biunivocal, exterior, and “deformed” and thus, while there is “real independence,” there is also a “real detachment” (p. 66). “We are never signifier or signified,” Deleuze and Guattari proclaimed, “we are stratified” (p. 67). Yet, there is an interface between the content and expression that provides meaning for interpretation (Massumi, 1992). For an expression to form, content needs to be made into meanings and content needs to become meaningful to be practiced in society. For example, bodies (the content) actualize in the social categories of obese and unhealthy, thin and healthy bodies—a meaning expressed by the measurement of fat. Although bound by the double articulation, these strata, as formalized knowledge, also tend to separate the expression and content. For example, the way we know about the physically active body through many kinesiology curricula, illustrates the division of expression (the theory) and content (the physical activity practice): theoretical courses (drawing from several sub-­disciplines) are taught separately from any existing physical activity (skill) courses that do not have any theory component in them. The strata on the human stratum—organism, signifiance, subjectification— have distinct expressions and contents. However, they also operate in conjunction with each other to shape our everyday lives. One example of their combined effect is what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) characterized as “face.” Although they earlier identified “face” as the primary substance of signifiance, they also illustrated how it combines the stratification by organism, signifiance, and subjectification.

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The Face, Faciality Traits The face, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is a concept close to what we would probably call “an identity.” Their explanation of the formation of face and its traits, however, departs from many of the ideas related to the social construction of identity. As noted earlier, the face brings together the functioning of organism, signifiance, and subjectification. Deleuze and Guattari, however, carefully pointed out that the face is not the same as the head. It is not, in fact, a part of the body at all, but is rather produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code—when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face. (p. 170, italics original) As such, the face moves the head from the stratum of organism, connects it to the strata of signifiance and subjectification, and provides a readable map for their workings. In other words, the face as a mechanism situated at the intersection of signifiance and subjectification, is not an individual face, but acts as a surface for appropriate meanings in a given social context. Deleuze and Guattari explained how the face serves as a substance for expression for both strata: signifying traits are indexed to specific faciality traits. Faces … define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci or resonance that select the sensed or mental reality that make it conform in advance to a dominant reality. (p. 168) The combined effect of signifiance and subjectification function through a two-­ step process: biunivocalization and binarization. As the first step, biunivocalization brings together the elements that make a “facial unit.” This is the function of signifiance: it makes these elements into a recognizable “face.” In our current dominant system, faces are made recognizable in a binary pair (that have a biunivocal relation with another): a face is either a man or a woman, white or black, rich or poor, active or inactive, dancer or non-­dancer. There are several levels of binaries that can be added to these dichotomies (e.g., a white man, a rich woman, a professional dancer). While the face itself is not an individual, “concrete individualized faces are produced and transformed on the basis of these units, these combinations of units.… You don’t so much have a face as slide into one” (p. 177).

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As the second step, binarization, some faces are chosen as “acceptable.” These normal faces are absorbed within the dominant societal system. Subjectification functions to create this selective choice. The choice adds a type of hierarchy on the recognizable faces: some are more suspicious than others. No face, however, is outside of the binary system. No one is an “other.” Every face is made recognizable when inscribed by the cultural codes and by signifiance that “computes” the normalities. All faces are included into the system through a creation of a successive list of deviances that depart from the accepted first choice. Therefore, instead of “outsiders,” there are 1st, 2nd, 3rd or nth choices of faces. The signifiance constantly creates “new” recognizable faces that subjectification then orders. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) used a telling example: “A ha! It’s not a man and it’s not a woman, so it must be a transvestite” (p. 178). Some of these “deviant choices” are more tolerated than others. The degree of tolerance also constantly changes based on cultural conditions. For example, a face of a young Muslim man can be considered a deviant face (from the dominant middle-­aged, White, Christian man) that currently indicates an intolerable face. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) used racism as an example of the two-­step process of facialization: Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-­Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves … from the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside.… Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness. (p. 178) Racism, similar to other hierarchical facializations, “protects” the signifiance/ subjectification system from any intrusion from “outside” and thus, keeps the binary system functional. If facialization separates individuals into hierarchical categories, Deleuze and Guattari also investigated how segmentarity operates on a larger societal scale.

Stratification: Lines of Segmentarity Deleuze and Guattari (1987) emphasized that all the strata are segmented: the entire premise of the strata rests on the idea of formalizing substances into a statistical order (segments). In the beginning of this chapter, I discussed Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) double articulation: content emerges from substances when undefined particle flows and molecular units are coded first into a statistical order and then further into larger stable structures. As a consequence, as I discussed earlier, faces are also segmented through the two-­step process of biunivocalization and binarization. This segmentation then constitutes a social “order” that is inherently stratified, but, as Deleuze and Guattari elaborated (1987), there are several ways segmentation works and not all segmentation is “negative,” oppressive, or marginalizing.

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First, there are rigid modes of segmentarity. This type of segmentation is divided by molar lines that are governed on the one hand, by the “great machines of direct binarization” of the state apparatus and expressed, on the other hand, by the great traditional model of philosophical thinking. The molar lines segment individual faces based on the binary process discussed previously. In addition, there are supple modes of segmentarity. These create binary divides, but are not expressed by direct binarization. They are segmented by the molecular lines. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) equated the molar lines with macropolitics (the molar lines of class) and the molecular lines of micropolitics (the molecular lines of mass). They argued that the molecular lines of everyday life, where the micropolitics allows for more diversity, are less rigid than the molar lines governed by the state apparatus. Both, nevertheless, operate simultaneously. For example, Deleuze and Guattari noted that while “politics and its judgments are always molar,” the molecular “makes or breaks” the success of these judgments (p. 222). Despite the seemingly obvious link with the division between the social and the individual,3 Deleuze and Guattari emphasized that the molar and molecular are not distinguished by size, scale, or dimension, but rather, the nature of the system they create and operate: the difference is not at all between the social and the individual (or interindividual), but between the molar realm of representations, individual or collective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which the distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning since flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by collective signifiers. (p. 219) In addition to molar and molecular segmentary lines, Deleuze and Guattari identified a third type of line: the quantum lines (of flight) that break out from the otherwise segmented social space of supple lines and rigid lines of the political space of the state apparatus. Often operating within everyday actions, the micropolitics of society, quantum lines flee from the segmented binaries to decode and deterritorialize the space of the rigid lines. I elaborate on the functions of molar and molecular lines, and lines of flight in Chapter 5 where I discuss how individuals can transcend the binary structure of molarity.

The Strata as Apparatuses of Capture In summary, the strata are layers of substances and their functions (the forms) are articulated into content and expression. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) identified three dominant strata: inorganic, organic, and anthropomorphic (human) strata that each enabled a specific interaction between content and expression. They further distinguished between three strata on the human stratum: organism,

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s­ ignifiance, and subjectification. These human strata organize knowledge into rigid, immobile segments that limit thinking by “capturing” it within predetermined knowledge “belts” in the current capitalist knowledge production. Deleuze and Guattari used “the face” as an example of how these three strata operate together to locate an individual within their territories. In addition, they demonstrated how individuals are segmented into molar binaries supported by “state politics” and the modes of traditional philosophical thinking supported by subjectification and signifiance. The strata capture previously unorganized material, elements, and particles to organize them into recognizable belts. The human stratum, particularly, organizes material elements, the content, to be expressed in language. In this sense, expression tends to dominate the interactions on this stratum. Nevertheless, organism, signifiance, and subjectification function together to imprint our faces with features for “normal” citizens in segmented capitalist society. Do the strata, then, limit how we interpret our bodies and selves? Should we aim to demolish the organism, subjectivation, and signifiance to look for freedom from capitalist rule? From Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) point of view, the current human strata, and the following segmentation into molar binaries limit multiplicity and thus, marginalize certain thoughts, individuals, groups, and modes of life. While these strata prevent us from thinking differently, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) cautioned against the complete dismissal of their organization in favor of returning to chaos. In some ways, they continued, the strata are beneficial and therefore, the idea is not to get rid of organized knowledge layers entirely—they will always exist—but to escape or resist being entirely stratified, coded, or organized into neat belts of knowledge. To further illustrate the meaning of the strata for social scientists, Tampio (2014) suggested that we engage in “stratoanalysis” that enables using Deleuze’s philosophy as a tool box for social science investigations yet honoring its complexity. Stratoanalysis, according to Tampio, “means to diagram the layers, sides and components of a body” (p.  10). Diagramming, in this context, denotes to “drawing” how concepts are layered into components and thus, into bodies of thought. He practiced this visual technique to illustrate how organism, signifiance, and subjectification bind individuals, yet are also open to lines of flight. First, he recommended drawing a circle. Second, one should draw horizontal lines across the circle to divide it into three sections that can then be labelled organism, signifiance, and subjectification. Finally, he suggested perforating one side of circle “with lines of flight fleeing” the circle. These three sections can then be labelled “disarticulation, experimentation and nomadism” (p. 10). The meaning of portraying the layers of Deleuze’s concepts is to visually demonstrate their interconnections and thus, make them more “usable” also for social scientists studying the physically active body. There will always be strata—ways of organizing elements—but they do not all need to be imprisoned by organism, signifiance, and subjectification that

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characterize the capitalist apparatus of capture. In their work, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) developed ways to move beyond the limitations of the strata through returning to the plane of consistency (the plane of intensities where various elements have not yet been organized). Transforming the strata and their segmentation requires pragmatics based on a different model of organizing thought. For these insights to have an effect on capitalist society, however, they have to translate into concrete practices. In other words, they need to return to operate in connection to the strata. These are types of practices that socio-­ cultural researchers of physical activity can certainly explore. I expand on Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatic model in the following chapters, but focus now how the strata can inform analyses of the physically active body.

How Does It Work? What New Thoughts Does This Make Possible to Think? While the formation of strata, and the following segmentation of capitalist society, are central to Deleuze’s work, they are not widely used to analyze the physically active body. To examine how these concepts can work as tools for such examinations, I first provide an example from geology to then discuss how the concept of stratum has been employed by some researchers of the dancing body. In her work, Yosuff (2017) examined the relationship between geological forces located in the inorganic stratum and social practices located in the anthropomorphic stratum. Her “political geologic analysis” “excavates the constitutive power relations that derive from geologic forces that exceed but continue to animate the social field” (p.  109). Geology, thus, intertwines with capitalism in geosocial relationships. In her work, strata “are a material and affective infrastructure through which the social becomes embodied (literally) in forms of subjectivity, modes of social organization, and in the bonds of sociability” (p. 109). She further located her discussion within the Anthropocene: an era where the human subject is conceptualized as “capable of challenging geologic forces and probing deep into the standing stock of the earth” (p. 107). In this era, the social strata “locks in” the earth’s intensities and flows into social, political, and economic apparatuses. As these apparatuses, nevertheless, are subtended by earth flows, the social is inevitably determined by the operations of geopower and its stability. Even if the inorganic is deemed to exist mainly for the use of humanity, the analysis of strata can highlight the interactions between different forces in geosocial politics. For example, Yosuff explained that “[c]apitalism succeeds as a geosocial machine because it organizes modes of capture that capitalize on geopower” (p.  113). When capturing the earth’s fossil stocks and mineral flows, capitalism, nevertheless, changes “ocean currents, temperature, potentiation, pH (in ocean acidification), nitrogen, carbon, water, zoological and biological flows, deep mining, combustion,

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d­ esertification” (p. 113). Thinking through strata, capitalism becomes indistinguishable as a force from other geologic forces and as such, has been naturalized as the force using the earth. Thinking through strata should further bring an awareness of this interdependences of the planet and social practices that is currently obscured. This, Yosuff asserted, is a challenge for the social sciences and humanities that now “need to begin to populate” (p.  123) the concepts and implications of sciences such a geology without assuming their methods. In addition to demonstrating how these relations turn deadly in capitalism, Yosuff ’s geopolitical analysis offers steps to reoccupy the geosocial data. These can be helpful also for socio-­cultural researchers who aim to demonstrate how the physically active body is produced by the interactions of the inorganic, organic, and social strata of capitalism. I, thus, have slightly modified her steps for the use of studying the human body. 1. Lodge yourself in the forces and flows of geologic and organic strata; 2. Form a meticulous relation with the modes of capitalization and habituated inculcations that extract from fossil and organic strata; 3. Work to recognize the modes of exhaustion (planetary, ecological, and social) that characterize those geosocial and organic interventions in the strata; 4. Develop a praxis that considers the geopolitical as well as biopolitical; 5. Investigate and experiment with modes of geologic and bodily expression (aesthetic, incorporeal, collective, axiomatic); 6. Avoid anthropocentric valorizations at all times; 7. Examine the intrastratum between social, biological, and geophysical stratifications; 8. Discover new undercommons of biologically and geologically subtended relations; 9. Seek out flows of matter and energy that capture collective modes to rethink and redevelop these relations. Following these steps can help consider how the forces of inorganic and organic strata interact with the social to create new formations of expression. In other words, we can move beyond examining only the social construction of physically active bodies to consider them also as biological actors in their geophysical environment. This, nevertheless, requires lodging to the inorganic and organic strata to consider their unique conceptual worlds, but also a meticulous analysis of how capitalism has captured these forces to naturalize itself as their user. Only then is it possible to seek flows that enable us to rethink the relations of the strata and redevelop alternative ways of considering also the human body. Understanding the layers of the three dominant human strata can also work for researchers of the physically active body. As these strata are currently employed by the capitalist order, they can be analyzed to detect how the physically active body is stratified by the layers of the strata. Drawing from Deleuze

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and Guattari’s (1987) work, I thought through the concepts of the strata, molarity, and the face to reveal how traditional thought permeates theoretical traditions, lived experiences, and representations in dance. To examine how the strata operate in the micropolitics of dance, I (Markula, 2015) was curious why recreational contemporary dancers continued to dance in pain or through injuries without the pressures of earning a living as professional dancers. To understand these experiences, I interviewed fourteen women dancers. I then reflected on the findings through the lens of the three anthropomorphic strata to conclude that the dancers defined pain as an unavoidable aspect of their practice and continued to train injured while expressing their passionate commitment to dance. Their understandings of injuries, I detected, were based on the pathology of an individual body and were thus, supported by the scientifically, medically organized way of understanding the body (the stratum of organism). The other strata, subjectification and signifiance that were closely intertwined, provided the context that supported the dancers’ (ill)treatment of their injuries. When the contemporary dancers accepted personal responsibility for their injuries, that they saw originating from bodily unawareness and carelessness, they further constructed a contemporary dancer’s self. Their subjectification to contemporary dance femininity enabled them to ignore pain and dance injured in favor of considering how to train differently for a stronger dancing body. In addition, they defined contemporary dance as an art form that expressed emotions and feelings. The dancers then embodied this signifiance by expressing their passionate commitment to dance. The passionate subjectification overruled any bodily injury. In this study, then, I demonstrated how lived experiences of pain and injury in contemporary dance were structured through the three anthropomorphic strata that supported unhealthy practices. It is possible to investigate how stratification further segments (physically active) individuals in society based on recognizable faciality traits. Some dance scholars have used the concepts of face and faciality trait as tools to examine how dance articulates or disarticulates the strata. In her research, Dodds (2014) concentrated on “the dancing face” as an integral aspect of choreography. Suggesting that “facial choreography” is “an embodied site of meaning construction in relationship to other dancing faces and other body parts in motion” (p. 46), Dodds drew on Deleuze and Guattari to examine if “the capacity for dance to articulate corporeally offers scope to destabilize the semiotic inscription of the facial machine” (p.  43). Disrupting the constitution of the face is possible, Dodds argued, because “[t]he mobility of dance facilitates facial motion that might conform to or resist the aesthetic and politically inscribed choreographies of the body” (p.  43). Drawing on her ethnographic work in hip-­hop and neo-­ burlesque performances, Dodds illustrated how the smile, specifically, can “maintain, undermine, mock, overdetermine, or re-­imagine the face” (p. 43). Concentrating on Virgil “Lil O” Gadson’s use of smile to contrast his movements that conveyed intimidation during his freestyle hip-­hop in a street dance competition in the United States, Dodds asked: What did his smile signal here?

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A dramatic irony of his pretence of aggression toward his opponents? An attempt to win over the audience and judges in this cash-­prize competition? Or an expression of happiness to be dancing? Throughout his performance, Lil O continued to create such “instances of disconnect and semiotic instability between facial expression and bodily action” (p.  47). Such “quick-­fire” facial movements, Dodds observed, produced “an excess of disparate meanings” of which instability resisted the semiotic coding of the facial machine (p.  48). They disturbed “the fixing intent of facility” (p. 48) by bringing the face and the body into dialogue with each other during the performance. She added that Lil O’s smile further destabilized the “racialized normativity of the facial machine” in the United States that “encodes the African Amer­ican smile as a trope of pleasure and entertainment” for example, through the blackface minstrelsy (p. 49) that has been used to mask social and economic exclusion of slavery and persecution. A smile in a hip-­hop performance, however, can produce “a critical commentary on this history,” because its “polysemy” and “mobility” no longer conform to the previously fixed order of meaning (p. 49). As a second example, Dodds (2014) presented Darlinda Just Darlinda’s neo-­ burlesque act, You Have Made Me So Very Happy George Bush! Both humorous and unsettling, this performance illustrated how gendered norms are made meaningful through the facial machine. Darlinda opened her performance with a hyperbolic, full smile with flashing white teeth to represent “the ultimate Republican patriot and all-­Amer­ican woman” (p. 49). This strategy, according to Dodds, “exposes her nationalist, feminized body as a ‘masquerade’ that calls attention to its own construction” (p. 50). Darlinda’s performance further problematized the governance of female bodies in the Bush era by moving from a triumphant supporter to a confused, horrified woman stripped off from all of her clothes. As such, Dodds argued, the excessive facial expressions dismantled and redirected the meanings of “the facialized body of the Amer­ican patriot or the female stripper” (p.  52). In her work, then, Dodds aimed to demonstrate the capacity of dancing faces to construct, support, or disrupt meanings determined by the facial machine. In my own work (Markula, 2018), I examined further how a particular dance “face” was constructed in a televised reality show. I (Markula, 2018) employed Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of “face” to examine how two women ballet dancers were represented in the reality television show So You Think You Can Dance Canada (SYTYCD). I discovered that the upwardness, etherealness, and delicateness of a ballerina needed to be transformed into a sexy, emotionally expressive, and hard-­working dance face to ensure success in this dance show. The ballet dancers, indeed, aimed to live up to “the SYTYCD face” of commercialized, popular, mass-­mediated dance by working towards the correct emotional sexiness, but tended to became recognizable as white, technical, and sweet ballet faces. This televised reality dance show amplified its preferred face through its close-­ups of the dancers’ emotional faces, detailed focus on the judges’ commentary, and the intimate rehearsal shots that all constructed certain meanings through which we come to understand dance in popular

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culture. In this work, I demonstrated how the ballet face aligned with the existing commercial, capitalist production of dance rather than producing “new thought.” My focus on “the face,” however, revealed how the “normal” ballet face, while often seen to represent ideal femininity, was no longer “selected” as acceptable based on the cultural codes of a popular television show. An analysis of how face is created in the intersection of the organism, signifiance, and subjectification can reveal how the strata subject the self and give it a function in a particular context. No one is outside of this formation, including the researcher whose self is similarly structured within the strata of the traditional model of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) deepened their analysis of the strata to include the relations between bodies. This analysis highlights how expression (language-­based meaning making) and content (the material bodies) assemble to shape behaviour in diverse social contexts. I explore their concept, assemblage, further in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Deleuze (2007) explained later that his Logic of Sense expanded his theory of intensity introduced in Difference and Repetition by moving from an examination of intensity stemming from the depths to surfaces. The events were the surface entities through which such an examination could proceed. As such, events introduced change to the deeper, solidified structures: running through these structures, events as multiple interactions streaming through bodies and existing structures, could transform the existing order (Williams, 2008). Later on, Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) further developed the concept, now also termed hecceity or haecceity, into a more “abstract” idea of intensity operating at the plane of consistency where thought, not yet structured into knowledge, is continually formed free of an individual thinking subject or things to be thought of. For a more complete discussion of the event, see Chapter 5. 2. The same semiotic framework borrowed from Hjelmslev was later used by Deleuze (2006) in his work on Foucault. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Hjelmslev, a linguist, used the term matter for “the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all of its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities” (p.  43)—what Deleuze and Guattari called the Body without Organs. 3. Massumi (1992) modified Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) terminology to explain that “molar populations (person)” are locally connected discrete particles who have become correlated at a distance, homogenized, and stabilized. Within the molar population there is some multiplicity, but it is a “disciplined” multiplicity within which each individual is “constructed” according to the molar lines. This molar individual is the dominant term in a relation of power and a contained population is called a “subjected group.” A molarized individual is “a ‘person’ to the extent that a category (cultural image of unity) has been imposed on it, and insofar as its subsequent actions are made to conform to those prescribed by its assigned category” (p. 55). An individual, supple or molarized, is stable only within the limits provided by the disciplinary lines.

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References Beckman, F. (2017). Gilles Deleuze. London: Reaktion Books. Buchanan, I. (2015). Assemblage theory and its discontents. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 382–392. Deleuze, G. (2006). Foucault. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2007). Note for the Italian edition of The Logic of Sense. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 63–66). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy. London, NY: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2006). Dialogues II. London: Continuum. Dodds, S. (2014). The choreographic interface: dancing facial expression in hip-­hop and neo-­burlesque striptease. Dance Research Journal, 42(2), 39–56. Evans, F. (2016). Deleuze’s political ethics: The Fascism of the new. Deleuze Studies, 10(1): 85–99. Foucault, M. (1977/1994). Theatrum philosophicum. In J.  D. Faubion (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Aesthetics: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol  2 (pp.  343–3680). London, UK: Penguin. Markula, P. (2015). (Im)Mobile bodies: Contemporary semi-­professional dancers’ experiences in injuries. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 50(7), 840–864. Markula P. (2018). “So You Think You Can Dance”: The feminine ballet body in a popular reality show. In P. Markula & M. I. Clark (Eds.), The evolving feminine ballet body (pp. 27–48). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tampio, N. (2014). Entering Deleuze’s political vision. Deleuze Studies, 8(1), 1–22. Taylor, D. (2014). Uncertain ontologies. Foucault Studies, 17, 117–133. Williams, J. (2008). Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh Press. Yusoff, K. (2017). Geosocial strata. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(2–3), 105–127.

Chapter 2

The Assemblage Sport, Exercise, and Dance as Cultural Arrangements

In Chapter 1 I explained how Deleuze and Guattari (1987) define the human or anthropomorphic stratum stratified by organism, signifiance, and subjectification. These human strata, they asserted, guide how we view the world. To further understand how the strata impact on individuals’ behaviour in their micro-­level contexts of everyday life, Deleuze and Guattari developed a new concept, assemblage. In this chapter I focus the role of assemblage. In addition, I highlight how Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and the abstract machine relate to their understanding of how society operates.

Assemblage The term assemblage now appears more commonly within the social sciences where it has assumed a variety of meanings (e.g., Buchanan, 2017), some of which are quite distant from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept. If this diversity has created confusion, Deleuze and Guattari themselves have added to this misunderstanding by using several terms before settling on “the assemblage.” For example, the term “desiring-­machine” (Deleuze, 2007b; see also Buchanan, 2015; Massumi, 1992) appears in Anti-­Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994a), but when detailing its characteristics further in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari (1987) used assemblage consistently. Translating assemblage to English, furthermore, has created some controversy. While Massumi (1987) translated the original French “agencement” in A Thousand Plateaus as assemblage, it is not a choice uniformly agreed upon by all Deleuze scholars. “Agencement,” some pointed out, means “to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to combine, to order” (Law 2004, p.  41, cited in Buchanan, 2015, p.  383) or “‘putting together,’ arrangement, laying out, layout, or fitting” (Cousin et al., 1990, pp.  9–10, cited in Wise, 2005, p.  77). Joughlin (1995) added that Deleuze’s own translation of agencement was, indeed, “arrangement” adding that acengement, similar to Foucault’s dispositif, characterizes an empirical interplay of power and knowledge difficult to express in a single English word. Consequently, while not disagreeing with Massumi’s choice, Buchanan (2015), for example, preferred “arrangement.”

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Regardless of the exact choice of the English word, what is important to note is that we are not dealing with a static organization or arrangement or situation, but rather something that is an ongoing process of arranging, organizing, or fitting together various elements that then stipulate people’s behaviour in society. As Deleuze (2007b) explained “we are trying to substitute the idea of assemblage for the idea of behaviour” (p. 177). The assemblage, nevertheless, is not exactly the same as observable behaviour, but it gives parameters, consistency, and coherence, to the way we behave in a specific social context and as such “goes beyond mere ‘behavior’ ” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 504). What is important here, is Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) analysis of how multiple, heterogenous elements, including both biological and organic as well as language and social elements—or as Deleuze (2007e) put it, “both natural and artificial elements” (p.  179)—shape individuals’ behaviour and thoughts. In this sense, assemblage is not necessarily the behaviour itself, but something that exists prior to contour the actual ways of behaving. As such, assemblage is an arrangement, “a process of composition,” that “works with a pre-­existing set of entities and gives it a different order” (Buchanan, 2017, p. 458). In this chapter, I use the term “assemblage” but acknowledge that, instead of entirely accidental “coming together” of various elements, assemblage denotes some stability and order into the ways we behave in society.

Dissembling Assemblage Deleuze deployed assemblage in a manner specific to his thought system. Therefore, his concept can differ from the generic notion of assemblage—or what Buchanan (2017, p. 458) characterized “a plain language understanding of the English word ‘assemblage’ ”—as grouping together various aspects. However, the uses of assemblage have increased significantly among social scientists. As Deleuze’s use of the term can be elusive, it can be helpful to start by recounting some uses of assemblage that, while associating with Deleuze’s work, have also dimmed its original conceptualization. I use Buchanan’s (2015, 2017) critique of what he labels “the assemblage theory” in social sciences to highlight some of the appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas. While acknowledging that Deleuze and Guattari did not call for strict adherence to their ideas, Buchanan (2015, 2017), nevertheless, endorsed precision when using their concepts. “Without any anchor in Deleuze and Guattari’s work,” he insisted, concepts like assemblage, float “off into an alternate universe in which all contributions … are treated as equally valuable and there is no arbitration between the strong and the weak versions, never mind the accurate and the wrong versions” (Buchanan, 2017, p. 459). His critique of assemblage theory focused on two of its versions: Actor Network Theory (ANT) and DeLanda’s work on assemblage. As both of these appear in the works by socio-­ cultural researchers of the physically active body, it is fruitful to compare these conceptualizations of assemblage to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept.

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While Buchanan (2017) also employed Latour’s concept of actant in his own assemblage analysis, he established that the ways assemblage is used in ANT departs from Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of assemblage. One of the main contributions of ANT is bringing in material objects into analysis—to assemble the social and the material. Although Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage also includes materiality, this is not the main element of their assemblage. In addition, ANT uses assemblage to establish phenomena as complex sets of causal events. Buchanan (2015) observed, “ANT uses the assemblage to name a complex form of causality … which attributes causality to the whole network of interacting elements” (p. 386). As such, assemblage is employed to deal with complex social and cultural situations or problematics which can neither be reduced to a single instance, object or truth nor allowed to remain indefinite, undecidable or purely perspectival as though to say … that there is no discernible object, instance or truth. (pp. 385–386) As a case in point, Buchanan (2015) used Law’s (2004) analysis of the Ladbroke Grove train crash in 1999 that exemplified an event as an assemblage of several complex elements. Law’s analysis demonstrated that it is was impossible to establish a definitive explanation for the cause of the crash, because there were too many factors ranging from driver error to system failure that potentially caused the accident. While Buchanan acknowledged that to describe the crash fully, no doubt, requires counting for several elements and establishing it as a complex event, “there is no particular analytic advantage in describing it as an assemblage” (p. 387), because it was an accident, not an arrangement as Deleuze and Guattari would have it. While a good example for ANT, a train crash is not a deliberate assembling of elements in Deleuzian sense. Focusing on events as complex and undecidable, Buchanan concluded, does not make it a Deleuzian assemblage analysis. If the ANT approach tends to focus on complexity, Buchanan (2015) found DeLanda’s (2006) work reducing “assemblage to the status of adjective” (p.  387). Similar to ANT, DeLanda’s assemblage is a complex entity, but one that “grows in both scale and complexity as components are added” (Buchanan, 2015, p. 388). The components increase due to continual interactions between different parts that then lead to emergence of assemblages. As unique, singular, and historically contingent, DeLanda’s assemblage offers a way of thinking about part-­whole relations as “a new kind of causality, one that acts without conscious intention or purpose” (p. 388). DeLanda, therefore, offered his model to be used in analyses of interpersonal networks, social justice movements, cities, or nation states. Buchanan summarized that this type of assemblage is “a whole” built gradually from smaller, interacting parts. As such, it is “the product of an accumulation of individual acts” (p. 388) that then changes incrementally when new parts are added. Nevertheless, these are not characteristics of Deleuze

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and Guattari’s assemblage and as such, DeLanda’s concept differs drastically from their concept. While the assemblage theory can be useful, Buchanan (2015) concluded that it is limited to naming or simply giving “a currently fashionable way of speaking about” problems (p.  391). If everything and anything is treated as an assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory loses its analytical power. When defined in such loose terms, Buchanan emphasized, a concept only describes instead of defamiliarizing and then framing a problem for analysis which, for Deleuze and Guattari, was the purpose of having concepts. If this is the case, what exactly is Deleuze and Guattari’s account of assemblage that frames a problem to open it up to an analysis? If we know that assemblage, as they conceptualized it, is not an accident, incidental coming together of social, individual, and material elements, a gradually expanding network, or a social movement, what is it?

Assemblage: How Does It Work? As noted earlier, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) located the assemblage in relation to existing strata. Between strata, it has an ability to bring about changes in their organization of its relation to the substratum of not yet organized elements. The assemblages, nevertheless, develop only on the anthropomorphic or alloplastic human stratum, because they also assume the regimes of signs form their expression. Evans (2016) visualized the entire human stratum as an assemblage that “is always dividing itself into new assemblages” (p. 89). Assemblages, thus, become actual in the organized plane of the human stratum as concrete assemblages. These enable the relationships between the different strata of the human stratum: they are necessary for development of articulations on the organic stratum; they catch organisms for the use of a social field; they enable regimes of signs to intertwine with organism. Similar to the strata, the assemblages include both expression and content, but they are a different form from the strata and thus, should be treated as separate from the strata. For example, Deleuze (2007b) noted that “[t]here are various kinds of assemblages, and various component parts”: “things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges, but you also find utterances, modes of expression and whole regimes of signs” (p. 177). These elements gather around two axes: 1. content (pragmatic system)—expression (regime of signs) 2. territoriality and deterritorialization At the same time, the assemblages “effectuate” the abstract machine and thus, involve an element of power. I first discuss how expression and content “make up” an assemblage and how it can move closer or further away from the strata (the second axis). I then focus on how it operates as social force, the abstract machine. I begin by mapping the first axis of content and expression.

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The First Axis: Content—Expression 1 As noted earlier, assemblages are located in between the two layers of strata— they belong to strata, said Deleuze and Guattari (1987), but are not contained within them. Similar to strata, the elements assemble alongside content and expression, but content now becomes “a pragmatic system of actions and passions” and the expression “a semiotic system, a regime of signs” (p.  504, italics original). Therefore, on the human stratum, it is possible to assemble a hand (a  form of content) with a tool and other technology that obtain meaning through language (e.g., work). Or it is possible to assign meanings (expression) to human facial features and expressions (content). As a further similarity to the strata, Buchanan (2015) observed that the relationship between the form of content and the form of expressions is reciprocal presupposition: “one implies and demands the other but does not cause or refer to it” (p. 390). As an example of reciprocal presupposition between expression and content, he offered mountaineer George Mallory’s simple response “because it’s there” to question why he planned to climb Mount Everest in 1923. In this context, obtaining fame as the first man to conquer Everest turns into the form of expression. Yet it requires physical effort to climb to its peak and consequently, to obtain fame. This physical effort is the form of content in this situation. “There is a feedback loop between these two forms,” Buchanan explained: “If the symbolic accolade (form of expression) is not great enough, then the effort (form of content) will seem out of proportion; by the same token, if the effort (form of content) required is not great enough, then the symbolic accolade (form of expression) will seem undeserved” (p. 391). The expression and content are now placed in reciprocal presupposition with each other: clearly if Mount Everest could be visited by a helicopter, there would not be sufficient accolade in physical effort to climb it. On the other hand, if there are many other mountains considered more difficult to reach, climbing Mount Everest would lose its reputation as an important achievement. Therefore, the content and expression always sit in “a dialectical relationship” (p. 391). Assemblages differ from strata in that they are “simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation” (p. 504). This means that expression and content, the parts of an assemblage, are in a process of becoming something as they assemble. An assemblage, thus, is becoming as a system that produces something (e.g., an effect, ways of thinking, practices). In this context, the machinic assemblage refers to how various material bodies, not yet clearly organized, are coming together with elements of expression into a machine of production. As machinic, the assemblage is a type of “organizer” that places content and expression in contact with each other. It is a type of social machine that selects bodies, machines, and tools and takes them to be parts of its arrangements with certain expressions. Deleuze and Guattari, thus, referred to the machinic assemblage as the dimension of an assemblage that primarily deals with individual bodies and their location within different assemblages. The machinic assemblage,

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thus, brings together contents with different expressions and thus, enables continual formation of different assemblages. An assemblage of enunciation assembles elements of expression and thus, determines “the usage of language elements” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 90). These language elements then express incorporeal transformations. Deleuze and Guattari also referred to collective assemblage of enunciation, because it gives the incorporeal transformations or the actual actions resulting from the statements (the speech act, if you will) their social character. In summary, the horizontal axis consists of contents that can refer to the actions and passion of an intermingling of bodies reacting to each other whereas expression refers to the acts and statements, attributed to the bodies. Or as Buchanan (2017) put it, the assemblage combines “nondiscursive multiplicities” (the content or the machinic assemblage of bodies) and “discursive multiplicities” (the expression or the collective assemblage of enunciation) (p. 471). These, he continued, “are dimensions of an active, ongoing process, not a static entity” (p.  471) that then frame individuals’ behaviour on the social assemblage. The assemblage of enunciation is collective, because for Deleuze and Guattari (1987), language is always “social” rather than an individual endeavour. An analysis of assemblage, thus, attempts to move beyond signification that assigns the subject as “the master of the world it chooses to express its beliefs and its desires” (Lambert, 2005, p.  35) to operate within collective expression that shapes beliefs. The collective assemblage of enunciation, thus, refers to the collective, social nature of language.2 Individual speech is, thus, only a result or an effect of the social character of language that we all repeat to make ourselves understood in the specific contexts we operate. While the basic process that structures the strata and the assemblage is the same, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) insisted on a further difference: unlike the strata, assemblages enable incorporeal transformations, a type of bodily transformation engendered or effectuated by the enunciation. In other words, the “language” side of the assemblage affects the bodies; it transforms bodies to act, to feel, to move. This means that statements create actions beyond their non-­ corporeal attributes. For example, the statement “you are physically inactive” does not only express the fact that someone does not do physical activity, but also implies a judgment of the person being unhealthy which further means a significant cost for society. In addition, it implies that there are certain ways of defining and measuring physical activity that is now important in a society. The statements, thus, effectuate incorporeal transformations to physical activity as accepted “health behaviour” by society. While the statements are to evoke bodies to act, the incorporeal transformation is a type of extra-­being that brings the enunciations and the incorporeal in connection. As Lambert (2005) explained: “it is what causes language to become expressive of the sense that is immanent to the plane of bodies” (p. 37) and without which language would be “senseless” or lifeless with no connection to “beings” in the world.

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The content is assembled by the machinic assemblage or the assemblage of bodies. Like the collective assemblage of enunciation, it is a social machine that “abstracts” the content. Consequently, it is important to analyze how the material elements—that Buchanan (2017) characterized as “bodies in the broadest possible sense”—are arranged and what “relations do they entail, what new arrangements and relations might they facilitate” (p. 437). It is then possible to analyze how a specific arrangement of the material or “the things” is justified or becomes a legitimate, recognizable, “right and proper” arrangement (p.  437). Such an analysis, according to Buchanan, reveals “different kinds of entities, non-­discursive and discursive (or better yet, performative) that have been yoked together” (p. 437). In other words, a Deleuzian analysis of an assemblage seeks to determine both “the specific conditions under which matter becomes material” and “the specific conditions under which semiotic matter becomes expressive” (p. 472). In this sense, an assemblage has boundaries that cannot be crossed without it becoming “something different from what it was” (p. 468). Buchanan further identified both the internal limit—the sum total of possible variations the assemblage can accommodate—and the external limit: the restrictions history places on the number of possible variations in an assemblage. Thus, not just anything becomes a “recognizable” assemblage: the elements assemble to become recognizable following certain “rules.” For example, in a fitness assemblage we recognize as “CrossFit,” “functional” exercise has become expressive of certain types of exercise practices (the Workout of the Day, WoD) practiced by certain types of human bodies. It is only recognized as an assemblage in a context where “fitness” has historically become a recognizable expression for certain movement practices. A Deleuzian, then, needs to ask: What are the specific conditions, internal and external limits, within which “functional” has been understood as materializing in the WoD practiced in a CrossFit “Box” and identified as exercise and fitness? The important element of an assemblage analysis is to simultaneously consider what is said and what is done: the reciprocal relationship between content and expression and how they shape behaviour, practice, and action. In Deleuzian terms, this means considering how we talk about physical activity as well how we practice and feel about it simultaneously. Statements about correct technique, coaching, or mental preparation directly inform our practices and the practices directly inform these statements. While this might appear self-­ evident, we can consider how often we assign “theory” and “practice” in separate realms. For example, we often examine how physically active bodies are socially constructed through a theoretical discussion embedded in socio-­cultural issues. If “practice” is included, and if it exists, for example, in ethnographic research, it receives much less attention as it is more difficult to analyze through available concepts in social theory. As a result, it can be difficult to connect with students in kinesiology or “practitioners” (e.g., coaches, fitness instructors) who consider theory esoteric, abstract, or irrelevant for practice. Placing expression and content in a reciprocal relationship, however, does not mean “applying”

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theory to practice, in other words considering linearly how theory (what is said) can explain different practices, but rather thinking how both sides of the assemblage simultaneously shape each other. If content and expression constitute the first, horizontal axis of assemblage, the second axis is vertical on which the assemblage creates lines “that cut across and carry it away” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.  504) to connect to other assemblages, to other “lands,” to abstract, cosmic machines. The Second Axis: Territoriality and Deterritorialization In addition to the first axis of states of being and enunciation, assemblages have an axis of territorialities/re-­territorializations and deterritorialization (Deleuze, 2007b). This axis also determines the location of the assemblage between the strata that are stratified into stable layers and the body without organs (Deleuze, 2007a) that is unstratified realm where the matters have not yet formed into expressions and contents (see also Chapters 3, 4, and 5). Deleuze further explained that “the body without organs opposes all strata of organization, the organism’s organization as well as power organizations” (p. 130). As such, it enables the deterritorialization of assemblage or its flight from the organized sphere of the strata. The two ends of this axis also reflect the operation of “diagrams” or power systems that support either the organization of the strata, “a plane of organization and development,” or consist of “undeveloped” speeds and slowness and intensities not yet formed into contents, “plane of immanence/plane of consistency” (Deleuze, 2007a) (see also Chapters 3, 4, and 5). This vertical axis directs the assemblage towards the strata or away from them. As the strata constantly territorialize space for themselves and reterritorialize space that has momentarily become destratified, the proximity of an assemblage to the strata depends on how closely it is stratified into categories established by the strata. Thus, an assemblage with territoriality similar to the strata also has stability similar to the strata. If an assemblage approaches the body without organs, it leans towards destratification of the existing strata and engages in processes of deterritorialization. In other words, the territorial side3 of this axis stabilizes the assemblage (similar to the strata that are stable) and the deterritorialization operates in its “cutting edges” where it is possible to “carry it away” from stability towards the multiplicity characterizing the body without organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  88). While this might seem rather esoteric and abstract, the vertical axis allowed Deleuze and Guattari to analyze “social fields,” not based on the Marxist ideas of conflicts between dominant and marginalized groups, dominance and resistance, or superstructure and base structure, but as “reciprocal presuppositions” between social meanings and the bodies intermingling in a similar space. This social field is then continually changing based on how different events, things, bodies, and ideas combine.

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To summarize, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) conceptualized “enunciations” as continually interlinking with the material worlds of bodies, technologies, and things to form arrangements that, nevertheless, are constantly “reforming” themselves. These assemblages are located in between the stratified, stabilized strata, but also have a connection to the body without organs and thus, they are never entirely stable. The concept of assemblage is central for Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the social world for several reasons: • it enables an analysis of the articulations of the organic—the bodies, technology, objects—with meaning making (the enunciations); • it enables an analysis of how organisms are caught within and permeated by a social field that utilizes them; • it enables an analysis of the relations between (human) strata; • it enables an analysis of the unity of compositions enveloped in a human stratum and how their relations are organized rather than random; • it enables an analysis of how regimes of signs intertwine with force relations. The “system” of assemblages as the organizing entity between material and “social” (the enunciations, the strata) replaces the divisions between the material world as a domain of science and the social world as a domain for, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, state philosophy, Marxism, structuralism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Assemblage now connects elements from all aspects of the world: An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus) … an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicity drawn from each of these orders. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 23) Therefore, there is no longer “a transcendental real” against which all representations are judged (see Chapter 3). There is no longer an assumed permanent conflict and contradiction between two social structures. There is no longer a “true self ” of which to search. There is no longer a universal signifier(s) that serves as an organizing principle for all social life. Instead, there are assemblages connecting certain meanings with certain actions and passions in a particular social world. For Deleuze, social relations form another dimension of assemblage formation. In other words, if the assemblage refers to a process of how things, events, knowledge, operation, and functions take place at the micro level, they are eneffectuated by the abstract machine(s).

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The Abstract Machine The abstract machine is a type of societal force, if you will, that brings together the elements of the assemblage. Deleuze (2007a) made a connection to Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon as a force that disciplines individuals into docility. Deleuze envisioned the Panopticon as a type of diagram that is immanent or continually present “on the whole social field” (p.  123). The abstract machine, similarly, is a type of force that, like the Panopticon, is not the State power or state authority, but more of a controlling force of the social field somewhat unmanageable by the State. Deleuze, however, did not conceptualize the abstract machine as entirely “normalizing” or repressive. The abstract machine acts as “a synthetizer” that places content and expression in relation and thus, enables their assemblage. It can also be described as “abstracting the content” by connecting it with expressible meanings. At the same time, it is the force that “connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). As a force, it “establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  7). The abstract machine, while effectuated by concrete forms and substances, is itself unformed and unsubstantiated. Succinctly explained, the abstract machine, thus, “is pure Matter-­Function” (p.  141). In a larger sense, the abstract machine synthesizes or joins “separate elements through chance encounters into an enduring, apparently stable, more or less reproducible conglomerate capable of being taken in by its own objective illusion of identity” (Massumi, 1992, p. 47), in other words, into an assemblage. The abstract machine exists separate from the assemblages, but also separate from the strata of which they also define.4 As noted earlier, the abstract machine is not necessarily a repressive force, but rather unifies, organizes, stratifies, or stabilizes the strata or an assemblage. The abstract machine, or societal force, continually segments and desegments, stratifies and destratifies the strata or assemblages. While the concept of the abstract machine that effectuates assemblage, but also defines the composition of the strata, may appear obscure and ambiguous, it enabled Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to think of what happens in society without being limited by “state philosophy,” structuralism, psychoanalysis, or Marxism. They described: an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. (p. 142)

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The abstract machine, they emphasized, operates within “concrete assemblages” where concrete bodies act based on recognizable social meanings or “rules” in specific contexts or territories to direct their functions. Thus, the abstract machine is also a “real” force, not transcendental, universal, or an eternal philosophical concept designed to only resemble some unreachable and incomprehensible truth. Similar to Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) asserted that power operates everywhere and the abstract machine provides an analytical tool to detect a type of power that functions at the molecular level of everyday life by continually arranging things and words into different assemblages. The concept of concrete assemblage also allowed Deleuze and Guattari, as philosophers, to transgress the force of language as the dominant creator of social meaning and challenge the notion that language itself has power.5 In their thought system, language belongs to the regime of signs that constitutes strata and thus, language, instead of “having power,” is formed, stabilized, and organized as an effect of force by the abstract machine (it is not an abstract machine itself ). Thinking of the social world as an assortment of assemblages, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) counted for the “content” of bodies, things, tools, and technologies as integral parts of how we understand society and the world. An assemblage, they summarized, “necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously … an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicity drawn from each of these orders” (p. 23). Deleuze and Guattari further enveloped their understanding of abstract machines with larger social production based on machinic processes.

Nomad Science: Analysis of Machinic Processes Deleuze and Guattari often talk of machines: the machinic assemblage, the abstract machine, the social machine, the desiring machine, the molecular machine, the micro-­machine, the war machine. As we have seen, such machines are not limited to technical instruments or technological machines in a conventional sense, but they tend to refer to various parts coming together to function as a system of production or a “power-­system.” An assemblage, thus, is a good example of machinism. As such, machinism “goes beyond both the mechanism of technology and the organization of the living being, whether in nature, society, or human beings” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 219).6 While “machines” function as a type of system, they are not permanent, clearly organized structures. These are the types of organizations supported by the logic of state philosophy or, for example, structuralist anthropology or functionalist sociology. Machinic function is not necessarily perfect or in a stable state of “equilibrium” of which Deleuze and Guattari described as mechanical function that characterizes the state philosophy (see Chapters 1 and 3). Massumi (1992) further explained the distinction between mechanical, machine, and machinic. First, mechanical “refers to a structural interrelating of discrete parts working ­harmoniously together to perform work” (p. 192). These are “concrete machines”

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or technological apparatuses as opposed to abstract machines that function to combine various elements into assemblages. Second, machinic refers to “functioning immanently and pragmatically.… Living bodies and technological apparatuses are machinic when they are becoming, organic or mechanical when they are functioning in a state of stable equilibrium” (p.  192). Unlike concrete machines, then, abstract machines refer to more conceptual understanding of how various elements (expressions and contents) form as a result of intensities or forces that operate in society. As an example, how a force or intensity, while invisible, can act as an important part of behaviour, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) used “technology.” They asserted that technology is made of formed substances (aluminum, plastic, electric wire) and organized forms (programs, prototypes), but also unformed matters such as resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or delay, induction, and transduction, that, instead of concrete formations, are degrees of intensity. In addition, they explained that “diagrammatic functions” “exhibit” tensors between these intensities and form matters. These intensities and tensors are “real, yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated” (p. 511). We can think of a parallel with human bodies that are formed substances and exercise programs that are the organized forms of physical activity. But physical activity is not merely such a body and a written exercise program. Movement, instead, is the unformed matter with force, momentum, energy, heating, and intensity that makes the body resist, stretch, defy, and give into gravity. The movement qualities are not exactly concrete but they are effectuated by the body that then “does” the exercise program. The body’s doing of movement further involves social forces, a diagram, that assigns certain movements “healthy exercise.” Although invisible, the machinic processes act as a force to support modes of production in society (Surin, 2005). By describing modes of production as machinic, rather than mechanical, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) were able to transcend the dominant philosophical thinking that aims to establish harmonious, stable structures of thought (see also Chapter 3). In their sense of the term, anything can act as a machine, including research writing. Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1995), for example, described his books as types of machines: “What matters is whether it [the book] works, and how it works, and who it works for. It’s a machine too. It’s a matter of reading it over and over again, you have to do something else with it” (p. 22). Similarly, research on the physically active body can be machinic depending on how it works. Consequently, researchers of the physically active body can transcend the limitations of “state science” when they, instead of interpreting the social world as mechanical, clearly identifiable (ideological) structures begin to reconceptualize physical activity as a part of machinic processes: how bodies in motion assemble with various expressions (e.g., health, competition, nationalism, aesthetics) in fluid machinic processes effectuated by abstract machines. These assemblages, then, assume multiple shapes and meanings depending on their context. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) identified this type of research as “nomad science” that

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takes a specific machinic form, the war machine, to disrupt the flow of the state science. Deleuze and Guattari (1986) envisioned “nomad” or “minor science” (p. 17) as an alternative to the state philosophy or, as they also called it, the royal science or state science. It uses the war machine to support modes of production other than the State apparatus. Despite its rather military title, instead of representing military technology or even having war as its primary object, the purpose of the war machine is to disrupt the mechanics of the State apparatus. As “exterior” to the State apparatus, the war machine, can capture flows that escape from the State apparatus and its science. To use these flows, the nomadic science, instead of stable, eternal, identical, and constant “solid theory,” adopts a heterogeneous model that is constantly becoming (see also Chapter 5). As such, it is grounded on open space that, not striated by the strata, on which it is possible to examine how various elements of content and expression assemble. Instead of using predetermined rational, logical order to interpret social production, the nomad science begins with a problem. We need to keep in mind that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) included such theoretical models as phenomenology and Marxism (or psychoanalysis) with the state science and thus, they follow the scientific logics that the nomad science aims to disrupt. Therefore, an intent to reveal how heteronormativity, emphasized femininity, or racism, for example, operate in sport, does not, in itself, serve as a suitable starting point for a nomadic scientist who begins with problems presented by different physical activity contexts. Instead of interpreting experiences, events, or media texts based on pre-­existing theoretical models or concepts, a nomadic scientist analyzes how content (actions) can intertwine with different expressions (that can include inequality). To examine physical activity, it is essential, then, that a nomadic scientist first identifies a problem (e.g., Why do many individuals find exercise boring? Why do so many athletes burn out? Why do men’s contact sports receive the majority of media coverage when aesthetic sport dominated by women are ignored? Why does sport need to be fun? Why does dance receive less governmental funding than sport despite similar participation numbers? Why do some individuals have a passion for extreme sports?). The starting point employed by nomad science requires a different type of “intellectual” from the scientists employed by the State who, as Deleuze and Guattari (1986) described them, are “a strictly dependent organ with only an imagined autonomy” (p.  31). Broadly, this description can apply to a physical activity researcher dependent on grants from state organizations that distribute funding based on preferences defined by governmental needs. While there is some degree of freedom for this researcher to identify topics that land within these preferred areas of research, securing funding, nevertheless, requires an adherence to such areas. Nomadic science of the war machine, instead, does not organize its intellectuals’ thoughts on a ready-­made-form. The ready-­made-form, as Deleuze and Guattari saw it, separates content and expression, for example, based on disciplinary divisions: science examines the content and social science/

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humanities the expression. Nomadic science, instead, “is more immediately sensitive to the connection between content and expression in themselves, each of these two terms encompassing both form and matter” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 31). Nomad science also rejects the possibilities for a universal method and reductionism. Owing to these differences, the State apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, depresses nomadic science that, nevertheless, arises from local spaces using its own weapons, the war machine. Therefore, even if not the main object, a war might result because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of striation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine has as its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts as its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-­form. (p. 111) An engagement in nomadic, minor science, then, can be accompanied by war against the dominant mode of State science. Nomadic scientists, thus, need to use weapons to keep their open, non-­striated space to avoid succumbing to the organized form of State science. This, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is nevertheless worthwhile, because it is necessary to assign the heterogeneous model of nomadic science attending to the multiple problems of the world. From their point of view, it is necessary that researchers engage with problems arising for/in/through physical activity engagement, not from the dominant models of state social science. As these problems, often manifesting at the micro-­contexts of everyday life assemblages, do not necessarily coincide with the state policy, research council policy, or the popular disciplinary theoretical and methodological research traditions, it can be more difficult to find monetary support and scholarly acknowledgment for such nomadic research that can be labelled as “non-­evidence based,” “unscientific,” or “uncritical” toward identity based social injustices. In some cases, this can even lead to open disciplinary “wars” in faculties or fights for scarce funding from grant agencies. Following Deleuze and Guattari, nomadic science of the physically activity body is, nevertheless, necessary, if we aim to solve multiple problems facing physical activity presentation, promotion, and practice in their multiple contexts. I discuss in more detail how exactly we can shape nomadic science in the next chapter. In conclusion, the concept of assemblage is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) nomadic science that presents an alternative to the State science. The starting point is to identify a problem that can further be analyzed in the context of specific assemblages. In an assemblage, diverse elements of content (with form and substance) and their expression (with form and substance) come together to form a clearly identifiable, but heterogeneous, structure. The function of these assemblages can then be analyzed. Deleuze and Guattari emphasized the importance of analyzing how various elements assembled to organize

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behaviour at the micro level in order to understand larger social and political formations.6 The abstract machine acts as a “synthetizer” that brings the expression and content together and thus, assemblage formation in its social context is not entirely arbitrary, but rather a social affair. The assemblages further operate “machinically”: pragmatically, adjusting to their environments rather than based on predetermined rules or laws. A particular machine, the war machine emerges to oppose the State science to support nomadic science with a heterogeneous, localized model of problem solving. While analyzing the various arrangements of content and expression were at the heart of nomad science, Deleuze and Guattari (1987), nevertheless, left the size of an assemblage loosely defined. They talked about large “meaning” systems like Christianity and Judaism as assemblages. They talked about scholarly disciplines like psychoanalysis and/or psychiatry as assemblages. They talked about economic systems like capitalism, feudalism, or “primitive societies” as assemblages. Finally, while assemblages “group themselves into large extremely vast constellations constructing cultures or even ages” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  406), there are also several layers of micro-­level assemblages. Although such a variety of possible assemblages can create confusion, understanding how human lives are shaped by diverse combinations of contents and expression in different contexts also help map the multitudes of problems in current physical activity phenomena and then provide context specific solutions, whether at the local, state, or global level, to these problems. This type of assemblage analysis, nevertheless, requires an immersion into the nomad science and thus, a fresh starting point departing from many of the familiar theoretical traditions. While relatively rare among researchers of the physically activity body, in what follows, I aim to provide some starting points for a line of research framed with assemblage analysis.

How Does It Work? What New Thoughts Does This Make Possible to Think? As the assemblage can be considered Deleuze’s primary unit of analysis, it enables the nomadic scientists to examine, at the micro level, what is “happening” in dance, exercise, or sport. The idea is to map how diverse elements combine into recognizable assemblages (the horizontal axis) with some stability and coherence and how these assemblages change or impact other assemblages: how closely do they align with the existing models of thinking or how do they “dip” towards different types of thinking (the vertical axis). At the same time, it is important to account for how the abstract machine, the social dimension, has assisted in the assemblage formation, maintenance, or change. Given these possibilities, how do we, in practice, analyze assemblage formation? First, it is important to realize that it is not possible to use the familiar tools of “state science” (including tools from Marxism, phenomenology, or psychoanalysis) to map assemblages. Instead, we must focus on assemblage formation,

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local level problem solving, and pragmatics to detect what type of abstract machine combines what elements into specific assemblages of content/expression (not separate matter and expression). Therefore, the key is to consider how both the non-­discursive content (its form and substances) and their discursive expression(s) operate together to form an assemblage that is meaningful within its context. As a starting point, we can treat sport, exercise/fitness, and dance as assemblages with different types of expressions (form and substance) and content (form and substance) to analyze how they have come together in particular social circumstances and then map how physically active bodies, necessarily, behave differently and thus, face different problems in each assemblage. After this assemblage analysis, a nomadic scientist can consider a problem, a curious event, or a normal “behaviour” that emerges from a practical dance, exercise, or sport context to engage in an analysis of its connections within an assemblage of elements. However, as Buchanan (2017) emphasized, “We have to stop thinking of the concept of the assemblage as a way of describing a thing or situation and instead see it for what it was always intended to be: a way of analysing a thing or situation” (p. 473). Thus, a critical question for a Deleuzian assemblage analysis should be: “given a specific situation, what kind of assemblage would be required to produce it?” (Buchanan, 2017, p. 473). Such analysis should emanate a new way of seeing by revealing how a specific assemblage is justified and legitimated as right and proper in its given context and how it, thus, produces certain actions and practices. Because Deleuzian assemblage analyses of physical activity are scarce, I use Buchanan’s (2017) work on the development of Aboriginal housing policy as an example of this type of analysis. Buchanan (2017) examined the implementation phase of Australia’s Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) as an assemblage. Based on ethnographic work by Lea (2015), this policy was launched in 2009 to offer governmentally led solution to the indigenous housing shortage in Northern Australia. However, the project ran into trouble when the costs exceeded the budget due to corruption “on the part of ‘white’ building contractors” (p. 468). Buchanan continued that it turned into a public relations disaster of misused public funds when unit costs for housing soared. As a result, “ ‘urban’ Australians (i.e., ‘white’ middle-­class voting Australians) began to express resentment at the amount of money being spent on houses for ‘black’ people living in the ‘bush’ ” (p. 468). Considering an assemblage as “a way of analysing a thing or situation” (p. 473), Buchanan now asked: What kind of assemblage was required to produce these events in their specific situation? To answer his question, Buchanan (2017) began to map the logic of how an assemblage operated to structure this policy implementation process. He first identified the form of content and the machinic assemblage of bodies (the non-­ discursive multiplicities) involved in the process. He labelled this dimension the internal limit of the policy. He then focused on the form of expression or the collective assemblage of enunciation (the discursive multiplicities). He labelled this dimension the external limit of the policy.

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The main form of content or the material dimension in the policy was the house. Buchanan (2017) now asked: “what are the limits to what can and cannot be counted as material for a particular actant [policy] and how are these limits decided?” (p.  470). The ideas of what constitutes a house in Australian context set the internal limit in this case. For example, bricks, timber, and steel can be considered proper housing materials, but not mud, or straw, or wrecked cars in Australia. This aspect of the assemblage analysis, then, seeks to determine “the specific conditions under which matter becomes material” (p. 472). In this project, these limits were left to the building contractors to determine. To determine the form of expression or the external limits of the policy, Buchanan (2017) determined the specific conditions “under which semiotic matter becomes expressive” (p. 472). He examined “how it is decided that a specific arrangement of materials is ‘fitting’ for a person to live in and another arrangement is not” (p.  472). As this project was to provide housing for indigenous Australians, it was to determine what is an appropriate dwelling for these people living in the conditions of Northern Australia. As the definition of a house was left to the builders, who were deemed to cut costs, the housing in this project tended to be materially substandard if compared to the “urban” dwellings in Australia (e.g., not all were connected to water or sewage system or had adequate temperature control). Therefore, in this project the usual internal limits for housing in Australia were suspended. Thus, the material sense of a house was influenced by the “ethico-­political” sense of what constitutes appropriate housing for indigenous people versus “regular” housing in Australia. In this assemblage, the material (the house) was produced when it was interpolated and accommodated by the concept of appropriate indigenous housing and the following policy decisions. In Deleuzian sense, material, thus, is not something given, but instead, is produced under certain conditions. As Buchanan (2017) explained: “Now the issue is less what material is suitable for house-­ building and more what material is ‘fitting’, where ‘fitting’ is an ethico-­political judgment about what kinds of houses people ‘ought’ to live in” (p. 471). In an assemblage analysis, policy is seen “as the kinds of arrangements and orderings” as well the expectations that it makes possible (p. 465). As a result, the implementation of the housing policy was “a curious state of affairs that is neither the product of deliberate, conscious design, nor the product of a sequence of random, ad hoc experiments, but somehow a combination of the two” (p. 464). To understand policy as an assemblage, Buchanan (2017) summarized, it is important “to first of all grasp that the assemblage is not a thing and it does not consist of things” (p.  465). Instead, we should analyze how two interrelated dimensions (the arrangements of the material elements that constitute the “thing” under analysis and the expressions of how this material arrangement is justified and legitimated) have been “yoked together.” “T]he assemblage is the yoke” Buchanan emphasized, “not the product of the yoke” (p. 473, italics original). Such an assemblage is a very particular type of relation that works to explain how things exist in the world. An assemblage analysis, then, should

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consist of bringing into the light the internal (the form of material content) and the external limits (the form of expression) to explain how these have come together in specific circumstances. While assemblages are subject to change (deterritorialization), they can also stay the same—in Deleuzian terms possible deterritorialization is followed by reterritorialization. Keeping Buchanan’s advice in mind, I attempt to offer some possible, yet necessarily cursory, examples for assemblage analyses. Example 1: Why do “sedentary behaviour guidelines” now appear in conjunction with physical activity guidelines? Physical inactivity is considered a problematic behaviour that has resulted in several governmental physical activity guidelines. In 2011, the Canadian government added “sedentary behaviour guidelines” to its arsenal of physical activity promotion. The idea of sedentariness requiring governmental intervention can illustrate how the abstract machine, strata, and assemblage operate as a social system. The guidelines succinctly define—or express in Deleuzian terms— sedentary behaviour as postures or activities that require very little movement such as prolonged sitting, watching television, playing passive video or computer games, extended time spent on the computer (surfing the internet or working), and using motorized transportation. They further list the benefits of physical activity as the prevention of premature death, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, certain types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and overweightness and obesity. These statements now effectuate an incorporeal transformation by bringing a certain type of body (the content) in conversation with an enunciation of physical activity and health (or illness prevention). The guidelines further separate physical activity advice, as well as health benefits, for “early years,” children, youth, adults, and older people. The material bodies are categorized into recognizable groups based on their desirable physical activity behaviour and health outcomes—they have assembled with collective enunciation of sedentariness. When connected to the larger assemblage of healthy physical activity, the sedentary guidelines involve judgment (unhealthy) and a requirement for mobilization of action (physical activity). The abstract machine active in the Canadian context has brought together the collective physical activity and enunciation of health in a to recognizable arrangement. The location between the strata gives this assemblage of sedentary behaviour further stability. A Deleuzian can now ask: • Why is “sedentariness” expressed in these guidelines? How is “sedentariness” practiced in these guidelines? • How is including sedentary behaviour in physical activity guidelines justified in its context? • What is the meaning of health in this context? What becomes the most desirable form of physical activity and why?

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• Has the assemblage of sedentary behaviour and physical activity been enabled further by the territorializing of promoting exercise as medicine in Canadian society? • How does the abstract machine further connect the assemblage of sedentary behaviour and the strata of organism (medicine and illness prevention), signifiance (definitions of healthy exercise), and subjectification (individuals’ recognition of sedentary behaviour as undesirable for a good citizen) that then stabilizes the entire system as a part of neo-­liberal capitalism? • How does the abstract machine secure the Canadian Society of Exercise Physiologists, the expert body that has been invited to designs the guidelines, a more powerful role in governmental health promotion? • How is following the sedentary guidelines further justified and legitimized as a “proper” way of life? • What new way of seeing “health” and physical activity did the guidelines reveal? Example 2: Why have such physical activity forms as CrossFit and pole fitness, simultaneously, adopted a feminist emancipatory ethos? “Strong is the new beautiful”—is the new slogan now more commonly appearing to promote women’s exercise and sport participation. To locate this slogan within an assemblage formation we can begin by looking at what type of content does this expression assemble with to become recognizable as justification for “proper” women’s exercise. We can detect that this statement is connected with, or has effectuated incorporeal transformation of, a certain type of woman’s body such as the CrossFit body and the pole fitness body. These fitness assemblages make certain fitness practices (content) and the enunciation of “Strong is the new beautiful” (expression) recognizable. Both have their own content (bodies, techniques, equipment, spaces, movement vocabulary) that has assembled with the similar expression. However, at a larger societal level (the abstract machine), the assemblages of pole fitness and CrossFit, although seemingly unique, share statements recognized as women’s empowerment (physical strength). While the content of each of these activities differs (they use different equipment, different space), they both claim to increase women’s physical strength. A Deleuzian can now ask: • How are the strength claims made by CrossFit or pole fitness stabilized by connecting them with the sexualization of women’s bodies? • How is the connection between sexualization and empowerment through a physically active body effectuated by the abstract machine and the strata? • How can empowerment, a possible feminist line of flight that might have escaped the previous fitness assemblages, create new assemblages? • How is “empowering” strength assembled with “new” movements such as post-­feminism in neo-­liberal capitalism?

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• Have women’s physically active bodies been brought back, reterritorized, into the plane of organization that orders the bodies based on a dualist gendered logic of effective capitalist production? • What new ways of seeing can this assemblage reveal? Example 3: Why have “Barre workouts” that combine ballet and exercise become so popular? “Barre” workouts that consist of ballet barre exercises modified for fitness industry clients have become very popular. Considered as an assemblage, the barre class content has materialized from practices used for an art form, dance, where they were used to train skilled practitioners. These practices have also generated specific materials (e.g., barre shoes) designed exclusively for the barre class and different types of bodies from ballet. These exercises have assumed a different meaning, or expression, from dance (e.g., building the long, lean legs) when assembled by the abstract machine into a fitness arrangement. A Deleuzian can now ask: • How does disciplinary training for ballet previously accessible only for few select bodies now made dance available to the exercising masses? • What new understandings of dance and fitness have resulted? • How is this assembling of content and expression territorialized or reterrit­ orialized by the fitness industry to build women’s bodies toward the fit, feminine ideal? • What new ways of seeing can this assemblage reveal about contemporary society? Example 4: How has “taking a knee” created different thinking about professional men’s sport in the United States? The act of “taking a knee” during the national anthem played before each NFL game has attracted lot of attention in the U.S. professional sport world. As a movement “practice” (content), it has assumed a variety of expressions. According to Colin Kaepernick (previously the quarterback for the San Francisco 49s) to whom “kneeling” is most often attributed, taking a knee—a military gesture of respect—was intended as a peaceful protest against racism and police brutality in the United States. A Deleuzian can now ask: • What more do we know about Amer­ican football and its players based on the act of taking a knee? • What other expressions were assembled with kneeling at the beginning of a football game? How did the abstract machine combine military, football, racism, and police?

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• What new ways were revealed about the state politics, local level movements (“Black Lives Matter”), sport, and individual sportsmen? • How did the assemblage of taking a knee territorialize or reterritorialize strata? • What new ways of seeing resulted from assembling taking a knee in professional sport and protest against racism? Although all these brief examples require carefully completed analyses, they, hopefully, illustrate that a Deleuzian interested in dance, exercise, or sport can take up any (micro-­level) event to analyze how content and expression are justifiably assembled into legitimized and recognizable arrangements in their contexts. These arrangements are not purely products of deliberate or conscious design or random event, but can be seen as combinations of the two.

Notes 1. Although the content—expression axis should not be directly compared to Foucault’s apparatus or dispositif, Deleuze (2007c) himself talked about the visible—what is seen (the content)—and the articulable—what is said (the expression)—in similar terms to the assemblage that he also addressed as “desiring-­assemblage.” 2. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) condemned objective linguistic theories that seek to analyze language as a universal system isolated from its social context as entirely inadequate if we are to understand the force and nature of language in society. 3. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994b) drew from music, particularly, to further conceptualize how a variety of (invisible and not yet articulable) elements are arranged into a recognizable whole that turns into visible and articulable ways of behaviour in everyday life. As Buchanan (2017) explained, an acengement “could also be thought in terms of a ‘musical arrangement,’ which is a way of adapting an abstract plan of music to a particular performer and performance” (p.  383). Deleuze (2007d) also credited “the ritornello” or refrain as one of the most important concepts that he created with Guattari. He further explained: “For us, philosophy is not but music, from the most humble melody to the grandest songs.… The principles of philosophy are screeches, around which concepts develop their songs” (p. 316). The refrain also serves as a starting point for an assemblage formation that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) initiated by their ethology of bird song. Bird song, they noted, marks a territory, but “you get ritornellos in every territory”: people, assemblages, animals are constantly taking up territories, shaping them, and leaving them (Deleuze, 1995, p. 146). In this sense, ritornello serves as a concept that transcends attempts to create universal philosophical concepts: ritornellos are used everywhere from earth to cosmos. Because assemblages that also take territory, continually move on their vertical access to deterritorialize existing thought and behaviour only to be reterritorialized again, ritornello acts to effectuate assemblage formation. The refrain, such as a bird song repeated over and over again, makes rhythm and melody expressive: they are now marking a “concrete” territory. Beckman (2017) further explained that humans create security by means of refrains, because they help ward off difference. On a larger scale, “the refrain helps elucidate how different formations of life are established and how some are more consistent than others” (p. 88). Because territory, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) continued, is the first aspect of an assemblage formation, refrains, as a way of marking territory, serve important instigators for assemblages. The refrain here takes a function beyond birds marking their territory:

60   The Assemblage “In general sense, we call a refrain any aggregate of matters or expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes” (p.  232, italics original). The refrains continue to direct the assemblage movement (de/reterritorialization). The refrain, thus, is a type of impetus for an assemblage that begins to conquer territory through its motifs. As such, Deleuze and Guattari designated three simultaneous aspects to it. It first fixes a (fragile) point for a previous undefined arrangement. Second, it organizes the assemblage by providing it with stability. Finally, it enables the formation of the expression-­content of the assemblage. The concept of refrain (or ritornello), thus, is at the heart of how Deleuze and Guattari (1987) understood assemblage formation: how an assemblage begins with previously unformed elements by taking territory to then establish a special function and direction in the existing fields and finally, is either reterritorialized or manages to go outside the existing strata to connect to “the cosmos” to create new multiplicities of thought. A philosopher (or a social scientist) is then to detect the aggregates that develop into territorial motifs to analyze how thought can change. 4. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduced their concept “abstract machine” in connection to their discussion of the strata. Among other machines, the abstract machine is the force or “power” that provides unity to the strata or holds them together. Sometimes, the abstract machine “develops upon the plane of consistency, whose continuums, emissions, conjugations it constructs” (p. 71), but typically Deleuze and Guattari referred to it as “enveloped in a stratum whose unity of composition and force of attraction or prehension it defines” (p. 71). When enveloped within the stratum, it is called Ecumenon and when developing on the plane of consistency it is called Planomenon. Deleuze and Guattari clarified how the abstract machines while emitting and combining particles can, thus, have different modes of existence. The abstract machines (Ecumenon) “are enveloped in a certain specific stratum whose program or unit of composition they define (the abstract Animal, the Abstract chemical body, Energy in itself ) and whose movements of relative deterritorialization they regulate” (p.  56). Or the abstract machine (Planomenon) cut “across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the plane of consistence whose diagram it constitutes” (p. 56). The abstract machine as an Ecumenon then diagrams the unity—the relationship between the contents and expressions—of the strata and as Planomenon performs their destratification when developed in on the plane of consistency. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explained: Either the abstract machines remain prisoner to stratifications, are enveloped in a certain specific stratum whose program or unit of composition they define … and whose movements of relative deterritorialization they regulate. Or, on the contrary, the abstract machine cuts across all stratification, develops alone and in its own right on the plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes. (p. 56) 5. Dosse (2010) claimed that Deleuze and Guattari (1994) employed the term “machine” to contest the structuralist idea that everything is structured like language and everything starts with language. 6. Deleuze (2007c) later compared assemblage to Foucault’s dispositif or “apparatus.” Similar to Foucault, Deleuze asserted that we all belong to and act within apparatuses that are divided into “lines of stratification or sedimentation” (limitative lines) and “lines of actualization or creativity” (nonlimitative lines) (p.  352). According to Deleuze, Foucault located his analysis of power relations within these “large” societal apparatuses, while Deleuze himself was more interested in the micro-­level assemblages. This was also the element Deleuze found missing in Foucault’s work: how to analyze what happens at micro level of society that, for both Deleuze and Foucault, was a crucial element of operations of power. Because Foucault did not finish his work on

The Assemblage   61 how power relations worked at the micro level, Deleuze, attending to this omission, extended the analysis of micro-­level assemblages.

References Beckman, F. (2017). Gilles Deleuze. London: Reaktion Books. Buchanan, I. (2015). Assemblage theory and its discontents. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 382–392. Buchanan, I. (2017). Assemblage theory, or, the future of illusion. Deleuze Studies, 11(3), 457–474. DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1995). On philosophy. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 135–155). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2007a). Desire and pleasure. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 122–134). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007b). Eight years later: 1980 interview. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp.  175–180). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007c). What is dispositif? In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 343–352). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007d). We invented the ritornello. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 381–385). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Nomadology: The war machine. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994a). Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (7th ed.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994b). What is philosophy. London: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1995). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Anti-­Oedipus. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 13–24). New York: Columbia Dosse, F. (2010). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting lives. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Joughlin, (1995). Translator’s notes. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 183–203). New York: Columbia University Press. Lambert, G. (2005). Expression. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 31–41). Chesham: Acumen. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge. Lea, T. (2015). What has water got to do with it? Indigenous public housing and Australian settler–colonial relations. Settler Colonial Studies, 5(4), 375–386. Massumi, B. (1987). Translator’s foreword: Pleasures of philosophy. In Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia (pp. ix–xvi) London: Continuum. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Surin, K. (2005). Force. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 19–30). Chesham: Acumen. Wise, J. M. (2005). Assemblage. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 77–87). Chesham: Acumen.

Chapter 3

The Rhizome Researching the Physically Active Body from a Deleuzian Perspective

Thinking is central to philosophy, but throughout his work, Deleuze advocated that a different type of thinking is required to move philosophy forward. From his early work on Difference and Repetition that laid the ground work for his and Guattari’s later concept of rhizomatic philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus, and culminated in What is Philosophy, Deleuze developed a system of thought—there are always systems of thought, Deleuze (1995a) asserted—that supported multiple ways of comprehending reality, knowledge, and thinking. As a philosopher, Deleuze advocated alternative ways of thinking by creating different types of concepts. While this book is not intended as a philosophical investigation of Deleuze’s work, the philosophical thought process tends to inform also the process of social science knowledge production whether we are directly aware of it or not. Therefore, becoming familiar with Deleuze’s direct challenge to some of the ways philosophical thought is constructed is very pertinent to understand the ways social science knowledge of the physically active body accumulates, becomes accepted and appreciated as well as restricts possible ways of understanding and knowing the moving body in action. In this chapter, I proceed somewhat chronologically by starting with Deleuze’s early ideas about the image of thought to then highlight how such an image can be suspended through rhizomatic philosophy. I conclude with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about different types of knowledge that can result from thinking rhizomatically about the physically active body.

Thought without Image Deleuze’s (2001) Difference and Repetition, originally published in 1968, was his first major work that provided the grounding for his later views about thinking differently. Challenging how difference and repetition are used in philosophical thought, Deleuze problematized what he called the philosophical “doxa” or later the arborescent thought of philosophy. He characterized his book as “a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it” (p. xvii). The incarceration of thought, Deleuze demonstrated, was secured with the use of such concepts as identity and representation that also commonly appear in many texts about the physically active body. Deleuze’s treatment of these concepts

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might differ from their typical use by social scientists, but, nevertheless, can resonate with the research orientations and goals of social science examinations of the body in motion.

The Image of Thought To illustrate the limitations of the dogmatic, orthodox, and moral philosophical thought, Deleuze (2001) introduced his term “the image of thought.” This image embeds eight “postulates” that obstruct a philosophy of difference, a philosophy that encourages multiplicity of thought. I briefly introduce each postulate to provide grounding for the later discussion of rhizomatic thought that, then, exemplifies Deleuze’s idea of the philosophy of difference. 1  The postulate of the principle The image of thought places thinking (or systematic and rational elimination of presuppositions) as the main premise for philosophy. Unlike scientists who face “objective presuppositions which axiomatic rigours can eliminate” (p.  129), philosophical presuppositions, Deleuze (2001) observed, are by nature “as much subjective as objective” (p.  129). The subjective presupposition refers to the rationalist idea that it is fundamentally the philosopher’s self who is doing the thinking. Deleuze was particularly interested in how this universal and essential assumption impacts on how we perceive knowledge. His first postulate concerning the image of thought, thus, refers to the presupposition that thinking is a natural exercise, universally practiced by everyone. Furthermore, if everyone knows what it means to be and to think, then no one can deny that “to doubt is to think, and to think is to be” (p. 130). Therefore, everyone (who has a self ) should know, naturally, what it means to think. As such, Deleuze explained, “thought has an affinity with the true” (p. 131): there is nothing questionable or “untrue” or doubtable about thinking as a natural, universal human faculty. Therefore, the results of thinking, necessarily, must be true. If natural, truth cannot be challenged, such an image of thought becomes the starting point for all thinking. This assumption of “the Cogitatio natura universalis,” as Deleuze characterized it, further implies good will of the thinker and good nature of the thought (p. 132). While these presumptions are implicit, philosophical thought, necessarily, must be recognized as “good sense.” Skeptically, Deleuze nevertheless added, “ ‘Everybody’ knows very well that in fact men think rarely” (p. 132). 2  The postulate the ideal or common sense 3  The postulate of the model or of recognition These postulates explain how thought differs from other human “faculties” (perception, memory, imagination, understanding) and how it can be considered

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naturally good. The other faculties, nevertheless, are needed for the recognition of the universally, naturally good thought. “Recognition,” Deleuze (2001) offered, “may be defined by the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined or conceived” (p.  133). Therefore, all the faculties must unite for the object to be given a recognizable identity. These are faculties possessed by “everybody” and “[re]cognition thus relies upon a subjective principle of collaboration of the faculties for ‘everybody’—in other words, a common sense as a Concordia facultatum” (p.  133). Accordingly, the philosopher, based on this common sense, assigns an identity to objects relying “upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject, of which all the other faculties must be modalities” (p. 133). As established by the previous postulate, the philosopher, relying on his natural ability to think, is able to provide the true identity for an object. This type of philosophy, as Deleuze revealed, is heavily based on “common sense”: “it provides a philosophical concept for the presupposition of a common sense; it is the common sense become philosophical” (p. 133). Deleuze added, however, that common sense that provides the universal premise for thinking as a unity of faculties formed into thought by the self, is complemented by “good sense” that “determines the contribution of the faculties in each case” (p. 134). Good sense, thus, constitutes the more empirical “distribution” while common sense constitutes the transcendental distribution of the image of thought. 4  The postulate of the element or of representation Under this postulate, Deleuze (2001) extracted four elements that define “reason”: identity, analogy, opposition, and resemblance. Reason then acts as “a medium of representation” (of the real world). What becomes a concept in philosophy is determined based on these elements. In this context, identity refers to conceiving (or understanding) a form to a yet undetermined concept that is then judged against already determined concepts (analogy). The concept is further nominated by opposing “determinations” within it, and finally, established through the perceived resemblance to the object in which the concept refers. In other words, there needs to be a perceivable object for the concept that then obtains its own identity through comparisons to other concepts assessed through established opposites and resemblances. These four elements, united by the thinking self, constitute, according to Deleuze, the premise of representational, dogmatic philosophy: “The ‘I think’ is the most general principle of representation—in other words, the source of the elements and of the unity of these faculties: I conceive, I judge, I imagine, I remember and I perceive” (p. 138). Although Deleuze’s reasoning here pertains to dogmatic philosophical thought, social scientists also use concepts created through the premise of representational philosophy. These concepts align the thought processes with sameness or as Massumi (1992) put it, with imitations of the world and “common

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sense.” He continued that “[c]ommon sense and good sense share an image of thought that assigns the development of a ‘general ideal’ as its goal (categorical thinking …)” (p. 97). Closer to social science thinking, Massumi summarized: “Analogical thought starts from an isolated individual considered to be typical, and ends in a category coherent enough to take its rightful place in a pre-­ existing system of good/common sense” (p. 98). Using “the body” as an example, Massumi rephrased Deleuze’s four dimension of “good” scientific (common) “sense” into the following logical sequence. First, it is necessary to isolate a typical body that is defined by “self-­identity” (based on similarities in its intrinsic qualities) (identity). Second, other bodies that have similar qualities are identified to share the same self-­identity (resemblance). Third, together these bodies are considered instances of a type (analogy). Finally, the bodies are reduced to what they have in common: “They are subsumed by the general ideal, or norm, formed by a double system of similarity (intrinsic, extrinsic: of the organism to itself, and to others)” (p. 96). This also means that “deviations from the norm are disregarded within certain limits” (p.  96) (opposition). This process of analogical, representational thinking establishes “a correspondence between symmetrically structured domains” (p.  4). The naturally thinking subject further ensures that the analogy is true. Thus, Massumi explained, “[t]he subject, its concepts, and the ‘external’ objects to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-­resemblance at the bases of identity” (p. 4). 5  The postulate of the negative Based on postulate 4, all four faculties are needed to ensure that the representation process through which identity is created is true. If one faculty does not align with the others, there is an error that the unified response of the other three faculties, nevertheless, could prove as an error. In dogmatic thought, then, error is always “a possible misadverture of thought” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 148). It is solely negative. It is the “not true.” Such errors are always products of external mechanisms to the representation process that, by nature, can only lead to truth. Deleuze (2001) specified that stupidity, malevolence, and madness produce errors, but these are “occasioned to external causes” (p.  148) to real thinking. 6  The postulate of logical function This postulate introduces the notion of “sense” that, according to Deleuze (2001), is not assigned an important enough role in philosophy that favours propositions as a logical way to derive truth. For example, “nonsensical” sentences or insignificant problems, rather than errors, are often a bigger “danger” for thinking than errors per se. Without “sense,” Deleuze urged, we are destined to endlessly provide the fixed and universal “correct” truths, not to create new knowledge that is based on expressing different ideas.

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7  The postulate of modality, or solutions Deleuze (2001) further demonstrated that truth based on propositions limits our understanding of what constitutes a “problem” in society. “We are led to believe,” he pointed out, “that problems are given ready-­made, and that they disappear in the responses or the solutions” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 158). Thinking, consequently, is considered to begin with a search for solutions without which an issue is not worth a concern. The search for solutions has, thus, resulted in a limited number of “problems” worthy of examination: The dogmatic image of thought supports itself with psychologically puerile and socially reactionary examples (cases of recognition, error, simple propositions and solutions or responses) in order to prejudge what should be the most valued in regard to thought. (p. 158) 8  The postulate of knowledge The eighth postulate “incorporates and recapitulates all the others in a supposedly simple result” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 167): knowledge. Knowledge that represents the truth is a result of thinking dogmatically. This postulate, with its emphasis on the end, Deleuze found, ignores the process through which the result is arrived at: learning. Learning takes place in interaction with culture that, in dogmatic thought, is excluded through strict adherence to method: the logical function of deriving propositions. As a reminder, the method is the means … which regulates the collaboration of all the faculties. It is therefore the manifestation of a common sense or the realisation of a Cogi­ tatio natura, and presupposes a good will as though this were a “premeditated decision” of the thinker. (p. 165) Method, thus, encapsulates all the characteristics of the doxa to enable thinking that arrives at true knowledge. In this system, knowledge represents “the entire transcendental realm” (p.  165) and learning is only the intermediary between non-­knowledge and knowledge, the end result of dogmatic thinking. According to Deleuze, learning, unlike dogmatic thinking, is always open to outside influences and errors. Deleuze offered learning to swim as an example of the “movement of learning” that demonstrates the narrowness of the knowledge produced by dogmatic thinking. The sea, where Deleuze (2001) imagined we learn to swim, is a system of multiple variations and relations to which we need to respond to learn how to float, how to move forward, how to use our limbs, and our bodies as whole. First “the real movement of the waves” (p. 165) dictates how we align our legs and

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arms in an answer to swim, float, and move forward, in these conditions. The resulting bodily movement then “determines for us a threshold of consciousness at which our real acts are adjusted to our perceptions of the real relations” (p. 165), the sea and its waves. The conscious effort to coordinate the moving body with the water provides the solution to the problem of how to swim. This is the process of learning to operate in these particular natural elements based on bodily perceptions. For Deleuze, knowledge production requires similar processes where we learn to solve problems, often by making errors, set by different types of external conditions. As he explained: “problematic Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature and the subliminal objects of little perceptions” (p. 165). Thus, learning takes place in and through “establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind” (p. 165). Learning also always takes place within culture and thus, cannot be a closed system uninfluenced by its surroundings. Culture further acts as an outside influence that confuses the representational logic of dogmatic philosophy: “Culture, however, is an involuntary adventure, the movement of learning which links a sensibility, a memory and then a thought, with all the cruelties and violence necessary … to train a ‘nation of thinkers’ ” (pp. 165–166). In their work, Cutler and MacKenzie (2011) further demonstrated how learning in the culture of dogmatic philosophy is subordinate to knowledge. We learn to swim, they explained, through interaction between different bodies: the human body and the body of water. Nevertheless, this interaction does not, on its own, guarantee that we actually learn how to swim. Swimming instructors can assist in this situation: they have useful knowledge on how to learn to swim. In this case, “the body of knowledge is made manifest in the body of the instructor by way of the method of instruction” (p. 54) and thus, one more body, the body of knowledge, is now added to the interaction required for learning to swim. At the same time, the instructor’s knowledge regulates the learning process and, as Cutler and MacKenzie argued, “is premised upon the idea that every learner learns the same way” (p. 54). Such an idea of learning dominates “the modern societies”: “If learners do not adopt the appropriate method, then they will be disciplined by the instructor on the grounds that they are not really learning” (p. 54). Learning, thus, is only useful, if it is conducted based on a particular method based on particular knowledge. However, if the learning process is appropriately regulated, it results in learning the appropriate knowledge. In other words, learning culminates in knowledge. This, Cutler and MacKenzie demonstrated, illustrates Deleuze’s eighth postulate. The result is a certain type of “nation of thinkers” who have learned to think that “a culture of learning is subordinate to a method for the attainment of knowledge” (p. 54). Deleuze (2001) summarized that together these eight postulates form the dogmatic image of thought. He further emphasized that each postulate has two forms: they are both natural and philosophical, empirical and transcendental. For example, the good will of the thinker is considered natural and it will then transcend into the nature of thought. Common sense is a result of natural good

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will and will then transcend into good sense. This leads into a model of thinking that is empirical and provides the basis for the recognition of thought for philosophy. Consequently, the elements of thought are based on empirical faculties, particularly perception. This ensures that the truth of the philosophical representation is grounded on perceived reality. The results of thinking, the propositions, are based on the empirical method that will then provide philosophical knowledge. Following Deleuze, the philosophical doxa is simultaneous material/empirical and transcendental/philosophical. Thus, considering materiality, as per recent post-­humanist thought intends to do, is not by itself a departure from the representational, dogmatic philosophy and does not, in itself, help in thinking differently or providing alternative knowledge. We need to problematize our thinking further if we are to expand the dogmatic image of thought that Deleuze strongly advocated is “a hindrance” to thinking differently: The supposed three levels—a naturally upright thought, and in principle natural common sense and a transcendental model of recognition—can constitute only an ideal orthodoxy. Philosophy is left without means to realise its project of breaking with doxa. (p. 134) While such description might seem to apply only to the rational, dogmatic philosophy, Deleuze demonstrated that also phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism belong to the same tree of dogmatic philosophy. Consequently, it is vital to introduce a different type of thought that breaks out from the limitations of the doxa. Deleuze called this “thought without image.”

Thought without Image A true critique of the doxa and consequently, a true creation of thought, requires the destruction of the image of thought. It should be replaced with “new thought” that is not grounded on recognition that always brings forth already established values, but on difference. At this point, Deleuze (2001) labelled such thinking, following Artaud, thought without image. This is the type of thinking that is not innate or natural, but must be engendered in thought. In other words, thinking should not methodically create a thought which pre-­exists in principle and in nature. Instead, a thought without image “is born in thought, the act of thinking which is neither given by innateness nor presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its geniality” (p. 167). Instead of recognition, the thought without image is based on a fundamental encounter, something that can only be sensed (not directly recalled, imagined, or conceived). These sensations are, in a sense, “imperceptible” because they do not depend on the four faculties of the dogmatic image of thought. These imperceptibles “move the soul,” perplex it, and then force it to pose the thought itself as a problem.

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Problematic ideas are necessary for philosophy without the image of thought: they “are not simple essences, but multiplicities or complexes of relations and corresponding singularities” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 163). A problem is at once both transcendent and immanent in relation to its solutions: Transcendent, because it consists in a system of ideal liaisons or differential relations between genetic elements. Immanent, because these liaisons or relations are incarnated in the actual relations which do not resemble them and are defined by the field of solution. (p. 163) It is important to note that, unlike assumed by the doxa, problems do not disappear with solutions. Deleuze concluded that “Systems in which different relates to different through difference itself are … intensive; they rest ultimately upon the nature of intensive quantities, which precisely communicate through their differences” (p. 277). They do not rely on a pre-­existing resemblance, but resemblance that results in the functioning of the system. This system is described based on a notion very different from representation and developed further into the rhizomatic thought system.

Rhizomatic Thought In their A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) attempted to think without image or in their own words, to “render imperceptible … what makes us act, feel, think” (p. 3). Following Deleuze’s earlier reference to the image of thought, Deleuze and Guattari introduced their well-­known image of the tree that now provides a picture of western philosophical thought, “the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought” that constitutes “the spiritual reality of the root tree” (p. 5). The image of a tree further demonstrates that although philosophical thought has multiplied through several bifurcations, it is always supported by a singular root. Thus, while the “tree thought,” Deleuze and Guattari contended, gives an impression (or an imitation) of including multiple thoughts, in reality, it is structured based on a system of hierarchically organized binaries that are further stratified by signifiance and subjectification (see Chapter 1). Any multiple in this “arborescent system” (p.  16), they claimed, only verifies its unity. As it has already become clear, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) found the tree thought limiting, or in their words, “sad” (p. 16), because it verifies the “same,” unified “accepted” way of thinking and thus, does not allow for multiplicity and difference. To think differently from the striated, hierarchical state philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari proposed a different thought system, “a rhizome.” While also a type of root, a rhizome (e.g., bulbs, tubers, but also such weeds as couch grass or invasive plants such as Japanese arrow root) does not have a single root per se, but is able to grow from multiple segments to multiple directions. As

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Deleuze and Guattari noted, rhizomes assume very diverse forms, from the best to the worst. In terms of a thought system, the rhizome has six main principal characteristics: 1 and 2  Principles of connection and heterogeneity Unlike the tree system, that fixes an order, any point of a rhizome can, and must, be connected to anything other. For example, rhizomatic thinking ceaselessly connects with powerful organizations, arts, sciences, and social struggles and thus, is open to ways of knowing beyond the philosophical foundation for thought. 3  Principle of multiplicity Multiplicity is different from multiple that characterizes the binary derived tree system of thought. Multiplicities are not fixed within binaries, nor have they a subject or an object determined through subjectification or signifiance, but are “only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  8). If structures, trees, and roots have points and positions to form unities, rhizomes grow to diverse directions, they proliferate and move. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) observed that multiplicities can turn to a “unity” “when there is a power takeover … by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding” (p. 8). This enables the tree system to overcode and turn them into multiple of its own system. “Rhizome,” they continued, “never allows itself to be overcoded” (p. 9). It is important to remember, then, that multiplicity in Deleuze’s philosophy does not refer to the acknowledgment of multiple identities, multiple meanings, or multiple subject positions analyzable by multiple methods. These constructs belong to the tree model where signifiance and subjectification fix concepts to refer to objects, subjects, or things. Multiplicities, instead, provide a different base for Deleuze’s logic in which “they do not suppose unity of any kind, do not add up in a totality or refer to a subject” (Deleuze, 2007b, p. 315). Multiplicities, Deleuze summarized, “is the reality itself ” (p.  315) and thus, they replace the representational logic of the tree model and constitute a grounding principle of rhizomatics as “the real element on which things happen” (Deleuze, 1995b, p.  146). Therefore, also subjectivation, unification, totalization, and binarization of identities are processes “which are produced and appear in multiplicities” (Deleuze, 2007b, p.  315). To explain this, Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) envisioned multiplicities to have both virtual and actual elements. The virtual elements actualize as “singularities” that then “individualize” as individuality (or a subject). Instead of unities, Deleuze talked about a multiplicity of dimensions using such concepts as the assemblage (Chapter 2) that includes multiple lines and moves to multiple directions. To summarize, including multiple different

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identities, subjects, representations, or ideas does not denote a rhizomatic analysis. Such an analysis requires an immersion into Deleuze’s concept of a multiplicity with related concepts of an event, a singularity, or a plane of immanence that I aim to clarify further throughout this book.1 4  Principle of asignifying rupture The rhizome has a tendency to grow lines that cut across the tree structure to finally escape it. In this process, it can be broken or shattered, but will grow again. It is important to note that rhizomes do not exist entirely outside of the world of stratification: “Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed … as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  9). This principle connects the discussion of the different lines (molar, molecular, and lines of flight) (Chapters 1 and 5) with operation of the rhizome. It further complements Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) idea of constant processes of interconnected deterritorialization and reterritorialization between the rhizomatic thought system and the arborescent system of thought in an assemblage formation (Chapter 2). They, nevertheless, urged us to follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and torturous lines.… Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight. (p. 11) 5 and 6  Principle of cartography and decalcomania These principles become probably the clearest when compared to the arborescent thought system that is based on a logic of tracing and reproduction. We can trace the origin of philosophy from the Greek philosophers to the current day. This tracing is based on the idea that thought has to be built on the foundation of what is previously known, or “ready-­made.” According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), “[t]he tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings, tracings are like the leaves of a tree” (p. 12). While the rhizome is also a type of thought system, it does not have a deep structure based on a unity that can be traced to a singular root. It is not possible, thus, to “trace” the origin to establish a unity for a rhizome. A rhizome is, instead, better understood as a map that is open, detouchable, modifiable, and adaptable. A map has multiple entryways for the multiple rhizomatic shoots. Issues and “problems,” not ready-­made thoughts, are the entryways into a map. In their What is Philosophy Deleuze with Guattari (1994) further elaborated their rhizomatic philosophy. The key notion here is that philosophy is a practice of creating concepts and in this sense, it is “pragmatic.” Instead of being treated as representations of reality, philosophical concepts must be created:

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Philosophers have not been sufficiently concerned with the nature of the concepts as philosophical reality. They have preferred to think of it as a given knowledge or representation that can be explained by faculties able to form it (abstraction and generalization) or employ it (judgment). (p. 11) Deleuze’s philosophy, in contrast, is a philosophy that constructs concepts: “you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them—that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them” (p. 7). Consistent with the rhizomatic map, concepts are always created as an answer to a problem. They, however, do not aim to express an essence of a thing or of a being akin to representational philosophy, but rather they speak of an “event” that Deleuze now terms a haecceity: “a concept speaks of the event, not the essence or the thing—pure Event, a hecceity, an entity.… In this sense the concept is act of thought” (p. 21), not a representation of reality. As such concepts are not “discursive,” a term Deleuze reserved for “propositions” characterizing the tree philosophy. I return to discuss the event in more detail in Chapter 5. These concepts are not created without “a plane.” The rhizomatic plane, however, is different from the hierarchical plane of organization of the tree philosophy that Deleuze and Guattari (1994), following Nietzsche, accused of having four fundamental illusions: illusion of transcendence, illusion of universals, illusion of the eternal, and illusion of discursiveness, all of which Deleuze (2001) previously found limiting philosophical thought. To avoid being trapped within these illusions, Deleuze and Guattari further clarified their notion of the plane of consistency,2 now also called the plane of immanence. While acknowledging that there are a multiplicity of planes of thought, the plane of immanence enables the creation of concepts that are not locked into contemplation, communication, or reflection—the ills of “common sense.” Such concepts need a specific kind of “milieu” that, nevertheless, does not exist outside of philosophy. The plane of immanence is this specific milieu. It is prephilosophical in a sense that it does not exist outside of philosophy, but is, rather, its internal condition. It “constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy, its earth or deterritorialization, the foundations on which it creates its concepts” (p. 41). The plane of immanence, Deleuze and Guattari continued, is like a desert (or a horizon) that provides the conditions for concepts. It is their “image of thought, alternative to the representational image of thought”: “the image of thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought” (p. 37). If the plane is a type of grounding or surface or horizon with “diagrammatic features,” the concepts have intensifying features that keep the plane of immanence continually “curving” or renewing. The plane of immanence, thus, does not set the scene for an accepted philosophy, but enables the constant movement of thought. Free movement is possible only when divorced from empirical

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representation: experience that refers to an object or belongs to a subject. Deleuze and Guattari’s “radical empiricism,” thus, points to the self as not given, but constructed, as thought of as something. Such thought is possible on the plane of immanence that exists before constructions or representations: on it, it is possible to think of the self, individual habits or identities that are only fictions or artifices “in which, through habit, we come to believe, a sort of incorrigible illusion of living” (Rajchman, 2005, p. 13). A pure plane of immanence, Deleuze (2005) later clarified, “eludes all transcendence of the subject and of the object. Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject” (p. 26). The plane of immanence is not, however, a superior, universal thought against which other thoughts can be judged: “Immanence is not related to Some Thing as a unity superior to all things or to a Subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things” (Deleuze, 2005, p.  27). Only when immanence is immanent to itself, Deleuze emphasized, “we can speak of a plane of immanence” (p. 27). On the plane of immanence, thought is able to move free from pre-­existing thought systems and the naturally thinking self to construct new compositions based on encounters with different elements. Out of this plane, nevertheless, the habits of self, identities, and the potentials of life take off. The plane of immanence, thus, is a type of “presubjective delirium and pre-­individual singularity” (Rajchman, 2005, p. 13) with which we need to construct relations in our lives and in our relations with others. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) emphasized the role of the plane immanence in finding different ways of existence from today’s exploitative and unequal social relations. This requires a new conception of society as an experiment “in which what we have in common is our singularities and not our individualities—where what is common is ‘impersonal’ and what is ‘impersonal’ is common” (Rajchman, 2005, p. 13). “Those who do not renew the image of thought,” Deleuze and Guattari (1994) maintained, “are not philosophers but functionaries who, enjoying a ready-­made thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim to take as their models” (p. 51). In addition to concepts and the plane of immanence that enables their creation, Deleuze and Guattari introduced the “conceptual personae” as the third feature of their rhizomatic philosophy. Conceptual personae bring to life the concepts created on the plane of immanence. While these, in a way, refer to the philosophers who will then “talk about” the concepts, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) aimed to avoid assigning philosophical concepts to a person, to a subject (to an “I”). Rather, they envisioned conceptual personae not as a philosopher’s representative, but as an intermediary that produces movement by thinking, a type of philosopher’s friend, who assists in concept creation. They clarified their point by contrasting the conceptual personae to “psychosocial types,” their term for “real people” who exist in social fields, the types that we social scientist—Deleuze and Guattari assigned Simmel and Goffman as scholars of psychosocial types—study. The

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conceptual personae, nevertheless, incarnate themselves in psychosocial types (Dosse, 2010). While some psychosocial types exist in the margins (the stranger, the exile, the migrant, the transcient, the native), all “real types” live in social fields that are “inextricable knots” of constant territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. As such, the psychosocial types make perceptible how these three movements work and thus, can be used to “diagnose” “the disentaglements of the formation of territories, the vectors of deterritorialization, the process of reterritorialization” (p. 68). As an example, Deleuze and Guattari offered a merchant who buys a plot of land, then deterritorializes it with his products by turning them into commodities, but is reterritorialized on commercial circuits. Similarly, we can think of such commercial fitness forms as Les Mills, CrossFit, or Zumba that all “buy” plots in the fitness industry and how their creators, like the merchant, successfully commodified fitness instruction into standardized, licensed products. Their products, nevertheless, become subsumed into the commercial circuits of the industry and are, then, reterritorialized to sell the fit body similar to other products. The psychosocial types, nevertheless, do not produce the movement of thinking, the becoming of a philosopher. This is the role of the conceptual personae whose role, parallel to diagnosing how the psychosocial types manifest the movements in the social fields, is “to show thought’s territories, its absolute deterri­ orializations and reterritorializations” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 69, italics original). The conceptual personae, thus, “constitute points of view according to which planes of immanence are distinguished from one another or brought together, but they also constitute the conditions under which each plane finds itself filled with concepts of the same group” (p. 75). They refer to psychosocial types as those whose physical and mental movements the thought “wrests” out of their social conditions and lived experiences. With thought, everyday behaviour turns into the features of conceptual personae, into thought-­events “on the plane laid out by thought” (p. 70). Deleuze and Guattari evoked Dostoyevsky’s Idiot who is not a real person per se, but a conceptual personae who created a plane of thought for Dostoyevsky’s work. One could possibly argue that the schizophrenic acted as conceptual personae for Guattari who identified schizophrenia as a condition that could not be suitably understood by psychoanalysis. The conceptual personae of schizophrenic, thus, opened a way to think differently, to challenge psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari could also be described as conceptual personae influencing each other’s thought. Deleuze (1995b) described that they, rather than persons, were more like two streams with nonpersonal individuality, an event. “Even when you think you’re writing on your own,” he continued, “you’re are always doing it with someone else you can’t always name” (p.  141). These three elements—concepts, the plane of immanence, and the conceptual personae—present the main elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy that they now labelled as “geophilosophy.” Geophilosophy, unlike the paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical and referential tree philosophy, is syntagmic (the concept), connective, linking, and

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c­ onsistent. Such a conceptualization of philosophy enabled Deleuze and Guattari (1994) to see science, art, and philosophy as horizontally linked actively creating knowledge on their own, unique planes. The plane of immanence of geophilosophy actively connects with the social milieu where the psychosocial types make perceptible the geographical movements of the three elements of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Through this connection, geophilosophy is always “political”: it does not exist outside of the social world, but provides active “resistance” or alternative to the capitalist functions of thought. As Deleuze and Guatteri noted earlier, geophilosophy and thus, thought, is elusive to the majority and thus, it is not the populist writers or masses who create concepts, but the philosophers with significant sophistication. At the same time, a philosopher must become the “majority,” the non-­ philosopher, in order to create works of resistance “to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, to the present” (p. 110). In summary, a pragmatic, constructionist philosophy creates concepts to respond to problems on a prephilosophical plane of immanence through conceptual personae. This is a political philosophy in which the plane of immanence connects with the social and, instead of aligning with capitalism, offers an alternative multiplicity of thoughts.

How Does It Work? What New Thoughts Does This Make Possible to Think? Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994) clearly adopted their concept, rhizome, as an approach to think differently from the tree model. As philosophers, they did not want to verify the tree model’s natural good sense of the thinking self, but instead, were interested in creating concepts as an answer to problems arising from various micro contexts. The socio-­cultural researchers of physical activity can encounter rhizome as an image informing qualitative methodology in social sciences and humanities research more often than as a philosophical concept. Many qualitative researchers have embraced the rhizome in ways that also depart quite significantly from Deleuze and Guattari’s original intent. Their applications range from adopting the rhizome as a data analysis tool to using it to rethink the entire process and meaning of qualitative social science research. I highlight some of the uses here to illustrate when rhizome, if used in the Deleuzian sense, can fruitfully help thinking differently about practicing qualitative research. Rhizoanalysis In some qualitative research, the rhizome appears in the methods section separate from the paradigmatic or theoretical assumptions guiding the research. In these studies, rhizome works as a metaphor that, usually, aids in the data analysis process.

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In their work, Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots (2008) used rhizome as a metaphor to re-­imagine that narrative construction of the self. Challenging “the traditional idea” that a self-­narrative is a coherent story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, they advocated conceptualizing narrative self as a postmodern story, of “the juxtaposition of more or less disjunctive elements” (p. 635). Their approach to narrative, thus, drew strongly from “the postmodern idea that the self has no stable core but is multiple, multivoiced, discontinuous, and fragmented” (p. 635). To clarify how these selves can be captured, Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots introduced the idea of the narrative self as a rhizome. Following Deleuze and Guattari, they identified three characteristics for analyzing the narrative self as a rhizome: multiple entry points, multiplicity, connection, asignifying rupture, and cartography. We have already encountered these concepts earlier in this chapter. At this point, Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots (2008) emphasized that their application of rhizome is not necessarily consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, but rather, should “be viewed as a thought experiment and not as a closed methodological or theoretical vision” (p. 637). Experimenting with the rhizome metaphor allowed the researchers, instead of seeking for a linear structure, to consider multiple entry points to selfhood. The rhizome metaphor further illuminated the connection between the researcher and the participant: the researchers necessarily become a part of the rhizomatic story. Instead of objective observers, the researchers “are within the rhizomatic story as a part of the dynamic construction process” (Sermijn, Devleiger, & Loots, 2008, p. 639). In addition, multiple entryways automatically imply multi­ plicity: many possible truths and realities—as opposed to a unified story of the self—that can all be viewed as social constructs. As a result, Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots (2008) viewed “narrative self-­hood as a multitude of stories” that cannot be reduced to one story (p. 639). These co-­constructed stories, nevertheless, are not “structured according to logical, linear connections” (p. 643), but the connections between story elements can be shattered or “ruptured” and replaced with other connections that then create new story lines. The result is a type of co-­constructed map (cartography) that is dynamic, always open to change and never complete. Representing this rhizomatic narrative, Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots (2008) concluded, requires rethinking research writing. To capture its rhizomatic character, they recommended “messy” texts instead of coherent narratives. In rhizomatic analysis and writing, they concluded, “[t]he subject … is continuously (re) born” in a narrative that “is characterized by multiple entryways, multiple connections and asignifying ruptures” (p.  648). Their qualitative analysis, thus, challenged self-­narratives as coherent and linear “truths” in favour of considering co-­constructed, continually evolving stories. As such, Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots’ work experimented with how to move beyond examinations of one true self, but did not consider how (interpretive) qualitative research itself draws on the tree model. Therefore, the rhizome as a metaphor provided a means to expand thinking at the pragmatic level of qualitative narrative

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a­ nalysis, but not the idea of self-­narratives that can be discovered, even if only partially, through the “traditional” qualitative research act. As the researchers noted, Deleuze’s philosophy did not support their theorizing about the socially constructed self and as such, the metaphor of the rhizome served as a tool to try finding an analysis technique for their postmodern project. “Rhizoanalysis” emerges through a similar path in Leafgren’s (2009) work on children’s disobedience in schools. In her book, rhizoanalysis appears in the methods chapter after a literature review without references to Deleuze’s work. Thus, similar to Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots (2008), Leafgren treated the rhizome as a metaphor to support her qualitative methodology rather than a guiding philosophy for the project. After contrasting the rhizomatic model to “the arbolic model,” she revealed applying rhizomatic principles “in order to study children’s resistance to domination” (p.  39). “Rhizoanalysis resists,” she concluded (p.  40). While she faithfully recited the principles of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics and conceptualized the classroom as a type of map, these remained somewhat detached from her actual data collection (observations, conversations) and analysis (Eisner’s structural corroboration, internal coherence, referential adequacy) process. Thus, her qualitative methods as well as her research aim (to detect children’s resistance) remained unchallenged by Deleuzian thinking. In these investigations, the rhizome appeared as a metaphor for creating connecting lines between different elements in data or between the researcher and the participant—a type of map with multiple entry points. In her work on multiple literacy theories, Masny (2013) further conceptualized rhizome as “a map to analyze and report data” (p.  342). Similar to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), she conceptualized her research articles as rhizomes with multiple entry points. Unlike the previous examples on rhizome as a metaphor, her work was permeated by Deleuze and Guattari’s “transcendental empiricism” that she used to “disrupt” qualitative analysis process. Similar to Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots (2008), she suggested entering the data in the middle, but avoiding interpretation that assumes an autonomous thinking subjects akin to the tree model. This meant not coding the (interview) data, but presenting them, instead, as vignettes, types of “real” life discussions that, in Masny’s case, took place in the classroom. These vignettes were then subjected to “palpation” (an intense and immanent reading) instead of interpretation (Masny, 2016). For Masny, such rhizoanalysis invents in “different ways of thinking about research through … the virtual thought of what might happen when thinking data differently” (p.  345). While such rhizoanalysis “opened potentialities to thinking beyond what is already known or assumed” (p, 345), it continued to use traditional qualitative data collection methods in its aim to “deterritorialize” the data analysis process. While these social scientists have used Deleuze’s work to redefine the boundaries of qualitative research, their experimentation has not impacted their actual research methods. Most commonly, the rhizome is used, then, as a type of

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a­ nalysis technique to interpret the data. In addition, Deleuze’s theory does not necessarily frame the entire project. For example, Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots (2008) drew from “postmodern self ” whereas Leafgren (2009) was looking for “resistance” akin to critical theory. Adopting Deleuze’s rhizomatic philosophy would mean a challenge to such theoretical perspectives. Other social scientists have taken Deleuze’s philosophy as a starting point for qualitative research. Rhizome as a Starting Point for Qualitative Research Deleuze’s concepts have been put into further motion by the new materialist turn in social sciences and humanities that aim to transcend the humanist approach based on the representational logic of the tree model. Within this turn, some researchers use Deleuzian concepts, including the rhizome, to rethink qualitative research process. For example, Fox and Alldred’s (2017) volume of new materialism draws strongly from Deleuzian philosophy. They suggested that social inquiry is “to reveal relations, affects and affect economies in assemblages, the capacities (and limits to capacities) produced in bodies, collectivities and social formations, and the micropolitics of these capacities and limits” (p. 169). Thus, they promoted qualitative research design that is conceptualized as a research assemblage: data collection as a machine of obtaining data from multiple sources through multiple familiar social science methods such as ethnography, interviews, and the mixed methods approach. Their suggested analysis consists of “close reading of data sources to identify possible relations … within assemblages, and how these affect or are affected by each other” (p. 172) in the micropolitical context of the event under investigation. It directs readers to conceptualize the aspects of the methodological process differently without a need to abandon the usual social science methods or data analysis techniques. While Deleuze’s concepts are used to re-­imagine the premise of qualitative research design, Fox and Alldred, similar to Sermijn, Devleiger, and Loots (2008), Leafgren (2009), and Masny (2013, 2016) did not abandon the actual qualitative research methods, but rather use them slightly differently. In their edited collection Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Coleman and Ringrose (2013) employed Deleuze’s concepts to introduce an empirical research practice. Such a methodology, they argued, breaks down the dichotomy of theory and practice that “impels researchers to re-­think research processes—to pose (and re-­pose) questions about the relationship between theory and methodology, the conditions under which empirical research is conducted, and its effects/affects” (p. 2). The empirical research practice further connects different disciplines to promote interdisciplinary research. Coleman and Ringrose, then, wanted their book to map out and make clear(er) “some of the ways in which the often seemingly abstract ideas of Deleuze are being and might be put to work” social science research (p.  3). They found the Deleuzian approach to address such trends in qualitative research as the turn to affect (emotion), performativity, and the “messy” reality. Deleuze’s concepts can then be employed

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to invent new methods and create new concepts that align with these trends. The authors used such Deleuzian concepts as becoming, the molecular and molar, affect, machines, and desire to analyze a diverse set of issues. Similar to Fox and Alldred (2017), they tapped into everyday “affective,” “little experiences” (p.  4) in order to relate to fluidity, messiness, and “multiplicity of the world/worlds,” (p.  5) with “performative” methods that remain “clearly rooted in an empirical social science tradition” (p.  3). Consequently, the chapters explore and trouble such methods as ethnography, group and individual interviewing, and text analysis as well as traditional modes of data analysis, coding, categorization, thematization, and interpretation. While promoting performative and inventive methods, therefore, they did not reject the familiar modes of qualitative data collection practices, but rather aimed to put “to work some of Deleuze’s ideas about the world and ways of studying … other ways of knowing, relating to and creating the world, ‘noticing’ … different kinds of things that might be happening, or things that might be happening differently” (p.  4). Deleuze’s theory, nevertheless, is integrated seamlessly with the analyses of data to suggest how his philosophy can work “methodologically” for social sciences researchers. This approach aims to break out from the “ready-­made” tree model in which we have to speak through accepted traditions of humanism and qualitative social science research. It has been further elaborated by St. Pierre who suggested that we leave humanist qualitative research to move to post-­ qualitative research. Post-­Q ualitative Research In a series of works, St. Pierre (e.g., 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018) suggested a more radical reading of a Deleuzian approach to “conventional, humanist qualitative methodology” (St. Pierre, 2018, p.  603) that she described in similar terms to the tree model: “a handy preexisting research process to follow, a container with well-­identified categories into which researchers are expected to slot all aspects of their research projects so they are recognizable, clear, and accessible” (p. 603). She asked: “how could a researcher enchanted with Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome think qualitative methodology at all given that the rhizome is so clearly anti-­method?” (p.  603, italics original). Promoting post-­qualitative inquiry, “that does not involve studying humanist methodology and methods except to understand why they are not appropriate for this kind of inquiry” (p.  604), St. Pierre asked researchers to engage with theory as “the post qualitative researcher must live the theories (will not be able not to live them) and will, then, live in a different world enabled by a different ethico-­ontoepistemology” (p.  604, italics original). This is a lengthy process that requires thinking without methods, rules, or recipes. Instead, post-­qualitative inquiry is experimental filled with intensities and movements that are arrested by dogmatic methodologies and methods. For St. Pierre, “[i]nquiry should begin with the too strange and the too much” to ask “that we push toward the intensive,

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barely intelligible variation in living that shocks us and asks us to be worthy of it” (p.  607, italics original). This is the way, she concluded, that leads something unimaginable to come out to change the world. Following St. Pierre’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, it becomes evident that their concepts, such as the rhizome, cannot be used as simple “add-­ ons” to the existing qualitative traditions embedded in the tree model tradition of interpretation, phenomenology, or Marxist based critical theory. These theories, Deleuze (1994) demonstrated, lock thinking into a “ready-­made” model in which we have to speak through accepted traditions of humanism and qualitative social science research. As demonstrated in this chapter, a Deleuzian approach first locates these traditions in the tree model to then send out lines of flights that create a map of rhizomes to connect to different ways of thinking, knowing, and practicing social science research. Adopting a rhizomatic approach, thus, means rethinking how we conduct (social science) research and then inventing alternatives ways of knowing about the world. In this sense, the rhizome is not a concept to be applied to social science analysis per se, but a guiding concept to craft research approach(s) that surpasses theoretical and methodological approaches of the tree model. While Deleuze and Guattari (1994b) clearly identified creating concepts as the task for philosophy (not social science), we can sensitize ourselves to ways of escaping the limitations of the tree model and its universalizing theoretical and methodological models. Rhizomatic thinking, for example, can mean taking problems as a starting point for a “pragmatic” analysis. In such an analysis, however, social scientists engage with the psychosocial milieu of everyday life and thus, need to obtain material for their empirical analysis. Therefore, I do not see a Deleuzian approach opposing the collection of empirical material, but rather, as an opportunity to think differently about social science methodology and its methods. It is important to keep in mind that Deleuze and Guattari (1987), as philosophers, claimed rhizomatics as the starting point for their analysis. As they expressed it: “RHIZOMATICS=SCHIZOANALYSIS=STRATOANALYSIS= PRAGMATICS=MICROPOLITICS” (p.  22, capitals original). Their understanding of a “method”—analysis as a conceptual approach—can differ from social scientists’ notion of “data collection” or “data analysis.” For example, they explained how schizonanalysis differs from Freudian psychoanalysis (built within the tree model): the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious. (p. 18, italics original) The idea, thus, is to arrive “at an entirely different state of unconscious,” to produce a new concept to respond to problems arriving from the micropolitics

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of everyday life instead of applying a “ready-­made” concept from the tree model to prove it “true.” To put it slightly differently, rhizomatics would treat the physically active body, not as an object of analysis of, for example, identity construction, but as a part of machinic network that produces new statements and thus, a new concept of a(n active) body. The starting point, thus, has to be a problem arising from the micropolitics of bodies operating in various contexts, not a pre-­ determined theoretical concept whose existence we then verify through our analysis. The approach or process of thinking about the physically active body is the rhizome. It produces its concept of the physically active body instead of interpreting the body based on the ready-­made theories of the tree model. As part of this process, we should also think of new concepts for collecting empirical material and thus, new creative ways of what count as “methods.” We collect empirical material to know about the world, to create concepts that solve social and cultural problems. The ways of obtaining this material, their ethics, their verification, and their analysis also require a radically new conceptual base if we are to break out from the limitations of the tree model. This is an on-­going, but exciting challenge for Deleuzian researchers of the physically active body.

Notes 1. Deleuze (2007a) summarized the main features of multiplicities in the following way: Their elements are singularities. Their relations are becomings. Their events are haecceities, subjectless individuations. Their space-­time is smooth. They actualize in rhizome. Their plane of composition is plateau or continuous zone of intensity. Finally, their vectors are territorialization and derritorialization. 2. There are several English spellings of the plane of consistency. In the translation of What is Philosophy?, it appears as the plane of consistence where in A Thousand Pla­ teaus, the plane of consistency. The idea of plane of consistency is also close to the Body without Organs, discussed in further detail in Chapter 4.

References Coleman, R., & Ringrose, J. (2013). Deleuze and research methodologies. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Cutler, A., & MacKenzie, I. (2011). Bodies of learning. In L. Guillaume & J. Hughes (Eds.), Deleuze and the body (pp. 53–72). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995a). On A Thousand Plateaus. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 25–34). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995b). On philosophy. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 135–155). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2001). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2005). Immanence: A life. In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Pure immanence: Essays on a life (pp. 25–34). New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (2007a). Preface to the Amer­ican edition of Dialogues. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp.  309–312). New York, NY: Semiotext(e).

82   The Rhizome Deleuze, G. (2007b). Preface for the Italian edition of A thousand plateaus. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp.  313–316). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy. London: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2006). Dialogues II. London and New York: Continuum. Dosse, F. (2010). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting lives. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Fox, N., & Alldred, P. (2017). Sociology and the new materialism: Theory, research, action. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Leafgren, S. (2009). Reuben’s fall: A rhizomatic analysis of disobedience in kindergarten. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Masny, D. (2013). Rhizoanalytic pathways in qualitative research, Qualitative Inquiry, 19(5) 339–348. Masny, D. (2016). Problematizing qualitative research: Reading a data assemblage with rhizoanalysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(8), 666–675. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to “Capitalism and schizophrenia.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rajchman, J. (2005). Introduction. In G. Deleuze, Pure immanence: Essays on a life (pp. 25–34). New York, NY: Zone Books. Sermijn, J., Devlieger, P., & Loots, G. (2008). The narrative construction of the self: Selfhood as a rhizomatic story. Qualitative Inquiry, 14(4), 632–650. St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N.  K. Denzin & Y.  S. Lincoln (Eds.), SAGE handbook of qualitative inquiry (4th ed., pp. 611–635). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). The appearance of data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13, 223–227. St. Pierre, E. A. (2015). Practices for the “new” in the new empiricisms, the new materialisms, and post qualitative inquiry. In N. Denzin & M. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry and the politics of research (pp. 75–95). Walnut Grove, CA: Left Coast Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (2016). The empirical and the new empiricisms. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16, 111–124. St. Pierre, E. A. (2018). Writing post-­qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(9), 603–608.

Chapter 4

The Body without Organs A Purely Intensive Body

One of the most stimulating, but probably also one of the most perplexing, Deleuzian concepts for researchers of the physically active body is the Body without Organs (BwO). With an increased attention to Deleuze’s work in the social sciences, some socio-­cultural researchers of physical activity have engaged already with the BwO, but only to strongly object to it due to its perceived dismissal of the material body (Evans, Davies, & Rich, 2009; Wainwright, Williams, & Turner, 2005). These references are minor, but, to my reading, they illuminate important misconceptions of his work and thus, are worthy of discussion in the context of this book. In this critique, Deleuze alongside with Foucault, is firmly located under the umbrellas of social constructionism, postmodernism, and relativism. Deleuze’s perceived “social constructionism,” it is claimed, denotes the disappearance of the “organic body” from any type of social analysis. For example, Williams (2001) claimed that health sociology that now embraces social constructionist critique of “medicalization” discredits the “natural” or “bio-­physical” reality” of ill health. Such an approach to health sociology, Williams continued, neglects the brute reality of bodies-­with-organs in favour of vaguely conceptualized and unattainable bodies without organs. This theorizing does not serve the ill whose material bodies, indeed, are affected, because social constructionism dismisses any other knowledge claim (e.g., biology or medicine) to argue for their own omnipotent understanding of reality. While references to Deleuze in this recent debate in socio-­cultural studies of physical activity are brief, they echo Williams’ dismissal of social constructionism. In their study of the dancing body, for example, Wainwright, Williams, and Turner (2005) referred to Williams’ work to acclaim that “body-­without-organs” suffers from a “disembodied view of the social world” where the “materiality” and reality of “bodies-­with-organs” are neglected (p.  49). Similarly, in their call for increased attention to material bodies in physical education and socio-­cultural research on physical activity, Evans, Davies, and Rich (2009) suggested that the body’s presence as a flesh and blood, thinking, feeling, sentient, species being, a “body with organs” … whose very presence—moving, growing,

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changing over time—is generative of a meaning potential to which both the self and others must respond. (p. 392, italics original) They elaborated that “[we] refer intentionally to the ‘Body with Organs’ because of the centrality of its counter position, the ‘Body without Organs’, in post-­ structural theory and the latter’s culpability in the disappearance of the organic body from social investigation” (p. 403).1 These readings illustrate several points of perceived usefulness of Deleuze’s work to study of physically active bodies. First, Deleuze and Foucault’s work is often discussed as closely connected to, even inseparable, from each other. Second, Deleuze’s work is characterized as social constructionist, postmodernist, or poststructuralist without clear definitions of these very broad and even contradictory terms. Third, Deleuze is considered ignoring the material body to advocate for disappearance of all empirical “reality.” Reading Deleuze’s work against such interpretations, two characteristics of the BwO need to be laid out directly. First, Deleuze’s BwO does not imply a disappearance of the material body from analysis. In fact, Deleuze (2007b) assigned the body a central role in his thought system: This body is as biological as it is collective and political. It is on this body that assemblages are made and come apart, and this body-­without-organs is what bears the offshoots of deterritorialization of assemblages or light lines. (p. 130) Therefore, the BwO does not signal a disinterest or disappearance of the material body from social inquiry, but rather provides a concept to analyze its force in the assemblage formation (Chapter 2) and social change. Second, the BwO is not the material body or its organs in Deleuze’s thought system. Actually, Deleuze (2007a) labelled the body defined by the strata (or entirely socially constructed body) as “Organs without the Body.” Deleuze, therefore, never promoted the disappearance of the organic body and thus, the BwO does not imply a disappearance of materiality: the “BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs.… The body is the body. Alone it stands” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  158, italics original).2 Similar to Foucault, Deleuze found “matter” containing great potential for aiding us to think beyond the plane of organization of the “tree model” (Chapter 3), but he aspired to expand Foucault’s revelation on how power operates directly on the body to discipline it to docility: Michel’s idea that power arrangements have an immediate and direct relationship with the body is essential. I am more concerned with how they impose an organization on bodies. Thus, the body-­without-organs is the place or agent of deterritorialization (and thereby the plane of immanence

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of desire). While all organizations, all the systems Michel calls bio-­power, in effect reterritorialize the body. (Deleuze, 2007b, p. 131) In this chapter, I aim to illustrate how the BwO might act as an agent of deterritorialization of how we currently understand, think of, and analyze the physically active body. This is not necessarily a straightforward undertaking due to the multiple uses of the concept BwO. Deleuze (1995) himself did not readily see why his readers might have problems understanding what the BwO means. He recommended approaching such concepts as the BwO from the “inside”: instead of continually trying to understand or interpret its meaning or find its significance, we should ask how this concept works and how it can work for us. “There is nothing to explain,” he claimed, “nothing to understand, nothing to interpret … I know people who’ve read nothing who immediately saw what bodies without organs were, given their own ‘habits,’ their own way of being one” (p. 8). I readily confess that I have great trouble in seeing my own way to how the BwO works without interpreting its meaning. Unable to entirely live without interpretation, I, nevertheless, aim to focus on how the BwO might work for researchers of the physically active body. To do this, I first discuss the introduction of the BwO as an aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-­Oedipus and then expand this discussion in light of their later work in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). I then offer examples by scholars who have employed the BwO to examine the positive force of the material, moving body. I begin with Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis.

The Body without Organs in Schizoanalysis While the concept of BwO is most extensively discussed in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), it evolved from their earlier work in the Anti-­ Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari (1994) challenged psychoanalysis that they, in addition to philosophy, defined as “sad business” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1995, p.  13). Highlighting their critique, thus, sheds further light into the potential uses of the BwO as a research tool. Although not necessarily directly relevant to many socio-­cultural researchers of physical activity, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) critique of psychoanalysis put to work many of Deleuze’s earlier ideas about thinking differently. Deleuze (2007c) openly admitted that he did not know much about psychoanalysis but when he met Guattari (a psychoanalyst), he felt that his philosophical approach could lift Guattari’s critique outside of its Lacanian framework. Deleuze in his work with Parnet (2006) later summarized their main criticisms of psychoanalysis: “it [psychoanalysis] breaks up all productions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances” (p. 57). By symbolic overcoding of everything that is said—“something has to always recall something else” (p. 57)—psychoanalysis,

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Deleuze claimed, did not give patients a chance to voice their thoughts, concerns, feelings, or desires. Evolved into a closed system of pre-­determined, strictly governed rules that assessed every aspect of human life based on “lack,” psychoanalysis had turned into a type of ideology: a system of beliefs that sustained capitalism and the State by providing appropriate knowledge and receiving valuable endorsement in return. According to Holland (2005), Deleuze revealed psychoanalysis as a strictly capitalist institution: capital privatizes reproduction in the private sphere at the same time that is privatizes ownership of the means of production in the economic sphere. And each sphere develops a corresponding discursive or mode of representation: psychoanalysis, political economy. (pp. 55–56) Deleuze and Guattari (1994) revealed how dominance is imposed through thought systems, such as psychoanalysis, that stifle any voices asking for change. The BwO emerged among the concepts included in the schizoanalysis, an analysis freed from the limitations of the Freudian Oedipal psychoanalysis. Schizo­ analysis, thus, engaged with several tasks to discover possibilities for “positive” desire to think outside of psychoanalysis. In what follows, I discuss each of these tasks in more detail.

1st positive task of Schizoanalysis Deleuze and Guattari (1994) indicated that the individual’s positive potential is limited by psychoanalysis in the capitalist society that suppresses the function of what they called the “desiring machine.” Therefore, discovering “the nature, the formation, or the functioning” of desiring-­machines (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p.  322) is the first task for schizoanalysis. “Desire” continues to be central in Deleuze’s rhizomatic philosophy.3 For Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006), “desire” was an integral aspect of liberating life from the suffocating dominance of capitalism that had harnessed psychoanalysis, in particular, to its service, thus, his assertion that psychoanalysis “hates desire, it hates politics” (p.  58). Desire, for Deleuze, is not an internal, subjective “feeling.” It is not to do with sexuality or sexual pleasure (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) or lack of it. Neither is desire a “natural or spontaneous determination” (Deleuze, 2007b, p. 124), nor a construction, but a production of reality: products of desire are real, not abstracted in conceptual schemes of, for example, psychoanalysis (Holland, 2005). Nevertheless, for Deleuze and Guattari (1994) desiring production is always bodily: the organic body needs energy to function. This energy is desire. Furthermore, desire, Deleuze (2007b) indicated, is the leading element of a micro-­analysis of the assemblages (Chapter 2): desire is a part of every functioning assemblage, or as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) called it as this point, the “desiring-­machine.”4

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They used the term desiring-­machine to indicate that desire is something that actively produces, it is a process of production, not something passively waiting to be interpreted using pre-­determined concepts (e.g., the Freudian image of the phallus). As explained in Chapter 2, the assemblages or desiring-­ machines organize us, “make us an organism” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 8), but, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) noted, the body also desires recuperation, to use its energy differently. This can take place on a surface that Deleuze and Guattari labelled as the body without organs. This surface does not construct meanings (such as a phallus), but is, instead, “the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 8). It is, therefore, a type of surface on which the desiring production, the body’s energy, free of limitations, can make multiple, new connections and thus, discover new ways of functioning. As Massumi (1992) summarized, desire refers to “the production of singular states of intensity by the repulsion-­attraction of the limitative bodies without organs (governed by deterministic whole attractors) and nonlimitative bodies without organs (governed by chance-­ridden fractal attractors)” (p. 82). The body without organs, thus, does not refer to a material body or an image of a body, the representational body (e.g., feminine/masculine body, raced body, heteronormative body): The body without organs has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists, right there where it is produced … it couples production with antiproduction. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 8) Deleuze and Guattari further illustrated the connection between the body and body without organs: “The organ-­machines now cling to the body without organs as though it were a fencer’s padded jacket” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 11). This clinging, however, creates multiple connection points between the jacket and the fencer’s slippery and fluid moving body. The subject, not analyzed and interpreted based on psychoanalytic laws of lack, now emerges as a product of the desiring-­machine and the connections between the body without organs: the point of disjunction on the body without organs form circles that converge on the desiring-­machines; then the subject—produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine—passes through all the degrees of the circle, and passes from one circle to another. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 20) Consequently, Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) asserted that change begins from the level of micro-­politics, from creating a “self,” an “I,” that, similar to

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Foucault, Deleuze characterized as “a substance to be manufactured, to get flowing—a social and political space to be conquered” (p.  58). It is possible to produce this self on the body without organs. To clarify their point, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) further compared the body without organs to an egg that has not yet developed into identifiable organs: The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors. (p. 19, italics original) In such a space, the subject, which has no fixed identity, is free to wander about over the body without organs in the process of becoming something not yet quite definable. Instead of the Oedipal representation of desire based on a singular signifier, the phallus (and thus, family), a different understanding of psychoanalysis, a material psychoanalysis, or schizoanalysis, was needed. This first task of schizoanalysis is to identify the desiring-­machines—that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) later called the assemblages—their outputs and functions. This first step is a mechanical and functional analysis without the limitations of interpretation. In addition to the micro-­analysis of the desiring-­machine, schizoanalysis concerns the “political” that Deleuze and Guattari (1994) brought in through their re-­adaptation of Marxism. In his introduction to the Anti-­Oedipus, Foucault (1977/1994) summarized the central questions for schizoanalysis: How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order? Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica. (p. xii, italics original) Consequently, as its second task, schizoanalysis engages the desiring-­machine with the socius: the technical machines of labor and production.

2nd Positive Task of Schizoanalysis After detecting the possible working of the desiring-­machine, schizoanalysis identifies how it works with the social machine. From Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) point of view, socially defined “principles” or concepts intervene to suppress how desire works to produce reality. For example, they found that psychoanalysis, or in their terms, the Oedipal desiring production (of the individual), and the social production operate through strikingly similar principles in capitalist society. The nuclear family is assigned to program its members to submit

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to prohibitive authority (the father, the boss, capital production) to become docile, ascetic members of the socius (Holland, 2005). This finding prompted Deleuze and Guattari to ask why people desire their own oppression? Why don’t they do something to break out from such an unenjoyable existence? Although Deleuze and Guattari (1994) distinguished between desiring production and social production, these are not separate spheres, but rather both the social machine and the desiring-­machine, while operating based on a different regime, produce real products and thus, social production is also desiring production. However, they noted, there is massive social repression that has an enormous effect on desiring production: “The prime function incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channelled, regulated” (p.  33). Interestingly, however, they also found capitalism “deterritorializing” the socius by offering openings for the desire to reach the body without organs and overturn the dominance of social production. To further highlight the interplay between the desiring production and social production and their effects on sustaining oppression, Deleuze and Guattari introduced the idea of molar and molecular poles of investment. The concepts of molar and molecular were already introduced in Chapter 1, whereas here I show how Deleuze and Guattari connected them directly to capitalist production. The distinction between molar and molecular combines the ideas of desire, subject, and social investment. Categorically speaking, the molar pole refers to a social and political “field” or machine that organizes groups to exclude some and include others. The representations that signify and thus, turn meaningful in capitalist society, are created in this field. This is the field of purpose and intention. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) further argued that the molar structures of the social field turn individuals into a subjugated group who invest in the shared interests with the social field. They called this type of investment preconscious investment in interest. The subject group, instead, invests in desire, an unconscious investment “in transverse multiplicities that convey desire as a molecular phenomenon” (p.  280). Together these groups and their investments make a socius. They also make the two sides of the body without organs onto which the individual’s desiring production can connect. In other words, they offer the possibilities for the individual’s production of reality. The distinction between preconscious investment in the molar structures and an unconscious molecular investment helped Deleuze and Guattari to further understand reactionary social action and revolutionary social action. They asked: “Why do many of those who have or should have an objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of a reactionary type?” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p.  344). This question continues to be relevant in the contemporary society where individuals and groups desire for change, but then opt to invest in reactionary, conservative politics that pushes them into the margins of capitalist production, or entirely excludes them. Instead of Marxist derived resistance to ideological deception or mystification

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(see also Chapter 5), Deleuze and Guattari (1994) argued that the unconscious investment in desire is the key to any change because “one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty” (p.  344). This investment does not necessarily coincide with the preconscious investment in interest. As result, some people find joy and purpose from being a wheel in a capitalist machine. Others have preconscious investment in interest, but their unconscious investment is in capitalist codes and flows. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari argued, “[a] revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring production” (p.  348, italics original). A subject group’s investment, on the contrary, is unconscious and thus, revolutionary, because “it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the social or the form of power to desiring production; productive of desire and a desire that produces” (pp. 348–349). This desire, in turn, is able to draw from the body without organs, the limit “underneath” the capitalist production, the socius. Deleuze and Guattari provided the following image to their relationship: “The socius— … capital-­money—are full-­clothed bodies, just as the body without organs is a naked body … the molecular unconscious” (p.  281). The task of schizoanalysis is “to reach the investments of unconscious desire of the social field” and reveal how they are differentiated from, co-­exist, or oppose the preconscious investments in interest (p.  350). In their political analysis of psychoanalysis and capitalism, thus, Deleuze and Guattari emphasized desire as the way to understand what is real. Desire, for them, is not a metaphor, image, fantasy, or dream as psychoanalysis would have. Neither has its interests been hidden under some ideological construction like capitalism would have. Desire produces what is real to us. It is just a matter of detecting what aspects of the social are open to desiring-­machines that enter its “parts, wheels, and motors” (p. 381). So far Deleuze and Guattari (1994) have advocated desiring-­machines, types of machines fueled by energy and the vitality of desire, as the force that produces reality. These desiring-­machines, however, have been suppressed within current capitalist molar structures of which psychoanalysis is a part. When we remember that the impetus of Anti-­Oedipus was a critique of psychoanalysis, how does its message, then, work for socio-­cultural researchers of physical activity? We can draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of capitalism that effectively continues to function by codifying, signifying, regulating, and channelling resistant energy or desire and thus, suppresses attempts at change. A different reality can only be produced by giving voice to the desiring-­machines. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) analysis, nevertheless, revealed that not all attempts at revolutionary action necessarily result in social change: some groups, while openly demanding change, actually invest in the capitalist interest to gain a better position in its system. For example, identity-­based group action can be based on inclusion in the capitalist coding of an acceptable labor force. From

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this perspective, we can investigate whether the claims for increased access to sport by such identity-­based groups as women, people experiencing disability, or gay men derive from the actions of a subjugated group with preconscious investment in interest or from a subject group with an unconscious investment in desire. In addition, we can use Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of preconscious investment in (capitalist) interest to understand recent postfeminist calls for empowerment through women’s sexualization. The postfeminist discourse proclaims women’s choice to sexualize themselves as well as physical activities like pole fitness, as liberating. While such attempts could possibly be considered using sexual desire as liberating energy, from a Deleuzian perspective, this type of “liberation” is clearly invested in the interest of the preconscious logic of the capitalist socius instead of a desire to construct a different type of existence that draws from underneath the capitalist interest to oppose the selling of women’s bodies. To my reading, physical activities that are marketed based on women’s sexualization do not make us think outside of the existing strata or build different types of selves or bodies from the capitalist neo-­liberal feminine body. In this case, women’s sexualization continues to invest in molar socius. The preconscious desire to resist is there, but it desires action along the molar lines of the socius. Analyzed from a Deleuzian perspective, identity-­based group resistance can turn out to be a reactionist investment in molar structures. For Deleuze and Guattari (1994), thus, social change does not stem from revealing ideologies as myths and replacing them with other codified belief systems, but from an analysis of how desiring-­machines, in multiple ways, produce multiple understandings of the real. They expanded on this analysis in A Thousand Plateaus that moves from a critique of psychoanalysis to a broader range of social phenomena.

How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs? In the Anti-­Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), the body without organs appears as passive “surface,” a limit on which capitalism (or the “body of capital”) makes sense of itself. Furthermore, the molar “aggregates” and molecular elements rested on the same limit surface; one supporting the capitalist system (the molar structures), the other providing openings out of its codification (the molecular elements). In A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), where an entire plateau is devoted to the Body without Organs (now abbreviated as the BwO), it appears as much more of an individualized tool that all of us should actively use. Massumi (1992) clarified that the BwO can been thought of as “subset of the world’s plane of consistency … it is body’s pure potential, pure virtuality … the body without organs is the body’s plane of consistency” (p. 71). The important point now is to recognize the possibilities for an individual BwO that while pre-­existent to certain extent, does not come

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“ready-­made.” The BwO continues to be necessary for desire as a productive force: One can’t desire, explained Deleuze and Guattari, without making a BwO. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) continued to assert that the BwO is not a physical, material body, the organs, per se. Rather it appears beneath the body as a purely “intensive body” (Smith, 1997, p. xxxvii). As adjacent, not pre-­existing, to the body, the BwO continually produces itself in felt, bodily experience. Neither is it something opposite, like an ideology or a discourse, for instance, to the organs: “the BwO is not at all the opposite to the organs.… The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism” (p. 158). As reminder, the organism is one of the prevailing strata (see Chapter 1), not the BwO: The organism … from which medical doctors benefit and on which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO: rather it is stratum on BwO … a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. (p. 159) The BwO, nevertheless, “is not at all a notion or a concept” (p. 149), but must be actively built by an individual. How are we to build it? As a clue Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offered that the BwO is “a practice, a set of practices” (pp.  149–150). Such practice, nevertheless, involves experimentation that includes both the biological, the corpus or the body, and the political, the socius. Deleuze further compared the body without organs to the abstract (social) machine (see Chapter 2): if the social machine functions to structure the social aspects of life—“the men it makes use of, to the tools it selects, and to the technologies it promotes”—the BwO functions to define the lines, axes, and gradients of the organism and as such is separate from the organic functions of the body. Massumi’s (1992) explanation can further illuminate how the BwO operates in the intersections of the individual body, behaviour, and the socius. Massumi (1992) encouraged us to imagine the human body learning to behave within society or socius where certain behavioural “patterns can be expected to follow with a greater certainty” (p. 70), patterns that eventually will govern “the socially significant actions” of “the unified adult body” (p. 71). The socius, thus, limits “the body potential (‘power,’ ‘degree of freedom’)” (p.  70). Deleuze and Guattari, nevertheless, conceptualized the body as on open system, also influenced by impulses outside the socius and its organization. This body outside any socially determinate state, Massumi continued, is the body without organs, “the body from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality” (p. 70). The body in the socius, nevertheless, can pass through different determined

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“behavioural” states. The body without organs gains intensity in these “in-­ between” spaces. The body without organs, thus, is “the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action in its repertory” (p.  70). According to Massumi, the BwO is the broadest possibility of behaviours not limited by anything; “an expression of individual desire in its social dimension” (p.  184). In other words, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggested an involvement in an individualized practice that allows the desire to actively create reality through a body that operates within the existing social and cultural conditions. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) further introduced different types of individualized BwOs that can embody different attributes. These individual BwOs produce intensities when attached to the totality of BwOs, similar to the passive limit surface introduced in Anti-­Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), but now called the plane of consistency. This totality of BwOs or the plane of consistency is now described as, no longer entirely passive and uncoded, but “glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also signification and a subject—occur” (p.  159). The plane of consistency continues to be an unreachable limit for thought and reality, but is, indeed, a plane that we already live our lives on. To summarize, our selves, bodies, and our thinking are deeply ingrained by the capitalist ideas sedimented in the strata. Building a BwO is a means of breaking out from these limitations to desire different types of realities, think different types of thoughts, and create different types of selves from the predetermined behavioural patterns of capitalism. In Deleuzian terms, the idea is to dismantle the medicalized view of the body, the true self, meaning, and interpretation to be able to reach to the BwO that does not limit our thinking and  practices within organism, signifiance, or subjectification, but is, indeed, “real.” Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offered actual example bodies potentially making themselves into BwOs. Their examples of engaging with the process of BwO consisted of “a dreary parade” of bodies: anorectic, hypochondriac, paranoid, schizophrenic, drugged, masochist. These bodies, potentially, lead a way outside of the dominant strata: they want to “slough off ” or “lose” their organs in ways that are not “acceptable” or “limited” by “normalized” thinking in capitalist societies. Despite such a collection of bodies, Deleuze and Guattari did not envision that the practices used by these bodies were successful at building a BwO. While starting a BwO practice, these bodies emptied themselves without reaching for new selves or new ways of thinking and have gone overboard without reaching their BwOs. In addition to empty bodies, another dangerous BwO practice, Deleuze and Guattari warned, is the “fascist body” that, indeed, desires certain practices, selves, and thoughts. Not all desires and thoughts, they cautioned, lead to a positive building of a BwO, but to too violent destratification rejected by the plane of consistency, the larger BwO. Therefore, the idea is not to celebrate “ill” bodies, but to find ways to challenge the limitations of the strata. “How can we,” Deleuze and Guattari asked, “fabricate a BwO for

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o­ urselves without it being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac?” (p. 163). To further illuminate the dangers of building a BwO, I use Deleuze’s (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) discussion of the anorectic body as an example that can be relevant to the researchers of the physically active body. An anorectic body practices a desire to think and act differently from its capitalist surroundings through several ways (or “fluxes” as Deleuze called them) that destabilize the organism: restricting food, building a specific anorectic “elegance,” exercising, or cooking for others. As such, “[t]he anorexic consists of a body without organs with voids and fullnesses” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006, p.  81): emptying the body of food, but also filling it with such items as diet soda. Deleuze emphasized, however, that “[i]t is not a refusal of the body, it is a matter of refusal of the organism, of a refusal of what the organism makes the body undergo” (p.  81). Instead of a proper dietary regime (organism), an anorectic selectively “emits” and “conquests” various food particles. From this point of view, anorexia is a political statement: an escape “from the norms of consumption in order not be an object of consumption oneself ” (p. 82), from the constraints of family (mealtimes), from what is expected from us as healthy organisms. When the BwO enters into relation with other “fluxes” such as fashion, language such as the ANA and MIA internet sites, or sexuality, it enters into the regime of signs that then dictates how anorexia is understood in society. While the BwO of the anorexic body enables some escape from our consumerist society, it is important to ask what are the dangers of this type of BwO. Can this become a fascist body? While her BwO (her set of practices) may enable the anorexic to escape consumerist, capitalist society and the dominance of the family in this structure, her BwO is also lethal as it empties the body without filling it with a different type of thought. The anorexic body becomes incapacitated before entering into a new thought or different type of existence. Therefore, it is not a constructive strategy for thinking differently about consumerism, but falls a victim to the capitalist mode of production. The task of schizoanalysis is to map the regime of sign or the stratum (i.e., subjectivation) and the abstract machine (the social force) that define how the stratum is taken up within a particular assemblage. In terms of anorexia, this means detecting how an individual develops a “passionate attachment” to the practice of fasting in our society in a particular assemblage of, for example, healthy exercise and its image world of the feminine body ideal. When building a practice that breaks out from the normalized accepted behavioural patterns of capitalist society can be unconstructive, the BwO can be “full of gaiety, ecstacy, and dance” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  150). However, it is very important not to “destratify” too violently. We can create a BwO every day, but not by using a sledgehammer. We need to be cautious about dismantling the self, the body, and the ways they are currently interpreted to be meaningful parts of the capitalist socius. “You can’t reach the BwO,” Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explained, “by wildly destratifying” (p. 160). This is what their “dreary” example bodies had done. Instead,

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you have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. (p. 160) “Mimic the strata,” they urged, because wildly destroying it will result in a worse fate than staying stratified (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 160). With these precautions in mind, Deleuze and Guattari offered the following steps for building a BwO, that unlimited by the strata, supports desire and enables us to consider a different reality from the one created by capitalism: 1. lodge yourself to a stratum (signifiance, subjectification, organism); 2. find a place on this stratum that is open to experimentation; 3. create lines of flight that allow for small and gradual deterritorialization of the stratum; 4. connect to others, environments, ideas with “allies” to problematize interpretations and meanings normalized in society; 5. create “a diagram” (of practices) that enables a multiplicity of selves, ideas, bodies. The key point about making a BwO is to actively form, reform, and deform a passionate attachment of one’s social reality instead of being determined by the current social formation (Holland, 2005). If Deleuze, and particularly Guattari, defined schizoanalysis as a practice that allows a psychoanalyst to think and thus, practice, differently by using active desiring production as social critique, the same idea can be used by others to deform BwOs on the plane of consistency. The BwO engages the material body into practice— Deleuze and Guattari’s example bodies were all practicing bodies (e.g., they used self torture, dieting, drugs)—and thus, physical activity can lead a BwO through which to think differently, to practice research differently, and to build a different type of body to carry out social critique. The material body, according to Deleuze, travels beyond “interpretation” and the eternal search for the true self to experiment with intensity, energy, and movement. This is both biological and political experimentation enabled by the involvement of the materiality of the body. Finding and building a BwO, thus, should be “a continuous process of positive desire” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  155), a joyous practice of untying the body from the social construction of the three strata to create change.

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How Does It Work? What New Thoughts Does This Make Possible to Think? How can the joyous practice of untying the body from strata work in a physical activity setting? How can we experiment with the energy and intensity of the physically active body? How can we use desire to engage in the process of building a BwO to initiate new thoughts that enact social change? Although references to a BwO are rare in the socio-­cultural literature of the physically active body, there is some work that illustrates this possibility. In my work, for example, I (Markula, 2006a) have engaged with the BwO to examine how the fit, feminine body can be read in Pilates practice. In this article, I searched for a creative and theoretical way to deterritorialize the molar feminine body by introducing a set of Deleuze’s concepts that are discussed more in-­depth in this book. In another work, I (Markula, 2006b) mapped my becoming as a contemporary dancer/choreographer by exploring how movement practice may help finding a BwO and alternative ways of doing and representing research. In this chapter, however, I have chosen examples from philosophy to map further ways of the building and functioning of a BwO in dance and in Taijiquan. The Desire of the Dancing Body and Building a BwO In his seminal study, Gil (2006) illustrated how dance, as a movement practice, transforms the body to construct a BwO. He drew on the BwO as the plane of consistency on which the dancing body in space assembles with the desire to dance. Following Deleuze and Guattari, he further emphasized that building the BwO, the plane of consistency, is always “a question of matter” (p. 34). In other words, it requires a body, but there are multiple types of bodies one can desire to build (“a body of pictorial sensations, a body of pain for the masochist, a body of loving affects as in courtly love, a body of thought for the philosopher, a body of health for the sick, a body of movement for the dancer” (p. 34)). This building process, nevertheless, constitutes the BwO. Faithful to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Gil emphasized that he is not dealing with the body as organism “formed by organs that impede the free circulation of energy” invested and fixated on the system of organs in the physiological and medical sense. Such an organism represents “an obstacle to innovation.” Instead, the interior space of the dancing body opens to its exterior space through its skin that senses the world. Gil, however, did not address the material body of the individual dancer, but rather “the body as a meta-­phenomenon” that is “inhabited by—and inhabiting—other bodies and other minds, a body existing at the same time at the opening toward the world provided by language and sensorial contact” (p. 28). The task of a dancer is to untangle herself from the existing “systems, to constitute another body where intensities may be taken to their highest degrees” (p. 33). To assemble with the space, objects, and other

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bodies, the dancing body needs a desire to dance. This is the energy for the moving body “to reach the highest intensities” (p. 29). The energy, thus, subsides the importance of movement in dance: the dancer aims at energy and not at concrete movements: the most abstract and subtle modulation of energy is enough to actualize the most concrete bodily movements. Energy is what assembles assemblages; the energy map is what composes the most abstract tracing of movements. (p. 30) When the energy of the dancer’s body traces the movements, “[t]here is no longer or no more the separation body/mind, or mind/matter” (p.  33). The danced movement and desire to dance manifest in choreography that “is to experiment, to work all possible assemblages of the body” (p. 30). As a result, the dancing body becomes a Mobius-­strip type of body: an “obverse” body without clear distinction where the back or the front begins or ends, that seems to endlessly rotate “ceaselessly making and unmaking itself, absorbing and dissolving the interior without stopping” (p.  34). The “trivial” dance movement, Gil continued, further connects to, or motions, larger cultural movements, “the vital movements,” to discover new ways of being, moving, and thinking: “Dance unearths it [the vital movement], makes it gush out and awaken other potencies of movement” (p. 30). In summary, Gil (2006) aimed to demonstrate how the BwO (the plane of consistency) is constructed by building a dancing body in movement. While the dancer desires to dance, the process of building a dancing body appears not to involve a conscious decision to restructure/destructure or critique the socius or to create “resistant” or “reactionary” choreography. The material dancing body that combined with desire, the energy to dance, assembles with space, objects, and other bodies is not directed by a mind or the body, but is an assemblage itself that builds the BwO. Thus, the Mobius strip like the dancing body frees itself from the limitations of the organism, the type of thinking that limits the body within physiological and bio-­medical parameters. When innovating free from the organism, a dancer is able to connect with “the vital movement” of humanity. In their work, Yu and IlundáinAgurruza (2016) illustrated how another physical activity practice, Taijiquan, can turn into a BwO. The Complete Taijiquan Body as Individualized BwO Similar to Gill (2006), Yu and Ilundáin-Agurruza (2016) invested into the idea of “inside-­outside” connectivity of the material, active body. They focused, however, on the possibilities of building the individual body as an open assemblage, an “individualized” BwO (rather than the plane of consistency on which the individual body builds itself ). They reiterated:

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rather than endorsing a view of the subject as an articulating, enclosed entity, BwO emphasizes the desiring-­machine (la machine désirante) that proclaims neither closure nor interpretation but instead productivity, openings, and a state of constant flux. BwO designates a body as a collective assemblage of organs, experiences, and states of being, as opposed to an “organized” subject constituted by the organization of organs. (pp. 430–431) Aligned with Gil, they assigned the “organism” as limiting, but designated a BwO as something that “reconceptualizes subjectivity, breaking free traditional modes of theorizing subjectivity in terms of identity and consciousness” (p. 431). They further provided the term “bodymind” to theorize physically active subjectivity “without anatomy and kinesiology’s objectifying views and physiology’s reductive accounts” (p. 431). While Yu and Ilundáin-Agurruza, like Gil (2006), referred to incorporeality, they also accounted for a large system of interacting forces behind which “lies the desire in life, or the ever-­forming of ‘intensities’ in a BwO. The intensities traverse, rearrange, and reform themselves, making pathways, allowing themselves to flow out of the body, enabling the never-­ending process of becoming” (p. 433). Departing from Gil who placed energy ahead of dance movement, Yu and Ilundáin-Agurruza’s “bodymind” emphasizes “the very performing” of physical activity. What matters are experiences of moving, not the result. The BwO, however, enables the researcher to picture the performing body holistically: “an intensive wave without any before/after, internal/external, void/full, and mind/body divide … a non-­formed, non-­organized, and non-­stratified body” (p.  430). Within movement performance, the subject, “rather than a subject of consciousness, is nothing but a BwO incapable of seeing, perceiving, remembering, and understanding” open to intensities around them (p. 427). Such a “bodymind” “immediately and fluidly responds to its environment” (p.  427). Skillful performers, they continued, are able to integrate the psychophysical with their kinetic experiences effectively. Echoing Gil, Yu and Ilundáin-Agurruza presented the practice of Taijiquan as something that can involve the internal and the external into a fluid Mobius-­strip-like subject, not a body. The element of qi now provides the assembling energy. The athletic body, like the dancing body, brings together diverse elements in the space of its performance: Athletes in performance illustrate this well, e.g. triathletes—together—create dynamic, ever-­changing interrelationships at multifarious levels where they constantly ‘intertwine’ kinetically with other triathletes and the environment (ocean waves, road, and wind), and integrate technology (shoes, bicycle, and wetsuit) as bodily extensions. (p. 431, italics original) Yu and Ilundáin-Agurruza further illustrated Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the complete body, BwO, and its double, the cancerous, empty body by

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contrasting expert athletes with athletes who dope. Expert athletes, they contended, embody a body complete with both psychophysical and kinetic elements whereas the drug using body has emptied itself of its organs, yet, as organized and passive, it has hollowed “out its own intensities and forces” (p. 431). These bodies “are neither complete nor capable on their own” (p. 431). The complete consummate body, the bodymind energized by qi, emerges through the practice of yielding that “structures this process in two ways, through physical relaxation, and through experiential and theoretical communion and blending with the environment” (p. 434). Based on yielding “Taijiquan practice involves the progressive realization of already existing and underlying intensities” (p. 433), the outside forces structuring sport and the opponent, and the inside forces emanating from the creation of BwO. The Taijiquan body becomes an open “whole”: the sensitive body being in one with the self, in communion with its environment, and filled with empathy, has eliminated the friend/enemy, self/other dividers structuring sport (p.  436). Intersecting “a thinking-­in-movement” (p.  432) with Deleuzian philosophy, Yu and Ilundáin-Agurruza summarized, “the ideal qi-­body of inside-­outside connectivity that Taijiquan has highlighted for centuries can be ‘re-­reached’ through a completely different route: that of a BwO” (p.  437). The process of performance (not the end results) allows for “bodymind” and a subject who without interpretations reacts to sensory stimulus around her. Inside/outside connecting body is able to assemble forces of inner (flow) and qi and the outer forces created by the opponent and sport as a social institution. The two examples involving the dancing body and Tiajiquan body demonstrate how physically active bodies can “break free” from the limitations of organism. The desire to move provides energy to reach either the plane of consistency (the larger BwO) or to create an individual BwO that allows practitioners to think differently about their bodies that can now assemble in different ways from the organism. Yu and Ilundáin-Agurruza (2016) also asserted that the BwO breaks free from the stratum of subjectification which allows Taijiquan practitioners to redefine their subjectivity. Gil (2006) further emphasized that when freed from the organism, the dancing body can connect with the larger vital movements of humanity. To further interrogate the possibilities for the BwO to connect to society at large, I draw from Massumi’s (1992) conceptualization of the BwO in socius as the final example of how the BwO can work in the context of physical activity research. His work can assist social scientists who analyze the limitations of socius and the body’s potential to expand these limitations. Limitative and Nonlimitative Body without Organs of Socius In his reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Massumi (1992) distinguished between two types of body without organs:

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• The limitative body without organs of socius that refers to “a set of whole attractors proposed by a society for its individuals” to better “exploit their habit-­forming potential” (p. 71) • The nonlimitative body without organs of socius that refers to individuals, in Massumi’s terms, supermolecular bodies, with potential for free or wilful action. The “undetermined selection of populations” (p.  72) embody this potential. Both types of bodies without organs exist in society that mediates between the two to form the socius. The limitative body without organs categorizes individuals into identity binaries that then assign the appropriate patterns of action and consumption to reproduce society’s capitalist balance of power. The non-­ limitative body without organs refers to the idea that all bodies, nevertheless, have the potential to explore bodily repertories outside determined states imposed by the limitative body without organs. Consequently, Massumi deducted, all bodies have “degrees of freedom” that some individuals desire while others are happy to leave the limitations of socius unchallenged. According to him, inventing an individual BwO, however, is always “fundamentally collective” (p. 184), because each BwO is created within the potentials offered by society. As he concluded: “The BwO is an expression of individual desire in its social dimension” (p. 184). By way of an example, I imagined how this might work for me. As I operate in society in several capacities, as a researcher, teacher, fitness instructor, or dancer for example, I can begin by thinking how my behaviours are determined by the limitative body without organs of socius and then determine if I have a desire to think, behave, and practice in ways less determined by the social categories reserved for me. If so, I then need to think how my desire can be expressed in the social dimensions I have available for me. I, however, need to lodge myself to the strata that define my practices in each one of these everyday practices. I should then ask how each stratum determine my self, my body, and my thinking. For example, building an anorectic body, although relatively common in dance and the fitness industry, does not free me from the limitative body without organs, because it aligns with expectations of the thin feminine body in dance and exercise in society. Instead, I need to desire to break out of such limitations to energize my practices that involve different bodily repertoires. The degrees of freedom offered in my various social contexts will require a different type of individual body without organs, but if I take my research as an example, I then need to desire to practice it in ways that are not defined by the limiting body without organs of socius. I need to ask: How are my research practices grounded in the accepted strata of social science research? How can I express my individual desire to practice research differently in my social context without stratifying too violently? What is the potential of my individual body without organs to create research practices toward multiplicity of thought? Similarly, if take my bodily practice of barre fitness instruction as an

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example, I will first have to identify how the limitative body without organs of socius “exploits” my “performance potential” and then desire to expand these limitations by practicing differently. I need to ask: How can my bodily practice as an instructor become undetermined by the limitations of what is expected from a fit feminine body? As Deleuze and Guattari cautioned, I should not destratify too violently, because my participants will still come to the class with preconceived notions of what fitness and ballet (signifiance), femininity (subjectification, graceful appearance matters), and the fit body (organism, thin and toned) mean. I can, however, through designing movements that connect the bodies differently with the space, the barre, the shoes, the clothing, the music, create different assemblages with women’s fitness and then offer different creative ways of thinking of fitness from “myths” of femininity, appearance, and beauty. My research practice as well as my bodily practices can be individual expressions of social dimensions of social science research and fitness, BwOs that are less determined by the socius. With these examples, I have aimed to demonstrate how the unconscious revolutionary investment—the desire to free oneself from the limitations of the socius—can create expressions of the material body that assemble in multiple, different ways that are less determined by the strata. Building a BwO can then change how we think and practice physical activity in various social contexts. As the BwO is also an individualized practice, social scientists can practice research in multiple ways. It is important, however, to separate an analysis of creating a BwO from examinations of how individuals liberate themselves from neo-­liberal ideologies that Deleuze and Guattari (1994) found embedded in a molar desire to be a part of capitalist production. As Deleuze and Guattari did not ground their thinking on debunking “ideologies” that they considered “myths” created by the social structures of capitalism, analyzing the impact of such myths would only reinforce oppression and inequality built on universal signifiers such as a phallus or identity and leave the philosophical machine, as a part of the capitalist regime, unproblematized. Furthermore, identity formation that Deleuze (2001) considered based on sameness and Massumi (1992) as “limitative” would not be challenged in such an analysis. Grounded on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) work, the challenge for social formations has to come from a desire to be freed from the limitations of social life through the potential provided by the BwOs for different expressions of the body, life, practice, self, and the society.

Notes 1. Larsson (2014) clarified that the “sceptics of poststructuralism” seem to assume that this type of research is focused on a body entirely socially constructed or “discursive” ignoring its materiality, but continues: To my knowledge there are no poststructuralist scholars who would deny the materiality of the body or existing inequalities. On the contrary, the term “the

102   The Body without Organs social construction of the body” is indeed about the material body, and how inequalities materialise through discursive practice. This is about a material body that is not void of sociocultural potential.

(p. 643) 2. In his introduction to the edited volume, Deleuze and Body, Hughes (2011) reserved the body an uncertain place in Deleuze’s work. He continued that Deleuze did not develop “a theory of the body” (p.  2) despite the body’s omnipresence in his texts. Therefore, it is not necessarily clear “what kind of work the concept is supposed to do within Deleuze’s corpus” or “what kind of work we can do with it” (p. 2). While his volume further addresses these issues in several ways, Hughes was clear that “in thinking the body with Deleuze, we cannot separate it from thought itself ” (p. 4). This is a starting point for this chapter as well. 3. Deleuze’s use of “desire” resulted also in a disagreement with Foucault that, as some observed, created a rift between these two thinkers. Deleuze (2007b) explained that Foucault preferred the word “pleasure,” a word that Deleuze could only “barely stand” (p. 130). “Desire,” nevertheless, was central to Deleuze’s thinking, but not in its psychoanalytic sense of lack that represses desire. Desire is the central element of “a functioning assemblage” in which it allowed the process of the continual constitution of a BwO and the plane of immanence that is defined by “zones of intensity, threshold, degrees and fluxes” (p. 130) instead of organized, stratified knowledge fields. Desire, as a process, “opposes all strata of organization, the organism’s organization as well as power organization” (p.  131) whereas pleasure, as Deleuze saw it, is “on the side of strata and organization,” because it operates as “a means for persons or subjects to orient themselves in a process that exceeds them. It is a re-­territorialization” (p. 131). 4. Massumi (1992) explained that Deleuze and Guattari (1994) originally drew from Nietzsche’s concept, “will to power” to create their concept of a “desiring-­machine.” Deleuze’s concept of desire, indeed, draws on his reading of Nietzsche’s “eternal return” and “will to power.” Deleuze (2001) was drawn to Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the eternal return of ideas that does not bring back the same identity, the Whole, but always something different. The eternal return, thus, “is a type of intensity” that flows back through all its modifications: “the world of the eternal return is a world of difference, an intensive world, which presupposed neither the One nor the Same” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 123). The eternal return also characterized Deleuze’s understanding of difference as becoming and multiple: “a world without being, without unity, without identity … the eternal return constitutes the only unity of multiple as such, the only identity of what differs: coming back is the only ‘being’ of becoming” (p.  124). The eternal return is a selective, superior thought that authenticates the desire, or in Nietzsche’s terms, the will to power. The will to power is not an individual longing to possess power or dominate that Nietzsche defined as the lowest level of the will to power. Instead of “a will that wants power or wants to dominate,” it is a will to create new values, to demystify: “The will to power has its highest level in an intense or intensive form, which is neither coveting nor taking, but giving, creating. Its true name … is the virtue that gives” (p. 119). The eternal return, thus, is a type of pure intensity (a thought) and the will to power is the desire to live up to that level of thought: “it means extracting the superior form of everything that is (the form of intensity)” (p. 122, italics original). This thought is not contained within the factitious limits of this or that individual, this or that Self. Eternal return or returning expresses the common being of all these metamorphoses, the measure and the common being of all that is extreme, of all the realised degrees of power. (Deleuze, 2001, p. 41)

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References Deleuze, G. (1995). Letter to a harsh critic. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 3–12). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2001). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2004). Conclusions to the Will of Power and Eternal Return. In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Desert islands and other texts (pp. 117–127). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007a). Two regimes of madness. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 11–16). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007b). Desire and pleasure. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 122–134). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007c). Eight years later: 1980 interview. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 175–180). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (7th ed.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1995). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Anti-­Oedipus. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 13–24). New York: Columbia Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2006). Dialogues II. London and New York: Continuum. Evans, J., Davies, B., & Rich, E. (2009). The body made flesh: Embodied learning and the corporeal device. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30(4), 391–406. Foucault, M. (1977/1994). Theatrum philosophicum. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Aesthetics: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol 2 (pp. 343–3680). London: Penguin. Gil, J. (2006). Paradoxical body. The Drama Review, 50(4), 21–35. Holland, E. W. (2005). Desire. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 53–64). Chesham: Acumen. Hughes, J. (2011). Pity the meat? Deleuze and the body. In L. Guillaume & J. Hughes (Eds.), Deleuze and the body (pp. 1–6). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Larsson, H. (2014). Materialising bodies: There is nothing more material than the socially constructed body. Sport, Education and Society, 19(5), 637–651. Markula, P. (2006a). Deleuze and the Body without Organs: Disreading the fit feminine identity. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 30, 29–44. Markula, P. (2006b). The dancing Body without Organs: Deleuze, femininity and performing research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12, 3–27. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to “Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, D. W. (1997). Introduction: “A life of pure immanence”: Deleuze’s “Critique & clinique” project. In G. Deleuze, Essays critical and clinical (pp.  xi–liii). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Wainright, S. P., Williams, C., & Turner, B. S. (2005). Fractured identities: Injury and the balletic body. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 9(1), 49–66. Williams, S. J. (2001). Sociological imperialism and the profession of medicine revisited: Where are we now? Sociology of Health & Illness, 23(2), 135–158. Yu, T.-D., & Ilundáin-Agurruza, J. (2016). Taijiquan and the Body without Organs: A holistic framework for sport philosophy. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 43(3), 424–439.

Chapter 5

Becoming Beyond Identity Politics

As already demonstrated, the goal of Deleuze’s deeply political work is to create new types of social relations. As a critic of capitalist power relations, he, similar to Foucault, believed that individuals have an important role in initiating social change. Consequently, Deleuze was interested in new ways of thinking about what an individual can do to change social relations. Such change requires thinking outside the binary, arborescent knowledge production system that Deleuze located at the heart of capitalist domination. His concept of “becoming” refers to this process of finding different ways of thinking. Related concepts to “becoming” are molar and molecular lines, lines of flight, and the plane of consistency that I discuss further in this chapter. To set up the discussion of becoming, however, I begin with how the molar and molecular lines operate to set the foundation for Deleuze’s thinking of macro politics, micro politics, and social change.

Segmentation: Molar and Molecular Lines In Chapter 1, I introduced Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept, face, that acts to identify subjects in capitalist society. To expand the limitations of capitalism, the face as a signifier of an individual subject needs to be replaced with other ways of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari began this discussion by locating our lives within a society that is segmented in several ways. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) defined humans as “segmentary animals.” Thus, our lives are organized around several segments. As already noted (Chapter 1), the strata, or the knowledge beds that “compose” our meanings, bodies, and selves are segmented. Life, similarly, is spatially and socially segmented. The binary divisions into identities are social segmentations that define our lives in “modern” capitalist societies. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari observed segmentation of ever enlarging circles—“my neighborhood’s affairs, my city’s, my country’s, the world’s” (p. 208)—in our lives and finally, a linear segmentation of one’s life span: “along a straight line of a number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an episode or ‘proceeding’: as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another … in the family, in school … on the job” (p. 209).

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These segmentations cross each other in everyday life: children attend school in their neighbourhoods, adult men work in their cities, mothers drive their children to sports events in their neighbourhoods. To further understand segmentation, it is necessary to account for how power operates in organized societies. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), sociologists claim that power is centralized in the modern State. Instead of this sociological starting point, they found segmentation the major organizing point for politics and power. Owing to this segmentation, our lives follow a number of lines. Deleuze and Guattari distinguished between lines of rigid segmentations, supple lines, and lines of flight (see also Chapter 1). In modern societies, the State imposes segmentarity that is an “exceptionally rigid” (p. 210) system of a unified and unifying global whole of ordered subsystems. For example, our lifespan follows a line of living in a family setting, then school, then work, then retirement that all have clear starting and end points. The rigid lines have several characteristics. First, they depend on such “binary machines” as social classes (working-­upper), sexes (men-­women), ages (young-­old), races (white-­black), or sectors (public-­private) (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006). These machines are “dichotomic”: they allow for in-­ between choices as long as the choice stays on the same line. For example, if one is not a man or a woman, one can identify as a transvestite. If one is neither white or black, one can identify as “brown.” Second, this rigid segmentation is sustained through levels of forces: the devices of power that code the segments, the abstract machine (see Chapter 2) that regulates the relationship between the segments, and the apparatus of the State that then “realizes” the abstract machine. In Deleuzian thought, then, the State itself is not the same as the abstract machine (or a power or a force), but rather a concrete assemblage or arrangement through which the force of the abstract machines operate. Finally, the rigid segmentary lines follow a thought plane of organization that characterize the arborescent model of thinking. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) schema, thus, the rigid segmentation and the arborescent model of thought are closely related: arborescent philosophical thinking supports the formation of capitalist society. This rigid segmentarity, they emphasized, “is always expressed by the Tree. The Tree is the knot of arborescence or principle of dichotomy; it is the axis of rotation guaranteeing concentricity; it is the structure of network ­gridding the possible” (p. 212). The binary, circular, and linear segmentations operate as parts of the rigid modern social system where dual segmentarity has been elevated “to the level of self-­sufficient organization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  210). Furthermore, circular segmentarity has assumed “concentric” circularity: it is everywhere, but ends nowhere. As noted in Chapter 1, all individuals acquire a “face” in society, but the concentric circularity acts as “a macroface”: “a central computing eye scanning all of the radii” (p.  211). Therefore, the central State has not abandoned circular segmentation (the idea of humans living locally and thus, also governed locally), but uses it in a form of “concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance among centers”

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(p.  211). Linearly (e.g., the movement of an individual through successive institutions of day care, school, work, retirement home), each segment in modern society is “underscored, rectified, and homogenized in its own right, but also in relation to the others” (p. 211). Although the State of the modern society relies on rigid, molar segmentation, it retains “a supple fabric without which their rigid segments would not hold” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  213) and consequently, “[e]very society, and every individual, are thus plied by both segmentaries simultaneously” (p. 213). Deleuze and Guattari labelled this supple segmentariness molecular with lines that operate in the micropolitics of everyday life. Thus, “everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics” (p.  213, italics original). In their analysis, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also detected the supple micropolitics of feelings and perceptions, the fine segmentations of experience. This micropolitics of perception and affection is further detailed in Chapter 6. Similarly, the supple micropolitics of social aggregates (e.g., sex, class) requires an analysis of molecular assemblages (Chapter 2). This means attention to the process of becoming, discussed later in this chapter. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) clarified that while molecular refers to micropolitics, it is not purely an individual affair or limited to the realm of individual imagination. The molecular lines of segmentation are not personal, but “run through societies and groups as much as individuals” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006, p. 93). Molecular is always also social, located within segmentariness, yet operates in a more supple fashion to the rigid molar segmentarity. The molecular lines operate simultaneously with the molar lines without necessarily crossing them. For example, following one’s profession as an academic means following a rigid line defined by modern society, but there are many connections, attractions, or “repulsions” beneath this line that do not necessarily “coincide with the segment” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006, p. 93): one has certain freedom to act, think, and appear different within one’s role as a university professor. While the molecular lines do not necessarily cross the rigid segmentary lines, they operate in-­between them to destabilize some of their organization. A professor can, for example, work at home instead of going to the office as typically expected by a university employee. Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) emphasized, however, that to “make fluxes,” is not a question of adding a new segment to an existing rigid line (e.g., a third sex, a third class, a third age), but tracing another line in the middle of these lines. In addition, molecular does not refer to small in size: “although it is true that the molecular works in detail and operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coextensive with the entire social field than molar organization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 215). Molecular, furthermore, does not refer to marginalized groups or minorities, but all micropolitics that disturbs molar rigidity. In this sense, the molar and molecular always exist in a proportional relationship to each other. Finally, it is an error, Deleuze and Guattari argued, to think that some suppleness will make things better or create substantial social change. On the contrary, acknowledging some

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suppleness or some micropolitics can result in “microfascisms,” because capitalism can use molecular elements to further micro-­manage its operations at the local level. For example, accounting for local resistance does not necessarily create larger scale change. Here Deleuze and Guattari directly opposed the Marxist idea of constant dialectic organization of society: “It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular) that a society is defined by contradictions” (p.  216) or conflicts between the dominant and oppressed groups. Micropolitics, they asserted, is the defining factor of social action, because lines that flee the molar segmentation emanate from these settings. Such lines escape the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine to then return to disturb the molar lines. The social field is animated by such flows, or movements of decoding, or deterritorialization that affect “masses” operating at different speeds and paces. “These are not contradictions,” Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, “but escapes” (p. 220). In addition to supple lines that operate by interlacing codes and then territorializing space and rigid lines that operated through the State apparatus, dualisms, and concentric circles that generalize overcoding and thus, reterritorialization, there are lines of flight that decode and deterritorialize. Again, molar and molecular lines exist simultaneously with lines of flight to define meanings and values, individuals, their bodies, and life in society. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) terms: the formation of dominant segments in a society are governed by the abstract machine (Chapter 2) specific to it, but centres of power (e.g., the State) govern the assemblages—and thus, individuals who operate within them—that continually adapt to variations to their segments. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) concluded that the State apparatus governs the rigid lines and molar overcoding of the assemblages, but there is the molecular fabric within the micropolitics of assemblages, and additional flows, the “quanta” of the lines of flight. The lines of flight carry “us away, across our segments, but also across our thresholds, towards a destination which is unknown, nor foreseeable, not pre-­existent” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006, p.  94) to detach from the molar and molecular lines. While all three lines are entangled and co-­ exist, Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) noted that not all people “have” them: some have two lines, some only one, rigid line in their lives. Analyzing the segmentation by the different lines, however, is the main task for a Deleuzian scholar. Scholars of physical activity can also analyze the molar and molecular fabrics in the micropolitics of different physical activity contexts. In her project, Borovica (2017) examined how dance can problematize the narrow conceptions of young women’s embodiment produced by molar identity categories. She particularly aimed to challenge molarity that assigns women’s bodies merely as “passive objects upon which culture writes meanings” (p.  1). Acknowledging that some stratification is necessary for young women to create sense of self in the current society, she also considered identity categories as limiting “as they reduce the body to particular modes of being and interacting”

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and thus, lock women into stabilized identities. Because the identity categories are assigned externally, they seriously limit “our capacity to understand the world and ourselves” (p. 2). To explore how the stratification “works on bodies, what it produces, and how it limits and/or enforces bodily potentials” (p.  3, italics original), Borovica organized a series of six dance workshops for a group of university students, one of which focused particularly on identity stratification. In this workshop, the participants, all “non-­dancers,” creatively danced with papers printed with text such as sex, gender, class, race. These papers were scattered around the room and the participants were to “follow whatever came up in the encounter with those strata” (p.  4). Dance, Borovica discovered, enabled the participants to create an immediate relation with the identity categories through “a sensory relation that preceded memory and cognition” (p. 6). For example, the limitations or troubles with identity categories created anger “as an immediate bodily response” (p. 6): “It was an anger at having to move in a certain way, having to behave in a certain way, being perceived and treated in a certain way, or being ‘boxed’ in, in a way that did not feel true” (p.  7). Through mediated bodily action, Borovica’s dance workshop, thus, demonstrated how the stratification into identity categories can be illustrated and felt through bodily action. Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) corroborated that pragmatic schizoanalysis has no other object than “the study of these lines, in groups or as individuals” (p. 94) including the dangers of molar and molecular lines as well as lines of flight, none of which is good or bad on its own. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) gave examples of four main dangers: fear, clarity, power, and disgust that turn to distraction. Awareness of these dangers can also serve as a precaution before a researcher uses Deleuze’s work to analyze, for example, resistant activity in society. The first danger is the fear of any change related to the molar segmentariness. Molar structures provide security and thus, it is convenient to “desire” their influence which further rigidifies the segments and binary logic that protect “our type of life.” In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) words, we “reterritorialize” everything based on the logic of molar segmentarity: the “large-­scale aggregates” (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, class), the “little groups” we belong to, and the feelings, emotions, observations, actions, ways of moving, life-­styles, and the way we speak. The recent election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States can illuminate this type of retreat to the safe, rigid molar segmentation: the fear of change in the world that is turning different and unknown. It is safer to cling to the rigidness of the old. Closer to the world of sport, as I indicated in the introduction to this book, Manley, Palmer, and. Roderick (2012) discussed how sport academies impose strict control on their athletes who then adhere closely to traditional training regimes and accepted sporting behaviour. While such control uses new technology such as social media (similar to Trump), it ensures that sport is practiced the way we have always known it. The second danger pertains to the analysis of the molecular lines. If the molar line concerns the organization of large-­scale political issues at the macro

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level, a local level analysis of the molecular lines can provide a view to how individuals act in their immediate surroundings. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) pointed out, however, that such clarity can also be dangerous: micro level analysis does not necessarily reveal the larger operations of the rigid lines that, nevertheless, operate simultaneously to structure behaviour. Thus, although local level action appears “different” or even resistant to macro level politics, it might actually reinforce the molar lines. Such politics might result in “all kinds of marginal reterritorialization even worse than the others” (p.  228). This is what Deleuze and Guattari called “microfascism” in which everyone can assume “the mission of self-­appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman, or neighbourhood SS man” (p.  228) while actually supporting the central system of control. Therefore, it is important to carefully analyze when micro level action that seemingly escapes molarity can be considered going beyond microfascism. If such actions appear to oppose the rigid molarity, they can, nevertheless, align with the existing system by using the tools of the rigid molarity. For example, in my work with Avner (Markula & Avner, 2013) we traced the Finnish ski jumper Matti Nykänen’s exploits after his athletic career that included such activities as strip tease and singing that departed from the hypermasculinity and the “dare devil” attitude of a super hero. Despite such apparent escapes from a molar identity, Nykänen was known for his excessive drinking, violence, and numerous divorces that also upheld his status as a celebrated media star. Such a reputation could be considered a marginal reterritorialization that became more destructive than following the molar line of the masculine athleticism. The third danger derives from attempts to control a variety of lines. Power, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) observed, impacts both the molar and molecular lines simultaneously, because “every man jumps from one to the other” constantly depending on his situation (p. 229). “The man of power,” however, “will always want to stop the lines of flight” by capturing them back by overcoding them and thus, assimilating them within the accepted molar structure. As a simple example, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) can act as a “man of power” by trying to control all the lines segmenting sport. It continually aims to include previously “unorganized” action sports, often born at the local level, into its structure by renaming and defining rules of action. This can attract youth, who have been let to escape from the sports endorsed by the IOC, back under its governance. However, the power cannot entirely control all the lines that continue to escape the molar structures. For example, not all action sport athletes participate in the Olympic Games. In addition, novel physical activity forms continue to evolve at the local level. Finally, there are dangers associated with the lines of flight. While escaping the molar structures of segmentation (to be eventually captured by them), they can also lead to despair and destruction if not captured by the other lines. For example, performance enhancing drugs can, to some extent, present a line of flight from the molar structure of elite sport where the use of other training aids, such as various ergogenic aids or altitude training, can provide microlevel

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molecular lines still operating in-­between the molar lines. While doping flees this system, as demonstrated by Sluggett (2011) in the introduction to this book, it can also ruin athletes’ health and result in tighter control by the system of sport. Therefore, the flows that escape the molar or molecular organization should not be uncritically celebrated as always creating a better world, organization, community, or individual. Instead, a careful analysis is required to determine how exactly lines of flight operate in society. In summary, Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) identified three types of lines— sedentary rigid molar lines, migrant molecular lines, and nomadic lines of flight—that segment society. The rigid molar lines organize clearly defined segments supported by the plane of organization and overcoded by the abstract machine. The molecular lines migrate in between these lines to deterritorialize space, to be reterritorialized again. Finally, the lines of flight escape segmentarity and flee in different directions to form new assemblages and thoughts. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) located the individual within this framework to discuss the possibilities to move beyond the rigid lines of molarity and the dangers of molecular supple system to use the lines of flight without self-­ destruction. While there is always segmentarity in human lives—we are segmentary animals, Deleuze and Guattari asserted—it is possible to “become” something different to escape the rigid control of segmentarity. Becoming, thus, is a line of flight from the rigidly segmented State system.

The Process of Becoming In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) conceptualization of segmented society, “becoming” escapes the molarity. Consequently, it cannot be equated to the construction of binary identities that is sustained by molar lines. The process of becoming, thus, is not a type of consciousness raising through which one finally finds, acknowledges, or assumes one’s true identity, for example, as a woman, a representative of the working class, a person experiencing disability, or non-­heteronormativity, or a person of colour who embarks on political action for the rights of a marginalized group. This type of identity-­based action, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, will still embrace the existing rigid molar structure of society to seek security within its segmentation. Deleuze and Guattari did not deny the importance of such action in the current society, but to flee its limitations, thinking outside of the tree structure that supports rigid molarity, is essential. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) repeated that [b]ecoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-­progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiations. (p. 239)

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This means that becoming is not a part of molar “powers” (e.g., the organization of family, psychoanalysis, or the State) and as such, draws from an entirely different way of thinking from the arborescent model. It is important to note that “becoming” is “a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equalling,’ or ‘producing’ ” (p. 239). Deleuze and Guattari, perhaps quite controversially, understood becoming through a process of becoming-­animal, becoming-­woman, and becoming-­imperceptible. Such terms have created much misunderstanding, perhaps due to the misperception that becoming involves imitating animals or women. Becoming-­A nimal, Becoming-­W oman, Becoming-­G irl, Becoming-­I mperceptible Deleuze and Guattari (1987) were very clear that becoming does not involve imitation. One does not literally turn into, for example, a dog, a horse, or a wolf. At the same time, becoming is not mere imagination. I do not become by imagining that I bark like an angry dog if I try to intimidate someone, even less do I actually bark. While “becoming does not occur in the imagination,” it, nevertheless, is “perfectly real” (p.  238). This might appear contradictory, but the important point is to think what reality is. If it is the transcendental reality endorsed by the arborescent, tree model there is no space for becoming that is neither fantasy nor real. Thinking outside of transcendental reality is the first step to escape the tree model: We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself.… The becoming-­animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not … a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself … it has no term. (p. 238) The idea surrounding becoming is to be able to think differently: how can “animality” provide us with different thoughts of being a human? Accordingly, becoming is something that has not yet taken an identifiable rigid form of an animal or human species. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: “It is a question of composing a body with the animal, a body without organs defined by zones of intensity and proximity” (p.  274). In other words, becoming enables thinking on a different thought plane from the arborescent model (see also Chapter 3). Similarly, becoming-­woman is not a question of “imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman” (p.  275) as opposed to the molar woman who is defined within the three dominant strata “by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject” (p. 275). Deleuze and Guattari provided another example regarding becoming old: “Knowing how

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to age does not mean remaining young; it means extracting from one’s age the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the flows that constitute the youth of that age” (p. 277). There is, nevertheless, a special value for becoming-­woman: “all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-­woman. It is the key to all the other becomings” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 277). Through becoming-­woman it is possible to become-­girl and finally, become-­imperceptible, “go unnoticed— become everybody: reduce yourself into several abstract lines and conjugate with others that way, eliminate all that is resemblance and analogy, everything that exceeds the moment” (p.  280). In other words, a subject without a pre-­ determined, molar identity. As discussed in Chapter 2, humans operate within local assemblages where becomings can now trouble the established combinations of expression and content. As assemblages necessarily involve groups of individuals, becoming is not limited to individual processes but always involves other people, groups, or “a multiplicity” through which to then trouble the formation of assemblage. It must be noted that Deleuze’s term multiplicity does not refer to multiple identities, for example. Multiplicity, as a “substantive” (a noun), does not have a relationship to a subject (e.g., identity), reality or its images, or the world. As such, multiplicity has “only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8) that exists on the yet-­not-thought. These then individualize and or take a form when entering different assemblages. I expand on this discussion in the next section. Becoming, then, is not purely a personal matter. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) clarified that becoming takes place always on the fringe of recognized institutions: it is a rupture with the central, established institutions and thus, it is elaborated in assemblages that involve minoritarian groups, oppressed, prohibited, or those in revolt. Becoming, nevertheless, is not limited to what we might term marginalized identity groups that, as noted earlier, can operate along the lines of rigid molar structures to secure a more equitable position within the existing society. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari’s term minoritarian does not refer to marginalized identity, neither does the term becoming refer to the use of agency to overcome oppression. “Minoritarian” as a becoming process does not concern a minority group (only); being a minority, does not make anyone becoming. Therefore, although “all becoming is a becoming-­minoritarian” (p. 291), in this context, majority is “not to a greater relative quantity” (p.  291) (e.g., the majority of athletes are men and thus, the minority are women), but “the determination of a state or standard in relations to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian” (p. 291). For example, white men might not be the absolute majority of the world’s citizens, but being a white man can still be seen constituting the standard of being a human in the universe. This is also the reason why Deleuze and Guattari do not see any place for becoming-­man: “There is no becoming-­man because man is the molar entity par excellence” because “man constitutes the majority, or rather the standard upon

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which the majority is based: white, male, adult, ‘rational,’ etc., in short, the average European” (pp.  292–293). As a standard for the majority, man also “nourishes” such distinctive oppositions as “male-(female), adult-(child), white(black, yellow, or red)” and thus, acts as an organizing principle for “other binary distributions” (pp. 292–293). Becomings, on the other hand, are always “molecular” (p. 292). Although there is no becoming-­man, becoming-­woman is an active process, not something with which women, as a molar category, automatically embrace. Therefore, becoming is not turning into a molar category woman in favour of a man, but “[b]ecoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-­between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 293). Consequently, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) emphasized that women also have to become-­woman as they do not possess an innate agency to liberate themselves in their marginalization. They also did not cherish feminism as the best solution for women’s becoming minoritarian. Finding feminism currently necessary, they pointed out that it is also dangerous to confine a “liberatory” movement within a rigid molar subjectivity, because this means having interiorized the binary machine. In his interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Massumi (1992) further responded to feminist critics who accused Deleuze and Guattari, both male, of denigrating sexual difference and thus, denying the existing inequality in favour of the current system of male dominance. Massumi (1992) confirmed that Deleuze and Guattari did not deny sexual difference, but emphasized, rather, that the current notion of difference is located within the binary category man-­woman that then acts as an all-­inclusive definition. Massumi pointed out that no real body actually coincides entirely with either category that act more like limits for “feminine” and “masculine” depending on “the connotations and trajectories laid out for it by society” (p. 86). Despite individual differences, we, nevertheless, are judged based on a singular standard. Instead of privileging identity-­based difference as the premise for political action, the goal of Deleuzian analysis is to loosen the rigid molar system at the root of (gender based) inequality: The ultimate goal, for Deleuze and Guattari, is neither to redefine, misapply, or strategically exaggerate a category, nor even to invent a new identity. Their aim is to destroy the categorical gridding altogether, to push the apparatus of identity beyond the threshold of sameness.… The goal would be for every body to ungender (and unclass) itself, creating a nonmolarized socius that fosters carnal invention rather than containing it. (Massumi, 1992, pp. 88–89) It is obvious that the current society operates based on rigid molar segmentation. The ultimate goal, thus, should be to demolish the limitations of this system. This can be done by thinking differently. The process of becoming

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serves as the path for thought that draws from multiplicity instead of binary segmentation.

The Plane of Consistency, Latitude and Longitude, Haecceity Because becoming occurs outside of the arborescent model of molar lines of binary, circular, and linear segmentation, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) needed to conceptualize how it is possible to think “otherwise.” To this end, they introduced their concepts the plane of consistency, latitude and longitude, and haecceity. While necessarily abstract, this conversation places the body and its movements at the centre of becoming. Consequently, researchers of physical activity can be in the forefront of thinking differently from the binary identity formation of the rigid segmentarity. Integrating “becoming” into one’s theoretical tool box, thus, can further justify the importance of the socio-­cultural study of the physically active body. The Plane of Consistency Deleuze and Guattari (1987) characterized the arborescent thinking of the State philosophy using the plane of organization and development. On this plane, thought is stratified based on a clearly assigned form and substance. This type of thinking is the most common premise of research knowledge: the type of knowledge that explains and interprets how subjects make meanings and operate in society. As noted in Chapter 1, Deleuze and Guattari found such stratified knowledge limited to following molar segmentation. To explore thought formation outside of molarity and thus, inclusive of multiplicities, they introduced a different type of thought plane, the plane of consistency or of composition (planomenon). Instead of forms and substances, this abstract plane advances “a model of individuation proceeding neither by form nor by the subject” (p. 506). On this plane, heterogenous, disparate, unformed elements are tied together or consolidated into “fuzzy aggregates” (p.  507) that then become rhizome type multiplicities. This means that thought is not fashioned based on strictly organized rules, but continually evolves in multiple directions. In other words, the plane of consistency, as discussed also in Chapter 4, is the plane where thought has not yet been formalized or stratified into strata; where assemblages have not yet taken their expressions and contents, forms and substances. On this plane, it is also possible to think differently of oneself, to become “outside” of the molar identity construction. Longitude and Latitude Becoming is “initiated” by the body, but a body that does not yet have the form of a human body. This body only has particles (longitude) and intensities and

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affects (latitude) that eventually turn into substantial forms and determined subjects: “Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a relation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 256–257, italics original). All becoming is molecular (not molar), because it consists of various elements (particles, affects) coming together. This coming together takes a more defined form to turn into more clearly identifiable thought (of the body, the subject, the object, the world) in an assemblage. The notion of molecular becoming on the plane of consistency where the body’s latitude and longitude still roam freely, also connects Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the BwO with becoming. The body stripped from its form and expression is the BwO that is now free to “reorganize” its particles with new energy into something different. Becoming-­woman, particularly, is the reconstitution of the body “as Body without Organs, the anorganism of the body” that “is inseparable from a becoming-­woman, or the production of a molecular woman” who “never ceases to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line or a line of flight” from the molar system of binary identity construction (pp. 276–277).1 Haecceity (or Event) Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explained that “all becomings are molecular … collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects or form that we know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science, or by habit” (p. 275). Instead of signified states or signifying relations, it is possible to make expressions of becoming in connection to haecceities. What are haecceities? Haecceities, or events, have characterized Deleuze’s philosophy throughout his career. As a matter of fact, the event was his major interest as a philosopher. He and Guattari, as Deleuze (1995) explained, were “interested in the circumstances in which things happen: in what situations, where and when does a particular thing happen, how does it happen” (p. 25). These “happenings” are the events and thus, also philosophical concepts should “express an event” (p. 25). In their discussion of becoming, however, haecceities appear as abstract “events” that are located on the plane of consistency, where they act to “transform” particles and intensities into individuations. Deleuze and Guattari talked about individuations also when abstract concepts individuate persons or things by giving them, for example, a recognizable face or a body, but the events are individuations that are not detectable at such “concrete” level but rather, are thought-­in-formations that allow a philosopher to think beyond subjects and things. Being in between the “formless” body and its form, haecceities are “degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-­formed subjects that receive them” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  253). The haecceity, in other words, is an individuation of yet unformed particles and their energy. Thus, the concepts of individuation and haecceity are used to provide a space to think outside of the predetermined, arborescent logic. Individuation that is not “a person, subject, thing, or

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s­ ubstance” (p.  261) provides an opportunity to begin thinking beyond the already signified concepts. Haecceities, or events, provide an opportunity to think without having to reach essences of things, the primary goal of arborescent philosophy (Deleuze, 2007). The haecceity, thus, enables the creation of concepts—the prime function of philosophy (see Chapter 3)—that count for multiplicity. So, what is this to do with becoming? Becoming takes place on the plane of consistency when the speeds and slowness (the longitude) of body particles (the latitude) come to relations and begin to take form through events: “becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  272). To reach the plane of consistency, however, an individual begins the thought process “from the form one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills” (p.  272). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) summarized that both haecceities (events) and becomings are inscribed on the smooth space of the plane of consistency where they enable incorporeal transformations from particles and intensities to establish new ways of thinking and acting.

How Does It Work? What New Thoughts Does This Make Possible to Think? Socio-­cultural researchers of physical activity often emphasize how sporting and exercising identities align with the dominant ideologies or alternatively, how they provide possibilities for resistant identities. For example, we have concluded that the commercial fitness industry is built primarily around the promotion of the dominant emphasized femininity through the promotion of the thin and toned feminine body ideal. Sport, we have concluded, promotes hegemonic masculinity through the tolerance of violence, aggression, and extreme competitiveness. In addition, we have demonstrated how racism, ableism, and heteronormativity, for example, are constructed within various physical activity practices to reinforce dominant identities. On the other hand, we have aimed to find space for resistance, for example, to the heteronormative femininity in women’s sport or ableism in parasport. In these examinations, an individual’s identity is socially constructed within the binary of dominant-­resistant identity with which one either clearly aligns or lives in contradiction. This critical work has demonstrated the potential for physical activity to reinforce or change one’s position within the binary construction of power relations where dominant groups, through ideological means, oppress subordinate groups to support their power position. The analysis of intersectional identity construction within the matrix of oppression aligns with the position where oppressed groups can rely on their agency to try to overturn their oppression and

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to obtain power in their favour. Deleuze’s concept of becoming, on the contrary, is designed for thinking how social change takes place outside of binary identity construction. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of molarity/molar lines and becoming do not express oppression through ideological construction or resistance to it. As a matter of fact, Deleuze and Guattari did not find ideology a constructive concept to analyze events or behaviour in society. As they, quite strongly, expressed: ideology is a most execrable concept obscuring all of the effectively operating social machines.… It misconstrues the nature of organizations of power, which are in no way located with a State apparatus but rather are everywhere, effecting formalizations of content and expression, the segments which they intertwine. (pp. 68–69) Guattari even exclaimed: “we don’t have any time for concepts like ideology, which are really no help at all: there are no such things as ideologies” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1995, p.  19). It must be clarified that Deleuze and Guattari located ideology as the link between language and power; an assumption, they asserted, that locates power within language. While power is language driven (as Deleuze and Guattari demonstrated through their notion of the regimes of signs), it is not based purely on language. Rather, ideology is a product of a type of ideology: the power invested in language only. This ideology has supported, Deleuze and Guattari claimed, the rise of linguistics to a powerful part of the arborescent model of thinking. As Massumi (1992) further explained: Because they [semiotics influenced theorists of ideology] place the functioning of power primarily on the dematerialized linguistic or subjective plane they end up doing little more than idealizing the formations of power they set out to critique. (p. 155) Consequently, effective social change requires a different premise from resisting the ideological construction of the binary, molar construction of identities. Becoming is molecular: a minoritarian becoming of woman, of becoming imperceptible. How does this work for researchers of the physically active body? How do we think differently about sport and exercise to find spaces for becoming that appears an abstraction designed for creating philosophical concepts? As already emphasized, “becoming is never imitating” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 305), for example, an animal or a woman who are already formed into identifiable subjects or faces in society. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) used dance to further illustrate their point:

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Tarantella is a strange dance that magically cures or exorcises the supposed victims of a tarantula bite. But when the victim does this dance, can he or she be said to be imitating the spider, to be identifying with it, even in an identification through an “archetypal” or “agonist” struggle. No, because the victim, the patient, the person who is sick, becomes a dancing spider only to the extent that the spider itself is supposed to become a pure silhouette, pure color and pure sound to which the person dances. One does not imitate, one constitutes a block of becoming. (p. 305) Consequently, the point is not to describe, for example, animal like behaviour in sport or “feminine” behaviour, for example, in a drag performance as “becoming.” On the contrary, when clear faciality traits, such as the feminine or masculine binary, disappear, it is possible to enter becoming by “overspilling” the signifying system that marks individuals with clearly identifiable identities. If becoming is not an imitation, experience of sympathy, imaginary identification, or resemblance, how do we engage with it? Are there any more practical examples of how to become? Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggested, not that helpfully, that “we can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant things” (p. 292). However, what results is “always a political affair,” because becoming-­minoritarian requires active micropolitics to oppose the macropolitics (p. 292). One helpful clue about engaging with becoming, thus, is that it can take place within the micropolitics of everyday life. Not just anything, however, can turn into becoming. Important for researchers of the physically active body, Deleuze and Guattari earmarked movement as an important part in the process of becoming in everyday life. Movement, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) found, is pure relation of speed and slowness: it takes place before we perceive an image of the body after which movement already continues somewhere else. They illustrated their point by describing Japanese sumo wrestlers’ performance. The wrestlers’ approach is too slow to be perceived after which they strike into action too fast for the spectator to actually capture it until the fight is over. The point here is to count movement as an important aspect of thinking differently, as something that initiates new thought. I expand on this idea when discussing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “affect” in Chapter 6. Even if the movement action is not the target of actual analysis at this point, it is an integral part of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari offered another example of practicing the piano that can (or not) initiate becoming: x starts practicing piano again.… Is it a new borderline, an active line that will bring other becomings entirely different from becoming or rebecoming a pianist, that will induce a transformation of all of the receding assemblages to which x was a prisoner? Is it a way out? Is it a pact with the Devil? … you don’t know.… So experiment. (pp. 250–251)

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Therefore, just about any practice can initiate becoming as long as it turns into a political affair instead of a purely individual experience or emotion along the rigid line of molarity. Massumi (1992) offered a slightly more “practical” suggestion of how becoming, as a part of an individual’s micropolitics, can lead to larger political action. Massumi (1992) was clear that becoming, or what he described as a “supermolecular state” begins with “a desire to escape bodily limitation” (p.  94) created by molarity. However, “[w]hat matters is that the constraint is there, and that there is a counterdesire to leave it behind” (p.  94). Although the experience or feeling of constraint can be conscious, becoming is not “a consciously willed personal decision” (p.  94) to choose “freedom.” This is, as Massumi explained, because the molar as well as the molecular, both of which are touched by deterministic constraints, actualize in the body, and removing such constraints requires removing the body from its actualized form in its “normal habitat.” For Massumi, thus, becoming is more of a directional than intentional process. He further discusses a process where the “body-­inbecoming” eventuates “thought-­in-becoming.” While becoming necessarily begins with molarized bodies, it enables “thought” to become other through the body that has been “counteractualized” and as such, is unrestrained by its molar form to take a different form. Becoming, thus, is not a conscious choice to change or even less a change in one’s body shape, but the body-­in-becoming can sensitize us to molar constraints and enable different modes of thinking and being when it eventually actualizes into a form. The thought-­in-becoming is a bodily thought: the body enables the thought to grow in different directions rhizomatically. The body, when it responds to a stimulus in a different way, can crack open habits we have acquired through our everyday lives (or through training). Although not conscious at its start, becoming is not something that exists only in “unconsciousness” or something that does not result in “concrete” changes in the world we live in. Massumi explained: Thought-­of-becoming is less a wilful act than an undoing: the nonaction of suspending established stimulus response circuits to create a zone where chance and change may intervene. It does not close the door on analogy and analytical thinking, but rather pulls it open, suspending analysis just long enough to carry it over the threshold of habit. (p. 99) This means that “rational thinking” is opened to invention through the process of becoming. Therefore, becoming is not merely accidental, but as cautioned by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), must reconnect to other lines (molar and molecular) to avoid leading to despair and destruction. Individual becoming is also a social process precisely because its starting point is in molarity. It is collective because

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it “performs an operation on collectively elaborated, socially selected, mutually accepted, and group-­policed categories of thought and actions” (p. 101) even if only one body engages in the becoming process. Based on Massumi’s (1992) reading, becoming, as a body-­based and body-­initiated process, can lead to strategies to change analytical thinking and thus, social action. Such strategies, for Massumi, constitute resistance: frictions in the molar machine. He further suggested relatively “concrete” strategies for creating social change by the process of becoming (despite becoming not indicating a conscious, individual choice to find freedom). His strategies for becoming include: 1. Stop the WorldAsWeKnowIt. This means slowing down to become sensitized to the possible becomings-­other that are taking place even when one does not consciously “fight” for social change. This step takes place in the context of one’s immanent world of experiences. 2. Cherish derelict spaces. These are spaces, left empty by the molar lines, that the bodies-­in-becoming may make their own. 3. Study camouflage. This is the study of bodies-­in-becoming. What are the good places to “pass” as a molar identity to infiltrate, but deterritorialize, space? 4. Sidle and straddle. It is important to crack accepted social and spatial divisions as too much oppositionality can kill one’s strategy before it is formalized. At the same time, it is important to side-­step to discover and integrate alternatives under the camouflage. 5. Come out. Come out, based on new thoughts that differ from a molar identity. Keep the process of becoming to avoid reterritorialization into another molar identity category. While Massumi’s strategies can be used in multiple situations, I have thought of my work as a contemporary dancer and scholar within a kinesiology faculty through his process. Following Massumi, I theorized that body-­based processes can lead to change in how we think of kinesiology and what is important in this field. Currently, characterized by an increased retreat to sub-­disciplinary silos, hiding behind bunkers of what counts as its central subject matter (e.g., health, sport), and the debates about the role of movement practice versus theoretical, “scientific” content knowledge in the field, kinesiology is grouped into binary categories of natural science-­social science, theory-­practice, and health-­sport with accompanying structures of dominance (e.g., Kretchmar, 2008, 2014; Newell, 2007). Traditionally a physical education subject, dance has almost disappeared from kinesiology faculties to be housed in dance departments within fine arts faculties. In my current faculty that only recently changed its name to include kinesiology, dance has survived in the undergraduate curriculum, yet is under constant threat. In this context, I, a professor of socio-­cultural studies of physical activity, was accidently drawn into discussions of the role of dance and dance research at our faculty. It became increasingly clear that for dance to

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survive in the current academic climate, a change of thinking was needed. I briefly illustrate Massumi’s strategic process of thinking-­in-becoming differently about kinesiology through the body-­in-becoming of dance based on my involvement in the micropolitics of one faculty and my desire to leave behind both the ways dance and kinesiology operate through a set of binary arrangements. 1. Stop the “WorldAsWeKnow of kinesiology” by disrupting its disciplinary space through the binaries of natural science-­social science, health-­sport, and theory-­practice. While not consciously preparing to fight the content of kinesiology, I became sensitized to new materialist thought and physical cultural studies and the possibilities they offered to think differently about (molar body of ) dance in higher education. 2. Find a derelict space. Dance, while currently included in the curriculum, is a derelict space, currently a “wasteland,” that bodies-­in-becoming may make their own. 3. Camouflage. With a Ph.D. in kinesiology and as a professor of socio-­cultural studies of physical activity, I was in a good place to “pass” as a kinesiologist. I had to be careful not to reterritorialize dance to turn it into a representative of binary kinesiology, but to think how it can deterritorialize the current “habits” of kinesiology. How can dance, I asked, be a line of flight out of the binary construction of kinesiology? 4. Sidle and straddle. I had to be careful not to act too oppositional. For example, it can be a futile fight to preserve dance as an art form in a kinesiology context. Insisting on a full dance curriculum similar to a dance department, can kill my process. This can also “molarize” dance into the accepted mode of theatre dance supported by dance studies. Therefore, I had to use cracks in accepted spatial and temporal divisions possible in kinesiology: engage in dance research located within the physical culture, obtain grants to give credibility to this research and support graduate students in dance, suggest changes in the current dance curriculum to appeal specifically to kinesiology students. Side-­step: I had to identify what dance can bring into kinesiology without being molarized into a version of dance studies or being limited by a binary structure of kinesiology. 5. Come out as a new materialist, physical cultural studies, performance dance ethnographer but avoid a clear identity (as, for example, sport sociologist or dance practitioner/instructor). According to Massumi (1992), a group action of marginalized people is effective. Consequently, I have increased the amount of dance graduate students, created an interdisciplinary research group that includes a dance strand, initiated a faculty dance research group, and collaborated closely with the dance teaching staff. As Massumi (1992) cautioned, these strategies can also lead to further segregation as molarity tends to be a more powerful force at our faculty that has not tried to reterritorialize dance’s potential. Dance remains marginalized and I have

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been antagonized into relative invisibility. According to Massumi, this could be a sign that my tactics have worked! In any case, dance remains a vibrant community in our faculty and hopefully, some becoming-­in-thought of kinesiology has taken place and as a result, has reduced the inequality created by its current binary composition. As a final example of how the notion of “becoming” might work for researchers of the physically active body, I want to return to Deleuze’s concept of event. While an abstract concept located on the plane of consistency, the idea of haecceity or an event can serve as a useful starting point to locate becoming within a larger social context. As noted earlier, “event” has been central to Deleuze’s thinking throughout his career (Deleuze, 2007) and a concept that he developed, particularly, in his Logic of Sense. In this book, Deleuze (1993), instead of identifying repeated patterns of social relations and practices (also a common basis for social-­cultural research of physical activity,) focused on events that he identified introducing change and difference into such patterns. The events, Deleuze advocated, continually run through social structures as sets of multiple interactions that can also transform the structures. These events, although continually taking place all around us, do not have a linear timeline or run through well-­ordered spaces. For example, citizens can resist and modify political turmoil (an event) that envelopes them, but in this process, they change also the event and themselves (Williams, 2008). Individual citizens do not, however, have a pure choice in terms of altering the event, although their actions can impact its run through. As researchers of the physically active body, we can observe events running through sport or fitness (e.g., doping, the Me2 movement, exercise as medicine) and analyze what differences they might introduce to the structures of each. From a Deleuzian point of view, however, there will be no clear, repeatable, logical outcome to predict change. Deleuze’s events are incalculable. As researchers, nevertheless, we can examine “the characteristics of governing the effects of events” (Williams, 2008, p.  6) to identify a certain “chaos,” and thus, change, in the existing structures. As Williams (2008) explained: “We cannot be sure of the outcomes of events, but we can describe where and how they have reverberated” to then identify “novel situations” where they relate to other occurrences (p. 6). Deleuze’s concept of event, then, can work to identify, first, events that continually shape sport, exercise, and dance and second, to examine their effects, but also how they are governed in their particular social contexts, and finally, to analyze how the structures of sport, exercise, or dance have been changed by the “chaos” created by each event.

Note 1. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) sometimes give an impression that the BwO and the plane consistency are the same concept. While close concepts (and they occasionally actually refer to the same idea), there is also a slight difference. In a way, the plane of

Becoming   123 consistency acts as a surface where BwOs can compose multiplicities of the rhizome type. The heterogenous elements that otherwise can shoot off to dangerous directions, assume consistency on this thought plane. Deleuze and Guattari compared the BwO to a composer whose composition is created on the surface of the plane of consistency. This plane sections a variety of multiplicities, the elements for “thought compositions,” that the BwO can connect. As such, the plane of consistency also acts as “the means of eliminating the empty and cancerous bodies that rival the body without organs, or rejecting the homogenous surfaces that overlay smooth space, and neutralizing the lines of death and destruction that divert the line of flight” (pp. 507–508).

References Borovica, T. (2017). Dancing the strata: Investigating affective flows of moving/dancing bodies in the exploration of bodily (un)becoming. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 26–36. Deleuze, G. (1993). The logic of sense. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995). On A Thousand Plateaus. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 25–34). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2007). Note for the Italian edition of the Logic of Sense. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 63–66). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1995). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Anti-­Oedipus. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp.  13–24). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2006). Dialogues II. London and New York: Continuum. Kretchmar, R. S. (2008). The utility of silos and bunkers in the evolution of kinesiology. Quest, 60, 3–12. Kretchmar, S. (2014). Complementary kinesiology: Why it is not wise to choose sides or work alone. Quest, 66, 249–262. Manley, A., Palmer, C., & Roderick, M. (2012). Disciplinary power, the oligopticon and rhizomatic surveillance in elite sports academics. Surveillance & Society, 10(3–4), 303–319. Markula, P., & Avner, Z. (2013). Bad landing: Charting the gold and criminal records of Finnish ski jumper, Matti Nykänen. In L. Wenner (Ed.), Fallen sport heroes, media and celebrity culture (pp. 120–134). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to “Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Newell, K. (2007). Kinesiology: Challenges of multiple agendas. Quest, 59, 5–24. Sluggett, B. (2011). Sport’s doping game: Surveillance in biotech age. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28, 387–403. Williams, J. (2008). Gilles Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense.” Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

Chapter 6

Affect Understanding Force

Aligned with the “affective turn” in cultural analysis, socio-­cultural researchers of physical activity have also jumped on the bandwagon to analyze the feelings, affects, pleasures, and enjoyment of physical activity to “sociologize” the emotions resulting from sport performance. The emotions, feelings, and particularly, enjoyment can also be bestowed with “resistant” potential embedded in physical activity (e.g., Pringle, 2016). Deleuze’s concept of “affect” also informs some socio-­cultural analysis of emotions deriving from physical activity participation. While Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a strong critique of psychoanalysis, they did include an analysis of individual psychological states or behaviours in their work.1 In this chapter, I examine further how Deleuze’s use of such concepts as affect, desire, and perception, particularly, differ and/or expand from their psychological meanings. To connect Deleuze’s ideas closer to the socio-­cultural analysis of physical activity, I begin with Wetherell’s (2012, 2013, 2015) critique of employing psychological concepts in a sociological analysis. Her assessment, I believe, also reflects some of the issues with the Deleuzian notion of affect and its utility for the socio-­cultural analysis of the moving body. After this critique, I concentrate on Deleuze and Guattari’s own explanations and uses of affect.

Affect and Affective Practice: A Social-­P sychological Reading Although by no means a Deleuzian, Wetherell’s (2012, 2013, 2015) work can serve as a starting point to illustrate how an uninformed use of psychological concepts can result in contradictory analyses of emotions or affects. Her social-­ psychological appraisal further points to some possible misreadings of Deleuze’s work. In a series of texts, Wetherell critiqued how “affect,” particularly, is employed across several social science disciplines. Although acknowledging that the interest in affect emerged as one reaction to the alleged over emphasis on language and discourse, Wetherell contested how such scholars as Ahmed, Blackman, Massumi, Sedwick, and Trift included emotions into their social inquiries. Although “stimulating,” Wetherell (2015) argued, these cultural

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researchers’ “search on affect would benefit from a more sustained focus on the psychology” (p. 141). This is, no doubt, a valid point, that can also demonstrate the limitations of approaching Deleuze’s concepts through social psychology. While Wetherell (2013) acknowledged that affect, as a conceptual tool, has emerged from the readings of several philosophers (Deleuze, Spinoza, Whitehead, Bergson), I focus on her critique of Deleuzian inspired works. Wetherell’s (2013, 2015) critique culminates in two related aspects of the Deleuzian inspired “theory” of affect2: the denial of discourse in formation of affect and an emphasis on affect as a pre-­discursive bodily event that, following a clear order of steps, leads to emotion. According to Wetherell, the distinguishing aspect of “affect scholarship” “is that it emphasizes processes beyond, below and past discourse” (Wetherell, 2013, p. 350). As such, human affect is understood as an “extra-­discursive event” (Wetherell, 2013, p. 350) that “belongs in the minuscule periods of time before consciousness is woken up in the body and before we become aware of what we are about” (Wetherell, 2015, p. 151). As such, affect is outside of palpable experiences that are articulated by the speaking subject in language, discourse, and meaning. This definition, Wetherell (2013) observed, allows affect scholars to redirect their attention to the “somatically sensed” body: “perceptions, memories, feelings, forms of muscular movement and proprioceptive responses to vibrations and rhythms” (pp.  351–352). Working with the sensual, haptic, and kinaesthetic “sensed body,” besides a more encompassing view of social action, acts as resistance to the analytical focus of the social sciences: it shakes the bureaucratic and organizational “moment of discursive representation” (Wetherell, 2013, p. 354). By privileging the body, Wetherell (2013) continued, affect is located within the “non-­representational realm.” This is the second characteristic of Deleuzian inspired affect theory: affect accounts for the body, not consciousness. Affect as a bodily intensity makes a difference below the threshold of consciousness, thrusting the subject into particular kinds of relations with the material and social world. Consciousness is derivative and second-­hand in this view, inadequate as a guide to the process of “being affected.” (p. 354) An affect analysis, thus, necessitates clearly identified steps through which affect turns into conscious feeling, then cognition, thought, and representation. Consequently, the conceptualization of affect as a bodily intensity perpetuates what Wetherell found to be its main problem, the separation of affect and discourse. Of interest to scholars of physical activity, Wetherell demonstrated these problems through a study of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) that she defined as an exemplary display of the “adherence to the affect/discourse splits” and the consequent “huge difficulties and contortions involved in attempting to separate the affective from the discursive” (p. 355).

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In his ethnography of DMT, McCormack (2003) approached affect through an analysis of “the pre-­interpreted,” “the non-­subjective,” and “the pre-­personal” instead of emotion, that as discursive, was “already invaded by texts, symbols and representations” (Wetherell, 2013, p. 355). In weekly sessions of DMT and summer schools, he traced phenomena occurring beneath the threshold of contemplative cognition through a focus on embodiment by emphasizing movement, flow, and the events unfolding during the session. This focus was designed to allow McCormack to tap into the emergent and transformative potential of dance before it turned into structured feelings, emotions, or expressions. While acknowledging his bravery to study movement in practice, Wetherell (2013) pointed at two major problems resulting from the separation of bodily affect and conscious discourse. The first is the methodological challenge of stripping DMT of its discursive parts—the talk, the discussion, the language used to direct movement, the voices of the participants—to detect movement intensity that then unfolds to affect in each moment. Second, if affect and movement cannot be grasped, shown, understood, and represented through language, what is the point? McCormack, explained Wetherell, tried to overcome these limitations by focusing on detailed descriptions of the movement practices—narrated moment by moment from an “I” perspective—accompanied with short instructions of how “to read and contextualize what is going on” (p. 356). Wetherell pointed to the obvious fact that affect, in these extracts, is captured in words and thus, it is impossible to “neatly and surgically” separate it from discourse and representations (p. 356). As pieces of language acts, consequently, McCormack’s descriptions did not communicate unmediated events below the threshold of representation. Wetherell concluded: “his dense descriptions are no less representational than the testimony and narratives of the other participants, which he chose not to include because of their already interpreted and after the fact nature” (p. 358). Wetherell (2013, 2015) concluded that it is impossible to isolate affect in its own bodily realm. Such studies engage body parts that non-­consciously react to the world instead of talking to or negotiating with each other. Such work results in the polarization of “bodies versus talk, the physiological versus the cognitive, reactivity versus representation, the non-­conscious versus the conscious, and goes on to align affect firmly with the first term in each of these” (Wetherell, 2015, pp.  150–151). According to Wetherell, losing accounts of conscious meaning in favor of “just [pre-­conscious] bodies and events” (pp.  151–152), limits understanding of human interaction in the social world. Instead of a split between an automaton-­like, reactive body and “the reflexive, discursive, interpreting, meaning-­making, communicating social actor” (p.  160), Wetherell (2015) advocated “affective practice”: “a moment of recruitment, articulation or enlistment when many complicated flows across bodies, subjectivities, relations, histories and contexts entangle and intertwine together to form just this affective moment, episode or atmosphere with its particular possible classifications” (pp.  160–161). In Wetherell’s affective practice, human emotions and the

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meanings we make of them, are the result of intertwined physical, psychological, interpersonal, and cultural reactions in given situations and as such, central to a social-­psychological analysis of the world. If, indeed, the Deleuzian notion of affect is limited to pre-­conscious bodily reaction, Wetherell’s (2013, 2015) critique makes sense: Why would a social scientist engage in such an analysis when the goal is to understand social interaction and the formations of social relations from the micro to macro level? Her attention to the methodological problems with affect that eludes “words” is also pertinent to social scientists who, unlike philosophers like Deleuze, use empirical material as the grounding for their arguments. If affect as a bodily, pre-­ conscious intensity is unanalyzable, it makes perfect sense to resort to, as suggested by Wetherell, “affective practice” where discourse as well as emotion are counted as meaningful, “conscious” parts of human interactions that form larger power structures. When such structures become analyzable, it is also possible to create interventions towards more equitable social world. From this point of view, affect in a Deleuzian sense, limits, not broadens, the possibilities for social analysis and has little to offer social scientists. There are, however, a few caveats in Wetherell’s analysis that need further interrogation. First, it appears somewhat strange that Deleuze, as a philosopher whose prime tool was language and words, would limit his concept to refer purely to a bodily perception or reaction. Second, Wetherell’s argument is based on secondary readings of Deleuzian inspired texts and while undeniably a useful warning against using terms like “affect” flippantly, it is insufficient. Third, as Wetherell’s reading is taken out of the original context of Deleuze’s philosophical thought system, it is necessarily a partial conceptualization of “affect.” Although in many ways pertinent, I now aim to expand Wetherell’s reading of the “split” between discourse and affect by connecting “affect” with Deleuze’s other concepts to identify its potential for the social analysis of the physically active body.

What is L’Affect? Faithful to Deleuzian/Foucauldian tradition, I begin by stating what affect is not. Unlike the more common psychological concept affect, on which Wetherell (2013, 2015) (who did not present her definition of affect) drew, Deleuze was very clear that his concept does not refer to “a personal feeling” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 240). In his notes on the translation of A Thousand Plateaus, Massumi (1987) further explained that Deleuze and Guattari used the word “sentiment” (p.  xvi, italics original) for emotion whereas affect derives from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s distinction between affectio (the state of a body as it affects or is affected by another body) and affectus (a body’s continuous, intensive variation in its capacity for acting) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994b). As such, Deleuze’s understanding of affect, rather than an isolated concept, brings several different modes of existence under analysis. Wetherell’s (2013, 2015) critique focused only on one layer of such an analysis, whereas Deleuze (with Guattari),

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developed Spinoza’s “affection” (a bodily state) into a three tiered “conceptual map” that also underpins his understanding of power (Seigworth, 2005).3 In this map, “affect” served as a type of a narrow gorge (like a border or frontier) where “power” can meet “desire.” Contrary to many sociologists, Deleuze asserted that any analysis that takes power as a starting point will reduce any idea of resistance to a mere reaction of power (Seigworth, 2005). The notion of affect allows Deleuze to assign more importance to individual action than a simple reaction to power, something that is also pertinent both to socio-­cultural analysis and social-­psychological analysis represented by Wetherell. To further clarify the analytical power of affect, I first provide details of the concept to then locate its connection to desire, becoming, and power relations. Presently, it is already clear that affect is divorced from any personal feeling (sentiment). Instead, “[e]very mode of thought insofar as it is non-­representational will be termed affect” (Deleuze cited in Seigworth, 2005, p. 161). It is important to note that affect indeed refers to a type of thought or knowledge. Nevertheless, as also identified by Wetherell (2013, 2015), Deleuze’s affect is a type of intensity: the body’s intensity, the body’s ability to affect by acting.4 As further indicated by Wetherell’s critique, affect is a state between perception and its actualization as a feeling, or thought, or emotion (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) clarified that whereas “feeling implies an evaluation,” a type of meaning making, affect relates only to the intensity of the moving body, its speeds and slownesses (p. 400). “Affect,” they added, “is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion” (p. 400). They use the martial arts as one example of affect: these are the arts of suspense and immobility (slowness) as well as speed (the attack or action) and “[t]he affect passes through both extremes” (p. 84). Again, Wetherell (2013, 2015) is correct: affect is bodily intensity devoid of conscious evaluation or thought. Affect works through movement qualities (slowness and speed) or bodily intensities that it detects from L’affection (Spinoza’s affection), the body’s ability to have an effect on other bodies. But does the focus on the body’s ability to affect through movement intensity reduce humans to body parts without conscious meaning-­making? Why should socio-­cultural scholars be concerned about observing pure movement qualities? Movement affect, that takes place before thought or feeling, is an experiential state, a potential, that then actualizes in feeling, thought, and behaviour. Not solidified into emotion, not yet having channelled into already determined direction, affect can “undo things,” “undo oneself,” undo the subject (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 400). Sensitization to affect is the first mode of existence under analysis. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the intensity of movement embeds an ability to act. Through action, the body encounters other bodies and is also affected by other bodies. Such individual encounters are also invested in force and thus, power. To examine how the effects of power enter our actuality, Deleuze and Guattari focused on how a body effects or is effected by another body. This is the second mode of existence under analysis. It is then important

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to trace how the initial bodily “impact” turns into something of more duration: a line of continuous variation in the passage of intensities or “becoming” (discussed in more detail in Chapter 5) or how an individual can embody greater or lesser degrees of intensity or potentiality. Affect has, thus, the capacity to give directions to how we think about ourselves and the world around us. This level of analysis of affect was not clear to Wetherell (2013, 2015) who accounted only for the first two levels pertinent to the role of affect in a Deleuzian analysis. While unsolidified into expressible emotion or meaning, affect can direct how we feel about, think of, and understand the world. As such, affect can lead to different thought from the “tree model” precisely because it does not yet have a meaning. Thus, if a social scientist is interested in initiating change in thought, behaviour, or opinion, one’s own or others,’ instead of merely stating the current state of affairs, staying tuned to the body’s affect is a very useful starting point for an analysis. Deleuze and Guattari summarized: “affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel.… A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-­of becomings” (p. 240). In their rhizomatic thought, thus, affect has close affinity with becoming, desire, and the Body without Organs (BwO) and thus, thinking beyond the limitations afforded by capitalism. These concepts, abstract on purpose, are necessary for an analysis of affect and the third mode of existence.

Affect, Desire, the BwO, and Becoming Affect as the intensity of the body’s movement, its ability to act and thus, affect other bodies, is connected to Deleuze’s use of desire. As noted in Chapter 3, desire is fundamental to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 1994a) thought system. Similar to affect, their concept of desire does not refer to the individual feeling of passion or pleasure, but rather a process of production that gives impetus to all movement in society when not tamed within externally defined ideas (such as the psychoanalysis of desire or the linguistic/Marxist dependence on ideology) benefiting capitalism. In this sense, for Deleuze, desire, similar to bodily affect, is constitutive in relation to social production. Although not an individual feeling or a psychoanalytic notion of desire as lack, Deleuze retained the term desire, albeit in a different function. Deleuze’s insistence on the importance of “desire” was also a source of deep disagreement with Foucault who preferred to use “pleasure” as a source freedom (to think differently). Deleuze (2007) felt that Foucault’s understanding of pleasure was still close to a feeling and thus, the psychoanalytic use of desire: I cannot give any positive value to pleasure, because pleasure seems to me to interrupt the immanent process of desire. […] From my point of view, this is precisely how desire is brought under the law of lack and in line with the norm of pleasure. (pp. 130–131)

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In any case, affect, as a part of the desiring process, assigns a particular direction to a particular type of behaving and thinking. Because desire is a fundamental process of social production that prompts movement, including affect, through various levels society, it is also fundamental to change. Desire draws force when it roams on the plane of consistency, the plane not yet stratified by the arborescent thought systems that enables desire to take different directions and affect to move in different ways from those defined by thought initiated by capitalism. Individuals take part in the process of desiring production at the microlevel as acting, moving bodies with intensity—the affect—to think differently as long as we pay attention to its potential. Affect, in this capacity, is a part of becoming as long as we, instead of privileging the ways of understanding the self as lack or an identity assigned based on ideological domination, recognize it. The haecceity, as detailed in Chapter 5, gives further explanatory power to how desire and affect operate as parts of social production. The haecciety that does not depend on the cultural and social reality, but gives consistency to the plane of immanence and the BwO that are no longer “chaotic virtual” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994a, p. 154), enables new thought to form from desire and affect. Eventually, the haecceity actualizes “in a body, in a lived,” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994a, p. 154). It does not have a beginning or ending, but exists continually as a type of “shadowy and secret part that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994a, p. 156). In this sense, the social process, of which affect is a part, is not linear (as suggested by Wetherell, 2013), but in constant and continuous development. To conclude, the body’s movement, its ability to act, plays an important role in affect. Affect is further located as a part of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) larger philosophical scheme of how to think differently outside the framework of capitalism. In their thought system, affect, while not yet assigned with meaning differs from the phenomenological idea of primordial knowledge that is found through lived engagement in the world. Primordial knowledge, the essence or meaning, is already saturated with representations of the world whereas affect is a continual encounter between bodies that engage with haecceity (event) on the plane of consistency, a type of base for thought formation that, nevertheless, is actualized in reality in meanings and ideas. As such, affect, as bodily effect, enables a construction of the BwO, the material base for thinking differently outside the thought organized in the tree model (supported by capitalist ideas of useful knowledge). Being sensitive to affect, thus, does not lead to (primordial) truth, but rather ensures that we account for a constantly evolving process of possible ways of having freedom to think and know in multiple ways and thus, also to change the current social order. Contrary to Wetherell’s (2013, 2015) claim, Deleuze did not separate discourse/language from the body, but drew attention to how both modes of existence assemble to produce meanings and behaviours aligned with the capitalist system and its associated tree model of knowledge production or to create different meanings

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and behaviours from such a model. “With affect,” Seigworth (2005) explained, “Deleuze and Guattari seek a means to address the ‘whole’ universe of expression in a way that no other logic allows” (p. 168). Seigworth summarized: what one discovers, then, in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is the attempt to grasp power positively not only as an effect or in its effects. More crucially, however, the task is to take account of power in its affectivity and producibility, in its expressibility. (pp. 167–168) Deleuze further illustrated the role of affect in his later works regarding art and film. These discussions further clarify Deleuze’s use of affect, but also expand the notion of thought without image introduced in Chapter 3.

Affects and Percepts: Knowledge Specific to Art As noted in Chapter 3, Deleuze sought to break out from the tree model of representational philosophy that he characterized as the image of thought. In his later work with Guattari, Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994b) further developed his ideas of the type of knowledge specific to the philosophy of thought without image, philosophy concerned with concepts. Although Deleuze and Guattari discussed lengthily how they theorized “a concept,” in this chapter my focus is on affect that they reserved for the knowledge realm of art rather than philosophy. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari considered writing as a form of art and thus, elaborated on how writing can produce affects and thus, knowledge beyond the limitations of the tree model. This discussion can then sensitize researchers of the physically active body to examine the role of research writing in knowledge production. In addition, there is potential to examine sport literature as a form of art that produces affects. Deleuze and Guattari (1994b) contrasted the role of philosophical knowledge to art that produces new thought based on sounds, images, or colours. Unlike philosophy that is to create concepts, art preserves a “bloc of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects” (p. 164). In this bloc, percept makes perceptible the imperceptible forces that then affect us and thus, Deleuze and Guattari returned to the use of affect in knowledge production. Faithful to their previous definition, affects are not feelings or emotions by an individual perceiving (seeing, hearing) an art work. Accordingly, Deleuze and Guattari again emphasized the difference from phenomenology that “[f]inds sensation in perceptual and affective ‘a priori materials’ that transcend the perceptions and affections of the lived” (p. 178). Instead of representations of the existing reality or an essence similar to phenomenology, art, Deleuze and Guattari (1994b) stressed, produces new knowledge. Departing from phenomenology, Deleuze and Guattari were not interested in how a body comprehended its environment through its senses to

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open an avenue to primordial knowledge. They considered the body’s involvement in revealing the possibility for sensation. Sensation here consists of the bloc made of percepts and affects that “frees” the “flesh” from “the lived body, the perceived world, and the intentionality that is too tied to experience” (p. 178) to create new ways of doing and knowing about the world and about one’s self. In this context, affect as an element of sensations of art, continues to assist in and engender becoming: “The affect is not the passage from one lived state to another” (p.  173), but “[a]ffects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts … are nonhuman landscapes of nature” (p.  169, italics original). Therefore, affects as initiated by art act, similar to bodily movement, are tools for human becoming (thought, body, animal, woman, imperceptible). To gain consistency, sensations require a different plane of composition from philosophy. On this plane, the artistic material (e.g., paint or movement) can be freed from perceptions and affection to become expressive in percepts and affects. If the impact of art is limited to perceptions and affections, it, instead of new knowledge, reproduces only opinion. Deleuze (2001) regarded capitalism as the reign of opinion and as such, opinion functions as the antithesis to knowledge whether philosophical, artistic, or scientific knowledge.5 Therefore, the knowledge created by art must be based on percepts and affects that then combine into a sensation with which we dance, paint, sculpt, compose, or write, but what we also dance, paint, sculpt, compose, or write. This way affect together with percept, engenders new knowledge: By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another; to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994b, p. 167). Affects and percepts, nevertheless, depend on their creators, the content of the art work, and their environment. Artists, thus, “are presenters of affects, the invertors and creators of affects. They not only create them in their art, they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound” (p.  175). Deleuze and Guattari (1994b) further discussed writers who should create characters to then extract affects and percepts from their perception, affections, and opinions using the plane of composition (instead of the existing plane of organized thought). This is the way literature, as an art form, can go beyond opinion to illustrate new ways of thinking: “The composite sensation, made up of percepts and affects, deterritorializes the system of opinion that brought together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical, and social milieu” (pp. 196–197). Of specific interest to socio-­cultural researchers of the physically active body, they characterized writers as types of “athletes,” yet different from sport performers:

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They are athletes—but not athletes who train their bodies and culture of the lived, no matter how many writers have succumbed to the idea of sport as a way of heightening art and life but athletes of the “fasting-­artist” type, or the “great Swimmer” who does not know how to swim. It is not an organic or muscular athleticism but its inorganic double, “an affective Athleticism,” an athleticism of becoming that reveals only forces that are not its own—“plastic specter.” (p. 172) Notably, affects and sensations resulting from writing are located entirely in language, or discourse as Wetherell (2013, 2015) preferred to term it, and therefore, Deleuze’s concept of affect is, by no means, “splitting” the body and discourse, but both can be used to think differently through the generation of affect. Art, Deleuze and Guattari hoped, extracts from colours and sounds, new harmonies, new plastic or melodic landscapes, new rhythmic characters that raise them to the height of the earth’s song and the cry of humanity: that which constitutes tone, health, becoming, a visual and sonorous bloc. (p. 176) This is the meaning of considering sensations (or “the otherness caught in a matter of expression” p.  177): to be always in the process of becoming and eventually, become free from the limitations of capitalist opinion and communication. Many social scientists also attest to this ignoble aim and Deleuze and Guattari’s battery of concepts offers a way to think differently and thus, change the social conditions resulting from the capitalist social order. While Deleuze and Guattari (1994b) emphasized the need to sensitize one’s self to affect, whether in art or in the moving body, they did not offer much help on how to actually go about accounting for sensations in art or affect of the moving body. McCormack’s article on DMT, severely criticized by Wetherell (2013), can offer one example of a sensitivity to affect in a dance setting, but it does not lift the theorizing to the level of sensations essential for new knowledge. How exactly a social scientist is to extract affects, initiated by for example a choreographer, that then gain consistency as sensations (without interpretation derived from the tree model) is not immediately clear. Furthermore, it appears equally challenging to detect how social change is engendered by such artistic sensations. Obviously, there is no easy way to think with Deleuze who revealed how social life evolves outside the representational logic of the tree model. Possibly the most “concrete” example of affect is Deleuze’s work on the movement-­image and time-­image in cinema.

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Movement-­I mage: Perception, Affection, and Action in Cinema It is important to appreciate that Deleuze’s work on cinema is not an “application” of affect to understanding the cultural and social construction of film content—the type of research most familiar to socio-­cultural researchers who often look at how media images align or resist the dominant social constructions of the physically active body. Instead of this type of analysis, Deleuze (1986) was interested in how cinema can inform philosophy: What new concepts emerge through an examination of the moving images of cinema? Deleuze approached cinema through his reading of Bergson whose ideas of movement (physical reality of the external world) and image (the psychic reality) he further developed into a concept of “movement-­image.” Although such an approach might seem to reinforce Wetherell’s (2013, 2015) earlier critique of the Deleuzian approach to affect that divides discourse and the body, Deleuze was well aware that the separation of movement (the thing) and the mind (the image) was a problem already attended to by Husserl and Bergson. Deleuze, however, considered that phenomenologists grounded their search for true knowledge on “natural perception”: the still poses of the body, for example, are perceivable with human senses and such natural perception should provide the understanding of the real world. Deleuze did not see image, the representation of the world created by the brain, and the material body in the world outside of the brain to be perceived by the sensory organs located in separate spheres. “How can my brain be a container of images, if it is an image of itself?” he asked and continued: My body is an image, hence a set of actions and reactions. My eye, my brain, are images, parts of my body … external images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is movement?… Me, my body, are rather a set of molecules and atoms which are constantly renewed.… It is a world of universal variation, of universal undulation, universal rippling. (pp. 60–61) Deleuze’s concept of movement-­image was created to reconnect movement (of bodies and objects) and the mind: movement is in continuous change in relation to time unlimited by still (transcendental) poses of objects or bodies that are then perceived by the mind. Instead of sequential separation of perception and image formation, Deleuze stated that everything reacts to everything else— movement, in any case, is formed into images, but both react to each other. Cinema, Deleuze added, “makes up” its own image—it is not the world that can be perceived—and thus, it is not analyzable with the phenomenological tools of “natural perception.” We should then be cautious of using Deleuze’s concept of movement-­image to analyze physical activity in “real” settings. However, as

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demonstrated later, this concept can be useful for an analysis of sport films, social media, or other texts. Because the movement-­image6 provides Deleuze with the premise of thinking differently, it is imperceptible, a thought without image. The movement-­image exists in itself (without thought or a physical, measurable, perceivable form) on the plane of consistency, the plane that thought has not yet striated into an organized whole. As such, the movement-­image is unformed matter and thus, has potential to generate new thought, ideas, and understandings. Deleuze (1986) mapped the movement-­image in cinema in a relatively concrete manner through framings, shot-­making, and the resulting montage of images. The framing of a film acts as a closed system through which certain parts are chosen to the set. The shots, that then constitute the actual film, determine the movements established in the closed system of framing. The shot is also the movement-­image: “it relates movement to a whole which changes, it is the mobile section of a duration” (p.  23). Again, the movement-­image does not refer to the actual moving bodies or things but rather is “pure movement extracted from bodies or moving things” (p. 24), the movement that is not perceived into an image expressible by words, but “constantly puts bodies, parts, aspects, dimensions, distance and the respective positions of the bodies which make up a set in the image into variation” (p. 24). Finally, the shots are connected into a continuous “montage” that establishes the changing duration of the shots: “Montage is composition, the assemblage [agencement] of movement images as constituent of an indirect image of time” (p. 31). When an assemblage is formed, the imperceptible movement-­image has created something that now is perceptible and then expressible in language. In this assemblage, Deleuze then identified three varieties of images—action-­images, affection-­images, perception-­images—that are formed through the movement-­images. The perception-­image relates to the perceived “things” and “bodies” that are expressed as nouns in language. The action-­image is a type of delayed reaction to the perceived situation. In between these two “actions,” the affection-­image provides the quality for the movement that takes place. Similar to affect that is a type of bodily movement quality, not yet actualized into expression or action, affection-­image provides the direction for action-­image based on perception-­ image. In his analysis, Deleuze looked at how the combination of the three images assemble into the montage. In film, Deleuze observed, one type often dominates characterizing the entire film. I, however, provide a few more details regarding the affection-­image to further clarify how Deleuze’s notion of affect might become useful for a socio-­cultural analysis of the physically active body. It is affection-­image that provides a moment of hesitation: Which direction will the action take based on the perception? Providing movement quality (adjective), affection-­images do not transform themselves into perception or acts, but “mark the coincidence of the subject and the object in a pure quality” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 68). It is a kind of movement absorbed, not really reflected upon; movement that establishes the relation between perception and action.

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For example, Deleuze found some expressionist films using close-­ups of the face to foreground the affection-­image and its force to operate in between perception and action to create the direction for action that we then talk about, interpret, or analyze. As Deleuze’s purpose was to think differently, his work revolved around creating new philosophical concepts inspired by cinema. He, therefore, did not analyze the social construction of the film content, but rather what cinema can do: How the perception-­image, action-­image, and affection-­image create a set of concepts to understand how movement, its force, operates in the context of the “unreal” world of the cinema. Deleuze further argued that affect, a bodily force still roaming free on the plane of consistency, has potential to actualize in thought that considers multiplicity. As such, affect has a crucial role in breaking out from the representational logic of arborescent philosophy and thus, the limitations of capitalism. In this sense, the effects of affect eventually materialize in images, discourse, and thought. Therefore, it is important to count for affect as an important force in the contemporary, mediated world. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari (1994b) pointed to affect as knowledge particularly embedded in art and thus, regarded art as an important element of creating different thought. What can this mean to socio-­cultural researchers of the physically active body? Is it possible to count for the impact of emotions and feelings in sport and exercise using Deleuzian concepts?

How Does It Work? What New Thoughts Does This Make Possible to Think? Purposefully abstract, affect is easier to theorize about than actually count for in a social science research process. Including the force of affect can, nevertheless, challenge scholars to consider aspects of physical activity that are not detectable by other conceptual or methodological means. McMahon (2016), for example, used Deleuze’s work on cinema, specifically his concept of affection-­image, to illustrate how a focus on aesthetics can illuminate aspects of sport often neglected in existing analyses. McMahon: Deleuze, Affect, Cinema, and Sport McMahon (2016) acknowledged “sport as an exemplar of modern mass culture, media and commerce” (p. 221) but, without disputing these features, wanted to focus on aesthetic qualities that can express other facets of sport in contemporary society. This analysis enabled her to highlight “an aesthetic substance” without “reference to any psychological or ideological content” of sport (p. 221). To do this, she conceptualized sport broadly as a spectacle consisting of its viewers, its time and place, the weather, and its television coverage in addition to the players.

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While not necessarily defined as an art, McMahon (2016) contended, there are aesthetic qualities in sport that result from specific ways of thinking of space, time, and movement. Inspired by Deleuze’s concepts of movement- and affection-­image, McMahon set out to discover “the aesthetic power of sport … on its own terms” (p. 221). To analyze the movement-­image specific to “modern” sports, McMahon drew from their “particular rhythm and arrangement of movements” (p. 207). In common with cinema that expresses a new aesthetics of “a more casual, fragmented conception of movement, embedded in the course of everyday life or moved away from figurative representation altogether” (p. 211), sport movements, according to McMahon, also create a new reality. When movement continually reacts to space and time required in the play, its “set rhythm of repeated actions” provides “points” (minute, metre, line, ball) that then represent “both a unit of quantitative analysis and a potential qualitative threshold” (pp.  212–213). As such, sport contests, McMahon continued, are “rigidly codified and repetitive” spectacles (p. 215). But because each sport distributes its points and thresholds in unique ways, it creates an event that “no one has ever seen before and that everyone creates from minute to minute” (p.  125). “This,” McMahon observed, “is the whole intoxication of sport: you cannot look away and you cannot watch it later because something remarkable can happen at any time and it can only happen once–now” (p.  215). Consequently, sport illustrates how “a mechanical regularity” can continually produce novelty: “it is the constant of the grid that highlights irregularities, every implacable ‘beat’ is a potential tipping point” (p. 215). The analysis of the affection-­image further highlights how such irregularities operate with sport action. McMahon (2016) accounted for the affection-­image to connect Deleuze’s notion of affect to feelings and further, to his concept of “face.” Her analysis, then, can exemplify how feelings and emotions can be included in a Deleuzian analysis without confusing them with affect or psychological analysis of emotion. McMahon made a clear difference between an abstract psychological conceptualization of “the face as the ‘expression’ or ‘projection’ of a mental idea” and affect that is a sensory-­motor concept with an ability to highlight a “depersonalising, anti-­social element” in film or in sport (p. 217). As such, an affect analysis can project issues outside of the individual reflection of, for example, sport. Affect immediately relays “a movement or action” that the body absorbs. This resonance is “feeling” (McMahon, 2016, p. 216). The more intense the gap between the perception of the affect and the action that follows, the stronger the affect. These perceptions and actions are “diverted into reflection and expression” (p. 216) on “the face.” Deleuze discussed how the close-­up of a face “has become a sort of visual shorthand in cinema for conveying emotion or introspection” as it expresses a “more general affective schema” (McMahon, 2016, p.  217). McMahon (2016) further detailed how the face (its immobile surface and its micro-­movements) form the two “poles” of the affection-­image.

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The “reflective” or “intensive” (p. 217) poles emphasize either the visual or conceptual element of the affection-­image that now can characterize also more general qualities, the “affective schema,” of sport events. The “reflective” aspect of affection-­image foregrounds a single quality that unifies disparate elements. Cricket or baseball exemplify sports with an emphasis on the reflective pole of the affection-­image: the game consists of a few players on a huge field where most of the players occupy a small area with a great deal of “space” around them. The sports event, nevertheless, unifies these disparate players and their actions, yet leaves time for reflection between each action in the field. The intensive aspect of affection-­image “is foregrounded when the stress is on a series or succession of movements that break up the surface and point towards a transition from one state to another” (p. 218). McMahon offered basketball as an example of a sport with an emphasis on the intensive pole: relatively large number of players occupy a small space and the connections and actions between the players are more immediate without extensive time for reflection. While sports on both poles have reflective and intensive features, one type dominates. The affection-­ image then brings together the action and reflection in sport and thus, gives direction to both. As such, it is important to analyze the affection-­image if we are to understand how the game evolves based on the players’ actions and reflections brought together by the affection-­image. McMahon concluded: if we step back from the individual athlete or team and take in the whole scene, we see a smooth surface—the playing field, pitch or court—traversed by an intensive series of movements. Rather than, or as well as, an action-­ image, sport gives us an affection-­image with its poles of wonder and desire, quality and potential, the arena being a virtual space which extracts the pure affect and event from the actual causal interactions between bodies. (p. 218) Similar to film, sport is, to a certain extent, illusory, not real. As such, actions, shaped by affection-­image on the sporting field, do not have similar consequences to, for example, the battlefield in a war. The analysis of affection-­ image in sport, thus, does not necessarily reflect the politics of the real world. McMahon realized that the virtual world of sport “cordons off a section of the world and remakes that section of the world into its own world with its own rules and relationships, surfaces and intensities” removed from the “consequentiality of actions in the ‘real world’ ” (p. 220). Within its own world, however, “[a]ny actual, serious consequences of action on the field (or in the stands) are as shocking as when a theatre gun contains real bullets” (p.  220). When the “real” physical world intrudes the virtual world of sport, “its power and insularity” is clearly demonstrated (p. 220). It is, therefore, meaningful to analyze the aesthetics of sport’s movement, space, time, and rhythm that, in their insularity, continually produce the possibility for novelty, but also reflect the limitations of the causality and logistics of the “real” world.

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In addition to McMahon’s (2016) analysis of sport, some notable cultural studies scholars such as Grossberg (1992), Massumi (2002), and Featherstone (2012) have to developed Deleuze’s concepts closer to socio-­cultural analysis the physical active body and can, thus, serve as useful examples of expanding Deleuze’s work beyond creating philosophical concepts. Grossberg: Affective Empowerment If McMahon (2016) illustrated how affect can be used to connect reflections and actions in sport without resorting to psychology, Grossberg (1992) demonstrated how identity construction in contemporary society can be understood through an analysis of affects. In his Deleuzian inspired model, Grossberg (1992) identified two main “machines,” a differentiating machine and a territorializing machine, that produce social formations. The differentiating machine produces systems of social difference and identities. This machine, Grossberg (1992, 2006) argued, has been the most common target of analysis for cultural studies scholars. Arguably, sport scholars have also focused on the differentiating machine through examinations of how inequality has been produced in sport through systems of socially differentiated, marginalized, and dominant identities. Similarly, a significant proportion of the scholarly literature on exercise and dance focuses on analyzing differentiations of identity construction, particularly the construction of feminine identity. While such analyses have illuminated the potential of physical activity as a resistant cultural practice, Grossberg (1992) observed that focusing on the differentiating machine alone does not provide a sufficient account of cultural performances, but there is also a need to analyze territorializing machines that “operate distributively to spatialize time and temporalize space” (p. 104) to produce systems of circulation. Affect links the planes of these two machines that work together as an effective mechanism that produces differentiation: affect enables some differences as markers of identity rather than others. Grossberg (1992) developed a series of concepts (affect, affective relations, affective individuality) to analyze how change in power relations is possible within the current social context. Faithful to Deleuze’s conceptualization of affect, Grossberg carefully distinguished it from subjective feelings or emotions: [a]ffect is a plane of effects, a matter of actualization, effectuation, practices … an ability to affect and to be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. (p. 80) Affective relations quantitatively express affect’s level of energy: “Affect identifies the strength of the investment, meanings and pleasures, but it also determines how invigorated people feel at any moment of their lives, their level of energy

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or passion … affect privileges passion and volition over meaning” (p. 82). Qualitatively, affect refers to the “nature of the concern (caring, passion) in the investment, by the way in which the specific event is made to matter” (p. 82). Affect is always articulated through social struggles that define the direction of people’s investments into a particular event: they define what might matter for us in a particular cultural moment. Affect, therefore, offers the missing link of understanding why “ideologies are sometimes, and only sometimes, effective and varying degrees” (p. 83). How can individuals with certain ideologically determined identities create change in their condition through affect? Through “affective individuality,” Grossberg (1992) answered. This is not a subject or an identity, but the individual moving through the intensities of mattering maps. The affective individual exists in its commitments, its mobilities, its movements through the everchanging places and spaces, vectors and apparatuses of daily life. Its shape and force are never guaranteed; its empowerment (i.e., its possibilities for action—in this case, for investment) depends in part on where it is located, how it occupies its places within specific maps, and how it moves within between them. (pp. 125–126) His example of an affective individual is a rapper: in a rap song, the investment itself becomes the accomplishment, “more important than the accomplishment announced” (p.  126). Basically, an utterance of a rap song is more important than the impact of its violent lyrics. However, Grossberg acknowledged this type of affective individuality as a desperate attempt to establish a place in an unjust society. What matters, nevertheless, is what one does, not what one is. The affectivity of one’s action is context specific: an investment in a rap song will allow different movements, intensities, and directions in different daily contexts. The cultural context determines how much energy and passion one invests in different practices. Similarly, individual investments in different physical activity practices differ based on the cultural context. For example, a professional ballerina in her ballet class will be likely to invest significant energy and passion to make a living through the performing arts whereas an exerciser in a barre class will have a different level of investment based on different culturally derived exercise goals. Using Grossberg’s schema, we can analyze which physical activity practitioners are able to utilize their affective individuality to create change using their ideologically determined identities. Massumi: The Autonomy of Affect Massumi’s (2002) work on affect is particularly helpful in terms of analyzing the power radiating through media texts. Similar to Grossberg, Massumi found affect central to understanding how our information- and image-­based late

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c­ apitalist culture operates. He, nevertheless, proposed that Grossberg, despite his cautionary definition of affect, tended to equate affect with emotion: emotional reactions direct people’s choices of what matters in the world. Following Deleuze, Massumi is clear that affect is not an emotion, but it is an immediately embodied intensity “in purely automatic reactions most directly manifested in the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things” (p.  83). Massumi clarified that affect can also be described as the strength of duration of an image’s effect (or sensation): it has the capacity to “momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future” (p. 83) and as such, it creates a moment of suspense that allows activity to take any direction. Emotional content can add to this effect, yet is not the effect. Massumi advocated that affect, as a bodily sensation, provides new directions for cultural theory that has focused on a prefigured structure (signification). Against Wetherell’s (2013) reading, Massumi, thus, does not advocate excluding discourse from socio-­ cultural analyses, but like Deleuze, explicated affect potentially giving new direction(s) to thought, discussion, and the analysis of social events. Massumi (2002) advocated that affect holds a key, for example, to understanding ways that men in power try to preserve ideology or reproduce it. As a bodily sensation without signification, affect is a type of choosing point: it gives directions to potential outcomes or defines events that take place in actuality with the concrete activity and expressivity of the body. For example, Massumi demonstrated how Ronald Reagan obtained a position of power, not through emotional or charismatic means, but through utilizing affect. Reagan’s (and to some supporters, Donald Trump’s) verbal and physical clumsiness were overridden by the seductive fluency of his body image.… His means were affective. Once again: affective as opposed to emotional. This is not about empathy or emotive identification, or any form of identification for that matter. Reagan politicized the power of mime. That power is in interruption. A mime decomposes movement, cuts its continuity into a potentially infinite series of submovements punctuated by jerks. (p. 40) Reagan transmitted vitality and confidence through, for example, his “beautiful vibratory voice,” that provided an “asignifying intensity that doubled his every actual move and phrase” (p.  61). Therefore, it was not the content of his discourse that was influential, but the way he delivered it. The intensity produced by its movement and its range of proprioceptive “fleshy” senses and memories, made Reagan’s body undercut the conscious comprehension of the visual image as well as the content of the discourse. In other words, Reagan was able to produce ideological effects through non-­ ideological means (affect). In addition, there is a need to understand how one is able to actively actualize media transmission. This requires “a new understanding of the body in its relation to signification and the ideal or incorporeal”

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(Massumi, 2002, p. 44), because “[p]hilosophies of affect, potential, and actualization may aid in finding countertactics” (p. 43). Analyses of the mediations of the physically activity body, therefore, can reveal how affect operates either to reinforce current power structures or to offer choices for counterattacks by giving alternative directions to action and thought. Featherstone: The Body without Image Similar to Grossberg (1992) and Massumi (2002), Featherstone (2012) focused on the mediated culture, but his work can be particularly helpful in understanding the affect of the physically active body in contemporary culture. He sought to understand the role of body work beyond rational conscious choice or phenomenological lived experience. As his main aim, Featherstone unpacked “the relationship between body and image and the modes of conceptualization and experiencing of the body image” (p.  194). The body image (or what Massumi earlier defined as the mirror-­image) is the body’s visual image that becomes the dominant mode of representing and imagining the shape of one’s body in the current culture. These visual images, through which an individual’s beauty and the beauty of his/her inner self is defined, create an extreme emphasis on body work required to improve one’s looks. According to Featherstone, however, the images of bodies “may literally move us, make us feel moved, by affecting our bodies in inchoate ways that cannot be easily articulated or assimilated in conceptual thought” (p. 195). Unlike the visual mirror image, the body without image refers to bodily sensations such as “the shiver down the spine or the gut feeling” (p.  195). These sensations, for Featherstone, indicate affect: “Affect points to the experience of intensities, to the way in which media images are felt through bodies” (p. 195). “Bodies in motion” are “imbued with the possibility of movement” (p.  195) to give “off intensities which refuse to cohere into a distinctive image” (p. 195). Although the “affective body” is more difficult to conceptualize and articulate, people, nevertheless, are aware of its force: “This is a body whose movement and sensory range communicates a positive affective charge” (p.  207). It commands respect because it “possesses social force in the urban milieu and the spaces of sociability” (p.  207). Consequently, it is important to count for “the body in movement” if we are to fully understand the formation of consumer culture. At this point, Wetherell (2013) might ask: How are we to analyze the affect, the intensities that do not cohere in an observable image? Drawing again from Massumi’s (2002) work, Featherstone (2012) demonstrated that detecting the force of affect requires movement-­vision that breaks the “subject–object symmetry of mirror-­vision” to give space for movement, different perspectives, and ultimately, transformation (p. 208). Using movement-­vision, we can detect the body without an image that “enlists other bodily senses and sensibilities, such as the registering of ‘muscular’ memory [sic!], or bodily pressure (proprioception)” [sic!] (p.  209). In other words, if the mirror-­vision registers (and

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produces) already formed images, the movement-­vision tunes into proprioception and visceral sensibilities (such “a gut feeling”) to register both movement and the formed image. Featherstone (2012) further called increased attention to “the discontinuity of the subject’s conscious experience and the role of the non-­intentionality of emotion and affect, which has returned the body to the agenda” (p. 209). This does not mean abandoning an analysis of language and text, but realizing that “[a]n image culture and the new information technologies offer greater possibilities for these affective intensities to be experienced” (p.  210) and thus, their impact needs to be accounted for “in order to move between the different registers of reacting to, perceiving and being affected by body images” (p.  210). Featherstone drew special attention to “new media technologies” and any consumer’s access to them and thus, ability to manipulate the standards of judgments in the media: we need to consider the ways in which the new media technologies themselves reveal the centrality of affect in the process of perception and also enable viewers to become accustomed to seeing and enjoying a new register of affect previously undetected in the flow of facial and bodily movements. (p. 211) In his work, Featherstone brought together an analysis of body image (the discourse) and the body without image (the affect). This was also Wetherell’s (2013) preferred approach, although she refuted the effects of affect undetectable by the means of discourse analyses. From Featherstone’s point of view, omitting affect is detrimental because of the increased opportunities to influence, negatively and positively, the social world through affective means. Using the body without image, social scientists can problematize the marketing messages that simplistically promise a positive transformation through such techniques as dieting, exercise, or cosmetic surgery. On the other hand, an analysis of the body without image can shed light on affective means of populism employed by, for example, Donald Trump. As Featherstone aimed to demonstrate, there is something more to the body without image “which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect” and continues “to shine through” discourse, words, and meanings (p. 213). The body without image, Featherstone emphasized, does not imply the absence of image, but we “need more research to understand the ways in which the affective image works, and how people move between … the body image and the body without image” (p. 213). Notably, McMahon (2016), Grossberg (1992), Massumi (2002), and Featherstone (2012) focused on analyses of media texts. Deleuze (1986), similarly, had an interest in the “unreal” world of cinema and the role of affection-­image in this context. In his work with Guattari, Deleuze (1987), nevertheless, emphasized the micro analysis of everyday life within which affect operates in multiple ways. While there has been less emphasis on this type of empirical

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a­ nalysis, it is important to understand affect within the micro politics of contemporary society. The ongoing challenge is, thus, to find ways to capture its impact. This requires thinking differently and increasing the options of collecting empirical material for the use of socio-­cultural analyses of the physically active body.

Notes 1. It is not novel that a philosopher tackles psychology. For example, the roots of phenomenology are in psychology and while Deleuze’s philosophy includes such phenomenologically sounding concepts as perception, habit, or sensation, he was critical of phenomenology as well as psychoanalysis that, in the 1960s when Deleuze was establishing his career, dominated French intellectual debates. 2. “The affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities is by no means a unified approach to studying emotions, feelings, or bodies. In their edited volume, for example, Seigworth and Gregg (2010) distinguished between eight main approaches to theorizing affect: phenomenological/post-­phenomenological, cybernetics, non-­Cartesian (Spinozist) gendered philosophy and cultural studies, psycho-­biological Tomkian analyses, politically oriented works on collectivized, marginalized bodies, affective turn away from the linguistic turn, “post-­cognito” works of subject’s place-­position with objects, and science studies approach to affect. It is evident that current examinations of “affect” do not derive from a singular theoretical, ontological, epistemological, or disciplinary approach. Therefore, it seems a misnomer to talk about an “affect theory,” and therefore, in this chapter my focus is on one approach to affect advocated by Deleuze. 3. In his later Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze (1997) expanded his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics that he saw advancing three elements “Signs or affects; Notions or concepts; Essences or percepts” (p. 138). In this discussion, Deleuze located affect further within the system of thinking or knowledge making. Spinoza’s term “sign” here does not refer to the semiotic meaning of sign composed of signified and signifier. Instead, Spinoza had several meanings for a sign, but it generally refers to an effect, created by both affectio and affect. Affectio is “the trace of one body upon another, the state of a body insofar as it suffers the action of another body” (p. 138). For example, this can be the effect of the sun on our skin. We, Deleuze continued, have knowledge of affection through sensations of, for example, heat and colour and perceptions of the sun’s distance from us. The affectio expresses “our state at the moment in time” (p.  139) whereas the other type of sign, affect, adds the increase or decrease of the effect on our sensations and perceptions such as the pleasure of feeling the sun or the pain of being burned by the sun. Affect illuminates the passages or “continuous variations of power … that pass from one state to another” (e.g., joy or sadness)” (p. 139). Spinoza further divided affectio (or scalar signs) into four subcategories and affect into three subcategories. Deleuze summarized that signs (both scalar and affect) “are states of bodies (affections) and variations of power (affects), each of which refers to the other” (p. 141). The second aspect of ethics, common notions or concepts, in turn are more “developed,” adequate ideas from “which true actions ensue” (p. 143). In this conceptual schema, signs are “inadequate ideas and passions” (p.  143) that serve as springboards for concepts. Deleuze explained: From a random encounter of bodies, we can select the idea of those bodies that agree with our own and give us joy, that is, that increase our power. And it is only when our power has sufficiently increased … that … we become capable of

Affect   145 forming a concept.… There is thus a selection of passional affects, and of the ideas on which they depend, which must liberate joys … and ward off sadness. (p. 144, italics original) Consequently, affects continually shape our ideas that then develop into essences that, unlike concepts, do not reveal structure, but are “pure figures of light” (p. 148), a type of highest level of absolute “contemplation.” For Spinoza, the three levels of knowledge were interconnected. Deleuze summarized their relationship in Spinozian terms: Relative speed is the speed of the affections and the affects: the speed of an action of one body upon another in space, the speed of the passage from one state to another in duration. What the notions grasp are the relations between relative speeds. But absolute speed is the manner in which an essence surveys … its affects and affections in eternity (speed of power). (pp. 148–149, italics added) The important point is that, strongly influenced by Spinoza, Deleuze located affects, that do not operate merely at the level of bodily reactions, within a larger schema of knowledge production. 4. As Massumi (1987) emphasized, the body here can be understood in its broadest sense, including the physical body, but also “’mental’ or ideal bodies” (p. xvi). 5. Opinion, Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994b) contended, is the type of thought closely connected to the idea that “everybody knows” because everyone can think— the logic he critiqued in his Repetition and Difference. Opinion in this context is knowledge based on lived experience or a type of “tacit” knowledge. As Deleuze formulated it: opinion proposes “a particular relationship between an external perception as state of a subject and an internal affection as passage from one state to another” (p. 144). He provided the following concrete example: “we grasp a perceptual quality common to cats or dogs and a certain feeling that makes us like or hate one of the other” based on the group or “society” that either likes or dislikes one or the other (p. 144). Opinions, Deleuze quite categorically argued, are the foundation of the doxa, the tree model philosophy. He explained its logic: in a given perception-­affective lived situation (for example, some cheese is brought to the dinner table), someone extracts a pure quality from it (for example, a foul smell), but, at the same time as he abstracts the quality, he identifies himself with a generic subject experiencing a common affection (the society of those who detest cheese). (p. 145) What makes such opinions deeply political is that they “abstract quality from perception and a general power from affection” (p. 145) and thus, while based on individual feelings, they derive power from abstraction that lifts them above individual sensation to generic truths. Such opinions represent the three aspects—contemplations, reflection, and communication—that Deleuze found characterizing capitalism as well as the philosophical doxa that grounds truth in recognition. Therefore, opinion is recognized as truth if it coincides with the contemplations, reflections, and communication of the group to which one belongs and that claims the position as the majority. Deleuze concluded: “The philosophy of communication is exhausted in the search for a universal liberal opinion as consensus, in which we find again the cynical perceptions and affections of the capitalist himself ” (p. 146). 6. Deleuze (1986) labelled the immobile sections of the movements, instantaneous images, the mobile sections, movement-­images, and the “duration” images—the changes in the objects’ relation—time-­images. I focus on the movement-­images that illustrate Deleuze’s use of affect. Readers interested in further analysis of time, can find Farred’s

146   Affect (2014) discussion of French footballer Eric Cantona an insightful example of the movement-­time relationship. In his work, Farred (2014) employed Deleuze’s “reversal:” time that operates “in terms of two sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory coordinates; the horizontal and vertical” (p. 72). The horizontal time, as Farred defined it, is “the time of the athlete” (p. 72), the time rooted on the game clock on the field, whereas the vertical time is the time of the spectator, time outside of sporting field and its time delimitations. Using these dimensions of time, Farred analyzed a specific event where Manchester United player Cantona, after being “red carded” by the referee, “kung-­fu kicked” an abusive fan on his way out of the field. Detailing how Cantona’s movement entered both the vertical and horizontal times, Farred demonstrated how time acts as a force of its own to make an event a chance. 7. As often remarked, Deleuze’s work was strongly influence by Bergson. Already in his early texts, Deleuze (2004) reviewed Bergson’s main concepts duration, memory, élan vital, and intuition, many of which later appear in connection with such concepts as difference, multiplicity, and actual-­virtual. In these works, Deleuze also used Spinoza’s conceptualization of memory to critique psychology that, according to him, had set up its problem “badly” by focusing memory as an aspect of the present instead of the Spinozian notion of present, past, and future being simultaneous layers of duration. Later, Deleuze (1986) returned to Bergson’s work on Matter and Memory in his Cinema 1 to elaborate on his movement-­image to then build his topology of images. Bergson drew attention to the differentiation of movement as still images or poses and the idea that even if movement is captured through still images, they are not necessarily always the same. This is “the any-­instant-whatsoever” where each instant of movement is considered different (instead of being analyzed as a pose frozen into a form). According to Bergson, “modern science” and technology stresses the second type of understanding of movement through, for example, cinema. In his Cinema 1, Deleuze (1986) considered three Bergsonian theses in relation to film: 1. 2. 3.

Movement is present, space is past—these are thus separate; Some (movement) instances are more privileged; movement is not composed of transcendental elements (poses). Any-­instant-whatsoever is an instant that movement relates instead of transcendental elements; Movement expresses something more profound than the present moment: a change in “the whole.”

As Deleuze clarified: movement expresses not only “the instant and immobile section,” but “a mobile section of duration” (p. 8) “Matter moves,” he continued, “but does not change. Now movement expresses a change in duration or in the whole. What is a problem is … this expression” (p. 9 italics original). As a result, Deleuze proposed that (1) there are not only instantaneous images, that is, immobile sections of movement; (2) there are movement-­images which are mobile sections of duration; (3) there are, finally, time-­images, that is, duration-­images, change-­images, relations-­ images, volume-­images which are beyond movement itself.… (pp. 11–12) He then analyzed the differences between the immobile sections of the movements and the movement-­images of the mobile sections to think of the “new,” the change that can take place in the whole of philosophical thinking. The affection-­image occupies a crucial role here as it gives direction to action and thus, can effect change. In Cinema 2, Deleuze focused more closely on the time-­images.

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References Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The movement-­image. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1997). Spinoza and the three “Ethics.” In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Essays critical and clinical (pp. 138–151). Minneapolis, MI: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, G. (2001). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2004). Bergson, 1859–1941. In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Desert islands and other texts (pp. 22–31). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007). Desire and pleasure. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 122–134). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London, UK & New York, NY: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994a). Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (7th edition). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994b). What is philosophy. London: Verso. Farred, G. (2014). In motion, at rest: The event of the athletic body. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Featherstone, M. (2012). Body, image and affect in consumer culture. Body & Society, 16, 193–221. Grossberg, L. (1992). We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and postmodern culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Grossberg, L. (2006). Does cultural studies have futures? Should it? (Or what’s the matter with New York?): Cultural studies, contexts and conjunctures. Cultural Studies, 20(1), 1–32. Massumi, B. (1987). Translator’s foreword: Pleasures of philosophy. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia (pp.  ix–xvi). London: Continuum. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCormack, D. (2003). An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(4), 488–507. McMahon, M. (2016). The other industrial art: Deleuze, cinema, affect and sport. Deleuze Studies, 10(2), 206–222. Pringle, R. (2016). Disrupting identity: An affective embodied reading of Runner’s World. In W. Bridel, P. Markula, & J. Denison (Eds.). Endurance running: A socio-­cultural examination (pp. 95–110). Abingdon: Routledge. Seigworth, G. J. (2005). From affection to soul. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 159–169). Chesham: Acumen. Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp.  1–28). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. London: Sage. Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse—what’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349–368. Wetherell, M. (2015). Trends in the turn to affect: A social psychological critique. Body & Society, 21(2), 139–166.

Chapter 7

Connecting Deleuze on Foucault

Arguably, Foucauldian research currently occupies a prominent role in the socio-­cultural studies of sport (e.g., Ciomaga, 2014). Deleuzian inspired sport researchers also often include references to Foucault in their research either to use Deleuze’s concepts in tandem with Foucault’s concepts (e.g., Manley, Palmer, & Roderick, 2012; Pringle, 2016 Woodward, 2009) or reflect their choice of Deleuze against Foucault (e.g., Sluggett, 2011). Foucault and Deleuze, indeed, mutually admired each other’s work. In his review of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, Foucault (1977/1994) famously exclaimed: “a lightning storm was produced which will bear the name of Deleuze: new thought is possible; thought is again possible” (p. 367). In his turn, Deleuze, on several occasions, pledged affinity to Foucault’s work and as a testament to it, wrote his book, simply titled, Foucault (Deleuze, 2006) originally published in 1986, to commemorate Foucault’s death. Deleuze (1995b) remarked that writing this book marked “an inner need of mine, my admiration for him, how I was moved by his death, and his unfinished work” (p.  94). Although friends, Foucault and Deleuze actually never worked together and thus, their thoughts cannot be simplistically lumped together into a coherent philosophical thought. Deleuze described their relationship: “I never worked with Foucault. But I do think there are a lot of parallels between our work (with Guattari) and his, although they are, as it were, held at a distance because of our widely differing methods and even our objectives” (Deleuze, 1995a, p. 85). Although not identical, the connections to Foucault’s work can further illuminate Deleuze’s philosophy in addition to providing possible new insights into Foucault’s concepts. In this chapter, I reflect on the similarities and differences between Foucault and Deleuze’s thoughts primarily through Deleuze’s (2006) book Foucault. These insights can further our understanding of how Deleuze’s work can enrich research on the physical active body in the contemporary world.

Connecting Foucault and Deleuze Although Deleuze never actually worked with Foucault, they had a solid friendship through their activism and similar intellectual pursuits. Both were active in

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the Prison Information Group (GIP) and together “revived” Nietzsche’s philosophy in France (Beckman, 2017; Deleuze, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c; Dosse, 2010; Morar, Naill, & Smith, 2014). In addition, they frequently commented on each other’s works or appeared together in interviews. There was also an apparent “cooling” in their relationship that has been a source of much speculation. When asked about his relationship with Foucault, Deleuze himself did not acknowledge a specific fracture or reason for such a “cooling,” but noted not seeing Foucault due to his own circumstances and due to his desire to respect Foucault’s personal space (Deleuze, 1995b). In any case, both scholars expressed as their wish to have had more contact at the end (Beckman, 2017; Dosse, 2010; Morar, Naill, & Smith, 2014). The possible drift apart, however, can be attributed as one reason for Deleuze’s lecture series on his friend’s work that then culminated into the book, Foucault published shortly after Foucault’s death in 1984. In this book, Deleuze (1995a) explained, he was not “trying to speak for Foucault,” but instead traced “a transversal, diagonal line running from Foucault to say “something about what he was trying to do and what he was fighting, as I saw it” (p. 88). In this sense, Deleuze’s book on Foucault is not a review, but rather an exploration of how Deleuze understood Foucault’s work trajectory. This work is divided into two sections. The first section maps Foucault’s development from an “archivist” to a “cartographer.” It sets up the scene for the second section of Foucault’s three main concepts—knowledge, power, and subjectivation—that Deleuze expanded by using the concepts of the strata, the strategies of outside, and folding.

The New Archivist: The Audiovisual Knowledge Naming Foucault the “new archivist” Deleuze (2006) leaned on the Archaeology of Knowledge that he saw as a step towards dismantling structuralism. Foucault’s focus on “statements” instead of words, phrases, and propositions challenges interpretation and formalization characterizing the structuralist analysis of the signification of meaning in language, but also paves the way to think differently about any scientific thought based on formalizing concepts and interpreting them into a series of propositions. Instead of looking to formalize a theory of meaning making, Foucault, according to Deleuze, focused on statements that are rare, yet regular, but, unlike many theoretical formulations, are not invented by any identifiable person. Following his own conceptual schema, Deleuze characterized Foucault’s statements as multiplicities: they are not attributable to a thinking subject, nor are they universal truths. Instead, statements are formed in the collateral space of other statements through which they are able to make “correlative” links to a subject matter, to statements, within the larger complementary, institutional, and political context. Deleuze further explained: There are only rare multiplicities composed of particular elements, empty places for those who temporarily function as subjects, and cumulable,

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repeatable and self-­preserving regularities. Multiplicity is neither axiomatic nor typological but topological. (p. 13) This sets the scene for Deleuze’s later discussion of Foucault’s denunciation of the subject as the source for thought. At this point, Deleuze saw the Archaeology of Knowledge as a decisive step “in the theory-­practice of multiplicities” (p. 13) where Foucault was interested in, not the structure or “author-­subject” of knowledge, but the simple function that concepts, propositions, and phrases “carry out in the general situation” (p.  16). The idea of statements as multiplicities formed within specific historical contexts, functions as the foundation of Foucault’s later understanding of conditions for knowledge formation that Deleuze characterized using his own concept, strata. In Discipline and Punish, Deleuze (2006) explained that Foucault continued to develop the focus on knowledge which, in Deleuze’s terms, transformed him from an archivist to a cartographer of knowledge formation. The major development in Discipline and Punish, Deleuze disclosed, was the distinction between two types of practical knowledge formations: “discursive” involving statements and “non-­discursive” involving environments (p.  27). The Panopticon (the prison design where the invisible guards were located in a central tower surrounded by prison cells open to their undetectable gaze) provided the non-­ discursive environment, a system of light, that was supported by a system of language (of delinquency, of law). In Deleuze’s reading, the idea of separate but intertwined elements of articulable and visible was central to Foucault’s understanding of knowledge. Deleuze conceptualized knowledge in Foucault’s work as kinds of strata: “as ‘sedimentary beds’ they are made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and sayable, from bands of visibility and field of readability, from contents and expressions” (p.  43). These strata, the sedimentary beds, are historical formations, because historical eras create new ways of seeing, displaying, and talking about key notions. For example, physical activity emerged (or remains unsaid and invisible) differently in different eras to become a key concept. Consider a stadium as a way of displaying and competition as a new way of understanding physical activity within a specific historical formation that then became talked about as sport. Or a consider the health club as a new way of displaying a healthy-­looking body and commercialism as a new way of understanding physical activity within a historical formation where it became talked about as fitness. Or consider a physiotherapy clinic as a new way of displaying illness or the injury free body and a new way of understanding physical activity in the historical formation of public health. The strata, therefore, are not the sciences per se, but historically formed knowledge beds (e.g., how we talk about physical activity) that differ in the terms of the composition and combination in each historical formation. Different sciences or a combination of sciences, nevertheless, provide elements for how we understand and practice sport, exercise, and dance. Deleuze (2006)

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asserted, however, that to be acknowledged as a science presumes crossing a threshold of formalization as a science. While this type of sayability enters a stratum, there are also “other thresholds, moving off in other directions” that “leave their mark on the stratum: thresholds involving ethics, aesthetics, politics, etc.” (p.  44). The historical formation of sport, for example, is not only talked about in terms of the scientific aspects of training, but also in terms of ethics (e.g., unfair advantages through doping, genetics, and technology), aesthetics (how to judge objectively artistic elements in figure skating, diving, ski jumping, and rhythmic gymnastics), or how sport is used to promote nationalism, support economics, or endorse peace. Deleuze summarized that for Foucault, “[k]nowledge is not science.… Knowledge is the unity of stratum … of which science is only one. There are only practices, or positivities, which are constitutive of knowledge: the discursive practices of statements, or the non-­discursive practices of visibilities” (p.  44). In here, Deleuze found a parallel between his and Foucault’s approaches to philosophy: both were pragmatists who considered knowledge a formation of various ways of knowing about the world. Foucault, like Deleuze, never had any problem concerning the links between science and literature, or the imaginary and the scientific, or the known and the lived, because the conception of knowledge impregnated and mobilized every threshold making each one into the variable of the stratum which stood as a historical formation. (pp. 44–45) Deleuze (2006) further emphasized that the idea of the sayable and the visible is not the same as the structuralist notion of signified and signifier combined into a sign. According to him, there were important differences that separate Foucault from structuralists. First, both sayable and visible have a form and an expression instead of the sayable, for example, being considered the expression, and the visible the form. For example, Foucault considered delinquency as a sayable form that was expressed in penal law. At the same time, the prison comprised the visible form through which the penal law was imposed on the prisoners who then expressed or exemplified delinquency.1 These two elements then intersected to create an understanding of discipline and punishment in a certain historical era. Neither is Foucault’s work phenomenological although his focus on the visible (the seeable, the perceived experience) can lend itself to a phenomenological inquiry. “Visibilities,” Deleuze (2006) explained, “will remain irreducible to statements” (p.  43) and thus, Foucault’s conceptualization of the visible (even if it can be considered closer to “experience”) does not presume a “natural” or “savage,” or “raw” experience unpolluted by knowledge. Rather, there is nothing prior to knowledge, because it is a combination of separate visible and articulable elements specific to each historical formation.

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At this point, readers might have recognized Deleuze’s description of the visible and sayable elements from his own concept of assemblage (Chapter 2). Indeed, Deleuze (2006) recognized Foucault’s contention of knowledge “as a practical assemblage, a mechanism of statements and visibilities” (p. 44). Knowledge is, thus, not set in stone, but rather a continually changing mechanism combining articulable and visible elements according to the practical sensibilities of each era. The “statements and visibilities” are “pure Elements, a priori conditions under which all ideas are formulated and behavior displayed, at some moment or other” (p.  51). In other words, Deleuze conceptualized Foucault’s visible and articulable elements materializing or actualizing in what we understand as knowledge and detect as behaviour in everyday life. In this context, the visible and articulable remain irreducible, but continually problematize each other. This means that the articulable and visible do not constitute a dualism, but rather operate simultaneously to inform or contradict each other and evolve within each other’s presence. Read through Foucault, Deleuze’s concept of the assemblage may appear more concrete for researchers studying the physically active body. When assembled into a formation, statements are not hidden, but neither are they directly readable or obvious. Similarly, the visibilities “are not forms of objects” or “defined by sight,” but rather “complexes of actions and passions, actions and reactions, multisensorial complexes, which emerge into the light of day” (p. 50)—“forms of luminosity” (p. 45). Following Deleuze, the idea is not to read the meaning of texts or observe objects or people per se, but analyze how the visible and articulable have connected to a specific formation in a certain time and context and what type of knowledge ensued from their amalgamation. Even less should a Foucauldian assign sayable (signifier) meanings (sign) to objects or perceivable things (signified). This would mean that objects, actions, or other visibilities unite into the sayable losing their irreducibility as pure elements in knowledge formation. In summary: “each historical formation sees and reveals all it can within the conditions laid down for visibility, just as it says all it can within the conditions relating to statements” (p. 51). Somewhat departing from his own work, Deleuze, nevertheless, emphasized Foucault’s approach according to which historical conditions steer the statements that are not created by anyone particular or are not cemented as signs in the form of words, phrases, and propositions. How do the sayable and visible interact? How do they come together? Which one determines which in a historical formation? Deleuze identified that Foucault needed a third agency to account for their stratification and their determination of each other—power.

The Cartographer: Power In Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Deleuze (2006) identified the Panopticon as a practical form of the discursive and non-­discursive that organized “matter” (the prisoners) and thus, gained an aim and function. According to Deleuze, Foucault documented several such concrete assemblages (e.g., schools, hospitals,

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asylums) or types of “mechanisms” that integrated “qualified substances” (e.g., the children, the ill, the mad) (p.  32). Foucault, thus, introduced a way to recognize how previously unformed matter was organized to give it a function. In Deleuze’s terms, an informal dimension of unformed and unorganized matter and unformed and unorganized statements now concretized into an assemblage within a social field. Deleuze’s reading of Foucault was now further aligned with his own thought about assemblage formation and his description of force engendering such formations. For Deleuze, the concrete assemblage and a certain social field within which they become possible constituted an abstract machine: “The abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations between forces take place … within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce” (p.  32). This description parallels my earlier discussion of assemblage formation in Chapter 2. Deleuze’s reading of Foucault continued to reinforce his own conceptual schema. Namely, Deleuze further observed that “The concrete machines are the two-­form assemblages or mechanism, whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram” (p. 34). The diagram, thus, is an open system of the relations between forces which constitute power that, as constantly changing, produces a new kind of reality, a new truth. The idea of a diagram, Deleuze argued, constitutes the foundation of Foucault’s concept of power that, according to Deleuze, fundamentally differs from the closed systems promoted by Lévi-Strauss or Bourdieu. Deleuze did not expand on this, but Lévi-Strauss’ strong structuralist connection suggests a closed system of relationships within a given culture whereas Bourdieu’s concept the field can be understood as a closed system of contested structure-­agency relationship. Deleuze (2006) first defined Foucault’s notion of power in terms familiar to many of Foucault’s readers: power is not a form (e.g., the state) but rather consists of relations between forces; power does not refer (only) to “violence” but rather actions upon actions; power is not repressive, but is practiced before possessed; and power passes through hands of both the mastered and the masters. Deleuze then summarized these power relations using his concept, affect (Chapter 6): to engage in power relations is “to affect or to be affected” (p. 60). Deleuze elaborated: “to affect is like a function of force” whereas “to be affected is like a matter of force” (italics original p. 60). In the Panopticon, for example, the function of force—the anatomopolitics—was to normalize (to affect) whereas the specific categories of people to be normalized were the matter of force (the affected). Within the diagram of biopower, the force—the biopolitics—functioned to administer and to control the life (to affect) of a diverse population (the affected matter). Deleuze further elaborated on his view of biopower into his concept of control society introduced later in this chapter, but summarized the main characteristic of Foucault’s power diagram as the presentation of the relations between forces unique to a particular formation; it is the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be

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affected; it is the mixing of the non-­formalized pure functions and unformed pure matter. (p. 61) In this summary, Deleuze connected the diagram of power closely to the formation of the strata: power dictates how the visible and articulable become formalized into strata within a specific historical context. However, unlike knowledge, power is not formalized by connecting two forms (articulable and visible), but instead, “is a pure function … independent of the concrete forms it assumes, the aim it serves and means it employs: as a physical action, it is a physics of abstract action” (p. 60). Unlike knowledge that formalizes into a recognizable assemblage of visible and articulable elements, power in Foucault’s work cannot be known but is rather a strategy of forces. As “diagrammatic,” Deleuze elucidated, power “mobilizes non-­stratified matter and functions, and unfolds with a very flexible segmentarity” (p. 61). Power and knowledge exist, however, in “a mutual immanence”: “The sciences of man are inseparable from the power relations which make them possible, and provoke forms of knowledge [savoirs] which can more or less cross an epistemological threshold or create a practical knowledge [connaissance]” (p.  62). In this arrangement, knowledge actualizes power: the articulable and visible, in their different ways, “fix unstable relations between forces, localize and globalize diffusion, and regularize particular points” (p. 67). Power, according to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, makes us see and speak, because knowledge is always caught up in power relations that presuppose and actualize it. In other words, power is “the nonformal element running between or beneath different forms of knowledge” (Deleuze, 1995b, p. 97). Deleuze (2006), therefore, endorsed that the articulable and visible formalize into knowledge to realize the specific function of power. Deleuze also characterized the visible and the articulable elements “as forms of exteriority, dispersion or dissemination” (p. 69) to continue to develop Foucault’s differentiation between the exterior and the outside. In Foucault’s work, the exterior refers to the concrete assemblages of knowledge (Deleuze, 2006). As demonstrated before, these are further comprised of two forms, the articulable and the visible, that are irreducible (but not opposite to each other) and thus, exterior to each other. They are the forms of exteriority. The power diagram as the fixed form of a set relations between forces joins these elements, but is not the outside. Deleuze (2006) saw Foucault relying on “an outside which is farther away than any external world” (p. 72, italics original). The outside, thus, refers to unformed elements of forces that “operate in a different space to that of forms, the space of the Outside, where the relation is precisely a ‘non-­relation’, the place of a ‘non-­place’, and history an emergence” (p. 72). In this schema, knowledge (with its external and heterogeneous duelling elements of articulable and visible) can provide solutions to the problem of truth only if it can reach to the outside, the not-­yet-formed thought. Following Deleuze’s (2006) reading of Foucault, seeing and saying remain as forms of the exteriority shaped by the diagram of forces whereas “thinking

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addresses itself to an outside that has no form” (p.  72). This is possible because thinking can enter into a relationship with forces (the strategies) in the diagram. The diagram initiated by the outside “presents particular features of resistance, such as ‘points, knots or focuses’ ” (p. 74). These composing forces must change for any transformation to occur (i.e., to change the composition of the strata in the historical formation). The type of thinking that can reach the non-­stratified outside is an innate exercise that “becomes a thought” (p. 72): a key element of resistance that can, through the diagram, open spaces in between the articulable and visible formation to enact change. As Deleuze (2006) concluded: “To write [to think] is to struggle and resist; to write is to become” (p. 38). The idea of “a thought,” he continued, forms a separate axis in Foucault’s work.

The Fold: Subjectivation 2 There was a crisis, Deleuze (2006) suspected, in Foucault’s thought after the analysis of the relationships between knowledge and power. Foucault now “needed to rework the map of apparatuses, find a new orientation for them to prevent them from closing up behind impenetrable lines of force imposing definitive contours” (Deleuze, 2007c, p. 345). Consequently, another line that went beyond the powerful lines of force needed to be found. For Foucault, this was thought. How to access thought beyond knowledge and power, then, required a new dimension: the idea of subjectivation. While Deleuze (1995a) assessed this dimension as “less original” (p.  93) than knowledge and power, he further contributed to this aspect of Foucault’s work with his concept, the fold. Following Deleuze’s (2006) reading of Foucault, the key to “resistance” or a change in knowledge is to change the forces that set the visible and articulable in a formation. It is the outside that can “disrupt the diagrams and turn them upside down” (p.  78). Consequently, access to the outside is necessary. To explore such an access, Foucault began to develop a new axis in addition to the axes of knowledge, the power diagram, and the outside (that reunited the other two). This new axis was to activate the outside by getting inside it. This inside of thought is an unthought: the new inside of the outside. Deleuze used the metaphor of a ship enveloped by large waves: it operates inside of the outside, folded within. For Foucault, folding operates as a dimension of subjectivity: how an individual, capable of thinking, forms a self derived from the diagram of power and the formation of knowledge without being dependent on them. Folding, thus, acts as a type of double: finding the other or a “Non-­self ” (p. 81) in one’s self. It is a type of repetition of the self in a different form; a practice of self-­governance with a double hooking (or differentiation) to power and knowledge, yet operating as its own axis.3 Because such words as subjectivity and the self were used in connection to subjectivation, Deleuze observed, Foucault’s last axis, subjectivation, has given rise to much misunderstanding and also rather unfair criticism of Foucault’s work.

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According to Deleuze (1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 2007a), the most often repeated misinterpretation is the claim that Foucault, with the idea of subjectivation, returned back to the subject that he had previously rejected. Foucault’s earlier claim of the “death of man” that received much criticism (e.g., without “a man,” there were no longer a need for human rights) led to misinterpretations that Deleuze (1995b) dismissed as “mixtures of stupidity and malevolence” (p. 99). Deleuze explained that Foucault was developing the death of man from his idea of the self as a form continually exposed to forces, and when confronted with these forces, this form changes. For example, when the nineteenth-­century human had to confront such newly established forms of force as life, industrial production, and language, it resulted in a “composite,” or an understanding of the self, that we now often define as a man (or as a human self ). And, Deleuze continued, “just as this form wasn’t there previously [e.g., in the Ancient Greece or early Christianity], there is no reason it should survive once human forces come into play with new forces” (p.  100) that then create a different type of man/human/self. Thus, “the man” in the form of a humanist, agentic self of the Enlightenment will disappear, die. Similarly, the axis of subjectivation does not denote Foucault’s return to finally address the importance of this humanist man/ self, but continues his work to find ways to think differently from the self. In this sense, subjectivation is primarily a process, a process of finding ways of thinking that is not determined by the existing knowledge and power structures. As Deleuze explained: “Foucault doesn’t use the word subject as though he’s talking about a person or a form of identity, but talks about ‘subjectification’ as a process, and ‘Self  ’ as a relation (a relation to oneself )” (p. 95). Consequently, subjectivation is about a relation to force: it is a process in which force folds in its relation to other forces. The folding force can come from the thought that then is able to use, instead of being dominated by, the forces of existing knowledge and power structures. In other words, the line of power can be folded, in the process of subjectivation, for a usable space of thinking, breathing, and existing. “We have to manage to fold the line,” Deleuze (1995c) explained, “and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe—in short, think. Bending the line so we manage to live upon it, with it” (p. 111). While it is us, the thinking beings, who fold, it is not “the Cartesian or phenomenological subject” who as a self-­contained “interiority” “stands as the locus and guarantor of truth” (Cisney, 2014, p. 54), but rather a “subject” who is not protecting the sanctity of its interiority, but is open to continual disappearance and self-­transformation. As Deleuze (1995c) clarified: There are still subjects, of course—but they’re specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble. The subject’s always something derivative. It comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one sees. (p. 108)

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In a Foucauldian sense, subjectivity has to be produced, “precisely because there is no subject. The time comes once we’ve worked through knowledge and power; it’s that work that forces us to frame the new question, it couldn’t have been framed before” (p. 114). Folding the forces to think differently is, nevertheless the way to freedom, freedom from the knowledge that determines forms of thinking (including thinking of the self ) and constraining rules of power. In the process of subjectivation, it is possible to fold the forces of power and knowledge to play on themselves. This “doubling” “allows us to resist, to elude power” (Deleuze, 1995a, p. 92) to invent new possibilities of life that operates based on “optional rules that make existence a work of art, rules at once ethical and aesthetic that constitute way of existing or style of life” (p. 92, italics original). A process of subjectification is, thus, “the production of a way of existing” (p. 92): “existing not as a subject but as a work of art” (p. 92). This means inventing a way of existing through optional rules that, despite knowledge and power appropriating them, can resist power and elude knowledge. This process of reappropriation requires constant recreation for the possibilities that then take shape in an individual’s behaviour, thinking, and approach to living. This is what Deleuze characterized as individuation: Indeed, I think subjectification has little to do with any subject. It’s to do with individuated fields, not persons or identities. It’s to do, rather, with an electric or magnetic field, an individuation taking place through intensities … it’s to do with individuated fields, not persons or identities. (pp. 92–93) The idea of individuation, instead of the subject who pre-­exists thought and transcends his environment, assumes an individual momentarily created by various forces and thus, [w]hat is produced this way is not a subject but an individuation effect. Thinking in terms of individuation means recognizing that seeing, thinking and feeling cannot be ascribed to an individual subject but happen through encounters that generate such effects. (Beckman, 2017, p. 48) Deleuze (1995b) emphasized that Foucault’s new ways of existing—the process of subjectivation—requires new, optional rules “that assess what we do, what we say, in relation to the ways of existing involved” (p.  100). Foucault recommended a new existence as a work of art instead of as a subject. The optional rules, not governed by the moral rules established by existing knowledge and power relations, require also a new ethics. To think differently by folding the existing powerful lines successfully, Deleuze (1995c) reminded us, we need to establish “what is our ethics, how do we produce an artistic existence, what are our processes of subjectification, irreducible to our moral codes” (pp. 114–115).

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It must be emphasized again that the aesthetic, ethical existence continues to develop within the boundaries of power/knowledge nexus, because it is not “a pre-­existing determination that can be found ready-­made” (Deleuze, 2007c, p. 345). Subjectivation is a process of producing subjectivity in “an apparatus” that makes it possible (Deleuze, 2007c, p. 345). In sum, subjectivation is the formation of the self in connection with the historical formation of knowledge and the power diagram. Subjectivation, consequently, is context specific because the historical formations of knowledge change with the continual change in power diagrams: “Recuperated by power-­ relations and relations of knowledge, the relation to oneself is continually reborn, elsewhere and otherwise” (Deleuze, 2006, p.  86). Fundamentally a process of thinking differently by folding the line of existing forces to have access to the Outside, the unthought, subjectivation “individuates” in different practices rather than originates from a pre-­existing thinking subject.4 The fourth axis in Foucault’s thought, subjectivation, operates by folding the Outside to find different ways of thinking. Thinking is necessary for the folding that requires constant problematization of operations of the power diagram, the knowledge formation, and one’s self in relation to these two axes. Such thinking is, however, “embedded in the present-­time stratum that serves as a limit: what can I see and what can I say today” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 98). In Deleuze’s words: “the relations to oneself is homologous to the relations with the outside and the two are in contact, through the intermediary of the strata” (p. 98). The process of subjectivation, thus, brings together the operation of Foucault’s three axes that Deleuze presented collectively as open, yet concrete “dispositifs” or apparatuses. They are composed of lines—power, knowledge, subjectivity—with forces in use, visible objects, articulable utterances, and subjects in position as the vectors of the main lines.

Connecting Deleuze and Foucault As demonstrated, Foucault and Deleuze’s poststructuralism shares several important tenets and Deleuze, indeed, greatly admired Foucault’s work. Both conceptualized knowledge (as well as the social world), not organized based on rigid universal structures, but rather continually changing arrangements of the material (visible) incorporeal and the articulable (sayable) ways of knowing the world. To change the existing arrangements that both found limiting the capacity to think, requires reaching out for the “unthought,” that Foucault considered the Outside and Deleuze the plane of consistency and immanence. While an individual is capable of folding the Outside or to think creatively on the plane of consistency, this has to be an active process. Thinking, although a necessity in the modern world, is not an innate capacity of a true self, nor can everyone necessarily think actively, but many of us simply operate within the premade model of the representational philosophy. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Foucault emphasized, the way to counter the negative, dangerous forces creating

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inequality and suffering is to think. The power of thinking derives from their shared understanding of power relations that do not operate based on “contradictions” between dominant and oppressed groups, but as micro-­level actions (and thoughts) that escape the dominant knowledge/power relations to emanate different arrangements for thought and action. Although Deleuze and Foucault’s thinking intersects in several ways, they are, by no means, the same and should not be treated as such. However, neither does it seem appropriate to use Deleuze to critique Foucault’s thought, but rather each scholar has been strongly influenced by each other and they have used each other’s concepts and ideas as foundations for their thought systems. Despite these connections, there are differences between the two thinkers’ works. Deleuze—confessing very close affinity to Foucault’s thought—identified two very minor differences: Foucault’s apparatus versus Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage (or arrangement, see Chapter 2) and the consequent methods used to map these formations.5 As Deleuze (1995d) explained: I differed from him [Foucault] only on very minor things: what he called an apparatus, and what Felix and I called arrangements, have different coordinates, because he was establishing novel historical sequences, while we put more emphasis on geographical elements, territoriality and movements of deterritorialization. We were always rather keen on universal history which he detested. But being able to follow what he was doing provided me with essential corroboration … thinking, with him, is like diving down and always bringing something back up to the surface. (p. 150) Deleuze often defined Foucault’s apparatuses as concrete historical formations whereas assemblages, while also consisting of expressions (visible) and contents (sayable) elements moved vertically either to take up territory from existing strata or to be taken over by them. In this aspect, Deleuze (1995a) believed that his work with Guattari might have helped Foucault “with his own analysis of ‘apparatus’ ” (p. 89). In addition, Deleuze’s work with Guattari is driven strongly by their concept of desire (a type of energy that enables thinking differently to create a different life, a vitality, micropolitics of desire) while Foucault preferred to use pleasure arguing that desire continues to be too deeply entrenched in psychoanalytic thought (see Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion). While both Deleuze and Foucault testified to the importance of analyzing the microphysics of power, Deleuze believed his thought system, including the assemblage formation to analyze behaviour, provided actual tools to analyze the impacts of different forces at the microlevel (see Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion). In addition, Deleuze’s concept of control society has been considered a major difference between the two thinkers. As some sports scholars have engaged with the control society in their analyses (Manley, Palmer, & Roderick, 2012; ­Sluggett, 2011), I discuss this concept in more detail here.

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Biopolitics versus Control Society? Foucault is sometimes critiqued for his failure to engage with contemporary developments of control such as surveillance technology because of his focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century total institutions dominated by concrete disciplinary power arrangements (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000). Haggerty and Ericson (2000), for example, found Deleuze providing a more theoretically sophisticated concept, the control society, to more aptly elucidate the mode of control in contemporary society. Based on his reading of Foucault’s work, Deleuze (1995e), indeed, suggested that it is important to consider three types of power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and the control of communication that is now turning hegemonic. He, however, credited his concept of control directly to Foucault. Foucault, he argued, while “often taken as the theorist of disciplinary societies … was actually one of the first to say that we’ve already left them behind” (p.  174). Deleuze’s vision of control society drew strongly from Foucault’s concept of biopower developed first in the History of Sexuality volume 1. Morar, Naill, and Smith (2014) located the first traces of control society in Deleuze’s 1986 lectures on Foucault in which he devoted an entire seminar to biopower. This seminar, they argued, “is a tour de force, and clarifies the enigmatic relationship of Deleuze’s concept of ‘control societies’ with Foucault’s concept of biopower” (p.  5). In his later interviews or in his book on Foucault’s work, however, Deleuze (1995c) did not refer to biopower, but explained Foucault’s historical analysis as follows: “In Discipline and Punish he’d shown how the eighteenth century political power became individuative through ‘disciplines’; but he eventually discovered pastoral power at the root of that tendency” (p. 117). Here Foucault’s original term pastoral power refers to his later concept of biopower. It is important to note, thus, that Deleuze’s concept of control society is not a critique, but, on the contrary, relies strongly on Foucault’s work to further elucidate forms of control in contemporary society. In this sense, it is probably more accurate to say that Foucault’s biopower and Deleuze’s control society are in the same trajectory of outlining the changing forms of control in contemporary society rather than referring to different or opposing notion of power. Deleuze, thus, began his essay on control society with homage to Foucault who had prophesized “the monster” “fast approaching” (Deleuze, 1995e, p. 178). As Deleuze’s vision of control society, indeed, illuminates types of control in contemporary society, I describe it in more detail to illustrate how the physically active body can be exposed to increased control in this type of society. Deleuze (1995e) explicitly introduced control society in a short post-­script published in 1990 after his book on Foucault. To begin, he reviewed Foucault’s map of the changing forms of control: first, sovereign power during which control was implemented by death penalties; second, disciplinary power during which control was ensured by locking individuals into various institutions, not to die, but to be disciplined into docility; and third, biopower during which

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control is no longer practiced through disciplinary institutions, but rather through less visible and concrete reforms that gradually break down the familiar disciplinary institutions (schools, hospitals, prisons, factories, the military). Expanding on Foucault’s concept of biopower, Deleuze observed that control, in these societies, is “free floating”: although many “new freedoms” are celebrated, they in fact, contribute to “mechanisms of control as rigorous as the harshest confinement” (p.  178). In this process, we move from analogical control—an individual’s life as a succession of concrete institutions that are nevertheless, separate and thus, an individual begins anew when entering into each institution such as first grade at school or a first job—to digital control that has a constantly changing logic with no necessary succession, common language, or logic. Such control, Deleuze described, is founded on modulation that “is continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (p.  179). Nevertheless, the short-­term and rapid shifts mean continuous and unbounded control. For example, Deleuze discussed the difference between factories in disciplinary society and business in control society. The factory workers, while disciplined under systems of surveillance, could still rely on a clear wage system endorsed by resistance from trade unions. Business, instead, has introduced “healthy competition” and with it “a deeper level of modulation into all wages, bringing them into a state of constant metastability punctuated by ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars” (p. 179). Similarly, Deleuze continued, education is now considered a business where schools (and universities) are paid “for results” (p.  179). Numerous ranking systems then determine the level of results. Interestingly, Deleuze saw the enormous popularity of various television game shows as a perfect reflection of similar business ethics: individuals are set up against each other based on a healthy rivalry that provides the motivation for the contestants, but also establishes a clear division between them in the show. Popular reality dance shows, So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars, can be seen to follow this logic in addition to such shows as The Survivor, The Biggest Loser, the Bachelor/Bachelorette, or the Celebrity Apprentice (previously hosted by Donald Trump) that set up individuals against each other to battle in many “ludicrous” challenges. If in disciplinary societies one completed one “phase of life” by moving into another institution (e.g., graduating from school to move to higher education or work life), under modulating control, individuals never finish anything. For example, there is always a need for continuing education, a new certificate, or an additional seminar. The requirement for continuing education credits (CECs) for fitness instructors or coaches to retain their qualifications reflects this logic and also exemplifies the business model of education in control society: the CECs are a way to make money for the certifying organization. Universities, Deleuze (1995e) noted, move away from endorsing research, particularly in the humanities and social sciences that are not seen to directly profit the business, to selling various short-­term, online continuing education certificates.

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In disciplinary societies, personal identification was based on numerically recorded personal details stored in various written registers. In a similar vein, individuals could verify their identities based on handwritten signatures. In control societies where digitalization has replaced such manual means of identification, individuals turn recognizable only through codes such as passwords. When digital codes indicate “whether access to some information should be allowed or denied,” individuals become “dividuals” (Deleuze, 1995e, p.  180, italics original). It is now the computer “that is making sure everyone is in a permissible place” (p. 182). Such controls have emerged with digital computer technology that now also enables selling services and products entirely online. In this type of business, Deleuze observed, the administrative, marketing personnel becomes the soul of business. As a consequence, “[m]arketing is now the instrument of social control” (p. 181). The control society, where everyone now has access to new media, does not eradicate the ills of capitalism that continues to keep “three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty” (p. 181) who are too poor to take part in its digitalized world and too numerous to be controlled through confinement. How can we “resist” such new forms of control? “It is not,” Deleuze (1995e) asserted, “a question of worrying or hoping the best, but of finding new weapons” (p. 178). While Deleuze left “the young people” to discover the exact arsenal, he, nevertheless, suggested, as the first step, recognizing the type of control and then detailing how it works to dismantle disciplinary control that, in many ways, continues to operate parallel to digitalized control. To follow this advice, I (Markula, 2007) analyzed the progress of the so-­called obesity epidemic that is, in many ways, symptomatic of the simultaneous apparatus of disciplinarity and control in contemporary society. The panic, I observed, is effectively driven by campaigns endorsed by the “old” and “new” media that provide global comparisons through statistical information based on the numerical coding of biological information such as BMI, cholesterol level, heart rate, blood sugar level, and exercise intensity level that then determine an individual’s risk for such illnesses as heart disease and diabetes. While the body is now coded as obese using these numerical measurements and statistics, it is then controlled by global media information rather than disciplined into docility in a diet centre or hospital. The media employ quick news flashes and visible images of extremely large bodies to catch the attention of the new media consumers. In this world of virtual interaction all information appears oddly distant because it is not felt, sensed, or thought about. Unlike in disciplinary societies where an individual had a sense of being physically confined into a school, a hospital, or a dieting centre, technological advancement and improved, globalized interaction reduces one’s sense of the material body and its immediate surroundings. As such, I suggested, perhaps somewhat naively, an increased attention to affect (Chapter 6), the body’s capacity to act—its force—in everyday material environments, as one way of reaching beyond the digitalized techniques of society of control.

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In summary, Deleuze (1995a, 1995b, 1995c) felt a close affinity to Foucault who he greatly admired and respected. When writing about Foucault’s work, Deleuze, as with many other philosophers’ texts, read it through his own thinking process. He became, in a sense, Foucault’s double by folding the thought to create new insights for philosophy. While Deleuze established that the ideas of thinking, ethics, and the self are closely intertwined in Foucault’s work, such concepts as the fold and the control society appear as examples of Deleuze’ own folding process. What can Deleuze’s insights to Foucault’s thought mean to scholars who study the physically active body?

How Does It Work? What New Thoughts Does This Make Possible to Think? To my reading, Deleuze’s insights into the articulable and visible discursive formation, the fold, and the control society, particularly, can work well when thinking about the physically active body with Foucault. These ideas can then add to the already existing strong Foucauldian work in the field. Conceptualizing knowledge as in the interplay between articulable and visible elements makes it possible to reserve a clear place for the moving body and physical activity practice when analyzing phenomena ranging from sport related events (e.g., sport [mega] events, doping, media representation), exercise (e.g., the promotion of exercise as medicine and other health related physical activity campaigns, “new” fitness services, media representations), to dance (e.g., the popularized televised dance shows, dancesport, dance derived fitness forms). While Foucault was interested in how discursive formations evolved historically, Deleuze (1995a, 1995b, 1995c) emphasized the usefulness of his work in analyses that focused on contemporary events. Thus, the premise of a discursive formation with articulable and visible components is very relevant for researchers interested in the concrete assemblages of contemporary physical activity. In Deleuze’s terminology, we can analyze how previously unformed matter and unorganized statements are organized to gain an identifiable function. For example, in my work with Clark (Markula & Clark, 2018) on online barre workouts, we sought to analyze how certain statements were organized together with certain bodily movements into an identifiable, concrete fitness form. These elements gained their function—shaping the lean looking body—in a relationship to such scholarly disciplines as medicine, physiology, or psychology. Appearing online, these workouts can exemplify how such disciplinary training operates in the rapidly changing control society. As concrete discursive formations are context specific—with the abstract machine locating certain compatible elements into a formation—this concept is also very suitable for socio-­cultural analyses that account for variations and diversity in social worlds. As such, the discursive formation aligns with the new materialist premise of including the material environments and non-­human

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objects as integral aspects knowledge formation (see Introduction). While we have several well-­developed methods to analyze the articulable elements, ways of collecting empirical material that include the visible elements of the discursive formation are yet to be fully developed. In addition to concrete assemblages, Deleuze also identified multiplicities, the unformed matter and unorganized statements, in Foucault’s work. These multiplicities, as not yet concretized into recognizable knowledge, have the potential to create alternative knowledges and thus, alternative physical activity practices. To tap into them, to think differently, and change the existing concrete, usually disciplinary, physical activity assemblages, we need to fold the outside. In addition to mapping the concrete assemblages, thus, we can use Foucault’s work to create new, alternative knowledges. While Foucault’s the technologies of the self is regularly employed in the socio-­cultural analysis of physical activity (see Crockett, 2016 for a useful summary), Deleuze’s fold has receive less interest. However, Deleuze’s discussion of Foucault’s use of the subject can rectify some of the misunderstanding around the technologies of the self when it is interpreted as a way of building a resistant personal identity through physical activity participation. Deleuze’s view of Foucault’s thought differs, for example, from the idea of analyzing multiple intersecting identities that has gained popularity within the socio-­cultural research in physical activity.6 It is important to emphasize, therefore, that multiplicity in Deleuze’s terminology is not the same as acknowledging multiple (e.g., multiple identities as opposite to a single identity), but refers to elements not yet concretized to knowledges and concrete assemblages. In Deleuze’s reading, Foucault advocated a move away from identity-­based structures to an entirely different way of thinking as a way to disrupt the dominant forms of knowledge. To fold the outside, then, means thinking differently. Folding the outside (the non-­stratified by knowledge formation and non-­strategized by power diagram) means to strategically establish optional rules that operate outside, for example, the current identity categories. In this process, the individual continually problematizes how one speaks/sees, confronts, and lives. It means being involved in a praxis of self-­formation by asking What can I know or see and articulate in such and such a condition for light and language? What can I do, what power can I claim and what resistance may I counter? What can I be, with what fold can I surround myself or how can I produce myself as a subject? (Deleuze, 2006, p. 94) Such thought confronts new types of struggles. As Deleuze (2006) summarized: “To think means to experiment and to problematize. Knowledge, power and the self are the triple root of a problematization of thought” (p. 95). Folding, thus, requires active thought, yet not without hooks to the axes of power and knowledge.

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In my own work (Markula, 2009, 2011, 2014), I have aimed, with a less ambitious goal, to actively think what I can do and what power I can claim as a Pilates instructor to create different fitness practices (the visible) through different ways of knowing about fitness (the articulable), yet taking into account the realities of the current fitness industry. My simplified attempts to fold focused on problematizing fitness practices as means for building a better-­ looking body to offer an alternative emphasis on improved movement ability. Based on Foucault and Deleuze’s work, then, I contended that changing the visible (the practice) could constitute a change in the established concrete assemblage of an exercise class within its larger context of the fitness industry. My optional rules, I argued, afforded a different instruction ethics that “provided the meaning for changing Pilates practice, even if subtly, to disrupt some of the limitations of the current fitness apparatus that is, in turn, shaped by the neo-­ liberal rationale” (Markula, 2014, p. 482). Although my experimentations were small scale projects with micro-­level movement experimentation, such projects, I suggested, can also problematize social science by allowing “movement practices, as a type of knowledge in need of problematization like other knowledges, enter into the research apparatus” (p. 482). Including the visible can then open an avenue for multiplicity to the ways to understand and advocate change in the world. “Practicing movement,” I concluded, “can help visioning research thought more like a rhizome: a type of root that simultaneously grows in multiple directions without one main root” and consequently, “to loosen some of the lines that immobilize my research by theoretically demonstrating the possibilities for studying movement practices as a social science project” (p. 482). My projects operated within the existing concrete assemblages of Pilates classes and their abstract machine of the disciplinary fitness industry within which I attempted to problematize how the existing articulable and visible elements were connected. Experimentation with the visible elements (bodily movement) dominated my practice that was then informed by thinking differently about dominant forms of group fitness. My practice, nevertheless, was informed by existing social science and biomechanical knowledge and thus, while requiring active thought, I certainly did not tap into the multiplicities of the yet not unformed matter or unorganized statements. I am looking forward to the potential of folding this outside and its possibility to create different thought and different practices for physical activity. In conclusion, analyses of the discursive formations of articulable and visible research have significant potential to grow the appreciation of work by the scholars of physically active bodies. I hope to see further projects that utilize the potential provided by Deleuze and Foucault’s insights into concrete assemblages with their discursive formations of articulable physical practices, physically active bodies, and physical environments and various articulable utterances operating in control societies, but also foldings based on optional rules that produce different aesthetic styles of existence that work towards social change.

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Notes 1. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) used Foucault’s work on Discipline and Punish already earlier to develop their concept of regimes of signs on the anthropomorphic stratum. See Chapter 1 for further discussion. 2. Foucault’s concept is translated both as subjectivation (e.g., Deleuze, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c) and subjectification (e.g., Deleuze, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c). I use subjectivation to follow the translation of Foucault when not quoting directly from other sources. 3. Drawing from French author Henri Michaux, Deleuze (1995a) identified four folds of subjectivation—or how the self operates—in conjunction with the other two axes of power and knowledge in Foucault’s work: 1. The material part of ourselves which is “to be surrounded and enfolded” (p.  86). For example, based on Foucault extensive genealogy, the Greeks were concerned with the body and its pleasures whereas the Christians were concerned with the flesh and its desires; 2. Fold of forces: a particular rule that the relations between forces are bent back to become a relation to oneself (natural, divine, rational, aesthetic); 3. Fold of knowledge: the relations to truth and our being to truth; 4. Fold of outside: the ultimate fold. After Foucault’s examples from the Greeks and Christians, Deleuze entertained the four folds of our time. He argued that the relation to oneself “is destined to encounter sexuality” at any era, but in a form defined by the modalities of the other folds. Currently, he observed, we, like the earlier Christians, continue to be concerned with desire but that now is “subjugated by Law” (p.  87) rather than the Church. This material part is enfolded by power that “increasingly informs our daily lives, our interiority and our individuality” (p. 87). Accordingly, knowledge has become increasingly “individuated” (p. 87). This manifests in the creation of known recognized identities, “fixed for once and for all” (p. 87), into which each individual is “attracted” or slotted. Struggle for subjectivation, the self-­formation, nevertheless, has to pass through the above two forms of subjection. 4. While one could argue that there is a certain degree of intentionality in Foucault’s vision for the fold, this differs from the concept of intentionality characterizing phenomenology. Deleuze (2006) devoted significant space to divorce Foucault’s concept from Heidegger’s phenomenology where intentionality “restores the psychologism that synthetisizes consciousness and significations, a naturalism of the ‘savage experience’ and the thing, of the aimless existence of the thing in the world’ ” (p. 89). In this phenomenological world, the self draws from natural knowledge (experience) existing prior to consciousness that then signifies it into a sign, a recognizable meaning. This meaning-­making process, nevertheless, is not theorized in connection to external forces, structures, or power relations. Deleuze saw Foucault’s major contribution as a move from this phenomenological view to epistemology: “everything is knowledge, there is nothing beneath or prior to it (like a ‘savage experience’)” (p.  90). In this move, an active engagement with the historical formation of knowledge is absolutely necessary for self-­formation. Deleuze added that it also is a question of thinking of visibilities and statements as non-­relational: they influence each other, but are not collapsed into a sign. In other words, knowledge is double: it includes both speaking and seeing. Thought in a Foucauldian sense, then, is not intentional, because it acknowledges that thinking takes place in the disjunction between separate, but intertwined forms of knowledge: seeing and speaking. In addition, thinking is not innate, but comes from Outside (that operates to link up random events in a mixture of chance and dependency) to be continually recuperated by relations of power, the diagram. In

Connecting   167 this process, “[t]he problematical unthought gives a way to a thinking being who problematizes himself, as an ethical subject” (p. 97). 5. Although Deleuze did not find many differences between Foucault’s thinking and his own philosophy, Morar, Naill, and Smith (2014), for example, listed the following departures: Foucault’s notion of biopolitical control versus Deleuze’s late concept of control society; Foucault’s genealogical method versus Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis; Foucault’s ethical self-­transformation versus Deleuze’s revolutionary nomadism; Foucault’s preference for pleasure versus Deleuze’s use of desire; Foucault’s apparatus (dispositif ) versus Deleuze’s assemblage (agencement). 6. Intersectionality is commonly credited to the work of legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) and the black feminist work of Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 2000) in the United States where race, gender, and class are seen as forming a matrix of domination through simultaneous overlapping and intersecting identities. Instead of isolated categories, intersectionality scholars suggest, each identity, in connection to other identities, should be analyzed in the context of such structural changes as globalization, the redistribution of capital and wealth, and inequality. While identity formation results in interlocking oppression—marginalizing, for example, black women to live in poverty—from the point of view of intersectionality, black female intellectuals can creatively use their marginality or their outsider within status (Collins, 1986) to resist their oppression. While there is some debate regarding what identities can be used to analyze the matrix of domination embedded in larger structural formations (and what are simple add-­ons without a connection to social and political analysis), the main aim is to reduce inequality by redistributing wealth and legal rights more evenly among individuals in different identity categories, not to remove the identity categories themselves.

References Beckman, F. (2017). Gilles Deleuze. London: Reaktion Books. Ciomaga, B. (2014). Institutional interpretations of the relationship between sportrelated disciplines and their reference disciplines: The case of sociology of sport, Quest, 66(4), 338–356. Cisney, V. W. (2014). Becoming-­other: Foucault, Deleuze and the political nature of thought. Foucault Studies, 17, 36–59. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 139–166.– Crocket, H. (2016). Problematizing Foucauldian ethics: A review of technologies of the self in sociology of sport since 2003. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 41(1), 21–41. Deleuze, G. (1995a). Breaking things open, breaking words open. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 83–93). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995b). Life as a work of art. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 94–101). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995c). A portrait of Foucault. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 102–118). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995d). On philosophy. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 135–155). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995e). Postscript on control societies. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 177–182). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2006). Foucault. London: Continuum.

168   Connecting Deleuze, G. (2007a). Michel Foucault’s main concepts. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp.  246–265). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007b). Foucault and prison. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 277–286). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007c). What is dispositif? In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 343–352). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Dosse, F. (2010). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting lives. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M. (1977/1994). Theatrum philosophicum. In J.  D. Faubion (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Aesthetics: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol  2 (pp.  343–3680). London: Penguin. Haggerty, K. D., & Ericson, R. V. (2000). The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605–622. Hill Collins, P. (1986). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of black feminist thought. Social Problems, 33(6), 14–32. Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. London: Routledge. Manley, A., Palmer, C., & Roderick, M. (2012). Disciplinary power, the oligopticon and rhizomatic surveillance in elite sports academics. Surveillance & Society, 10(3–4), 303–319. Markula, P. (2007). Governing obese bodies in a control society. Junctures, 11, 53–66. Markula, P. (2009). Affect[ing] bodies: Performative pedagogy of Pilates. International Review of Qualitative Research, 3, 381–408. Markula, P. (2011). ‘Folding’: A feminist intervention in mindful fitness. In E. Kennedy & P. Markula (Eds.), Women and exercise: The body, health and consumerism (pp. 60–78). New York: Routledge. Markula, P. (2014). The moving body and social change. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 14(5), 471–482. Markula, P., & Clark, M. (2018). Ballet-­inspired workouts: Intersections of ballet and fitness. In P. Markula & M.  I. Clark (Eds.), The evolving feminine ballet body (pp. 49–71). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press.  Morar, N., Nail, T., & Smith, D. W. (2014). Introduction. Foucault Studies, 17, 4–10. Pringle, R. (2016). Disrupting identity: An affective embodied reading of Runner’s World. In W. Bridel, P. Markula, & J. Denison (Eds.). Endurance running: A socio-­cultural examination (pp. 95–110). Abingdon: Routledge. Sluggett, B. (2011). Sport’s doping game: Surveillance in biotech age. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28, 387–403. Woodward, K. (2009). Embodied sporting practices: Regulating and regulatory bodies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 8

Topology of Deterritorialization Deleuzian Approach to the Moving Body and Social Change

I entered into Deleuze’s thought through a brief tour of his life to then introduce his constructivist, pragmatist, and empirical philosophy. The chapters that followed elaborated on such Deleuzian concepts as affect, assemblage, becoming, the Body without Organs, the event, rhizome, segmentary lines, stratum, the plane of consistency, and the control society. Some of these concepts had already been employed by some researchers of the socio-­cultural study of physical activity. I, nevertheless, have had a chance to locate the concepts within the larger context of Deleuze’s philosophy and thus, have attempted to provide further insights into the possible uses of his work in the socio-­cultural analysis of the physically active body. Within a detailed discussion, however, it is also easy to lose sight of the overall logic and use of each concept. To reiterate my main points, I, in this chapter, offer a concise summary of the major tenets of Deleuze’s approach to philosophy to illuminate ways to practice social science research addressing the physically active body differently, yet pragmatically and empirically. Deleuze’s focus was on thinking, more particularly on philosophical thinking. Thinking, he emphasized, is an arduous and even treacherous endeavour. As a telling comparison, he likened thinking to exercise: “People are well aware that strenuous physical exercise is dangerous, but thought too is a strenuous and unusual exercise” (Deleuze, 1995b, p. 103). He further assigned philosophy the task of creating concepts. This, he emphasized, is the enterprise of thinking. Yet, his work is also filled with references to literature, art, film, and sciences. Thus, philosophy, necessarily, cannot exist without connections to other domains if it is to creatively engage with thinking, thinking outside of the rational philosophy or as Deleuze characterized it, the arborescent model of thinking. While advocating relations with several thought domains as equal to philosophy, Deleuze seldom presented a similar affinity with the social sciences. On the contrary, he suspected “the human sciences” to be harnessed to the service of the capitalist powers through the concrete machine of the State. “Could we say today,” he pondered, “that the human sciences have assumed … role of providing by their own methods an abstract machine for modern apparatuses of power—receiving from them valuable endorsement in return?” (Deleuze

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& Parnet, 2006, p. 65). Social scientists, like psychoanalysts, apply concepts to interpret the world around them. This is not Deleuze’s method. Instead, he advocated a way of thinking outside of ready-­made concepts applicable through a clearly identified method to an analysis of the social world. To think outside of the confines of the dominant mode of thinking, Deleuze offered a set of concepts to facilitate the creation of new concepts. They are designed to also assist social science scholars to adopt a different mindset to how they approach their research. This is the way I endorse social scientists to use of Deleuze’s concepts: as a machine that functions to create different frames for thinking of possibilities for social science knowledge that is not merely providing methods and results powered by capitalism, but assumes the politics of changing social formations. Deleuze (1995a) indicated that philosophy was not only for philosophy teachers and was looking for allies, among them sociologists, who shared “common ground” with his thought (p. 27). With such networks of like-­minded researchers and artists, Deleuze believed, it is possible to counter the “terrible conformism” of the philosophical doxa (p.  27). To further re-­enforce this common ground, I offer a summary of Deleuze’s concepts introduced in this book.

Freeing Thought Throughout his work, Deleuze critiqued the representational philosophy that he also called the State philosophy, the doxa, or the arborescent, tree-­model dominating European philosophical thought. According to Deleuze (2001), there are four basic pillars to the State philosophy—identity, analogy, opposition, and resemblance—that make a thought to a philosophical thought. First, an unspecified concept to be conceived needs to be identified—given an identity—as a philosophical concept. This way, the concept can be recognized, judged different from other concepts. The concept is further divided into two opposing binary ends. Finally, the concept is perceived to resemble a particular object. As a result, a singular concept comes to represent several ideas that are deemed similar; it reduces their difference into sameness. As an example outside of philosophy, we can consider human movement. To be captured through the principles of representation, human movement first requires a recognizable identity. It is conceived by exercise scientists by naming it physical activity. An identity now allows us to recognize any movement created by skeletal muscles as physical activity—these movements can now be identified under the umbrella of the same concept based on their resemblance and then further concepts, such as exercise or sport can be located within the same umbrella of physical activity. When gathered under the same identity, physical activity can now be opposed to inactivity—a derivate of the same concept that is now also brought under the same umbrella concept of physical activity. Finally, physical activity has to have a perceivable object: the human body that moves. Similarly, a type of human condition can be conceptualized as health that is now identified as a particular

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way of existing. With a definable identity, the state of health can then be judged as analogous to, for example, the absence of illness or the presence of happiness. Therefore, these states are reduced to their similarity rather than to their difference from each other. Health can then be opposed to illness and be assigned a perceivable object (the physical body) which it signifies. Similar logic can be identified for the socio-­cultural concept identity. Following Foucault, we can detect that previously unspecified behaviours were brought under the concept of sexuality. Under this concept, human beings exhibiting these behaviours obtained an identity that is currently recognizable, most commonly, through oppositions between heterosexuals and homosexuals. The identity, homosexual, can include several analogous identities (e.g., gay, lesbian). Sexuality now identifies all human bodies that it has come to represent. In this thought system difference exists, but it is based on identifying common elements, the sameness, for difference. Thought grounded on sameness, Deleuze argued, limits thinking to search for essences: it categorizes, it creates measurable differences to support the dogmatic thought, the kinds of things that everyone knows and is able to think. In his Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (2001) identified three key elements for dogmatic thought: common sense, good sense, and a method of thinking. Common sense assumes that all thinkers naturally love and desire truth and consequently, “everybody knows what it means to think” (Cisney, 2014, p.  49, italics original). Good sense assumes that thinking is a natural capacity of a single, unified subject. Common sense and good sense support each other: if common sense dictates that we naturally desire to know the truth, good sense makes us naturally capable of attaining it. As Cisney (2014) summarized: “Thought, therefore, is ‘naturally sound,’ inherently pure, and morally upright” (p. 49). The method, as the third aspect of dogmatic thought, Deleuze (2001) declared, is “the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined, or conceived” (p. 133). Such a method of obtaining knowledge is based on the model of recognition that in philosophy translates into expressing solutions to problems through propositions. Philosophical argumentation proceeds through a series of premises clearly recognizable as truths to a true conclusion due to the truth of the argument. The method of thinking under representational philosophy unites common sense and good sense: the identity of the object to knowledge is true not only for me, but all other rational subjects as well, because I have adhered strictly to the established method of avoiding error; it “unites the presupposition of the identity of the object of knowledge … and the identity of the subject” (Cisney, 2014, p. 50, italics original). Deleuze critiqued the three aspect of dogmatic thought because they limit thinking. In addition, common sense is dangerous. Cisney (2014) provided telling examples from the United States where everybody knows that the solution to gun violence is the expansion of accessibility to guns; that market competition is synonymous with democracy;

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that an Iraqi civilian’s life is worth less in the grand scheme of things than the life of an Amer­ican; that America was founded upon the teachings of the Bible; that socialism is a failed experiment; etc. A great many atrocities and tyrannies have been perpetrated in history in the name of principles that everybody knows. (p. 51, italics original) Many, nevertheless, stick with this proper method of thinking to appear intelligent, proper scholars. Without abandoning the idea of a concept, Deleuze wanted to develop a different type of thinking that would free “difference” from the shackles of representation to create thought that dances before us, “in our midst” (Foucault, 1977/1994, p. 367). Foucault’s (1977/1994) lively explanation of Deleuze’s philosophy can further illustrate Deleuze’s take on philosophy. Deleuze, Foucault explicated, envisioned philosophy as a play of mime with constantly changing scenes in a theatre stage. In this stage, thought “dances” in different roles wearing “an unrecognizable face, a mask we have never seen before; differences we had not reason to expect” (p. 367). Such an image differs from the previous philosophical traditions that assumed a clear centre, a truth, an essence, or “a heart” for its thought. Deleuze (2001) assigned movement an integral role in this play: movement is “capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation … of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind” (p.  8). This philosophy is put in motion; it walks and dances. Such an emphasis on movement, while not necessarily to be taken literally, can also inspire researchers of physical activity to think differently. Deleuze developed a series of concepts to maintain his philosophical stage. Instead of emphasizing the interpretation of meaning, Deleuze (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1995) focused on functions: how do things work? This shift required an entirely different set of concepts from previous philosophical strands, psychoanalysis, or structuralist linguistics. Instead of searching for meanings, Deleuze’s urged scholars to begin with a problem: by problematizing one makes thought active, makes it “dance,” creates and thus, changes the world. For Deleuze, this usually meant problematizing previous philosophical approaches or concepts. As social science researchers, following Deleuze, we can ask: do our concepts work? Do they enable us to think differently? Do they confine us to produce the same thoughts? Do they grow as branches of the philosophical tree? If they do, what is it that we produce? For whom does it work? After such problematization, Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) detected, the problem suddenly “bounces back and it is political: what are the societies, the civilizations which need to make this machine work, that is, produce, to ‘overcode’ the whole body and head with a face, and to what end?” (pp. 13–14). This problematization, thus, takes place between ideas (not between individuals or subjects) to create multiplications that can grow in diverse directions. One is not sure, in advance, “how things will go” (Deleuze, 1995a, p.  33). To move between ideas to produce

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­ ultiple, different thoughts, Deleuze (1995a) developed an open system of conm cepts that relate to circumstances (or events) rather than essences. Deleuze saw a world that was not operating based on neatly organized categories that were based on bringing similar types of things, ideas, or people together—the essences of things—by a dogmatic thinker. Instead, he saw the modern world working as a series of circumstances. With Guattari, he was interested in “in what situations, where and when does a particular thing happen, how does it happen?” (Deleuze, 1995a, p.  25). While this sounds similar to the research endeavours of many researchers of the physically active body, Deleuze rejected the concepts that referred to representations of the identical, the essences. His concepts, instead, express an event: a series of multiple interactions running through various bodies and structures that cannot be produced by the mind of a conscious human being using a method of deducting essences from categories based on sameness (Williams, 2008). Consistent with his critique of common sense, Deleuze (2001) considered thinking not as a natural ability of “Man” (the good sense), but rather thought must be “engendered” in thought (p. 147). Thought is not assigned to an essential self, the “I,” or the subject, but is an active process that engages with, not the personal or individual self, but the individuality of the event. This means examining how events “individuate,” for example, in individual human or non-­human bodies at a non-­personal level. Here Deleuze (2007b, p. 355) wanted to counter “any psychological or linguistic personalism,” a feature that he also found in Foucault’s work. While advocating an active thinking process through his technologies of the self, Foucault’s self was not the subject who by default knows the truth. Instead, this self is open to thought outside of existing ways of knowing and then actively seeks different ethics as part of an aesthetic existence. To move from the common sense and good sense embedded in the knowing subject to examine non-­ personal individuations, Deleuze developed his rhizomatic philosophy with concepts such as the strata, assemblage, the Body without Organs, becoming, and affect.

Assemblage and the Strata In several occasions, Deleuze suggested that the idea of the assemblage or arrangement is central to his thought system. Developed with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), assemblage generally refers to what we often identify as knowledge or beliefs and corresponding behaviours that become recognizable in the social world. Departing from rational philosophy, linguistics, or Marxism, the assemblage, for Deleuze, is the primary unit of analysis. Assemblage analyses also enabled Deleuze to move outside the “subject,” the thinking “I” as the initiator of thought to consider how various occurrences or events (what is happening in the world) impact knowledge production. He (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) explained:

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The minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept, or the signifier, but the assemblage. It is always an assemblage which produces utterances. Utterances do not have as their cause a subject which would act as a subject of enunciation, any more than they are related to subjects as subjects of utterances. (p. 38) Assemblages are comprised of two interrelated but irreducible elements: content (the non-­discursive) and expression (the discursive) with forms and substances. Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006) found a parallel to Foucault’s work on the discursive formation where the visible materiality of the incorporeal combined with articulable forms and substances. In this work, Deleuze advocated carefully observing how the natural, animal, and human worlds come together to form various constellations that last shorter or longer periods. How these then translate into words, statements, and utterances is influenced by the forces around them. Assemblages are always collective. They are also machinic: although set up by desire, they turn into assemblages when they function as a machine of non-­personal and non-­human elements. Thus, the size of an assemblage can vary significantly. If capitalism functions as a machine comprised of certain expressions and contents, then, for example, an exercise class can also be an assemblage of its own expression and content. The abstract machine refers to the force that sets certain elements into contact in a particular milieu or social context. This means that certain combinations of elements become more functional in some contexts than in others. Similar to several other sports researchers (Pringle, 2016; Woodward, 2009), I find an assemblage analysis to be a central contribution to the research on the physically active body. It allows us to tackle problems—to examine how things are happening around us—that do not fit neatly into previously defined theoretical frameworks or that cannot be accounted for with already established research methods. An assemblage with expressions and contents or articulable and visible elements enables us to bring together an analysis of how incorporeal elements obtain a form that then becomes articulable and how these function in a certain context to become recognizable as a concrete assemblage. The analysis of functions of abstract machine provides a context specific analysis instead of universal truths of common sense. The premise of an assemblage analysis is not, however, to combine natural science and social science/humanities to interpret what elements have agency or how they are signified with identities, but to focus on their function, their practice: what do these different elements do in their arrangements? As a result, we should ask: what new knowledge emerged from our analysis? Assemblages can also take place, or deterritorialize, the more established modes of thinking and knowing on the anthropomorphic stratum, the layer belt that stratifies and codes material into stable forms and substances recognizable and usable for humans. The assemblages can also turn into strata (be reterritorialized)

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that always operate within every assemblage where they can determine the relative movements of the expression and content. Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) distinguished three major strata specific to the anthropomorphic stratum— signifiance, subjectification, and organism—that deeply shape the way we know what something means, ourselves, and our bodies. These strata are segmentary: they are segmented by molar and molecular lines that move within the stratum. Lines of flight, in turn, escape the stratum. Deleuze was interested in finding ways to think outside of the current strata to follow the lines of flight and to find ways for multiple forms of thinking and knowing. For him, this required abstract thinking beyond the limitations of the existing strata and the plane of organization of rational philosophy. This was the purpose of rhizomatic philosophy.

Rhizomatics As rhizomatic philosophy was developed to move out from the confines of the arborescent tree-­model philosophy, the main purpose of it is, according to Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006), to examine the lines that segment assemblages: how the molar lines create binary segments related to social events; how the segments might be “cracked” by other lines that, as they do not coincide with the molar lines, change the divisions of the molar line; how there are lines of flight that “rupture” the existing assemblage, break out, and create new assemblages. All these lines are tangled together and the task of rhizomatics is to analyze their collective operation. To do this, knowledge production (and the research process) cannot be thought of as a tree with one root that then grows multiple branches. Instead of beginning with a concept already developed by a tree branch, a rhizomatic analysis begins by problematizing events or occurrences happening around us. Therefore, it begins in the middle, not with concepts and thoughts from clearly identifiable origins. As rhizomatics does not have a clear starting point, it can connect with many different points (concepts, theories, disciplines) and grow in any direction (instead of following a clearly defined path of the rational philosophy). Unlike (post-) positivist research, rhizomatic research cannot be reproduced, but produces a map pertaining to each assemblage, event, and context of which lines it analyzes. Such an approach to research, Deleuze summarized, “operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” to produce “a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21).

The Body Parallel to Foucault’s work, Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) located bodies in the assemblages that touch, cut, break into sections, and regionalize them. At the same time, bodies (that can be human, non-­human, or larger social bodies) constitute an important, but frequently overlooked avenue or source for thinking

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differently. Deleuze then developed a set of concepts that aimed to account for the role of these bodies or as Foucault characterized it, to “topologize the ­materiality of the body” (Foucault, 1977/1994, p. 347). While Deleuze was more interested in how bodies can inform the thinking of multiplicities—thought not referring to a thinking subject—than analyzing the moving human body per se, his thought system can illuminate how we can create new thoughts based on analyses of the physically active body. This can take place by using his concepts affect, becoming, and the Body without Organs (BwO). Within the tree system, Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) found bodies defined by the stratum of organism that limited the ways of thinking about them to, for example, medical or biophysical terms. What we might define as the socially constructed body, Deleuze found limited by the stratum of signifiance that segmented the ways we know about bodies through the binary construction of identities. To think differently about bodies by counting for their force Deleuze drew from Spinoza’s concept of affect. In Deleuze’s (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) terminology affect does not refer to feeling or emotion, but a bodily force that, as not yet signified and aligned with existing thought lines has potential to open up different lines for thought. Rhizomatics then follows these lines. The Body without Organs (BwO) refers to the plane where affect can connect to multiplicities, a plane with only speeds and intensities. The BwO is an intensive reality of the body that, as Smith (1997) described it, is “a milieu of intensity ‘beneath’ or ‘adjacent to’ the organism and is in the process of continually constructing itself ” (p. xxxvii). As such, it is an intensity primarily felt “under the integrated organization of the organism” (p. xxxvii). Deleuze (2007a) summarized: This body is as biological as it is collective and political. It is on this body that assemblages are made and come apart, this body-­without-organs is what bears the offshoots of deterritorialization of assemblages or flight lines.… If I call it a body-­without-organs, it is because it opposes all strata of organization, the organism’s organization as well as power organizations. It is precisely the whole group of body organization that will smash the plane or the field of immanence, and will impose upon desire another type of plane, each time stratifying the body-­without-organs. (p. 130) When Deleuze and Guattari (1987) urged all of us to construct a BwO, they referred to the power of the intensive body which vitality can help in finding different thoughts.

Becoming Finding the BwO through affect should assist in dismantling the subject, as defined by subjectification and the binary self-­identity as defined by the signifiance. This

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process of disintegration is becoming. Becoming, in Deleuzian terms, thus, refers to a way out of our existing identity constructions that are defined by the strata and organized by the logic of the tree-­model. The process of becoming is never complete, but a continual process of disentangling the confines of the tree-­model thinking.

Desire The fuel for the process of becoming and the urge for thinking differently, is desire. For Deleuze, desire is the central force for all that is taking place in the world around us. Thus, it does not refer to sexual desire or any form of individual conscious desire, but is rather the vital force behind existence. Desire, thus, permeates Deleuze’s entire thought system: Desire is wholly a part of a functioning heterogeneous assemblage. It is a process, as opposed to a structure of a genesis. It is an affect, as opposed to a feeling. It is a hecceity—the individual singularity of a day, a season, a life. As opposed to a subjectivity, it is an event, not a thing or a person. Above all it implies the constitution of a field of immanence or a body-­without-organs, which is only defined by zones of intensity, thresholds, degrees and fluxes. (Deleuze, 2007a, p. 130) Desire is the force for a different type of thought plane, the plane of immanence (to which Deleuze also referred as the plane of consistency), a desire for vitalism.

A Life The plane of immanence, the thought plane consisting of pure intensities, allows for the movement of thought unlike the plane of organization characterizing the State philosophy. Deleuze (2005) explained that the plane of immanence does not refer to an object or belong to a subject or require empirical representation. Rather, “[i]t appears … as a pure stream of a-­subjective consciousness, a pre-­reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self ” (p.  25). Deleuze’s concept of immanence, thus, frees thought from the influence of the control society, its communication, and its universal information to have a life. A life was also the subject of Deleuze’s final essay. A life is not the same as an individual human’s life, because it is necessarily detached from the thinking subject. “Absolute immanence is in itself ” (Deleuze, 2005, p. 26), but it is expressed “when it is reflected on a subject that refers it to objects” (p. 26). This absolute immanence is a life: We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life

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is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss. (Deleuze, 2005, p. 27, capitals original) A life that is potentially subsisting on the pure immanent plane (Rajchman, 2005), is necessarily vague, yet real. As such, it is an important source for vitality of thought, of human existence, and of social change. Thus, for Deleuze, considering, drawing from, and embracing a life of the pure immanence is more important than examining individual life and consequently, following the established thought by authority figures. He concluded: The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event from … from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens.… It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a pure life of immanence, a neutral, beyond good and evil.… The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name.… A singular essence, a life. (Deleuze, 2005, pp. 28–29) A life is, nevertheless, everywhere, also in the lives of subjects, objects, and the events one goes through and thus, “a life coexists with the accidents of the life that corresponds to it” (p.  29, italics original). A life also contains “virtuals” that are engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The immanent event is actualized in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen. The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object and a subject to which it attributes itself … the plane of immanence is itself virtual … events or singularities give the plane all their virtuality, just as the plane of immanence gives virtual events their full reality. (p. 31) A life, as a pure form of absolute immanence, is the virtual dimension of which elements “individuate” to the dimension of actual time where we then live, perceive, and think. Deleuze’s use of verbs further illustrates his intention of highlighting the interchangeability between the virtual and the actual. Instead of dealing only with subjects and actions (the actual), the personal and the stability, verbs—to laugh, to arrive, to dance—can underline the impersonal, the immanent virtual. They express life as movement. They point to the event that then actualizes, or folds, the virtual into subjects and their actions. Using dance as an example, Beckman (2017) summarized: Verbs in their infinitive underline how we, rather than dealing with subjects and actions, deal with an interchangeability between the virtual and

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the actual—a folding, to return to a concept used earlier. Instead of a body that dances, a dancing body becomes dance. Through the event, it enters into a becoming, an actualization of the virtual. This is the event. (p. 104) As a concept that followed Deleuze throughout his writing and also concluded his work, a life brings together the most central elements of his philosophy (Beckman, 2017). For Deleuzian researchers of the physically active body, a life is not a concept to be applied to various sports, exercise, or dance contexts, but rather an acceptance that thinking outside of the established strata requires a sensitivity to the virtual elements of life that, nevertheless, are real aspects of our lives.

The Unhappy Thinker Embracing Deleuze’s rhizomatics means acknowledging that his thought system does not provide concepts readily applicable to social science research projects. For example, we cannot begin a Deleuzian project by deciding to examine how someone becomes a dancer, an athlete, or a yogi. Instead, we need to consider what is happening around us in dance, sport, or exercise to then engage Deleuze’s concepts to map an assemblage that has actualized the event, the types of lines that segment it, and the strata that run through the assemblage. We can then ask what new knowledge we have learned through our analyses. This process also has its dangers—as Foucault (1977/1994) reminded us, it does not make one happy. In his review of Deleuze’s works, Foucault considered reaching to the unthought—a necessity for thinking creatively—”a dice throw”: when it flings itself outside of its dice box in the theatre stage of philosophy, one has an opportunity to overturn the dominant philosophical thinking through experimentation freed from the previous ways of thinking and its methods, but by doing this, one has to also confront “perversity,” stupidity, and madness. The thought, nevertheless, will return—eternally—as the Same, but a different Same and noting these differences, can help individual thinkers to make sense of the chaos of the ever-­changing world. However, when in resonance, “thought becomes a trance; and it becomes worthwhile to think” (Foucault, 1977/1994, p. 364). While risky, confusing, slow, and often filled with doubt, thinking creatively is worthwhile as it opens the way to new knowledge of physical bodies, new practices of physical activity as well as new research practices. In the process of writing this book, I have continually worked to comprehend and appreciate Deleuze’s thought. As it has slowly unravelled, I have been unhappy many times. How is it that I am going to use this elaborate system when it cannot be applied to my social science projects? Thinking differently, indeed, is difficult and experimentation without the usual support from theory and methods is extremely challenging. At the same time, Deleuze’s virtual world of immanence co-­exists with the actual world of living and thus, it is a matter of

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considering how these forces impact on how we think and practice physical activity (research). When we acknowledge this co-­existence, it becomes worthwhile to think. At least, this is my conclusion. Deleuze has helped me to think differently about how to analyze physically active bodies in contemporary society. I have learned that instead of taking a theory or concept as a starting point, I should consider what is taking place in the micro contexts of physically active bodies. This starting point enables me to first understand how various events have assembled into recognizable thought/knowledge and material bodies/practices, how they are segmented by molar and molecular lines in the capitalist system, and then map possible lines of flight to examine the potential for change, also change in research practices. Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006, p.  88) “worked on” several writers to further elaborate his thought system. He described his relationship to these scholars: My ideal, when I write about an author, would be to write nothing that could cause him sadness, or if he is dead, that might make him weep in his grave. Think of the author you are writing about. Think of him so hard that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with him. Avoid the double shame of the scholar and the familiar. Give back to an author a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that he knew how to give and invent. (pp. 88–89) I sincerely hope that, instead of causing sadness, I can, in this book, give back some of the joy and energy Deleuze has given to his large audiences. After all, Deleuze appreciated the moving body competing in sport or dancing on the stage. But to avoid oversights or misinterpretations of his conceptual world, required thinking hard to give back “the life of love and politics,” as Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006, p.  89) only could have known it, to the analyses of the body in motion. I hope this book allows scholars of the physically active body to think with Deleuze, what his thought can do, to engage in their own politics of bodies in motion in the contemporary world.

References Beckman, F. (2017). Gilles Deleuze. London: Reaktion Books. Cisney, V. W. (2014). Becoming-­other: Foucault, Deleuze and the political nature of thought. Foucault Studies, 17, 36–59. Deleuze, G. (1995a). On A Thousand Plateaus. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 25–34). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995b). Life as a work of art. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 94–101). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2001). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum.

Topology of Deterritorialization   181 Deleuze, G. (2005). Immanence: A life. In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Pure immanence: Essays on a life (pp. 25–34). New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (2007a). Desire and pleasure. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 122–134). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2007b). What is dispositif? In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 343–352). New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1995). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Anti-­Oedipus. In M. Joughin (trans.), Negotiations (pp. 13–24). New York: Columbia Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2006). Dialogues II. London and New York: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1977/1994). Theatrum philosophicum. In J.  D. Faubion (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Aesthetics: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol  2 (pp.  343–3680). London: Penguin. Pringle, R. (2016). Disrupting identity: An affective embodied reading of Runner’s World. In W. Bridel, P. Markula, & J. Denison (Eds.). Endurance running: A socio-­cultural examination (pp. 95–110). Abingdon: Routledge. Rajchman, J. (2005). Introduction. In G. Deleuze, Pure immanence: Essays on a life (pp. 25–34). New York, NY: Zone Books. Smith, D. W. (1997). Introduction: “A life of pure immanence”: Deleuze’s “Critique & Clinique” project. In G. Deleuze, Essays critical and clinical (pp. xi–liii). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Williams, J. (2008). Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Woodward, K. (2009). Embodied sporting practices: Regulating and regulatory bodies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index

absolute immanence 73, 177, 178 abstract machine 48–9, 53, 153; fitness arrangement 58; machinic processes analysis 49–53; nomad science and 49–53 action-image 135, 136 act of “taking a knee” 58–9 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 40, 41 affect 124–46; and affective practice 124–7; analytical power of 128; desire, BwO, and becoming process 129–31; extra-discursive event 125; knowledge specific to art 131–3; movement-image 134–6; partial conceptualization of 127; perceptions/sensations 136; and percepts 131–3; scholarship 125; sensitization 128; social-psychological reading 124–7; “theory” of 125 affectio 127 affection-image 136, 138 affective empowerment 139–40 affective individuality 140 affective practice 124–7 affective relations 139 affective schema 137, 138 affectus 127 African American smile 36 agencement 39 Alldred, P. 78, 79 anorectic body practices 94 anthropomorphic stratum 23, 24, 35, 174, 175 Anti-Doping Administration, and Management System (ADAMS) 9 Anti-Oedipus 3, 85, 88, 90, 91, 93 arborescent model 111 arborescent system 69 arborescent tree-model philosophy 175 Archaeology of Knowledge 149, 150

Artaud 68 assemblage 39–40, 135, 152, 174; abstract machine and 48–9; Deleuzian analysis of 45; dissembling 40–2; of enunciation 43; expression and 43–6; “recognizable” 45; territoriality and deterritorialization 46–7; working 42 athleticism 133 audiovisual knowledge 149–52 ballet barre exercises 58 barre workouts 58 Beckman, F. 3, 5, 7, 59, 178 becoming-minoritarian 112, 118 becoming process 110–11, 129–31; becoming-animal 111–14; becominggirl 111–14; becoming-imperceptible 111–14; becoming-woman 111–14; haecceity 115–16; longitude and latitude 114–15; plane of consistency 114; working 116–22 Bergson 3, 134 binarization 29, 30 binary machines 105 binary self-identity 176 biopower 161 biunivocalization 29, 30 bodies in motion 142 bodymind 98 body’s movement 130 body with organs 84 body without image 142–4 body without organs (BwO) 83–102, 129–31, 176; building 96–7; complete Taijiquan body 97–9; dancing body, desire of 96–7; limitative and nonlimitative, socius 99–101; in Schizoanalysis 85–91; working of 96

Index   183 Borovica, T. 107, 108 Buchanan, I. 12, 13, 28, 39, 40–5, 54–6 capitalism 95, 136 capitalist balance of power 100 capitalist machine 90 capitalist power relations 104 capitalist system 18–37 Cartesian philosophy 4 cartographer 149 cartography 76 cinema 136–9; perception, affection, and action in 134–6 Cisney, V.W. 171 Cogitatio natura universalis 63 Coleman, R. 78 common sense 67 concordia facultatum 64 concrete assemblages 49, 152, 163, 174 concrete discursive formations 163 concrete machines 49, 153 consciousness 125 consistency, plane of 114 constructionist philosophy 75 constructivism 4–6 continuing education credits (CECs) 161 control society concept 159, 163; biopolitics versus 160–3; business model of education in 161 cultural arrangements 39–61 Cutler, A. 67 Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) 125, 126, 133 Dancing with the Stars 161 data collection 78, 80 Davies, B. 83 degrees of freedom 100 DeLanda, M. 40–2 Deleuze, G. 4, 5, 7, 14, 20–2, 24–37, 39–44, 47–53, 62–73, 75, 77, 80, 84–96, 101, 104–15, 117–19, 122, 127, 129–33, 135, 136, 148–57, 159, 160, 162–4, 170–3, 176, 177; constructivism and 4–6; empiricism and 4–6; family life 1; physically active body and 12–15; pragmatism and 4–6; sport, sociocultural study 8–12; uses of work 6–8; work 3–4 Deleuze and Research Methodologies 78 Deleuzian scholarship 10 Derrida, Jacques 2

desire 129–31 desiring-machines 86–90 deterritorialization, topology of 169–80; assemblage and strata 173–5; becoming process 176–7; desire 177; freeing thought 170–3; a life and 177–9; rhizomatics 175; unhappy thinker 179–80 Devleiger, P. 76–8 Dewey 4 diagrammatic functions 50 dialectic organization 107 Difference and Repetition 3, 62, 148, 171 differentiating machine 139 direct binarization 31 Discipline and Punish 150, 152, 160 Dodds, S. 35, 36 dogmatic philosophical thought 64 dogmatic philosophy 68 dominant representational philosophy 12 Dosse, F. 3, 5, 7 double articulation 20, 21, 28 dual segmentarity 105 “eight-year-hole” 3 emotions 124 empiricism 4–6 epistrata 21, 22 Ericson, R.V. 8, 160 Evans, F. 23, 42 Evans, J. 83 experimental relation 5 expression, stratum concept 20–5 faciality traits 29–30 facialization 30 fascist body 93 “fasting-artist” type athletes 133 Featherstone, M. 139, 142–4 femininity 116 force, understanding 124–46 Foucault 148, 149 Foucault, M. 2, 3, 14, 18, 19, 148–67, 179; artistic existence 157; audiovisual knowledge 149–52; biopolitics versus control society 160–3; cartographer 152–5; connecting Deleuze and 158–9; connecting with Deleuze 148–9; knowledge, unity of stratum 151; new archivist 149–52; power diagram 153–5; subjectivation, fold 155–8 Fox, N. 78–9

184   Index Freudian Oedipal psychoanalysis 86 fuzzy aggregates 114 geophilosophy 74, 75 Gil, J. 96–9 Grandjouan, Denise Paul 1 “great Swimmer” athletes 133 Grossberg, L. 139–43 Guattari, F. 2, 20–2, 24–37, 39–44, 47–53, 69–71, 73, 75, 77, 80, 85–96, 101, 104–15, 117–19, 127, 129–33, 136, 176 haecceity concept 72, 115–16, 130 Haggerty, K.D. 8, 160 Halbwachs, Pierre 1 health sociology 83 healthy competition 161 heteronormative femininity 116 Holland, E.W. 86 human consciousness 18 human stratum 23, 24, 43 identity-based group resistance 91 identity-based inequality 10 identity politics, beyond 104–23 Ilundáin-Agurruza, J. 97–9 image of thought 63–8; element of representation, postulate of 64–5; ideal or common sense, postulate 63; knowledge, postulate of 66–8; logical function, postulate of 65; modality, or solutions, postulate of 66; model of recognition, postulate of 63–4; postulate of negative 65; principle, postulate of 63 individuation 157 Israeli occupation of Palestinian land 2 James, William 4 Joughlin 39 knowledge, conceptualizing 163 L’Affect 127–9 L’affection 128 Lambert, G. 44 large-scale aggregates 108 latitude 114–15 Law, J. 41 Lea, T. 54 Leafgren, S. 77, 78 Leibniz 3 Lévi-Strauss 153

“liberatory” movement 113 Logic of Sense 3, 122, 148 longitude 114–15 Loots, G. 76–8 machinic assemblage 43 machinism 49 MacKenzie, I. 67 macropolitics 106 Mallory, G. 43 Manley, A. 8–9, 108 Marxism 51, 88 Masny, D. 77, 78 Massumi, B. 13, 27, 28, 64, 65, 87, 91, 92, 99–101, 113, 117, 119–22, 127, 139–43 material body 11 McCormack, D. 126 McMahon, M. 136–9, 143 microfascism 109 micro-level assemblages 53 micropolitics 106, 107 mirror-vision 142 molar feminine body 96 molar lines 31, 104–10 molar organization 106 molar pole 89 molar segmentarity 108 molar segmentation 106, 108 molecular lines 31, 104–10 molecular phenomenon 89 molecular woman 111 montage 135 Morar, N. 160 movement affect 128 movement-vision 142 mutual immanence 154 Nail, T. 160 narrative self-hood 76 Nietzsche 3, 72, 149 nomad science 49–53 “normal” ballet face 37 obesity epidemic 162 organic stratum 23 organs without body 84 Palmer, C. 8, 9, 108 panopticon diagram 48, 150, 152 parastrata 21, 22 Parnet, C. 85 pastoral power 160

Index   185 perception-image 135, 136 phase of life 161 philosophical “doxa” 62 philosophical thinking 31, 32, 169 physical activity: CrossFit and pole fitness 57–8; guidelines 56–7; practice 7 physical inactivity 56 physiochemical or geological stratum 21 plane of immanence 177 plastic specter 133 political geologic analysis 33 poststructuralism 8, 158 power diagram 153–5, 158 power of thinking 159 power relations 11 practicing movement 165 pragmatism 4–6 present-time stratum 158 Pringle, R. 10, 11 Prison Information Group (GIP) 2, 149 professional men’s sport 58–9 psychoanalysis 4, 51, 53, 74, 80, 85, 86, 88, 124 psychosocial types 73–5 purely intensive body 83–102 radical empiricism 73 rational thinking 119 “reactionary” choreography 97 Reagan, Ronald 141 reciprocal presuppositions 22, 24, 46 refrain (or ritornello) 59–60n3 reterritorialization 22, 74 rhizoanalysis 75–8 rhizomatic thought 69–75; asignifying rupture, principle of 71; cartography and decalcomania, principle of 71–5; connection and heterogeneity, principles of 70; multiplicity, principle of 70–1 rhizome 62–81; image of thought 63–8; post-qualitative research 79–81; qualitative research, starting point 78–9; rhizoanalysis 75–8; rhizomatic thought 69–75; thought without image 62–3, 68–9; working 75–81 Rich, E. 83 Ringrose, J. 78 Roderick, M. 8, 9, 108 Rothfield, P. 7 sad business 85 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4

Schizoanalysis 85–91; positive task of 86–91 sedentary behaviour guidelines 56–7 sedimentation process 21 segmentary animals 104 segmentation 104–10 Seigworth, G.J. 131 self-expression 27 self-identity 65 sensation 132 Sermijn, J. 76–7 Sluggett, B. 8, 11, 110 Smith, D.W. 160, 176 social assemblage 44 social change 90, 165, 169–80 social construction 34 social constructionism 83 socially constructed body 176 social machine 43, 88, 89 social power relations 12 social-psychological reading 124–7 social psychology 125 social relations 6 social strata 24 socio-cultural analysis 12 socio-cultural concept identity 171 So You Think You Can Dance Canada (SYTYCD) 36, 161 Spinoza 3, 127 sport 116, 136–9 state science 52–3 St. Pierre 79, 80 Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) 54 stratoanalysis 32 stratum concept 19, 20, 150; apparatuses of capture 31–3; expression and 20–5; face and faciality traits 29–30; lines of segmentarity 30–1; of organism 25; signifiance 25–6; social construction of 95; stratification 30–1; subjectification 26–8; substance and form/content 20–5 student activities 2 subjectless concepts 4 substance, stratum concept 20–5 substratum 20 Taijiquan body 97–9 Tampio, N. 32 Taurasi, Diana 10 Taylor, D. 18 territorial arrangements 13 territorialisation 22

186   Index territorializing machines 139 thinking, ways 158 thought without image 68–9 A Thousand Plateaus 3, 39, 62, 69, 85, 91, 127, 173 threshold of consciousness 67 tour de force 160 “traditional” qualitative research act 77 transcendental empiricism 77 transduction 23 transverse multiplicities 89 tree model 14, 81, 84, 129 “trivial” dance movement 97 Trump, Donald 108, 143 Turner, B.S. 83

unified adult body 92 Wainright, S.P. 83 war machine 51 Wetherell, M. 124–9, 133, 134, 141–3 What is Philosophy 3, 62 Williams, C. 83 Williams, J. 122 Williams, S.J. 83 Woodward, K. 9, 11 workout of the day (WoD) 45 World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) 8 Yu, T.-D. 97–9 Yusoff, K. 20, 21, 24, 25, 33, 34