Introduction: Worrying about Deleuze|Guattari's Reception

It feels like a historical moment to present a series of essays that bring the formidable theoretical edifice of Deleuze|Guattari to bear on the field of art and its education. While there is an increasing number of essays that draw on their theory that find their way into the pages of the flagship journal Studies, this VAR issue makes an effort to demonstrate the potential of their concepts to the field in an intense but graspable way. In this very brief introduction, I would like to "tag" the short essay by Ian Buchanan, who is one of the foremost Deleuze|Guattarian scholars writing today. Buchanan's brief paper addresses some of the most common misperceptions when it comes to Deleuze|Guattarian thought. It is exemplary in the way he approaches their work critically and radically in the spirit of their own writings.

Reception of Deleuze|Guattari into our field has been uneven: from the total reduction of concepts like rhizome to simply mean non-linearity, and most often dichotomized from "tree" structuralism, to an apolitical appropriation of their agenda, as if Deleuze|Guattari had nothing to say about capitalism. For my contribution, I would like to develop briefly three worries that I have as more and more Deleuze|Guattarian thought begins to appear throughout the many art and art education journals. The first is Buchanan's worry as well. This is the question of interpretation that overwhelms the field, not only in visual art but in the countless narratological and ethnographic signifiers that drive commonsense representational research in both identity politics and the well-meaning social justice agenda that carves up experience in terms of class, gender, sex, ableism, and so on in a priori terms, as if subjectivity is a pre-defined entity composed of a conglomerate of signifiers depending on context. Differentiated difference is recognized through categorical means as played out most effectively through identity politics. While noble, it's time to question how we might move past such representational critical thought that simply produces a stalemate against the neo-liberalist agenda that continues to dominate the ethico-political life in post-industrialized countries. Difference here is continually used as a wager to further the schizophrenia of capitalism that needs such divisiveness to ensure claims of pluralist democracy. While this "scrum" between left and right is not about to stop, Deleuze|Guattari certainly forward a minoritarian politics that rethinks such representational strategy. The "stupidity" of interpretation, as a fall into commonsensical thought where the assuredness of the "way things are," is continually worried by the assemblages of affect that are composed of partial objects. When the signifier "stumbles," its signification does not simply "slide" forever to continue the profit margins of de(sign)er capitalism, but becomes a sense-event that is explored artistically through counter-actualizations. Charles Garoian's meditative essay provides an extraordinary example of this in this collection.

The second worry is perhaps that of phenomenology, which seems to be so close to the Deleuze|Guattarian position, but it is not. Many appropriations of Deleuze|Guattari introject a phenomenological spin through embodied lived-experience, especially following Merleau-Ponty's persuasive explorations. Yet the sense-event, its virtual effect, hovers above the body, transcendental (and not transcendent) to it. These effects "touch down," so to speak, and become actualized and then counter-actualized in a series. While phenomenology works with the "scar," the consciousness of the event, where the object and subject remain divided, Deleuze|Guattari are much more in keeping with the "wound." The sense-event remains open and a source of a continued problematic for the artist until it is exhausted. This seems counterintuitive on two accounts; the first is that the sense-event is incorporeal, taking place in virtual time of Aion, a non-time. The event exists in a time that is always just past and is always just about to come, but never happening. The second is that there is no "natural attitude." The machinic thought of Deleuze|Guattari posits humans as part of assemblages. We have "always" been cyborgs in the sense that technology mediates us from...