Deleuze and New Technology (Ed. Poster, Savat)

Verena Andermatt Conley: Rhizomes, Smooth Space, War Machines

"Deleuze makes clear that machines are always part of a collective assemblage and in that way can be understood to express the social forms that give birth to them." (p32)

The controlling function of technology is reoriented in today's capitalist societies.

Nature runs ahead of human thought.

Computers themselves are not rhizomatic - they do not "make connections outside pre-established paths." (34)

The move from a military-industrial complex (Eisenhower, 1954) to the military-informational complex (Virilio, 2000).

"Can we take the rhizome as a form of creative resistance to the more controlling aspects of electronic media?" (35)

Computer virus as a 21st century version of industrial sabotage.

Revolution hindered by social homogenisation: "To resist dominant arborescent thought imposed by the media in the guise of a false smooth space of information, Guattari continues to advocate deterritorialisation through creative resistance, that is, though all the arts that include computers in what he calls a machinic heterogenesis that does not, as in the era of the Cold War, introduce an alternative but rather a progressive shift in values that may lead to an eventual mutation." (38)