Deleuze and Guattari: Schizos, Nomads, Rhizomes

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have embarked on postmodern adventures that attempt to create new forms of thought, writing, subjectivity, and politics. While they do not adopt the discourse of the postmodern, and Guattari (1986) even attacks it as a new wave of cynicism and conservativism, they are exemplary representatives of postmodern positions in their thoroughgoing efforts to dismantle modern beliefs in unity, hierarchy, identity, foundations, subjectivity and representation, while celebrating counterprinciples of difference and multiplicity in theory, politics, and everyday life.

We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers … We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: p. 42).

A theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself … It is in the nature of power to totalize and … theory is by nature opposed to power (Deleuze 1977a: p.208).