Abstract
Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus includes some useful concepts to understand technologies and their relations to humans as individuals and as a society. This article provides an introduction to their notions of machine and becoming and places them in the context of technological use in general, with a special focus on the cellphone. The concept of machine exceeds the technological context, yet it can be still relevant to technologies, especially digital ones. The concept of becoming assists in better understanding co-shaping processes in which a technology and its users change in tandem. Becoming is analyzed as a set of five characteristics: [1] transduction, a change process in both the user and the technology; [2] rhizome, no starting or end point; [3] molecularity, small movement or change that can create a big difference; [4] partial simulation, creating a non-identical copy; and [5] anti-memory, forgetting the past. Based on this analysis, the concept of becoming-mobile is introduced as a new way of understanding the interrelations between humans and their cellphones. Becoming-mobile can be further developed either with Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts such as nomadicism or with “external” concepts such as postphenomenology’s embodiment and new mobility studies’ virtual mobility. Machine, becoming, and becoming-mobile address some basic questions in philosophy of technology, thereby enabling us to refer to Deleuze and Guattari as philosophers of technology.
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Notes
For Deleuze and Guattari, the book as a machine has several modes of usage such as reading linearily or rhizomatically.
Although similar, Altamirano attempts to eventually distinguish between machine and technology by pointing to the duo “operator and operated” (p. 31) which are not easily distinguished. He further attempts to differentiate between machines and technologies by claiming that technologies are conscious and machines are unconscious. It is a complicated classification and its consequences are not clear.
Pasquinelli’s reading is influenced by, inter alia, Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control” (1992), discussing the shift from the Foucauldian disciplinary societies to what Deleuze identifies already at the beginning of the Internet as societies of control.
(see Caliskan et al. (2017) showing through a big data analysis that the word instrument is usually related to “pleasant” words, while the word weapon is related to “unpleasant” words).
William E. Connolly rejects the view that “everything is always in flux,” and suggests that there are “periods of relative arrest and... heightened imbalance and change, followed again by new stabilizations” (Connolly, 2011, p. 44). However, in reality, it is rare to have a period of stabilization in which nothing changes. Transformations are the rule rather than the exception, and they vary in their frequency and intensity.
In his late work, Deleuze develops the example of the crystal to better understand the cinema (Deleuze 1989). The crystal metaphor serves to denote development in time, a state of growth and expansion, developing layer after layer, producing a complex structure.
We should be careful not assign the rhizomatic structures to every contemporary technology. Cf. Buchanan 2009 for an analysis explaining why the Internet cannot be regarded as a rhizome.
In the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, this type of analysis is likely to be termed as reterritorialization. It comes after an initial territorialization in which I mapped the concepts of machine and becoming, followed by deterritorialization consisting of loading the machine with technological context. Reterritorialization is the development of the notion of becoming-mobile and expanding it towards new “territories.”.
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Wellner, G. Becoming-Mobile: the Philosophy of Technology of Deleuze and Guattari. Philos. Technol. 35, 41 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00534-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00534-2