Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Deleuze's Foucault ("A New Cartographer")

 We began with questions:

  • Deleuze's Foucault holds together a conception of Foucault's methodology that emphasizes the historical and empirical (or empiricist) alongside a notion of the diagrammatic and cartographic.
  • What is Deleuze saying about what Foucault is teaching us about writing?  Why map-making as central rather than writing?  (See first sentence and last sentence of the chapter).
  • How is the diagram related to power?  What is the concept of immanent cause here?  How is the immanent cause of the diagram connected to the exercise of power?
  • How does Deleuze position the shift from archaeology to genealogy, from AK to DP?  What is the relation between the discursive/nondiscursive on the one hand and the idea of organizing forms on the other?
  • Deleuze's discussion of the state could be read as a reductionist account of the state to power; such that the state on his account merely redirects already existing power relations?  (See p. 25.)
  • Deleuze discusses "several correlative agencies": the outside, the exterior, and the forms of exteriority (43).  How do we understand this cluster of nonhuman agencies?
  • How does Deleuze qualify Foucault's understanding of function (p. 24, 33)?
  • Deleuze's account of technological change (pp. 42-43).  Deleuze can here be read as unpacking a notion of practice.  Relationship between techniques, assemblages, and diagrams.
  • P. 40: "Technology is therefore social before it is technical" (!!!).  Discuss.


We then moved to discussion:

We first discussed the notion of "immanent cause" and Deleuze's claim that the diagram is an immanent cause (37).

What is the role of the diagram in Deleuze?

How do we construe Deleuze in this book as starting with difference rather than identity?

Deleuze in conversation with Simondon in developing a conception of form that is not necessarily tethered to matter?

Deleuze: "technology is therefore social before it is technical."  The term "social" here can be misleading to 21st-century anglophone ears.

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