Gilles Deleuze
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) has enjoyed a reputation as one of the most
innovatory thinkers in an age increasingly preoccupied with the question of complexity.
Indeed Michel Foucault once predicted that the twentieth century would be known as
Deleuzian. Deleuze’s thought is a combination of commentary on other thinkers—
notably Nietzsche and Foucault—and his own highly original investigations, suffused in
his later work by the influence of his collaborator, the radical psychoanalyst Felix
Guattari.
Deleuze was above all a theorist of flux, plurality and movement. He rejected the more
traditional concepts of sameness and representation in favour of repetition, proliferation
and difference. He elaborated a series of concepts such as the ‘monad’, the ‘striated’ and
the ‘fold’, and in particular championed the ‘rhizome’. It would be doing an injustice to
the sophistication of Deleuze’s thought to attempt any shorthand definition of such terms.
It is precisely the fluidity of his thought that denies such totalizing strategies.
The extract ‘City/State’ reflects Deleuze’s increasing preoccupation with the theme of
connection. Here he examines, in collaboration with Guattari, the opposition between
town and state, ‘two forms, two speeds of deterritorialization’. The town should be
perceived as a ‘correlate of the road’, as a ‘function of circulation and of circuits’. The
town is a circuit-point within a network of flow, ‘a phenomenon of transconsistency’.
The state, by comparison, offers a more restrictive model. It is a ‘phenomenon of
intraconsistency’, an internal and isolated circuit, whose power is dependent on
stratification and subordination. Space can be seen as a complex interaction between
these two models, each warding off and anticipating the other in a process of ‘reciprocal
presupposition’, such that the state could even be read as a component within a
‘worldwide axiomatic that is like a single city’.
Deleuze’s essay, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, elaborates themes raised
initially by Foucault. The disciplinary societies have now given way to societies of
control. Emblematic of this is the shift from factories to corporations and from machines
to computers. Physical discipline has been replaced by more gaseous systems of control,
where the credit card has supplanted the gaze of the foreman. Humankind is no longer
enclosed by physical space, but forever trapped by debt, ensnared in a system of limitless
postponement. ‘The burrows of the molehill’ have been replaced by the complex ‘coils of
the serpent’.
Deleuze’s project can be seen to be highly relevant to the world of architecture. Not
least, his insights on societies of control have offered a crucial retake on the influence of
architectural form on human behaviour. Yet his work is directed primarily towards
processes of thought and not practices of building. Too often his sophisticated theory has
been appropriated in a simplistic fashion and translated crudely into a manifesto for
complex architectural forms.