6 - Deleuze and Guattari: Space and Becoming

Summary

If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.

Deleuze, Negotiations

Paul Virilio shows how the explosion of the information bomb has direct repercussions on humans and their experience of the nation-state, of the city and of world-space. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw repeatedly on Virilio when they declare that every critical relation, no matter what discipline it uses or represents, has to be treated in view of the world he describes. As Virilio put it, when addressing what he calls Deleuze and Guattari's “poetic or nomadological understanding of the world,”

[t]oday's world no longer has any kind of stability; it is shifting, like the polar ice-cap, or “continental drift”. Nomadology is thus an idea which is in total accordance with what I feel with regard to speed and deterritorialization. So, it is hardly surprising that we clearly agree on the theme of deterritorialization. (Virilio 2005a: 40)

Spatial consciousness is ubiquitous in Deleuze and Guattari's writings. It informs their theory of an event, which Virilio employs in a catastrophic sense, insofar as a sensation of space often becomes the event as it “takes place” and is as quickly abolished. It also subtends their politics, which in their lexicon means creating openings that will enable becomings. Becomings engage what so far has been called existential territorialization.