Deleuze, Gilles

Bio Sketch

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a French philosopher whose work — with and without Félix Guattari — reoriented continental philosophy around difference, becoming, and multiplicity rather than identity and representation. His concepts of the fold, smooth/striated space, deterritorialisation, the assemblage, and the "any-space-whatever" have been widely taken up in architecture, geography, and cultural theory. He matters to Geoffrey's research because his spatial thought underwrites both the parametric/digital turn (via the fold and the baroque house) and a critical alternative to it, and because he was previously logged as a "page needed" gap in the wiki.

Key Works

Difference and Repetition (1968) — the philosophy of difference and the intensive.
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) — the baroque house, folding, and the "superfold."
A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari, 1980) — smooth/striated space, the assemblage, deterritorialisation, the war machine.
Cinema 1 & 2 (1983, 1985) — the movement-image and time-image; the "any-space-whatever."

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

Assemblage — the machinic assemblage, haecceity, and plane of consistency.
Smooth and Striated Space
Deterritorialisation — the process by which fixed territories, codes, and identities are loosened, freeing flows; always in tension with reterritorialisation.
Milieu — "a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component" (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 313, quoted p. 391 of the Wise essay): the child's refrain, the car's rhythm, the radiance of lived markers — the D&G concept the wiki's home-register now carries.
Home — the territorialization register: home as "a place we are," product of territorializing forces (via Wise); the territory that "bites into" its milieus.
Warped Space — Vidler's account of the Deleuzian roster of "folded," "smooth," and "striated" space.
Uncanny — the Deleuzian "any-space-whatever" and the "Outside" as a form of the unhomely.
Heterotopia — Deleuze's "other spaces" alongside Foucault's counter-sites.

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Deleuze is a double-edged resource for Geoffrey's projects. On one side, his spatial concepts (the fold, smooth/striated space, deterritorialisation) are the theoretical vocabulary of the parametric/digital turn that Douglas Spencer critiques as "architectural Deleuzism" — the very "architecture of neoliberalism" the wiki analyses. On the other side, Deleuze's thought of difference, the "any-space-whatever," and the "Outside" offers a critical resource against the spectacular, image-driven city, and connects to the wiki's Ideology and Critical Architecture concepts (Wallenstein's reformulation of critique "beneath the subject" draws on Deleuze). His account of space and habitability, as reconstructed in Deleuze and Space, also speaks to the Dwelling and Phenomenology strands.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the A Thousand Plateaus toolkit rendered transparent for place theory (Ch. 2): desire as the base of power; place as territorialized assemblage (tetravalence); territorialization/deterritorialization from the urinating dog to nationalism; the three-step refrain of becoming at home; segmentarity (binary, circular, linear); rhizome/tree; smooth/striated as "tools for thought" ("all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space"); sense via the Carroll Snark; intensity vs extension; the plateau (Bateson); the abstract machine/diagram; mapping vs tracing. The chapter's stated aim: "My aim is to render it more transparent, and to construct a theory of place as assemblage" — the wiki's principal translation of the Deleuzian toolkit into architectural-urbanist method — see assemblage, becoming, smooth-and-striated-space, spatial-segmentarity.
Architecture is Always in the Middle (Gough 2015) — the assemblage as the ontology of bread-and-butter architecture; haecceity, plane of consistency vs. plane of organisation.
Deleuze and Space (Buchanan & Lambert eds. 2005)
Warped Space (Vidler 2000) — discusses the Deleuzian spatial roster
Architecture, Critique, Ideology (Wallenstein 2016) — Deleuze as the thinker critique must absorb
Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — "The Event" (The Fold, 1993) applied to the built object: the objectile, "a very modern concept of a technological object" (p. 88, via Bernard Cache's Earth Moves), the object rendered "a 'theater of matter'" (p. 37), "no longer essentializing but active," overflowing "its boundaries so as to annihilate the frame" — against which "the Deleuzian ontology of becoming thereby challenges the invariable presence of modern architecture that has continued to rely on an ontology of stasis." Hannah's historiographic correction: the evental was "played out by the historical and second-wave avant-garde" before Eisenman's "tardy embrace" — see objectile, event-space, temporality.
Topology and interiority: Folding space inside (Voordouw 2018) — The Fold as the monad-book: Voordouw quotes the Baroque-house passage as architecture's purest interiority problem — "The monad is the autonomy of the inside, an inside without an outside. It [monad] has as its correlative the independence of the facade, an outside without an inside. Now the facade can have doors and windows – it is riddled with holes – although there may be no voids, a hole being only the site of a more rarefied matter. The doors and windows of that matter open or even close only from the outside and onto the outside" (pp. 31–32) — and gives the architectural verdict: "This hole is topological. There is no void because the topology is a surface… Giedion's first conception has no space, Deleuze's monad is space but no architecture, his facade has surface but no space." Voordouw also dates the book's architectural reception (Lynn, Cache, Eisenman, mid-1990s Architectural Design) and re-dates topology's mathematical clarification (the Königsberg solution twenty years after Leibniz's death: "while topology has roots in the Baroque, its clarification was articulated later") — see topology, topological-interiority, objectile.
Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the home register of the D&G spatial vocabulary, via Wise's Intimus essay: the child in the dark ("gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath," A Thousand Plateaus, p. 311, quoted p. 391) as the refrain's founding scene — "The song marks a space, the repetition of the simple phrases structures that space and creates a milieu"; the milieu definition ("a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component," p. 313, quoted p. 391); "Milieus cross, 'pass into one another; they are essentially communicating'" (p. 313, quoted p. 391); "A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to intrusions). It is built from aspects or portions of milieus" (p. 314, quoted p. 393); and the whistling housewife ("it is the whistling and comfort-effect that is home, not the house necessarily," pp. 394–395) — the refrain-and-territory passages of A Thousand Plateaus applied to home, the wiki's first home-grounded use of the vocabulary. See milieu, home, territory.
Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — two D&G registers in one source: the Anti-Oedipus Ur-staat epigraph for Ur ("The State was not formed in progressive stages; it appears fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once; the primordial Urstaat, the eternal model of everything the State wants to be and desires… Every form that is more 'evolved' is like a palimpsest: it covers a despetic inscription," quoted p. 60) — the second Urban Revolution read through Deleuze and Guattari; and the Postscript on Societies of Control (1992, quoted p. 338 via M. Christine Boyer): "Foucault's spaces of enclosure are increasingly strained… disciplinary societies that have molded behavior are giving way to numerical societies of modulating control facilitated by computer technology… control acts like a sieve (a computer matrix) whose mesh transmutes from point to point… The code, not the norm, becomes the important device; now it is the password, not the watchword, that provides or inhibits access" — the societies-of-control thesis as the Cyberspace register of the Deleuzian roster within the wiki. Also D&G's "ordering" maxim quoted by Hooper ("Ordering is the practice of 'keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door,'" p. 362) and the border as "the zone of the line" where "all of power exists" (p. 365).