Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design

MRes: Art Theory and Philosophy First Year

Unit 3

Niina Keks

Affect Methodologies of Gilles Deleuze

Essay

Tutor: Christopher Kul-Want

London
June 2013

Introduction

This something can be specified only as sensation. It is a zone of indetermination, of

indiscernibility, as if things, beasts and persons endlessly reach that point that immediately
precedes their natural differentiation. This is what is called an affect.
Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy

The current essay is a close reading of an piece of writingWhat Children

Say

by Gilles Deleuze, as an attempt to unravel Deleuzes

affect

methodologies in comparison with Freuds psychoanalytic understanding of

desire and representation.
One could say, that like with Deleuzes texts in general, the essay What
Children Say does not demand a normal beginning-to-an-end reading. A
reader can almost pick and choose to read any paragraph, go back, go forth
and back againIn an exaggerated and illustrative sense, I could say that I
can choose even between sentences in one paragraphand maybe even
between words in one sentence3 (would suggesting reading backwards push
this claim too far?). However, this kind of reading, in Deleuzes case, does not
lead to chaos and non-sense. His concepts are part of a plane of immanence
or plane of consistency of his philosophy. As Deleuze puts it himself:
Philosophy is a constructivism, and constructivism has two qualitatively
different complementary aspects: the creation of concepts and the laying out
of a plane (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994 p. 35-36).Nonetheless, this plane of
immanence or consistency is neither a concept nor the concept of all
concepts, as this is something that would deduce Deleuzes philosophy to a
philosophy, which is looking for universals something he is differentiating
himself from.As contradictory as it may seem, I am going to try to show how
this paradox is possible in Deleuzes philosophy and why is this important.
1

What Children Say belongs to compendium of essays: Essays: Critical and Clinical
published in 1993 in French and translated into English in 1997.
2
As Deleuze collaborated very closely with Felix Guattari during his life, as well as writing
many of his main pieces of writing in collaboration with him, then I will refer mostly to Deleuze,
and only to Deleuze and Guattari when I am talking about the particular books that they wrote
together.
3
You can take a concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with it to its next
appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that repetitious. Deleuze and Guattari
call it a refrain. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 p. xv)

It seems like his text is breathing and that the concepts a reader is seeing are
shooting towards each other in every direction. They are all connected in a
way, that Deleuze would call rhizomatic. I would agree with Simon OSullivan
who wrote about A Thousand Plateaus4 in his book on Deleuze and Guattari:
To read it as a purely scholarly text, to read it simply for meaning, is to
position it always already within that field that it writes against
representation (OSullivan, 2006 p. 9). An attempt to create some kind of
representational system out of these connections of thoughts would almost
mean,killing the thought. And then again, would it?
As for Deleuze and Guattari a concept is not freestanding because it
presupposes a plane of immanence and because Deleuzes philosophy is an
immanent critique he is theorizing about his philosophy as well as applying it
in his texts at the same time, then by choosing one concept in Deleuzes
rhizomatic philosophy affect, a concept Deleuze is saying isindeterminate5 I
am going to show its connections to a selection of his other concepts on his
plane of immanence. I am going to do that in comparison with the
representational philosophy that Deleuze is differentiating himself from in
this case with the philosophy, or more precisely with the psychoanalytic
method, of Sigmund Freud.

What children say becomes (what) art (says)

A Thousand Plateaus is a collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari published in 1987.

Affects then are not to do with signification or meaning as such. /---/ Here the realm of
affect is positioned as an unreachable (and unsayable) origin (the before of language if you
like). (OSullivan, 2006 p. 43)
5

Children never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring
milieus by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them. The
maps of these trajectories are essential to psychic activity. Little Hans wants
to leave his familys apartment to spend the night at the little girls downstairs
and returns in the morning the apartment building as milieu. Or again: he
wants to leave the building and go to the restaurant to meet with the little rich
girl, passing by the horses at the warehouse the street as milieu. Even
Freud deems the intervention of a map to be necessary. (Deleuze, 1997 p. 61)

This first paragraph of Deleuzes essay contains in a way in itself everything

Deleuze is trying to convey in that writing, as well as, one could saywhat
Deleuze is trying to express in his philosophy in general. In this essay, he is
concentrating mostly on the case history of a little Hans by Sigmund Freud.
The maps, trajectories and milieu new constructed concepts by Deleuze
and Guattari are part of the core of Deleuzes rhizomatic philosophy, while
Freuds psychoanalytic interpretation of little Hanss story is something he is
trying to differentiate from6. Little Hans is a case study of a little boys phobias,
the summary of which Freud published in 1909 in a paper entitled Analysis of
a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy. This case study is based on Freuds
Oediupus complex7, which according to Freud structures all human behavior,
reducing it to a simplistic father-mother-child relationship. There are three
main points that I would like to bring out from this Deleuzes essay which are
important for giving a sense of Deleuzes affect methodologies.
Firstly, for Deleuze, Freud, universalizing human behavior by assigning its
base into an ancient Greek play in an attempt to order the whole world, is
exactly that root-tree that Deleuze and Guattari are writing about in their first
chapter of A Thousand Plateaus: The tree and root inspire a sad image of
thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or
segmented higher unity./---/ Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems
with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like

Freud is one of the many that Deleuze is trying to differentiate from according to Deleuze
and Guattari, he belongs to the type of root-tree thinkers, the concept of which I am going to
explain more further on.
7
Oedipus refers to a 5th-century BC Greek mythological character Oedipus, who unwittingly
kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. A play based on the myth, Oedipus
Rex, was written by Sophocles, ca. 429 BC. Sigmund Freud attended one of the modern
productions of Sophocles' play, and in his book The Interpretation of Dreams(1899), he
proposed that an Oedipal desire is a universal, psychological phenomenon innate to human
beings, and the cause of much unconscious guilt.

organized memories (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 p. 18) 8 .Instead 9 of this

root-tree (root-book, root-thought etc.) Deleuze and Guattari proposea
rhizome a vertical ramified surface extension that runs in all directions and
is an acentred system, finite networks of automata in which communication
runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist,
and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given
moment (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 p. 19).
Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy is rhizomatic and in order to understand
and read their writings it is important to keep in mind the basic characteristics
of rhizome10: one of which is cartography, or mapping as Deleuze calls it as
well, that the author mentions already in the first paragraph of the essay, while
it runs through the whole of the essay as Deleuze keeps coming back to it in
relation to his thoughts. So, what is so important about a map in Deleuzes
philosophy?
Again, we can grasp the idea of the map better in comparison to tracing.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, tracing can produce only reproductions as
it comes always back to the same. Alternatively, Deleuze and Guattaris
rhizome is a map, which is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is
detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987 p. 13) and perhaps most importantly it always has multiple
entryways (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 p. 14). In What Children Say
Deleuze is criticizing Freud for referring everything that little Hans is saying,
doing or feeling back to the father-mother-child relationship as if parents
had primary places or functions that exist independently of milieus (Deleuze,
1997 p. 61). Freuds psychoanalysis has only ever been tracings or photos of
the unconscious with all the betrayals that implies (Deleuze and Guattari,
8

Talking about the Oedipus complex in particular, Freud has said in his book The
Interpretation of Dreams: His fate moves us only for the reason that it might have been ours,
for the Oracle has put the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. Perhaps we are
all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers and our first hatred and
our first murderous wishes towards our fathers; our dreams convince us of it. (Freud, 1913 p.
223)
9
Instead doesnt mean that Deleuze and Guattari would like to forget or delete all root-tree
philosophies. I will talk about this more further on in the essay.
10
Deleuze and Guattari describe the characteristics of a rhizome profoundly in the first
chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. Considering that they would all need an extensive
discription, in this essay I will only mention and describe a relevant selection of them.

1987 p. 15). However, for Deleuze, parents are only one part of the milieu, of
the map, alongside with other qualities, substances, powers, and events that
children travel through. Furthermore, Deleuze says: the trajectory merges not
only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu but also with the
subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel
through it (Deleuze, 1997 p. 61). The same relationship that Freuds parentsidea has to Deleuzes milieu (being a part of it, but not the only part) we can
think also of Freud and his root-tree psychoanalysis having to Deleuzes
rhizomatic philosophy. As Deleuze and Guattari say it themselves: To be
rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or
better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange
new uses (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 p. 17).
As we can see in What Children Say, Freud and psychoanalysis confines
every desire and statement to a genetic axis or overcoding structure an
unconscious that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses
of memory and language (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 p. 13). This brings me
to the second point in the essay that brings us closer to grasping Deleuzes
affect

methodologies.

According

to

Deleuze,

Freuds

conception

of

unconscious consists of monotonous tracingof the Oedipus complex a

childs repressed memories of the desire to possess sexually the parent of the
opposite sex in the fear of castration by the parent of the same sex,
culminating in an eternal lack.Therefore, memory for Freud is something that
can re-present and re-cognise something as the same one as that
experienced

in

the

past.

Unconscious

is

therefore

memorial,

commemorative, or monumental conception that pertains to persons or

objects, the milieus being nothing more than terrains capable of conserving,
identifying or authenticating them (Deleuze, 1997 p. 63). For Deleuze this
kind of unconscious is an archeological concept, to which he proposes
mobilized unconscious, which deals with trajectories and becomings: the
issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify
according to the tree model. The issue is to producethe unconscious, and with
it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of
the unconscious (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 pp. 19-20). Becoming is one of

the key themes in Deleuzes work which we can count as an antidote to the
westerns tradition of predominant focus upon being and identity. If the latter
defines a world of re-presentation (as it is in Freuds case), then Deleuzes
becoming defines a world of presentation anew. Some characteristics 11 of
becoming are that of continual, moving, dynamic, without a goal it moves
through every event, such that each is simultaneously start-point, end-point
and mid-point of an ongoing cycle of production (Parr, 2005 p. 22).
The human subject, for example, ought not to be conceived as a stable,
rational individual, experiencing changes but remaining, principally, the same
person. Rather, for Deleuze, ones self must be conceived as a constantly
changing assemblage of forces, an epiphenomenon arising from chance
confluences of languages, organisms, societies expectations, laws and so on.
(Parr, 2005 p. 22)

The notions of map, unconscious, and becoming are very closely related to
Deleuzes notion of affects, which brings us to the third and final point I would
like to discuss. Deleuze says in What Children Say: Maps should not be
understood only in extension, in relation to a space constituted by trajectories.
There are also maps of intensity, or density, that are concerned with what fills
space, what subtends the trajectory (Deleuze, 1997 p. 64). Deleuze goes on
stating how little Hans makes lists of affects in his conversation and how
exactly this distribution of affects is what constitutes a map of intensity. Freud,
on the contrary, claims that instead of these direct affects, it is again the
unconscious memory of childs past that influences the childs libido. For
Deleuze a list or constellation of affects, an intensive map, is a becoming
(Deleuze, 1997 p. 64), which in turn brings us to Deleuzes understanding of
art. There is no straight definition of affect as such in Deleuzes work 12 ;
however, art can bring us closer to the understanding of it, while clearing
Deleuzes understanding of art and his philosophy at the same time.
One way to talk about affect connected to the previous discussion about
rhizome is to think of it as an experimental milieu, an experimental map.
Simon OSullivan writes in his book Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari

11

Deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation are another set of important characteristics of

becoming. As Paul Patton mentions in his Introduction to the Deleuze: A Critical Reader, that
Deleuze describes philosophy as a form of thought rather than knowledge, and thought is
described as a vector of absolute deterritorialisation (Patton, 1996 p. 13).
12
Look at the note 4

how the realm of affect is all around us and there are as many different
strategies for accessing it, as there are subjects (OSullivan, 2006 p. 47). He
says: Here it is a question of making yourself a Body without Organs13, the
latter understood, in this context, as a strategy for accessing that which is
normally outside yourself (that is, outside your signifying self), your
experimental milieu which everywhere accompanies your sense of identity
(OSullivan, 2006 pp. 47-48). So how is this connected to art then? According
to Deleuze, affects make up life and art: a thing or a work of art is a block of
sensations, a compound of percepts and affects. He explains this further in
What is Philosophy: Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are
independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer
feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo
them (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994 p. 164). Sensations, affects and
perceptions make up art works whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds
any lived (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994 p. 164). Therefore, we can see that for
Deleuze, art is not a way of representing experiences and memories that we
might recognizeexactly that which was Freuds metaphysical project of the
dialectic of presence and lack. Again, Freud connects art and its creation to
the Oedipus complex. He claims that art is a representation of an artists
infantile memories based on an unconscious lack and repressed desire as
well as a possibility for an artist to become conscious of this repression
through art14. Freud makes desire nothing but expressive, an expression of
the insistentOedipal drama. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, Oedipal
desires are the bait, the disfigured image by means of which repression
catches desire in the trap (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983 p. 116). Alternatively,
Deleuze defines desire by what it does not what it is desire is a machinic
production of reality:
Thus desire has to be understood, just as difference has to be understood, as
serving a strategic function it enables a certain phenomenon to be thought,
but does not claim to be adequate to it. Desire neither expresses, nor
13

A Body Without Organs, proposed as a means of escaping the shortcomings of traditional

psychoanalysis, is another Deleuzian term which would require a more extended
clarification.Also identified as the plane of consistency, it exists within stratified fields of
organisation at the same time as it offers an alternative mode of being or experience
(becoming) (Parr, 2005 p. 33)
14
Freud discusses this more thoroughly in his analysis of Leonardo da Vinci in Leonardo da
Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910).

represents anything, it rather indicates a certain movement and a break in that

movement in all things. (Buchanan, 2000 p. 16)

Desire, in Deleuzian sense, is closely connected to affectthe latter acts as a

force of desire within an assemblage to shape meaning and relations, advise
and construct desire, and produce intensity allowing different affects in
different situations and events. Deleuze ends his essay with the following:
Trajectories and becomings: art makes each of them present in the other, it
renders their mutual presence perceptible. Thus defined, it invokes Dionysus
as the god of places of passage and things of forgetting. (Deleuze, 1997 p.
67)

In its own way, art says what children say.

Deleuze in What Children Say

Conclusion

A rhizome, a map, a milieu, a trajectory, becoming, a desire, an affect, a Body

Without Organs, a root-tree etc. all these concepts mentioned in this essay

and discussed in Deleuzes essay What Children Say are concepts Deleuze
has either invented or pulled out from their everyday habitual use and given a
new meaning. In fact, this is what philosophy is in Deleuzian sense not only
is it the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1994 p. 2) but it needs to create concepts which are always new.
As we can see from the essay all these concepts are also connected with
each other (although in many different ways, such that their nature in turn is
transformed) they presuppose a plane of immanence (Deleuze names it
also a plane of consistency, a table, a plateau, a slice etc.), which is another
important point concerning a philosophy. However, a plane of immanence is
not itself a concept it must remain open: it represents the field of becoming,
a space containing all of the possibilities inherent in forces (Parr, 2005 p.
204).
Another important point to consider that emerges from the essay is that
except creating new concepts and laying them on a plane of immanence, a
philosophy (in Deleuzian sense) also always

needs to incorporate

representational thoughts as we saw him doing that in his essay What

Children Say with Freud and his psychoanalytic understanding of desire and
representation. That means that Deleuze is not uplifting his philosophy above
other philosophies and does not demand to forget or delete them. As Ian
Buchanan explains: his frequent emphasis on the need for experimentation in
philosophy should be taken to mean that philosophy must confront
representation as both its limit and its condition of possibility (Buchanan,
2000 p.33).
All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of
flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types, bodies
without organs and their construction and selection, the plane of consistency,
and in each case the units of measure. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 p. 5)

All three points discussed and concepts mentioned in the essay could in some
way be called Deleuzian methodology as they are all connected in such a way
that it is almost impossible to talk about one without the other. However, there
is a reason for my choice to title the essay affect methodologies. Ronald
Bogue has said, based on his reading of Anti-Oedipus, that Freuds

10

discovery of desire and the unconscious opened the way to Deleuzes

conception of affect and the non-rational as central constituents of being and
thought (Bogue 2009, p. 234). As we can also see from Deleuzes essay, it
seems like the discussions on affect (and art) are exactly where Deleuze is
striving for with his maps, trajectories, milieus and desires this is how the
creation of a concept (i.e. affect) works. This is then a great characterization
of Deleuzes methodologies as it contains the three important points
philosophy should do in Deleuzes sense: create always new concepts, on a
plane of immanence, in relationship to representational thoughts and
ideas.Also, as we saw from the essay then one characteristic of an affect is
that is an experimental milieu for Deleuze, we can say, philosophy (thinking)
is as well a form of experimentation.

Bibliography

11

Bogue, Ronald (2009) Sigmund Freud. In: Graham, J. and Roffe J. ed.
Deleuzes Philosophical Lineage. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, pp. 219-237
Buchanan, Ian (2000) Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix (1994) What is Philosophy?. London:
Verso
Deleuze, Gilles (1997) What Children Say. In: Essays Critical and Clinical.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 61-68
Freud, Sigmund (1913) The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: The
MacMillan Company
OSullivan, Simon (2006) Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought
Beyond Representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan
Parr, Adrian ed. (2005)The Deleuze Dictionary.Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press
Patton, Paul ed. (1996) Deleuze: A Critical Reader.Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers

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