RONNIE LIPPENS and JAMIE MURRAY

INTRODUCTION: DELEUZE AND THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW

‘‘If I had not had done with law I would not be doing
jurisprudence’’. Towards another law.

1. The Thread

What do machines do? Machines use and process energy, or force,

and matter. Out of this process comes something new. Machines
produce. They add to the world. They add to life. They produce
life. Life emerges in and through that which machines do. Law on
the other hand rarely adds anything to the world. Law prohibits,
curtails, halts. Law takes the force of energy and matter and re-
duces it to its own order, to its own stasis. Law does not produce
anything new. Nothing except itself emerges from Law. Law does
not add to life. It does not produce life. Law just feeds on life, di-
gests it, and metabolizes it into its own order. Life, new life won’t
emerge from Law. Law blocks off life. It nips life’s potential in the
bud. There’s precious little of life’s creativity to be found in Law.
Let us be clear: by Law we mean those assemblages that order life
through stricture, discipline, command and obedience. It might be
possible to imagine a new law, another law. One could imagine a
new type of law, and a new kind of lawyer, i.e. a creative and ethi-
cally aware artisan of life, a producer of new ways of life (MH, this
issue). But we’ll get to that new kind of lawyer later. Let us stick
with the old kind of oedipal Law for just a while longer. It should
come as no surprise that Deleuze and Guattari, in their most Nietz-
schean moments, were never great admirers of old, oedipal Law
(see also NM and JM, this issue). Deleuze, on a number of occa-
sions, explicitly preferred the moving and shifting politics of juris-
prudence, and the flows of desire therein. Jurisprudence, and the
pragmatics of desire in and through which it takes shape, indeed
becomes life, is what interests Deleuze, the lawyer. What interests
Deleuze and Guattari in particular, in the pragmatics of jurispru-
dence, is the workings of the machines of desire, the desiring
machines that operate in them. Indeed, it should not come as
too big a surprise either that the image of the machine, or the

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique (2007) 20: 1–6
DOI 10.1007/s11196-006-9042-9 Ó Springer 2006
2 RONNIE LIPPENS AND JAMIE MURRAY

machinic, figures so predominantly in Deleuzoguattarian thought:

machines of desire, machines of life, machines of becoming, ma-
chines of jurisprudence, machines everywhere, machines producing
life everywhere. The issue in Deleuzian jurisprudence is to liberate
machinic production. The issue is to machine desire into new ways
of life. The issue is to creatively assemble new ways of collective
life that are sensitive to life’s potentialities. The issue, in Deleuzian
jurisprudence, is to add to life.
Such liberation of life will not come about if oedipal Law, or any
other Law with universalist or colonial desires for that matter, is al-
lowed to capture, stratify, or code over emerging ways of life. A
Deleuzoguattarian pragmatics is about the ever-continuing multipli-
cation of forms of life, emerging as they do out of the clashes and
conjunctions of forces and desires in the social unconscious. Such
multiplication – unrelenting multiplication – of codes should pre-
vent any code from gaining or maintaining dominance. The social
unconscious is a machinic place (JM, this issue). There, machines
produce desire. Desire produces machines. New ways of life emerge,
rhizomatically, on lines of flight. If desires conjoin and the intensity
of affect reaches a certain threshold, new, virtual possibilities of life
open up. New ways of life are machined and machine on a plane of
emergence, deterritorializing from the coded territories of the old
and existing. The social unconscious incessantly produces, indeed
machines new virtualities of life. Out of the complexity of life, it
constantly generates potential. The social unconscious is the birth-
place of new, virtual ways of life. Such virtuality may actualize in
newly arranged assemblages of matter and signs. New forms of life
and social organization may actually crystallize. The Deleuzian law-
yer is to use the energy and desire in those new forms of life to
work towards the further multiplication of life. The codes and order
words around which particular social assemblages have emerged
should then not be allowed to overcode or dominate alternatives,
nor to block them off. A Deleuzian multiplication of life aims to
prevent forms of life to reterritorialize energies and desires in any
fixed way. The multiplication of life aims to prevent any assemblage
from attracting or diverting emerging ways of life towards its own
strictures, and any code, whether moral or legal, from becoming
totalitarian.
There is something in our age that makes Deleuzoguattarian
anti-oedipalism quite recognisable, familiar even. Indeed, has not
global capitalism itself, in its relentless deterritorializations, in its
 DELEUZE AND THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW 3

restless unleashing of desires, in its nomadism, in its mockery of

oedipal Law, has it not turned Deleuzian itself? It has not. It ret-
erritorializes all and everything onto itself. It is on its way to
becoming totalitarian. It only adds itself to life. It blocks off alter-
native ways of life. It is, in Nietzsche’s words, a crime against life.
The name of its game is mimicry – the eternal return to the same,
to itself. It knows no Other than itself. It seduces. It circulates
icons. It controls (NM, this issue). So where then does this leave
the law-to-come ? Where does it leave the newly becoming Deleuz-
ian lawyer, this creative artisan (MH, this issue), this multiplier of
forms of life? It leaves him to face the task of grasping the anti-
oedipal moment of our age. It leaves him to accommodate, indeed
encourage diversity. Its lines of flight incessantly reach out into the
realm of collective action. The Deleuzian law-to-come will multiply
collective assemblages. The Deleuzian lawyer-artisan is one who
joins in multiple collective undertakings. And who flees again, join-
ing yet others in the process, always ethically aware – ‘cautious’
(MH, this issue) – of the dangers in pretentious sovereignty. A De-
leuzian revolution, in all its desire for multiplicity and collectivities,
therefore, is an ethical revolution. A Deleuzian revolution is about
adding to the world and to life. It is about transforming the world
and life in such a way as to make further transformations, indeed
further multiplications possible (DM, this issue).

2. The Deleuzian Asssemblage

This issue, although initially conceived as simply a forum to draw

together a diverse set of papers from researchers working with the
theory of Deleuze and Deleuze & Guattari (‘the Deleuze assem-
blage’) in legal studies and criminology, has through its production
become more specifically a resonating network of a concept of ‘an-
other law’. This concept of ‘another law’ is found under diverse
designations across the papers: transformative justice, jurispru-
dence, Emergent Law, new law, the shape of law to come. That a
common theme of ‘another law’ is clearly developed in all the
papers, surely, draws from two key features of the Deleuzian
assemblage: the intransigent rejection of judgement and State law;
and the commitment to thought as the creation of new concepts.
The strong anti-law direction of Deleuzian thought has paradoxical
attractions for legal and criminological scholars. For scholars who
4 RONNIE LIPPENS AND JAMIE MURRAY

have followed trends of critical legal approaches, particularly post-

structuralist informed ones, or minority political critiques of law,
Deleuzian anti-legalism is so thorough going it offers an overthrow
of any binary capture between critique and law. The anti-law direc-
tion of the Deleuze assemblage is exodus and not critique, and
combat not judgement. The law of State and of capital is ‘had
done with’, not to diminish the representational battleground of
critique and law and the real politics of equality and recognition,
but to open up another front of imagination and experimentation.
One simply finds oneself individuated in an assemblage very differ-
ent to that of State legality and its subjectivity and representation.
Breaking with law is a becoming. What this breaking pushes one
towards is the practice of jurisprudence (NM, this issue), to a turn-
ing away from actualized law to a virtualized problem space of its
ontogenesis. This is the move to noology, and to the study of the
genesis, history and creation of images of legality. This is the sec-
ond common direction of the papers derived from the Deleuzian
assemblage: the virtualization of law into the virtual problem space
of legality where images of legality can be found, and, most
intriguingly, where new images of legality can be created. There is
nothing universal or given about State legality, nor capitalist axio-
matics for that matter. An image of legality is simply an informa-
tion-processing algorithm operating the social as a complex
adaptive system. As social circumstances change, speed up, scale
up, a given information processing algorithm can simply just be
outpaced, its complex adaptive system tired and lame at responding
and evolving in relation to flux in coupled environments. In these
circumstances another image of legality can arise.
Underpinning the anti-law ethic and the post-law creation of
new images of legality is the Deleuzian ontology. The ontology is
absolutely crucial to the entire working through of the Deleuzian
assemblage into legal studies, and more or less explicitly employed
and discussed in all the papers here. The ontology, drawing upon
Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, breaks with the epistemologies of
representation developed in Kant and Hegel, and points in the
direction of the corporeal assemblaging and emergence of the cos-
mos. Before the actualized and stratified worlds of language and
laws there are intensive processes of ontogenesis immanent and
autonomous in matter in a field of emergence. Matter expresses
itself, matters of expression pass back into matter, form settles into
substance, and substance overtakes forms, expression folds over
 DELEUZE AND THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW 5

contents, and contents overflow expression. This is a swirling

dynamic field of emergence where forces and potentials work
autonomous emergent processes of self-organization in matter. The
radical new can emerge potentially anywhere at anytime. In this
ontology, at the level of the social this field of forces always al-
ready feeds and is captured by the power of regimes of expression
to shape matter. But the ability of regimes of social power to shape
bodies through discourse is only one part of the ontogenesis of the
world, and not the most forceful. Indeed, these regimes of signs
can only function in reciprocal presupposition with regimes of con-
tent: material practices of bodies and things. Sense is contextual:
the regime of signs warping the continuous woof of matter. How-
ever, the dynamics of the assemblages of power, the workings of
State law and the capitalist axiomatic, are only ever presaged and
based on the capture of co-option of the immanent and autono-
mous self-organising processes found in matter in the virtual field
of emergence. This is the ontology, and it is this that drives the
specificity of the Deleuzian assemblage and its sproutings in legal
and criminological studies. One might say, to clarify what is at
stake: what is your ontology, what is your assemblage, what is
your image of thought? Are legal studies, criminology, politics pre-
pared to take the paradigm and assemblage leap that would repli-
cate the shift to the complexity paradigm in branches of
contemporary science?
The implications of the ontology of emergence and of post-law/
another law are no doubt being developed in the social sciences
now because of a sensed collective ‘structure of feeling’, to use one
of Raymond Williams’ phrases, that our social organization under
conditions of globalization and postmodernity has moved far-from-
equilibrium, and in terms of law, into a state of exception. The
society of control and Empire are the efforts of the State/capitalist
axiomatic of law to revive its structures of legality and complex
adaptive systems of discipline and control in new circumstances. Its
contemporary struggle is to contain and control the autonomous
and immanent processes that are emerging and self-organising, in
these far-from-equilibrium conditions, in the raw matter of these
power social machines. In this raw matter one finds the multitude,
now uncontained as a people that can be disciplined; a multitude
that leaves the subjection to the power assemblages, and self-organizes
itself in assemblages that directly connect energies of desiring and
productivity with networks of communication and transversal
6 RONNIE LIPPENS AND JAMIE MURRAY

connectivity. In the state of exception, what value do representa-

tional democracy and reasoned and principled critique of power
have? Rather the denunciation of power in direct action and modu-
lating direct democracies of multitude. And so, in conditions of far-
from-equilibrium, where the immanent processes of such great
force and reach of the virtual can be tapped and harnessed, why
not swing legal studies and criminology, at least in one wing, into
the field of emergence, playing out the very grave seriousness of
societies in the state of exception in inventiveness and experimenta-
tion, with the hope of collectively creating some legality that is, as
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued, more flush to the
social conditions it attempts to follow and catalyse? We are talking
here about an image of legality that is a stronger information
processing structure than that of either State or capital: a collective
intelligent adaptive system that can supplete and move beyond the
crisis in molar legalities.

R. Lippens (&)
Keele University
Staffs, ST5 5BG,
UK
E-mail: r.lippens@crim.keele.ac.uk

J. Murray
Liverpool John Moores University
Josephine Butler House, 1 Myrtle Street,
Liverpool, L7 4DN,
UK
E-mail: j.murray1@livjm.ac.uk