# Deleuze and the Internet



## somnambulist (Mar 16, 2009)

Το άρθρο έχει ενδιαφέρον γιατί εφαρμόζει ζόρικες (στην κατανόηση, τη χρήση και τη χρησιμότητα) ντελεζιανές έννοιες σε εμπειρικό περιβάλλον. Αποτελεί, δηλαδή, υπόδειγμα αυτού που λέμε πρακτικός ντελεζισμός. Το αναρτώ με αφορμή τη συζήτηση για το διαδίκτυο σε άλλο νήμα. 

Deleuze and the Internet

by Ian Buchanan

I've found myself more and more wary of Google out of some primal lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source.

John Battelle.1

There can be no doubt that the Internet has transformed practically every aspect of contemporary life, especially the way we think about the body and its relation to identity and to place, once the twin cornerstones of social existence: in social life you are always someone from somewhere, the son or daughter of so-and-so from such-and-such town. These details of our existence, which are essentially historical, although they may sometimes take a form biologists think belongs to their domain (i.e., gender, race, body shape), segment us in different ways, slicing and dicing us this way and that so that we adhere to the conventions and demands of the socius itself.

We are segmented in a binary fashion, following the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men-women, adults-children, and so on. We are segmented in a circular fashion, in ever larger circles, ever wider disks or coronas, like Joyce's 'letter': my affairs, my neighbourhood's affairs, my city's, my country's, the world's . We are segmented in a linear fashion, along a straight line or a number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an episode or 'proceeding': as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another, forever proceduring or procedured, in the family, in the school, in the army, on the job.2

These segmentations penetrate our being, they appear and even feel bodily, especially the apparently natural attributes of gender and race, but they are not for all that visceral. Deleuze and Guattari are very specific about this. They describe these socially orchestrated captures of the body - gender, race, class, work, family, and so on - as 'incorporeal transformations'. If, today, as Deleuze foresaw with typical acuity in his short paper on what he labelled 'the society of control', our credit card and social security numbers are more significant identity and place markers than the colour of our skin or where we went to school, that isn't because the 'meat' of our bodies has lately been superseded in its cultural significance by our bloodless digital 'profile'. Rather what has happened is that one incorporeal 'apparatus of capture' has been succeeded by another - the segmentations of gender, race and class have been supplanted by the segmentations of debt and credit. "A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt."3

Η συνέχεια εδώ.


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