Posthegemonic Comments
I'm interested in this concept of the diagram. Do you know if Deleuze uses it anywhere else than in the book on Foucault or is it just his gloss on Foucault's 'dispositif' and/or 'episteme'? (Granted, given Deleuze's particular way of reading other thinkers, such a distinction between his own concepts and his gloss on a Foucauldian concept may have little validity.) Also, in the Foucault book, Deleuze compares the diagram to Kant's categories, except he argues they're Kantian categories historicised with reference to a particular 'historical formation'. Wouldn't that return to us to questions of determination/overdetermination or have I missread Deleuze and/or you on that question?
Anyway, I think this is an interesting notion but I'm not convinced I've understood it properly.
Jeremy.
Jezzer, Deleuze and Guattari talk at some length about the diagrammatic in A Thousand Plateaus. There's also a fair bit of overlap with the Foucault book, especially, if I remember correctly, in the section "The Geology of Morals." (I don't have my books to hand just now.)
It'd be good to hear from a more die-hard Foucauldian (I'm looking at you, Craig), but I'd say that the diagram differs from both the dispositif and the episteme.
Regarding the latter, for instance, the diagram is prior to, or rather envelops and determines, a given age's regime of visibility (institutionality) as well as articulability (and so discourse).
And regarding the former, the dispositif seems to me closer to the Deleuzian assemblage. And as he and Guattari say in What is Philosophy? (which I do have to hand): "Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts" (36).
NB though that I think there are two senses of "abstract machine" here, one the absolute plane of immanence (to which this quotation refers), the other (the diagram) specific to given social orders, but I think in both cases it'd be fair to say that the assemblages (dispositifs) constitute the machine's "working parts."
As for Kant and to determination... Deleuze indeed argues that Foucault is a neo-Kantian (because his interest is in "conditions"). But his interest is in causality rather than determination... this may sound like casuistry, but it helps prevent confusion with Marxist (over)determination.
For a reading of Deleuze in which much is made of causality, see Michael Hardt's book.
Conveniently, in addition to the book on the diagram, Deleuze wrote a short article on the dispotif called, simply enough, "What is a dispotif?". The article can be found in either Michel Foucault: Philosopher or Foucault and his Interlocutors. (I confuse the two books all the time.) I haven't read either in a while, so I don't recall if Deleuze compares the dispotif and the diagram in the article.
Foucault, of course, isn't clear on this. To a large extent, I think Deleuze is (as he puts it in reference to Kant) bending Foucault and making a bastard child. In "The Confession of the Flesh", Alain Grosrichard and Jacques-Alain Miller go after Foucault for this conceptual unclarity. Michel responds,
"If you like, I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus [note: dispotif] which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible from those that will be acceptable within, I won't say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the 'apparatus' [note: dispotif] which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific."
It goes on from there. Deleuze is, to a large extent, inventing these concepts. Or at least imputing a lot into Foucault. The book on Foucault is actually a book on Deleuze, but he just wasn't vain enough to call the book Deleuze.
Nik Rose, who writes good textbooks for graduate students, knows diagrams (even if he doesn't know Deleuze and Foucault). See his Powers of Freedom.
Many thanks to both of you - much food for thought here & if I get time, I'll chase up some of these references.
Jeremy.
You might find pg 89 of Deleuze's "Foucault" useful, well pgs 83 to the top of 90.
Second para of pg 89 directly relates to this discussion, on the 'third power' and see also fn 28 for this chap.: "Strategies or the non-stratified" btw, I am not sure if this is deleuze's footnote or the translator's. What do you think?
very frustrating. in fact, this book is very poorly edited. so many spelling mistakes, etc.
actually the whole chap. relates to disc. see pg 92-93. v. useful for ur work, jon!
Glen, I'm a little confused as to whom you're addressing. After all, my original post is a discussion of (the first part of) Deleuze's Foucault.
Sorry, yes, my comment was written very poorly. I originally wrote "you might find page 89 of Foucault useful", then realised that foucault (proper name) is an author and the title of the book, so I added 'deleuze's', now it looks like I ignored the rest of the conversation!
I meant in reference to the points you raised in your post:
"It's not entirely clear here how Deleuze envisages the process of change. There's something rather functionalist about his account. Here, at least, there's no conception of agency or constituent power."
A bit further on, deleuze wites:
"It is still from the outside that a force affects, or is affected by, others. The power to affect or be affected is carried out in a variable way, depending onthe forces involved in the relation. The diagram, as the fixed form of a set of relations between forces [realtions between forces defined earlier as 'power'], never exhausts force, which can enter into other relations and compositions. The diagram stems from the outside but he outside does not merge with any diagram, and continues instead to 'draw' new ones. INthis way the outside is always an opening on to a future: nothing ends since nothing as begun, but everything is transformed. In this sense force displays potentiality with respect to the diagram containing it, or possesses a third power which presents itself as the possibility of 'resistance'. In fact, alongside (or rather opposite) particular features of power which correspond to its relations, a diagram of forces presents particular features of resistance, such as 'points, knots or focuses' which act in turn on the strata, but in such a way as to make change possible. Moreover, the final word on power is that *resistance comes first*, to the extent that power relations operate completely within the diagram, while resistances necessarily operate in a direct relation with the oputside from which the diagrams emerge. ^28^ This means that a social field offers more resistance than strategies, and the thought of the outside is a thought of resistance." (Deleuze, "Foucault" pg 89-90)
footnote 28 (pg 144): See Dreyfus and Rabinow, p. 211. And on the six particular features presented by contemporary forms of resistance see pp. 211-222 (especially the 'transversality' of present struggles, an idea common to both Foucault and Felix Guattari). In Foucault, there is an echo of Mario Tronti's interpretation of Marxism (M. Tronti, Ouvriers et Capital [Paris: Editions Bourgois, 1977]) as a 'workers'' resistance existing *prior* to the strategies of capital.
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