Animations of Deleuze and Guattari (review)

Anthologies are notoriously difficult to review, and this volume is no exception. It does have one huge advantage, for reviewer and anthology alike: its clear, consistent focus on the question of what can be done with conceptual tools developed by Deleuze and Guattari. Yet even more than most anthologies, this one is extremely uneven. One essay (thankfully found toward the end of the collection) needed a great deal more editorial input and revision before being published; it verges on the unreadable. At the other end of the spectrum lies one of the most beautifully and rigorously constructed essays on music, affect, and childhood from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective that I have seen. Content varies widely—ranging from Jennifer Slack’s study of The Matrix (“Everyday Matrix” [9-29]), to Slack and Christa Albrecht-Crane’s examination of the implications of affect for pedagogy (“Toward a Pedagogy of Affect” [191-216])—and it varies in quality almost as much as it does in style. One of the risks of forging connections between conceptual tools and novel materials, as Charles Stivale puts it toward the beginning of the volume, is that “the conceptual framework and terminology used here might seem to obscure rather than clarify” the diverse topics under consideration. (Happily, this is not true in his “Feeling the Event” [31-58], where richly detailed accounts of Cajun music-dance spaces and events serve nicely to illuminate a carefully chosen set of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts.) But obscurity may be only the most dramatic risk in this kind of enterprise. Ideally, concepts and topics provide mutually enhancing illumination; but a difficult philosophical concept can be carefully deployed without shedding enough light on the topic being considered to justify its deployment. The topic, in turn, may not engage or enrich the concepts in any significant way. Several of the essays included here unfortunately succumb to one or the other of these two misfortunes, in that their topics, while perhaps interesting in their own right, don’t really contribute to or benefit from the animation of specifically Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts.