Flow and Resistance: In order to think about resistance from a Deleuze and Guattari perspective, one would first need to think about flow, a notion that brings together two key concepts in their work: affect and assemblage. In Anti-Oedipus, we are told that the desiring-machine, the forerunner to the assemblage, does two things: it sets flows in motion, and it disrupts flows. “For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions.” Despite its prominence on literally the first page of Anti-Oedipus, this key aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the assemblage has largely been overlooked or ignored by assemblage theory as it has developed over the last two decades. Yet in the absence of a notion of flow, which like so many of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts also has several cognates, such as molecularity and flight, it is difficult to grasp what Deleuze and Guattari mean by saying desire is productive. For it is precisely flows that a productive desire produces and draws it surplus from. Isolated from its fundamental relation to flow, which is by definition external to the assemblage that disrupts it, it is easy to see how the concept of the assemblage has come to be understood as the ‘assembling’ of some kind of self-contained, self-powering, combination of things, or ‘object’, when in fact it should be understood as an apparatus for the production and capture of flows. Many of today’s conflicts, to speak to the theme of resistance, turn precisely on flows: of people, resources, finance, energy, and so on.
Ian Buchanan is Professor of Cultural Studies and Head of Head of Discipline for Cultural Studies, Indigenous Studies, Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Humanities, University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia. He has published on a wide variety of subjects across a range of disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, communications studies and philosophy, as well as on film, music, space, the internet and war. He is currently writing a book which combines assemblage theory and affect theory. Among his publications are: Assemblage Theory and Method, Bloomsbury 2020; Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory, OUP 2018; Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Continuum 2008, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, Continuum 2006; and collections such as Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature (with Aidan Tynan and Tim Matts), Bloomsbury 2015; Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Arts (with Lorna Collins), Bloomsbury 2014; and Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (with Patricia MacCormack), Continuum 2008.