16 Deleuze: History and Science.
unwittingly express unfavorable facts. The material components of the assemblage are more straightforward, consisting both of the physical bodies assembled in space, close enough to hear each other and correctly oriented towards one another, as well as the attention needed to keep the conversation going and the labor involved in repairing breaches of etiquette or recovering from embarrassing events. 10 Some technological inventions, such as the telephone, can change the requirement of co-presence, eliminating some of the material components (spatial proximity) but adding others: the technological device itself, as well as the infrastructure needed to link many such devices.
Processes of territorialization giving a conversation well-defined borders in space and time are exemplified by behavior guided by conventions. As assemblages conversations have a temporal structure, in which ways of initiating and terminating an encounter, as well as taking turns during the encounter, are normatively enforced by the participants. The spatial boundaries of these units are clearly defined partly because of the physical requirement of co-presence and because the participants themselves ratify each other as legitimate interactors excluding nearby persons from intruding into the conversation. 11 Embarrassment, damaging as it is to the public personas projected during the encounter, may be viewed as the main destabilizing factor, by taking attention away from the conversation and focusing it on the embarrassed participant. Goffman discusses critical points of embarrassment after which regaining composure becomes impossible to achieve, embarrassment is transmitted to all participants, and the conversation falls apart. 12 But other critical events may take place that transform a conversation into a heated discussion, or an intense argument into a fist fight. These should also be considered deterritorializing factors, as should technological inventions that allow the conversation to take place at a distance blurring its spatial boundaries.
When many conversations among the same groups of participants, or among different but overlapping groups, have taken place a new social entity may emerge: an interpersonal network. This may be a network of friends or professional colleagues living in different places, or the tightly-knit
Deleuze: History and Science.??17
communities that have already been discussed. To analyze this larger assemblage we can use the resources offered by network theory, the only part of theoretical sociology which has been successfully formalized. In the theory of networks the recurring patterns of links between nodes are often more important than the defining properties of the nodes themselves, a fact that orients the theory towards relations of exteriority. The links in a network may be characterized in a variety of ways: by their presence or absence, the absences indicating the borders separating one network from another, or defining a clique within a given network; by their strength, that is, by the frequency of interaction among the persons occupying the nodes, as well as by the emotional content of the relation; and by their reciprocity, that is, by the mutuality of obligations entailed by the link. As argued above, one of the most important properties of an interpersonal network is its density, a measure of the degree of connectivity among its indirect links. 13
The links in a network must be constantly maintained and the labor involved constitutes one of the material components. This labor goes beyond the task of staying in touch with others via frequent conversations. It may also involve listening to problems and giving advice in difficult situations, as well as a providing a variety of forms of physical help, such as taking care of other people’s children. In many communities there exists a division of labor when it comes to the maintenance of relations, with women performing a disproportionate amount of it, particularly those who, by obligation or choice, are involved in full time domestic activities. 14 A variety of expressions of solidarity and trust emerging from, and then shaping, interactions, are a crucial component of these assemblages These range from routine acts like having dinner together or going to church, to the sharing of adversity and the displayed willingness to make sacrifices for the community as a whole. 15 Expressions of solidarity may, of course, involve language, but in this case actions speak louder than words. As in the case of conversations, the value of the territorialization parameter is closely related to physical proximity. Much as conversations, in the absence of technology, involve face to face interaction, communities structured by
18 Deleuze: History and Science.
dense networks have historically tended to inhabit the same small town, or the same suburb or ethnic neighborhood in a large city. These bounded geographical areas are literally a community’s territory and they may be marked, and distinguished from others, by special expressive signs. Deterritorializing processes include any factor that decreases density, promotes geographical dispersion, or eliminates some of the rituals that, like churchgoing, are key to the maintenance of traditional solidarity. Social mobility and secularization are among these processes. The former weakens links by making people less interdependent, by increasing geographical mobility, and by promoting a greater acceptance of difference through less local and more cosmopolitan attitudes. For the same reason, the resulting deterritorialized networks require their members to be more active in the maintenance of links and to invent new forms of communal participation, given that connections will tend to be wider and weaker and that ready-made rituals for the expression of solidarity may not be available. 16 The same kind of resourcefulness in the means to maintain linkages may be needed in interpersonal networks deterritorialized by technology. For example, in the early “virtual communities” that emerged in the internet (such as the Well) the members were aware of the loss that a lack of co-presence involved and special meetings or parties were regularly scheduled to compensate for this. 17 While in a friendship network a particular node may become dominant by being more highly connected, directly and indirectly, to other nodes, this centrality or popularity rarely gives the person occupying that position the capacity to issue commands to those located in less centrally located nodes. This capacity implies the existence of an authority structure, and this, in turn, means that we are dealing with a different assemblage: an institutional organization. Organizations come in a wide range of scales, with nuclear families at the low end and government bureaucracies and commercial, industrial or financial corporations at the other end. A modern hierarchical organization may be studied as an assemblage given that the relations between its components are relations of exteriority, that is, what holds the whole together are relatively impermanent contractual relations through which some persons transfer rights of control over a subset of their actions to other persons. This
Deleuze: History and Science.??19
voluntary submission breaks the symmetry of the relations among persons in an interpersonal network where a high degree of reciprocity is common. 18 There is a variety of forms of authority. In small organizations, like religious sects, the charisma of a leader may be enough to legitimize commands but as soon as the number of members increases past a certain threshold, formal authority becomes necessary, justified by a tradition, as in organized religion, or by actual problem-solving performance, as in the case of bureaucracies. 19 In all organizations the automatic obedience to commands on a day to day basis constitutes a powerful expression of legitimacy. For the same reason any act of disobedience, particularly when it goes unpunished, threatens this expression and may damage the morale of those who do obey. Hence, the expressive role of some forms of punishment designed to make an example of transgressors. Punishment, on the other hand, also has a physical aspect, and this points to the material components of the assemblage, related not so much to practices of legitimization as to practices of enforcement. In charismatic and traditional organization these practices may involve torture, mutilation, confinement, exile. But in modern bureaucracies, as well as in many other members of the population of organizations (prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, barracks) enforcement uses subtler but perhaps more efficient means: a specific use of space, in which dangerous groupings are broken up and individual persons are assigned a relatively fixed place; systematic forms of inspection and monitoring of activity, a practice that shapes and is shaped by the analytical use of space; and finally, a constant use of logistical writing, like the careful keeping of medical or school records, to permanently store the product of monitoring practices. 20
As with interpersonal networks, territoriality in the case of organizations has a strong spatial aspect. Most organizations possess physical premises within which they carry on their activities and which, in some cases, define the extent of their jurisdiction. This territory is defined both formally, by the legitimate jurisdictional area, as well as materially, by the area in which authority can actually be enforced. But just as in
20 Deleuze: History and Science.
interpersonal networks, processes of territorialization go beyond the strictly spatial. The routinization of everyday activities, in the form of the repetition of rituals or the systematic performance of regulated activities, stabilizes the identity of organizations and gives them a way to reproduce themselves, as when a commercial organization opens up a new branch and sends part of its staff to bring with them the institutional memory (the day to day routines) of the parent company. Technological innovation, on the other hand, can destabilize this identity, deterritorializing an organization, and opening the assemblage to change. Transportation and communication technologies, for example, can have deterritorializing effects on organizations similar to those on face to face interaction, allowing organizations to break away from the limitations of spatial location. The modern bureaucratic form of authority may have emerged in part thanks to the precision with which the dispersed activities of many branches of an organization could be coordinated via the railroads and the telegraph. 21 And a similar point can be made about the transformation that large commercial or industrial corporations underwent in the nineteenth century, as they became nationwide corporations, as well as in the twentieth century when they became international. Individual organizations may form larger social entities, such as the supplier and distribution networks linked to large industrial firms, or the already mentioned hierarchies of governmental agencies operating within smaller or larger jurisdictions depending on their rank. Let’s skip this important layer to describe the largest scales, such as cities or nation-states. Neither urban centers nor territorial states should be confused with the organizations that make up their government, even if the jurisdictional boundaries of the latter coincide with the geographical boundaries of the former. Cities and nation-states must be viewed as physical locales in which a variety of differently scaled social agents carry on their day to day activities. A city, for example, possesses not only a physical infrastructure and a given geographical setting, but it also houses a diverse population of persons; a population of interpersonal networks, some dense and well localized, others dispersed and shared with other cities; a population of organizations of different sizes and functions, some of which make up larger
【德勒兹研究】德勒兹：历史与科学
