Sense and segmentarity: Some markers of a Deleuzian-Guattarian sociology

Although the focus of their work was rarely explicitly sociological, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed concepts that have important and ofte n profound implications for social theory and practice. Two of these, sense and segmentarity provide us,with entirely new ways to view sociological pr oblems of meaning and structure. Deleuze conceives sense independently of b oth agency and signification, That is, sense is neither the manifestation o f a communicating subject nor a structure of language-it is noncorporeal, i mpersonal, and prelinguistic, in his,words, a "pure effect or event." With Guattari, Deleuze notes that it is not a question of how subjects produce s ocial structures, but how a "machinics of desire" produces subjects. In Del euze and Guattari, desire is not defined as a want or a lack, but as a mach inery of forces, flows, and breaks of energy. The functional stratification we witness in social life is only the molar effect of a more primary segme ntation of desire that occurs at the molecular level, at the level of bodie s. In Deleuze and Guattari, bodies are not just human bodies, but "anorgani c" composites or mixtures, organic form itself being a mode of the body's s ubjectification. The problem of the subject, and thus of the constitution o f society, is first a problem of how the sense of bodies is produced throug h the assembly of desiring-machines. The subject, we could sag: is the actu alization of desire on the incorporeal surface of bodies.