Malins, Peta. Review of Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke, eds. DELEUZE, GUATTARI, AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE NEW. NDPR (December 2009).

O'Sullivan, Simon, and Stephen Zepke, eds. Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New. London: Continuum, 2008. The recent proliferation of books and anthologies focusing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari has been a cause for both celebration and concern. There is something unsettling about a growing commercial interest in the field: a sense that a kind of Deleuzo-Guattarian industry might be emerging, with publishers and authors churning out increasingly short-hand, commodified interpretations of their thought. Yet there is also something inescapably exciting about it all too: a sense of anticipation and delight at both the rhizomatic spread in and of itself, as well as a the possibilities that each new encounter might open up for rethinking -- and re-doing -- the contemporary world. It was with this latter optimism that I approached Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke's Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New. Fortunately, O'Sullivan and Zepke's collection not only explores the importance of the 'new' to our future ethico-political health, but attests to it in its very being. Rather than re-hashing familiar Deleuze and Guattari territory, or simply capitalizing on the quirkiness of their unfamiliar concepts, this collection offers innovative in-depth encounters between these philosophers and an array of political and artistic assemblages and problematics. In doing so it necessarily shifts the ways in which we can think about Deleuze and Guattari's concepts and the various fields to which they have been connected. The collection thus acts, at least to some extent, like a lever with which we might, as Massumi suggests, begin to pry open a gap in the 'World As We Know It'. The main aim of the anthology is to explore -- and put to work -- the concept of the new as it emerges from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly their jointly authored Capitalism and Schizophrenia texts and Guattari's relatively under-utilized individual works. This is a daunting task, given the central role that the production of the new plays within their philosophy: as the generative force of differentiation that drives life itself in its battle against stagnation, habit and paralysis. The editors do well, therefore, to narrow the field by outlining a range of subsidiary aims, or problematics, to which the collection is addressed. These include: the role of art and aesthetics in the production of new modes of thought and being; the capacity for repetition to become aligned with difference, rather than with recognition and representation; the problem of the new in relation to contemporary capitalism, given the extent to which creativity and innovation are being increasingly co-opted by mass marketing rhetoric and practice; and the role of the new in contemporary forms of resistance. The anthology comprises 18 specifically commissioned essays, which each take up and extend at least one of these themes. These are preceded by a thoughtful and accessible editorial introduction, and followed, at the end of the collection, with a newly translated extract from Guattari's Cartographies Schizoanalytiques, which is itself accompanied by a short translator's introduction. Of the commissioned essays, some focus on a particular philosophical or political problematic relating to the new in Deleuze and Guattari's work, drawing out dynamic concepts of difference and repetition, time, the future, ethics, the virtual, experimentation, resistance, desire and creativity. Others focus on connecting the concept of the new to particular artistic and aesthetic sites. From science fiction to jazz, contemporary art to industrial music, cinema to cultural icons, these more grounded essays bring to life Deleuze and Guattari's concepts, putting them to work in familiar, and not so familiar, domains. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18368.