7/12/2017 Sense and Segmentarity: Some Markers of a Deleuzian-Guattarian SociologySociological Theory - William Bogard, 1998

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Sense and Segmentarity: Some Markers of a Deleuzian-Guattarian

Sociology
William Bogard
First Published March 1, 1998 Research Article

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Abstract

Although the focus of their work was rarely explicitly sociological, Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari developed concepts that have important and often profound implications
for social theory and practice. Two of these, sense and segmentarity, provide us with
entirely new ways to view sociological problems of meaning and structure. Deleuze
conceives sense independently of both agency and signification. That is, sense is
neither the manifestation of a communicating subject nor a structure of languageit is
noncorporeal, impersonal, and prelinguistic, in his words, a pure effect or event. With

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Guattari, Deleuze notes that it is not a question of how subjects produce social
structures, but how a machinics of desire produces subjects. In Deleuze and Guattari,
desire is not defined as a want or a lack, but as a machinery of forces, flows, and
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breaks of energy. The functional stratification we witness in social life isMore
only the molar
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7/12/2017 Sense and Segmentarity: Some Markers of a Deleuzian-Guattarian SociologySociological Theory - William Bogard, 1998

nds
effect of a more primary segmentation of desire that occurs at the molecular level, at
the level of bodies. In Deleuze and Guattari, bodies are not just human bodies, but
anorganic composites or mixtures, organic form itself being a mode of the body's
subjectification. The problem of the subject, and thus of the constitution of society, is
first a problem of how the sense of bodies is produced through the assembly of
desiring-machines. The subject, we could say, is the actualization of desire on the
incorporeal surface of bodies.

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