Book Review

Craig Lundy (2012) History and Becoming: Deleuzes Philosophy of

Creativity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
As is well known, Deleuze and Guattari are notable for their eschewal of
the word or in relation to potential conceptual and creative encounters.
It is always a question of and as a means of propagating difference
and becoming through a combination of rupture and affirmation,
thereby circumventing the capture of signification, recognition and
representation, binary structures which stymie the production of new
subjectivities. It thus seems anomalous to discover in the Deleuzian
canon as well as Deleuze and Guattaris later collaborations a
stubborn predilection for opposing history and becoming as mutually
incompatible, largely because the former is always identified with a
capturing, ex post facto historicism while the latter, because of its
trans-situational potential, is the very stuff (as indeterminate excess)
of philosophy. In Negotiations, for example, Deleuze unequivocally
states that Becoming isnt part of history; history amounts only to the
set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order
to become, that is, to create something new (Deleuze 1995: 171).
A Thousand Plateaus continues the polemic, aligning history with a
syntagmatic teleology: All history does is to translate a coexistence of
becomings into a succession (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 430). Even
worse, History is always written from the sedentary point of view and
in the name of the unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one,
even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology,
the opposite of a history (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 23). Becoming
is always viewed as a productive, virtual force for change (puissance);
while history/historicism is equated with power/control (pouvoir): the
actual of the State. Deleuze even goes so far as to contrast history
unfavourably with geography: We think too much in terms of history,
Deleuze Studies 8.4 (2014): 569578
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dls

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whether personal or universal. Becomings belong to geography, they are
orientations, directions, entries and exits (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 2).
In his provocative new book, Craig Lundy subjects Deleuze and
Guattaris uncharacteristic binary tendencies in reducing history to
historicism to a form of immanent critique, in effect putting the
and back in the equation to create a hybrid, composite form that
is neither pure history nor pure becoming, thereby folding the virtual
into the actual and vice versa. Thus Lundy attempts to show that
historical reality is always more than the actual through its productive,
transmuting relationship with the virtual and incorporeal (and by
extension the two different forms of Stoic temporality that of Chronos
and of Aion). The result is a history irreducible to both historicism and
pure becoming an in-between composite that Lundy variously calls
history/becoming or historiophilosophy. This entails the construction
of a model of history that can be explained in five different ways
(corresponding to Lundys five different chapters), namely, the abyss
of the intensive-depth (focusing largely on the corporeal intensities of
Difference and Repetition); the dynamic surface (via the incorporeal
event of The Logic of Sense); the nomadic of A Thousand Plateaus;
the universal-contingent; and finally historiophilosophy itself through a
detailed look at the use of conceptual personae in Deleuze and Guattaris
What Is Philosophy?
In the final chapter of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze sees
creativity as a relation of depth and surface to the movement between
them, a trial run perhaps for the subsequent transverse relation of
chaoids to chaos in What Is Philosophy? Thus, as Lundy, echoing
Deleuzes position, argues,
all extensive reality is the product of an intensive process that comes from the
depths and emerges at the surface. While the creative movement from depth
to surface is referred to as a becoming, history concerns the retrospective
identification and representation of this productive process. Or does it? (10)

In attempting to rephrase this question in terms of history-as-becoming,

Lundy draws on Deleuze himself, Henri Bergson, Fernand Braudel,
Charles Pguy and Nietzsche to posit history as an intensive-depth that,
far from being anti-becoming, is actually in productive relation with it,
for if an intensive force is to move from depth to the surface, then the
historical process of production will need to be enlisted, not overcome
(10). Significantly, in On History (1980), Braudel saw this as a historical
process-in-depth, arguing that we can only come to know the life of
an event by living with it, not by externally tracking its movement.

Review 571
In contrast, in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari cite Pguy
on the same lines but in terms of philosophy, not history:
[T]here are two ways of considering the event. One consists in going over the
course of the event, in recording its effectuation in history, its conditioning
and deterioration in history. But the other consists in reassembling the event,
installing oneself in it as in a becoming, becoming young again and aging in
it, both at the same time, going through all its components or singularities.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 111)

Lundy convincingly makes the latter process compatible with history

by turning to one of Deleuzes chief philosophical forebears, Nietzsche,
who was never against history per se, only its timely incarnations (the
monumental and the antiquarian) as opposed to critical, useful history
for life. It is Nietzsches critical scepticism that questions whether
a philosopher could ever have ultimate and real opinions, whether
behind every one of his caves there is not, must not be, another deeper
cave a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface,
an abysmally deep ground behind every ground, under every attempt to
furnish grounds (Nietzsche 1996: 229).
Deleuze of course sees these intensities as becomings, while history
can only account for an extensive recording of intensities. This raises an
obvious series of questions: can history be intensive? Is the latter a viable
ontology and methodology of history? What would this alternative,
creative history bring into being? Following Bergson, the identity of
intensity is produced by a constitutive difference. Indeed, Deleuze is
not concerned in Difference and Repetition with a difference predicated
on spatio-temporal divisions such as past/present/future but, following
Spinoza, speeds and slownesses, issues of level, temperature, pressure,
potential in short, difference of/as intensity. Far from being cowed,
Lundy takes this as a challenge, arguing that history cannot be reducible
to time alone but must also include space that is, nomadology,
topology, geophilosophy which are all based on intensity-as-difference.
This produces an innate aporia, for if intensity/difference is to be
conditioned and correlated in and through extensivity, it ultimately must
put an end to itself: intensity is inherently suicidal. As Deleuze points out,
Intensity is difference, but this difference tends to deny or to cancel itself out
in extensity and underneath quality. It is true that qualities are signs which
flash across the interval of a difference. In so doing, however, they measure
the time of an equalization in other words, the time taken by the difference
to cancel itself out in the extensity in which it is distributed. (Deleuze 1994:
223)

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A way out of this double bind is to show that history is itself constitutive.
Taking his lead from far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics which
evades a radical finalism Lundy attempts to show that intensive
productivity can remain open and contingent, producing differentiated
histories that can no longer be taken for granted: History becomes
constitutive at precisely that point where the future becomes open [. . . ]
Thus to allow for the contingency of the event is to affirm the historical
processes of production, not to deny them (20).
It Is here that Lundy turns to Bergsons heterogeneous multiplicity of
duration an indivisible movement irreducible to a shared homogeneous
space (epitomised by the race between Achilles and the tortoise, where
each participant is placed on their own indivisible duration, thereby
allowing Achilles to ultimately overtake his slower opponent) in order
to make history compatible with depth. Situating ourselves within the
intensive depths entails placing ourselves within the past as it moves
towards the present in order to make a composite of the two as
duration. Braudel ties this process directly to a history for life: Just
like life itself, history seems to us to be a fleeting spectacle, always in
movement, made up of a web of problems meshed inextricably together,
and able to assume a hundred different and contradictory aspects in turn
(Braudel 1980: 10). Lundy argues that each form of history needs an
appropriate explication of the different durations involved of men and
women, of societies, of worlds. Thus there can be no unilateral history,
whether dubbed economic, racial or technological.
However,
Whereas depth for Bergson, Braudel and Pguy is in many respects an
historical depth that is intensively productive in relation to the present and
future, for Deleuze depth is a realm of becoming that is in turn overlaid by
historical extensities. How then are we to explain this discrepancy? (27)

Lundy argues that Deleuze repositions Bergson, Braudel and Pguy

against history to emphasise the future orientation of his own
philosophy-qua-philosophy. Yet the others are also future-oriented so
what is the creative role of history in this relation of depths of past
to what is to come? My claim is not just that the empirical facts of
history have an impact on what comes next, argues Lundy, but rather
that the intensive features of history are productive of the empirical
extensive facts of history (hence two kinds of history) (29). In short,
intensive-depths produce identities through their very difference, what
Nietzsche called will to power. It is the affirmation of this becoming as
Being that Nietzsche called the eternal return, for while the will to

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power is the play of difference, the eternal return is the being of that
difference it is that which is said of difference (32). Nietzsches history
is untimely, it acts counter to our time [. . . ] for the benefit of a time
to come (Nietzsche 1983: 60, cited in Lundy 2012: 35). Significantly,
when Deleuze quotes this line he omits the first half of the phrase because
of his vested interest in pitting the future against the past, contrasting
becoming to history. Conversely, Nietzsche stresses the importance of
both philology and history for life, for becoming is instrumental in
creating that very history it must be made experimental as a history
for the future. In this regard Nietzsche is perfectly Deleuzian he also
attacks historicism but in the name of history.
Shifting his attention to Deleuzes The Logic of Sense, Lundy extends
this argument from a focus on the intensive depths to the incorporeal
surface in an attempt to make this surface-becoming compatible with
nomadology and the different chaoid planes of What Is Philosophy?
Obviously, surface becoming is different than that of the depths and
requires a different model: it is organised like a chessboard with
a given plan. It has a logical organisation (the chaoid planes of
immanence, organisation and composition) which is given all at once
and stretches to infinite limits, in a constant state of renewal. This
dynamic process of creation also spills beyond each level of systematicity
as the dynamic process works transversally across and between planes
and their different levels. As Lundy points out,
The historical process that Deleuze describes and employs in the latter series
of The Logic of Sense will thus lie somewhere between these two extremes
of pure becoming and historicism. It will also lie between the depths of
corporeal bodies and the incorporeal surface, insofar as it is what generates
the movement from the former to the latter through a process of historical
creativity. (401)

Developmental becoming and historical progression cannot be reduced

to the surface itself as this will negate the innate difference of the steps
between and across the planes. This accounts for the key role of the
between in Lundys methodology.
One of the innate shortcomings of the incorporeal surface is that it
transforms the dynamic intensities of the corporeal depths into static
states of equilibrium as a base for judgement and comparison by the
intellect. Surfaces thus create actual things but these becomings are
also sterile and fixed: a form of static genesis. The latter proceeds by
processes such as prolongation, convergence, envelopment, stabilisation
and limitation in much the same way that Bergsons perception-image is

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extracted from an aggregate of images or Nietzsches creation requires a
modicum of limitation via forgetting and turning away from the abyss
of becoming. In other words, static genesis requires a dynamic genesis to
complement it, which for Lundy means that the logic of surfaces requires
a history of surfaces, in effect a history of developmental becoming.
True becoming can only unravel through the continually shifting relation
between two different realms: the corporeal/incorporeal; states of
affairs/pure events. They remain different despite their transmutations,
which allows them to collude in the task of creation. As Lundy argues,
The significance of developmental becoming thus lies in its unfinished
and dynamically progressive nature, as opposed to the already delimited
infinitives of various surface becomings (48). Developmental becoming
must not be equalised; it must be far-from-equilibrium a history open
to the future.
Lundys main metaphor here is the Herculean form, the mythic figure
who moves effortlessly between the surface and the depths, as well as to
the heights of the heavens: It is no longer a question of Dionysus down
below, or of Apollo up above, notes Deleuze, but of Hercules of the
surface, in his dual battle against both depth and height: reorientation
of the entire thought and a new geography (Deleuze 1990: 1312).
With Hercules, it is more a question of his return to the surface from
elsewhere with his plunder so that the surface is capable of refashioning
height and depth into an immanent monism or productive composite.
In other words, the surface is no longer just an enveloper, but it also
moves in a dynamic way between dualisms deep bodies and lofty
ideals. This allows Lundy to overcome the opposition between history
and becoming whereby the between is able to bring them together
through an ontology of historical creativity. This move also takes
Lundy to a new threshold and a harnessing of history to a new form
of geography nomadology and the key equation of multiplicity. To
avoid regression into an initial capturing dualism, we need to progress
to a nomadic history whereby PLURALISM = MONISM.
As we noted above, the Treatise on Nomadology The War Machine
in A Thousand Plateaus completely dismisses history as counter to
nomadology. Indeed, if nomadology opposes history, it is due to
its concern with space territory, topology rather than time. It is
geographical, aligned with becoming. The question for Lundy then
becomes: how can we excavate a Deleuzian philosophy of history
from within nomadology, the very thing that seems to most malign
it? The answer partially lies in nomadologys tendency towards
metamorphosis and deterritorialisation rather than confining itself to

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strict binary oppositions. Thus the apparent distinctions between the
smooth and the striated, the war machine and State machine (and,
by extension, pure becoming and pure history) are always mutually
implicated, often by a mediating third term that breaks the dialectic.
For example, the nomad/State dualism is split by a third element: the
machinic phylum the subterranean flow of pure becoming (Nietzsche)
or universal aggregate of action/reaction (Bergson) that flows between
them and on which they depend. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, the
great phylum is what selects through the intermediary of assemblages
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 398).
The same is true for the smooth and the striated, for their key
mechanism is the transmutation of form and how one part of the dualism
migrates to the other not just how transmutations occur between fixed
entities of smooth and striated, but how they themselves metamorphose
(that is, how the relation can differ from itself). Thus the nuclear
submarine does not convert the smooth space of the ocean into a striated
space but harnesses it for State control:
the smooth is employed by the State as smooth for the purposes of striation.
The smooth characteristics of the sea are thus maintained, but they are
redirected by State powers to achieve a level of control that the State on its
own would be incapable of. (79)

One thus can become the other while also remaining the same. Never
believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us, warn Deleuze and
Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 500).
While revolutionary becomings can spawn micro-fascisms, conversely
histories can be intensified as history for smoothing processes: the nomad
and the State can be brought back together through a shared immanence:
The smooth and the striated, in other words, are expressions of a
machinic phylum that gives itself to both (416).
While this might sound at first like a pragmatic compromise, one
should note that it is not uncharacteristic, for Deleuze and Guattari
invariably move towards a middle ethic of the between, for this is where
everything happens between pure being and pure becoming tempered
by prudence and caution.
This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with
the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential
movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them,
produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities
segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a
meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight,

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causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous
intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue . . . (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 161)

For Lundy, this shows the immense importance of historical processes

and relational mechanisms that link strata with lines of flight in order to
produce that small plot of new land (141).
Lundy then turns his attention to the problem of how history
begins. For example, the question of when the State apparatus emerges
cannot be found in history for it pre-exists and outlasts history it
is suprahistorical. Instead, Lundy calls for a contingent model of
simultaneity and non-linearity where the virtual (pre-history) and the
actual (history) co-exist: in short, universal history. This contingency
has three lines of creativity: (1) it remains open to the future and change;
(2) it is created by a presently existing power; and (3) it is approached
non-linearly so that it can have an influence on what it becomes. In
this sense, the traditional Marxist chronological development of State
forms for example, in the Asiatic formation the emperor-despot is
always prior to private property; agriculture gives rise to State stock is
replaced by a non-linear simultaneity. Thus the archaic State did not
come before the primitive development of a potential surplus, nor
the opposite, for they both coexist (108). Or, to put it in Deleuze
and Guattaris language, social formations are defined not by modes
of production but by the different social machines that produce those
modes.
More importantly, these modes are as much virtual as actual, and
indeed this virtuality has a concrete history: Universal history makes a
composite out of succession and simultaneity from its ability to array
an entire successive progression simultaneously (116). Capitalism is the
classic condition of this simultaneity as it determines the conditions and
possibility of its own universal history via its twin functions: its superior
power of decoding and deterritorialisation through exchange and the
endless flow of capital; and its flexible axiomatic structure which allows
it to set and then repel its own limits as well as account for all previous
(and future) societies. It universalises because of its relativity (in contrast
to the absolutism of schizophrenia which is an attempt to liberate the
world from these axiomatics). As Lundy argues,
Capitalism is able to occupy every point in history, for it has no point of its
own; it is able to interpret every coding and overcoding throughout history,
for it has no essential code or sign of its own. Like a spectre or faceless ghost,

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capitalism haunts all previous forms of society as their terrifying nightmare,
[. . . ] the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes. (122)

Lundy concludes with a look at the role of history and becoming

in Deleuze and Guattaris definition of philosophy, which leads him to
historiophilosophy as a call for a minor history. Deleuze and Guattari
define philosophy as the art of forming, inventing and fabricating
concepts which link together on the plane of immanence via their
common consistency. At the same time, every concept always has a
history, even though this history zigzags, though it passes, if need
be, through other problems or onto different planes (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 18). These concepts are not represented by fleshand-blood philosophers themselves Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche but
rather their conceptual personae who fabulate on their behalf Socrates,
Descartes idiot, Zarathustra, Dionysus. The latter encompass a certain
geographical uniqueness philosophy could only have come into being
given the specific conditions of ancient Greece at that time but also
historically according to the concerns of different eras. Thus Platos
concepts of One, Being and non-Being, and the Idea (predicated on
time as anterior) undergo a creative movement via Descartes cogito
(which expels time as anteriority in order to make it a simple mode of
succession referring to continuous creation). Put simply, the novelty that
is engendered by Descartes his creative act specifically occurs with
respect to Platos creation (149), whereby the cogito is prepared by
the Greek plane that precedes it (even if it is not fully accomplished).
This is surely a case of historical puissance rather than pouvoir.
Creative becoming is further exacerbated by the zigzag transverse
movement that occurs between planes of consistency which is an
inherently dynamic and nomadic movement combining intensive and
extensive forces in each measure. For Lundy, it is clear that all these
levels are directly susceptible to time (that is, it is a model of duration),
But, note Deleuze and Guattari,
if it is true that the plane of immanence is always single, being itself pure
variation, then it is all the more necessary to explain why there are varied and
distinct planes of immanence that, depending upon which infinite movements
are retained and selected, succeed and contest each other in history. The plane
is certainly not the same in the time of the Greeks, in the seventeenth century,
and today . . . (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 39)

Thus planes pass into and out of existence in time, so that the logic
of planes needs a history of planes. This does not necessarily have to
be linear, for every plane is not only interleaved but holed, letting

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through the fogs that surround it (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 51).
Consequently, a singular feature cannot be isolated from the plane
that gives it voice the breath that suffuses the different/separate parts.
Lundy concludes by calling for a historical version of what Deleuze and
Guattari call stratigraphic time, where before and after indicate
only an order of superimpositions (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 58).
In this respect, far from being an apparatus of capture in opposition
to becoming, philosophy necessarily becomes indistinguishable from its
own history (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 95; original emphasis), albeit
holey rather than linear.
Colin Gardner
University of California, Santa Barbara
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0170

References
Braudel, Fernand (1980) On History, trans. Sarah Matthews, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark
Lester and Charles Stivale, London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations: 19721990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1994) What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1966) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New
York: Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1983) Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.