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Foucault, deleuze, and the ontology of networks

Kai Eriksson a
a
Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland

To cite this Article Eriksson, Kai'Foucault, deleuze, and the ontology of networks', The European Legacy, 10: 6, 595 — 610
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10848770500254118
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770500254118

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 The European Legacy, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 595–610, 2005

Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks

Kai Eriksson

Abstract The concept of the network has become embedded in social thought and imagery, articulating
what at root is inarticulable. The network metaphor occupies an ontological space, but this space, insofar as it is
posed as a philosophical question, seems to assume a network-like shape itself. It may be particularly rewarding
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to read the constellations studied by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze from this point of view, in light of
the analysis of the preconditions of networks. This paper examines how the question of the ontology of networks
is addressed by these thinkers, especially with regard to the historicity of ontology.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch refers in his excellent history of railway journeys to a piece of

writing by Françoise Choay on Georges Haussman’s rearrangement of Paris’s road
network.1 According to Choay, the connecting lines of this network were like arteries,
and the whole system was compared by Hausmann to that of blood circulation. It was
divided into subsystems each of which had a center of its own. This center was not
a particular place but rather a node of traffic or, as Hausmann described it, a point of
reference. Schivelbusch traces the similarity between the objectives of city traffic and
those of the railway system, showing how it became possible to think of a boulevard as
dividing the city like a railway divided the countryside. What is crucial here is the way
in which different systems, institutions, and metaphors constitute a conceptual model in
and through which an emerging order is given shape. Railways influenced the way traffic
arrangements were seen, but railways themselves were connected to the metaphor of
the network.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, networks thus constituted a generic
model for considering societal phenomena. This was largely due to the diffusion of
railways and the spread of telecommunication systems. However, in the nineteenth
century, societal phenomena were conceived in biological terms, which explains why
the idea of the network was also understood mainly through biological analogies. It was
crystallized in models like the nervous system or blood circulation system, thus preventing
any direct comparison to the currently prevailing topological metaphor of the network.
There are nevertheless some similarities between these two network conceptions.
It is interesting to see that Hausmann perceived the space organized by the new traffic
lanes as cutting through Paris in a way reminiscent of the current discourse on networks.

Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, PO Box 10 (Snellmaninkatu 12), FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland.
Email: kai.eriksson@helsinki.fi

ISSN 1084–8770 print/ISSN 1470–1316 online/05/060595–16 ß 2005 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770500254118
 596 Kai Eriksson

The definition of a network by Manuel Castells, perhaps one of the best known network
theoreticians, was formulated in The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, as
‘‘a set of interconnected nodes. A node is the point at which a curve intersects itself.’’2
A network is thus manifest as a space constituted in and through the interconnections of
points, nodes, and curves, which would no doubt have sounded familiar to Hausmann.
This is because both Haussman and Castells share a similar conception of the space that
a network designates. What is important is that the identity of places and areas is formed
through their position and function as parts of the whole, constituted either by the
network of boulevards or the global financial system, rather than their intrinsic
significance as such. The intersections of a network, therefore, do not have a special
meaning-content as distinct places and localities but only as nodes and reference points
that have a certain function in the topology of the network. Thus, separate spaces, events,
and meanings lose their independence and become intelligible and influential only as parts
of a larger field that gives them shape.
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This modern experience of networks has been conceptualized in a more detailed

way in modern philosophy. Yet it is also true that this experience constituted, when
viewed the other way around, a large part of the undercurrent within which modern
philosophy formulated its problems and undertook its conceptualizations. This is why the
concept of the network and modern philosophy, especially in recent French thought,
are, to a large extent, interlinked. In fact, the transformation of institutions, practices and
images from a ‘‘hierarchy’’ to a ‘‘network’’ during the latter part of the twentieth century,
on the one hand, and the articulation of French thought, as largely a radical rethinking
of the relation between identity and difference, on the other, could be seen as parts of the
same historical process.
In French thought, it is especially the genealogy of Michel Foucault and the
nomadism of Gilles Deleuze that seem to provide a way for thinking about ontology
either of ‘‘power’’ or of ‘‘event’’ that is not based on a hierarchy or a closed totality.
The more this ontology is determined in terms of a network, as seems to be the case
today, the better the viewpoint developed by Foucault and Deleuze can be seen exactly as
a way of approaching and formulating the ontology of networks. These are not, however,
completely independent phenomena, for the thinkers mentioned have, by developing a
kind of network-based perspective, created prerequisites for research practices in which
the object of analysis appears as a system of continuously reorganizing relationships. This is
significant, because the model of the network has the same objective; namely, to enable
us to think about complex technological, theoretical, economic and political processes in
a coherent way that nevertheless cannot be reduced to a system. It is clear that Foucault
and Deleuze are not alone in developing this viewpoint, nor can their thought be reduced
to the reasons behind the normalization of the metaphor of the network. In any case,
it seems to me that it is illuminating to read them precisely from this point of view, that is,
from the point of view of the ontology of networks. Although it is clear that the concept
of the network has a number of irreducible origins, these thinkers have provided a
seminal philosophical formulation of the ontological space that has subsequently been
understood in terms of the network metaphor.
It thus appears that Foucault and Deleuze can help us to perceive the relation
between ontology and the network metaphor, that is, to conceive ‘‘networking’’ and its
preconditions as a philosophical question. What is interesting, insofar as the ontology of
 Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks 597

networks is given a conceptual form, is that the metaphor of the network seems to
organize it as well. That is to say, the conditions for thinking of networks appear,
as it were, to be network-like themselves.
In what follows, I will delineate in greater detail Foucault’s and Deleuze’s thought in
light of the analysis of the ontology of networks. I am not, however, going to investigate
the idea of the network as such, but rather I will consider the space in which the idea is
placed as a philosophical question for these thinkers. The broader concern of the paper at
hand is how the idea of a network, while organizing our thinking about society, is based
on the historicity unfolding in and through societal processes and, at the same time,
maintains a certain ahistoricity in itself as a model. In other words, I hope that the analysis
I am undertaking can outline the relationship between ‘‘network’’ and ‘‘historicity’’ in
ontological terms. I shall delineate the forms assumed by the network concept first in
Foucault and then in Deleuze. Then, on the backdrop of what has been said, I will offer
my critical comments on the ontology of networks.
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Preconditions of Power
The history of modern communication—and thus of community, the idea of which
is based on that of communication—has for the most part been a history of centralization,
differentiation and control, although there have always been movements in the opposite
direction as well. The institutionalized forms of interiority and the practices of exclusion
brought out by the history of modernity always presuppose an area of freedom that is
the condition of institutionalization but does not become institutionalized itself. This
has been brought out repeatedly, particularly in continental thought. Hierarchies and
enclosures require something that is not hierarchical or closed in itself, and this constitutes
their ontological foundation. It seems, however, that the ‘‘totality’’ of communication
should have been given exactly this sort of consistent form. Whereas it was the ‘‘nervous
system’’ that constituted the conceptual context for this totality until the first half of
the twentieth century, and that of the ‘‘machine’’ for the most part of the century, the
conditions of communication have recently been conceived more and more in terms of
the metaphor of the network.3 This metaphor points in two directions at the same time:
it has clearly become an ‘‘image’’ of the societal dynamics of our time, yet it bears witness
to the fact that the experience of the ‘‘totality’’ of this dynamics can no longer have
a consistent collective form. Thus, although the notion of the network does designate
a whole, it does not presuppose any coherence—on the contrary, it denies it and attempts
to escape from it. To the extent that thought is concerned with the communicative
conditions of a community, it has to include in its circles the empirical that continuously
undermines, replaces, and transcends the ‘‘images’’ of communication and community
in and through its own unfolding.
Foucault—following Friedrich Nietzsche—is the thinker who has perhaps most
consistently attempted to conceive the ontology of power and communication as a
question that has to be considered historically. Although Jean-Luc Nancy, among others,
has claimed that Foucault tends to see politics as a pure mechanics of forces, as a ‘‘political
technology’’ and not as an ‘‘opening of space,’’4 that is, as the formation of a new horizon
of conception and action, one can be confident in saying that for Foucault, politics is
 598 Kai Eriksson

exactly this: the emerging and dissolving of conceptions of truth in the horizon of
incessantly changing constellations of power and knowledge: it is a history of truth.5
Unlike Nancy, Foucault always studies this movement as the movement of historical
networks of knowledge and power and assumes that the history of truth cannot be
disentangled from the history of power. In fact, Foucault considers the point of reference
for the genealogical analysis of power to be that of war or battle rather than that of
language: battle is not based on the logic of meaning but on that of events.6 These events
can be realized as historical events only, and a meaningful interpretation of them can
be given, if at all, only after their occurrence. In any case, for Foucault the ontology of
power can be approached only through a whole historical network, which implies various
forms of knowledge, institutional practices, juridical and economic systems, and cultural
relationships. These constitute what Foucault calls ‘‘the network of power’’ (le réseau de
pouvoir).7
According to Foucault, the thematic of power was traditionally formulated either in
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juridical terms or in terms of the state apparatus. Yet he thinks that the questions relating
to psychiatric internment, mental normalization, and the development of penal
institutions—while appearing to have minimal importance from the economic point of
view—are essential to the general functioning of power.8 Foucault has, without doubt,
reoriented theoretical research by bringing into account—in addition to the key political
decision-makers and the top-level perspective of action—the fine structuration of power
around and through scientific knowledge and institutional practices. What is at issue
more generally is the rejection of self-evident paradigmatic concepts; what is investigated
instead is their conditions of becoming established. Despite this significant achievement
it seems that the Foucauldian turn remained half-finished. Notwithstanding the scope
of his work of redefinition, Foucault focuses—eventually—only on the conditions of
essential social institutions (penal, medical, psychiatric, sexual etc.) and has left out those
that lie beyond the boundaries of his studies—against his evident purpose and the line of
his thought—those institutions, conceptions, and practices that do not have any obvious
(conceptual, social) relationship with the same conditions. As he notes, ‘‘ultimately I had
done nothing but attempt to trace the way in which certain institutions, in the name of
‘reason’ or ‘normality,’ had ended up exercising their power on groups of individuals,
in relation to established ways of behavior, of being, of acting or speaking, by labeling them
as anomalies, madness, etc.’’ (emphasis added).9
Thus, although ontological questions are thought of in their historical relationships,
do not all relationships have an ontological dimension? Secondly, the notion of the
preconditions of freedom as a unified field or system, the historical expression of which
can be identified with certain institutions (such as the penal), with certain figures (such
as the panopticon), or with certain ideas (such as the disciplinary society), is no doubt
misleading. It is this very inclination to place the ontology of power within a unitary
perspective that appears also to explain why Foucault had difficulties in seeing distinct
relationships, irreducible to established ontological ‘‘structures,’’ in their own ontology.
The ontology of power is not institutionalized in any single form and cannot be
completely thought of in terms of any particular whole.
On the other hand, it is clear that one cannot read Foucault’s genealogy of power in
a simple way. It is possible to argue that, firstly, he did not complete the research program
he initiated by cutting off the head of all power institutions, not only of the sovereign,
 Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks 599

and secondly that he did not cease to conceive and discuss power in terms of the
images and metaphors related to these institutions. Nevertheless, Foucault provides a rich
and profound analysis of the ontology of power, which easily disproves all narrow
interpretations, and in the process of doing so he reformulated the task of philosophy.
Two central themes must be brought out at this point. Firstly, according to Foucault
power and its ontology should not be thought of in terms of any traditional conceptual
whole—such as the King or the State—because power relations transcend endlessly the
area that these concepts are capable of thematizing.10 Thus Foucault disconnects himself
from the line of thought in which rationalization becomes an iron cage (Max Weber) or
metaphysics achieves its completion in the planetary domination of technology (Martin
Heidegger). No single theme or image—not even that of a disciplinary society or
governmentality—can capture all the dimensions of historical movement and the
movement of history. There are various forms of rationalization and technology but none
of them can monopolize the whole field of power relations—as if it was one field, which
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it is not. Secondly, concepts such as the sovereign or the state or the institutions that
they refer to already presuppose the fine, existing network of power relations. Thus, for
instance, the state presupposes a whole series of diverse power relations that in numerous
ways intertwine with existing practices to produce knowledge, technology, and politics.11
In this way Foucault connects himself to a philosophical tradition the main preoccupation
of which is the always-incommunicable preconditions of freedom and communication.
This second point is one on which we should dwell a little longer. Foucault’s
program can, I think, be understood—up to a point—as a rearticulation and further
elaboration of Heidegger’s ‘‘thinking of Being’’ in a situation in which the idea of a
dominating technology and central power has crumbled away.12 Foucault has emphasized
the fact that, after Heidegger’s later work, the ontological question can be articulated
only as historical and in the context of omnipresent microrelationships of power and
knowledge. It cannot be posed any longer in terms of a major confrontation between
privileged institutions or principles, but rather has to be seen as an endless struggle and
transformation within ‘‘the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in
which they operate and which constitute their own organization.’’13 In this sense,
Foucault opens up the way to the ontology of power, which is why power/knowledge
relationships can be regarded as pointing to the ineffable field of the preconditions of all
social and conceptual structures. These relationships imply this transcendental field insofar
as it is understood as a historical category. Thus Foucault can be viewed, with certain
qualifications, as having rethought Heidegger’s question of Being (Seinsfrage), the line of
his rethinking having gone through Nietzsche and having been posed precisely in the
realm of the social.
Thus it seems that the ceaselessly reorganizing field of the relationships of power/
knowledge names for Foucault exactly what we have been calling the inexpressible: in
other words, it is a metaphysical name for the inexpressible.14 The omnipresent network
of the relationships of power/knowledge constitutes the precondition of any meaningful
expression (of both concepts and practices), which does not itself come into the sphere
of expression. Following Nietzsche, Foucault’s notion of the inexpressible is, however,
understood as becoming thinkable always within the political. That is, although the
inexpressible cannot be articulated in itself, it has always to be presupposed in social
discourse and is therefore necessarily conceived as some kind of a whole. Heidegger’s way
 600 Kai Eriksson

of questioning is ultimately read here through Nietzsche’s firm sensitivity to historical

change.
Foucault accepted and further elaborated the way in which Nietzsche moved
philosophical analysis from the object proper, be it a value or a conception, to the
conditions and circumstances where the object is seen as true and meaningful. This
change indicated that the object of interpretation cannot be understood without taking
into account the interaction of forces that have produced it as an outcome. Foucault was
animated by the Nietzschean view of the world as a battleground between relentless
forces, as a continuously reassembled field, which pulls itself together into a certain
grouping only to be dissolved and stretched again into a new order of forces. This field
of forces constitutes the precondition of truth: without the constant opposition of forces,
the truth could not come into view. It opens up the possibility for the truth, but this
possibility is not a permanent state or principle, rather it is defined always as a historical
conflict or displacement. Thus Foucault’s genealogy grounds the ontology of power on
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the incessantly reorganizing microrelations, which at the same time, in the course of their
own differentiation, define what this ontology is about.

Foucault and DISPOSITIF

By means of what he termed a ‘‘dispositif,’’ Foucault could articulate the direction of
action of a power that is no longer seen as based on a sovereign: power does not manifest
itself as an institution but rather as continuously functioning nets of relationships that form
into chains with each other: ‘‘Power is employed and exercised through a net-like
organization,’’ Foucault claims.15 Dispositif named this network of power. The concept
enabled thinking about the linkages and fields of interaction of questions relating to
the conditions of power and knowledge and of the particular systems and new practices
developed, the administrative and scientific interests concerning those systems, the
cultural sentiment and the discourses connected to the communicative relationships and
structures, and finally the conception of truth that these yielded. Foucault defined dispositif
as follows:
What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous
ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions,
laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philan-
thropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Secondly, what I am
trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist
between these heterogeneous elements. Thirdly, I understand by the term ‘‘apparatus’’
[dispositif] a sort of—shall we say—formation which has as its major function at a given
historical moment that of responding to an urgent need.16
The dispositif gathers local and historical relationships under a given network, but
it is not the ‘‘totality’’ of these relationships, let alone that of all social relationships.
It exists only in relation to the object of analysis. This thematical core defines an area of
experience that manifests itself in and through the mutually constitutive interrelationships
among theoretical discourses, social power relationships, and self-relationships of the self,
as well as in the whole range of different practices, institutions, and systems involved.
Dispositif is to be understood as a network of relationships that, in a given historical
 Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks 601

period, organizes the field of power and knowledge as both an object of speech and a field
of experience. Thus, it does not only indicate the historical institutions involved but also
opens an ontological dimension to be examined.
Networks of power and knowledge enable one to analyze the institutions, practices,
and discourses inherently related to the constitution of the social phenomena in question
not, as has been usual in the academic division of labor, as independent and separate from
each other, but, on the contrary, in terms of their historical interrelationships, as they
shape each other and become, in the course of this process, redefined and reorganized.
They do not belong to separate realms of institutional practice and scholarly discourse but
presuppose each other in order to be conceivable. They belong to the same ontological
level. They form a mutual ‘‘effective history’’ that dissolves only to regroup again,
depending on the historical circumstances and thematic frameworks in question. In this
way the network helps research practice to take into account that effects have an inherent,
not an external relationship between each other, and that their separation is always an
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analytic operation, not a ‘‘natural’’ state of affairs. At the same time, it emphasizes that
effects should not be seen as coherent components of an idealized, static scheme of
relationships but instead as ingredients of an open formation, the inner power distribution
of which changes logically when seen in retrospect, but is always unforeseeable at the
time of the change. For this reason the network enables articulation of thematic
relationships, not in terms of essences or structures, but rather in terms of flows,
movements, alliances, and detachments.
What is central about a network is that the specific relationships in and through
which it is actualized do not constitute a ‘‘totality’’ independent of the analysis, on the
one hand, or of the ingredients of these relationships, on the other. Although theoretical
discourses and social practices have an inherent relationship with power, as both an object
and a tool, it is only through a research program that this relationship is constituted as
an object of thought: ‘‘Power in the substantive sense, ‘le’ pouvoir, doesn’t exist.’’17
Furthermore, a network of the conditions of power and knowledge is not a totality of
all social relationships either. This is because, as mentioned above, a network always
thematizes a certain constellation of power relationships centered around some specific
phenomenon or experience from which it receives its meaningfulness.18 Therefore, the
network is to be understood only in relation to an experience thought of in this way. This
is also why the conditions of power networks are determined on the basis of different
circumstances, the regional and temporal relationships operative within them, although
they may have convergent or analogical characteristics and connections. But the network
is not the totality of power relationships even if applied only to relationships and fields of
relationships actualized in this way, because it is not independent of and does not precede
these relationships: it is nothing other than the occurrence of these relationships.
Although the areas of experience to be analyzed in genealogical research practice
always take shape within some definable configuration of power relationships, which
occur in both constant institutionalization and disintegration, talking about a general
constellation with respect to these experiences is not nonsensical. It has a realness of its
own as a unifying principle that gathers together diverse practices and institutions. Even
so, a given network cannot present itself as a unified, harmonious, and supposedly already
completed order, for these fragmentary and ever-changing chains of relationships and
practices constitute precisely what it is. It is nothing other than the economy of the
 602 Kai Eriksson

occurrence of the phenomenon under analysis and does not precede this occurrence in
any way. Thus power is inherently divided into an irreducible plurality of heterogeneous
events. Of course, power relationships are not independent of the networks of systems
and conceptions to which they pertain and that they, as an experience, necessarily
presuppose. History can be viewed as a diversification of different forms of power.
As every form produces its own relationship to the limits of power, and as these
relationships coexist, partly overlapping and always influencing each other, power is a
phenomenon that can be understood only with reference to this fragmentary
concatenation of events. This is to say that, although there is no network of power as
such, as an isolated phenomenon, and even though it gets its sense and significance
exclusively by way of a plurality of power relationships, even this experience of the
multiplicity of power relations does not exist in itself ‘‘before’’ the networks and systems
that produce it as an experience. On the contrary, power ‘‘is’’ the social relationships that
determine this network; it is the realization, expression, and mark of these relationships.
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Yet, as has become clear by now, the constellations of power should not be taken as
independent either, for they are determined, in turn, by the formation of power relations.
Ultimately, the very movements and rhythms of power are what provide a voice for the
integrative and productive tactics of networks of power.
A power network, strictly speaking, is therefore not an area, principle, category, or a
level of analysis. It is rather a texture of mutual relationships among institutions, practices,
and sentiments, which are interwoven in a particular historical system and its discourses.
For this reason this system is to be understood, like discourse in Foucault’s analysis, as a
series of discontinuous segments, the tactical function of which is not coherent or stable:
it is a point of intersection of social forces where it both unifies and disperses existing
groupings, but is also produced itself by the interaction of these same forces. But above all,
a network of power is the coming into view, the continuous unveiling of society itself.
Power, in this conception, as in Foucault’s notion of sexuality, is neither a ‘‘primitive,
natural, and living energy welling up from below,’’ nor a ‘‘higher order seeking to stand
in its way.’’19 Not unlike Foucault’s notion of sexuality, power is not a pure positivity and
not exclusively an effect of a law either. While power endlessly escapes the functionality
imposed on it from outside, power networks constantly introduce meaning structures and
circumstances through which it is experienced and perceived. Similarly, whereas power
processes produce and institutionalize power as a system, the formation of this system and
the practices it gives rise to constantly reorganize the contexts of power and knowledge.
It is this mutual relationship that is posed as a problem by Foucault.
Power takes place temporally and regionally in separate assemblages that—although
overlapping and interrelated—are, however, distinguishable from each other. This is also
why power is always discontinuous and heterogeneous, and can be separated from social
relationships only analytically, for it ‘‘is’’ this sociality, its realization: it is the realization of
the social. Yet in the hands of Foucault—as indicated—this realization, although analyzed
brilliantly, tends to be discussed in terms of systems of thought and action, which arrange
the question of ontology into a series of figures and institutions. Although the dispositif
is nothing other than the ‘‘sum’’ of the relations involved, in practice Foucault approaches
these relations through a particular body of ideas and practices within a rather consistent
perspective. What remains to be seen is whether the apparent discrepancy between the
rich potentialities inherent in his views on the ontology of power, which he defended
 Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks 603

against all attempts of totalization, and his historical investigations proper, which posited
the question of ontology through established totalities, is due to the traditionally difficult
task of approaching ‘‘history’’ philosophically without using concepts that enclose the
phenomena under investigation. In any case, by outlining—following Heidegger—the
central parameters and directions for approaching ontology and by insistently carrying out
this approach in view of empirical relationships, Foucault indicates the direction in which
ontology could assume a network-like nature.

Philosophy of Assemblages
If Foucault, despite his evident attempts, remained—at the end of the day—ensnared
by established structures, Gilles Deleuze broke away from the last bonds of these
structures. The aim of research for Foucault was to take up a chosen alignment of
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interlinked entities, both discursive and nondiscursive, and to analyze the conditions
through which a given power configuration is formed in terms of movements, struggles,
alliances, and displacements. As noted, this type of approach traces and constructs the
‘‘effective history’’ of discursive and institutional practices, arrangements, and formations
of controversies, their transformations and dissolutions in a certain historical setting.
Deleuze, however, working with Félix Guattari, regarded ‘‘becomings’’ as more
important than history, and took up the task of mapping the philosophical conditions
of the interplay of machines, assemblages, flows, and events that cannot be described
in terms of power. According to him, we tend to think too much in terms of history,
although multiplicities are made up of becomings without history.20 For Deleuze it was
desire—an event at the microlevel—that conditioned power, not the other way around.
Whereas Foucault positioned strategy in place of social dichotomies, Deleuze, in turn,
replaced strategy by lines of flight and the movements of deterritorialization—in other
words, uncontrollable events in the disintegration of an order.
Both Foucault and Deleuze shared, however, a similar kind of perspective, inspired
by the influence of Nietzsche, concerning the nature and aim of philosophical work.
Central to that approach was the need to investigate the ontological conditions of the
relationships of macrolevel structures and microlevel movements and flows, either in
terms of history or of desire. This was accomplished mainly by using the notion of
assemblage as an operational device, the aim of which, although being inevitably a
construction like any interpretative tool, was ‘‘not a matter of bringing all sorts of things
together under one concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its
mutations,’’ as Deleuze put it.21 Foucault called it ‘‘dispositif,’’ whereas Deleuze preferred
the term ‘‘agencement.’’22 Through this concept, it became possible to transgress the
rigid subject–object axis still dominant in theoretical discourse. Whereas for Foucault
dispositif—as a name for the ‘‘networks of power’’—provided a framework for genealogy,
for Deleuze agencement formed a tool for what he called ‘‘transcendental empiricism.’’
As with Foucault, it constituted a mixture of bodies, institutions and discourses in which
all the components were on the same ontological level: ‘‘An assemblage of enunciation,’’
stated Deleuze, ‘‘does not speak ‘of ’ things; it speaks on the same level as [à même les choses]
states of things and states of content.’’23 ‘‘We set ourselves the task,’’ notes Deleuze,
‘‘of analyzing mixed forms, arrangements—. We set out to follow and disentangle lines
 604 Kai Eriksson

rather than work back to points: a cartography, involving microanalysis.’’24 Thus, instead
of confronting a technological or conceptual totality, we see a heterogeneous
constellation of linkages and alliances between a number of distinct formations.25
The concepts used by Foucault and Deleuze are not, however, identical in their
meaning, as Deleuze considered the dispositifs of power to be a component of agencements.
Deleuze stated, in fact, that the thesis of the dispositifs of power seemed to move in two
directions, although they both presuppose each other. He hinted that in the direction
they took in Foucault’s program, ‘‘they referred to a diagram, a kind of abstract
machine immanent to the entire social field,’’ whereas in his own work they ‘‘consisted of
a diffuse and heterogeneous multiplicity, ‘micro-dispositifs.’ ’’26 Deleuze’s conception of
philosophy is characterized by an aspiration to think through flows, movements, alliances,
and disentanglements rather than essences, structures, or institutions: for him it is desire
and lines of flight that set the conditions of power, communication, and history.
Now, what is the figure through which Deleuze conceived the ontology of
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networks? Although he thematized it again and again through new concepts and
viewpoints throughout his work, the concept of ‘‘rhizome’’ is without doubt one of the
most central ones, being coined in a work written with Guattari in 1976 in which it was
opposed to tree-structure.27 The introduction of the notion of the rhizome must be seen
as integral to the authors’ philosophical conception that what is important in philosophy
is ‘‘the logic of multiplicities’’ and that all processes which inevitably take place within
a given field of multiplicity, must be regarded as becomings, being thus impossible to be
determined in terms of some final result.28 Yet these kinds of criteria are typical of tree-
like structures, that is, of hierarchical systems. These kinds of structures define the position
of any single node and its relation to any other node in a given system, so as to make up a
hierarchy in which the order of nodes has been predefined. Instead, each particular point
in a rhizome can be connected to any other point. It constitutes a whole that constantly
reorganizes itself according to creeping runners, yielding a multiplicity that does not
allow a unity. In this respect they are analogous to Foucault’s relations of micropower,
since neither of them can be articulated in terms of a state or sovereign.
Deleuze thought about ontology also, and above all, through the theme of the
virtual, which stretches the field of ontology to a kind of network of relations. In order to
think Being as one, the theme of the virtual requires as its counterpart the idea of
actuality. Thus Being lends itself to be thought always from two viewpoints at the same
time: on the one hand, from the ‘‘virtual’’ whole, which is the absolute precondition of
the actual; on the other hand, from the multiplicity that this whole actualizes in itself.
This is analogous to the relationship between substance and attributes in Spinoza, in
which substance exists only through its attributes, but, on the other hand, the attributes
do not constitute any whole: they cannot be independent of the ‘‘preceding’’ substance,
but at the same time this substance is nothing but the realization—or, according to
Deleuze, the actualization—of the attributes. This line of thought is not unlike Foucault’s
conception of the dispositif either—in fact, they seem both to emerge from a similar
philosophical territory.
Thus Deleuze conceives ontology always from two different directions, which
gather together a kind of ‘‘network of virtualities.’’29 Ontology becomes articulated
in terms of the multiplicity of actualizations, on the one hand, and of the ‘‘whole’’ of the
virtual, on the other. Although each actualization has its own virtuality, one has to be
 Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks 605

able to think of the ‘‘whole’’ of these virtualities, as the later Heidegger attempted
systematically to do. It is essential to notice that the mutual relationship that constitutes
what ontology is opens up precisely in light of the metaphor of the network. This is
because the virtual is not a homogeneous unity but rather actualizes differences and
is only in and through these differences. Incessantly expanding and differentiating
virtualities communicate with each other, take their shape and determine their boundaries
always in relation to other virtualities, through which they alone differentiate themselves.
Virtualities differ in terms of which of them are directly connected to most others and
which of them are directly connected only to a few.30 From this ensues a metaphor of
depth that Deleuze exploits himself: the actualities’ own virtualities form a sort of small
circuit, he claims, whereas the formations of expanding virtualities create deep loops that
communicate with each other.31 Deleuze utilized the concept of depth already in
Différence et répétition, although in somewhat different terms.32 It is important to keep in
mind that they are not independent areas or parts but are above all related to the same
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phenomenon, in that they bear witness to one and the same thing, which, however,
presupposes both of them. Yet the differentiating movement of the same seems to bring
about different depths and distances that—if conceived as a whole—together yield a
vision of a network.
Given this background, Deleuze differs from Foucault especially in relation to the
question of the historical. Whereas Deleuze severed himself from thinking philosophy
in terms of institutional wholes once and for all, he did not, however, conceive of
philosophy definitively from the perspective of the analysis of historical relations like
Foucault did. Although he releases philosophy from the confines of power institutions, he
nevertheless pursues his own philosophical work through the differentiation and creation
of concepts (and philosophical figures), which he considers to be the essential task of
philosophy. Deleuze has a simple reason for this: according to him, the virtual is at heart
ahistorical. He makes a distinction between ‘‘becoming’’ and ‘‘history,’’ and connects
philosophy to the realm of the former.33 What is interesting in an event, such as a
revolution, for instance, is not its existence within a specific social field but rather its
ability to produce a ‘‘concept’’ that can be extracted from the historical state of affairs.34
‘‘What History grasps of the event,’’ says Deleuze, ‘‘is its effectuation in states of affairs
or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its
self-positing as concept, escapes History.’’35
Deleuze regarded his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism, it is true, striving
toward utmost concreteness, yet he considered the arrangements he studied to ‘‘enter
into history only indirectly.’’36 The network of relations (agencement), consisting in folds,
identities and boundaries, within various dimensions of depth, that communicate
constantly with each other without being inflexible, remains in the final analysis external
to the historical, despite its own simultaneous opening of different directions. By claiming
that history provides merely the condition that ‘‘makes possible the experimentation
of something that escapes history,’’37 Deleuze refuses a historical determination of
philosophy, as Keith Pearson has noted.38 Also Nancy, when defending the ‘‘materiality’’
of ontology, as mentioned above, refrains explicitly from affirming its ‘‘historicality.’’39
Philosophy, also according to Giorgio Agamben, as distinct from linguistics, is
concerned only with the pure existence of language, independent of its real (historical)
properties, although the analysis can be accomplished only through a particular (historical)
 606 Kai Eriksson

experience of language.40 Of course, the whole idea of the limits of language that
characterizes Agamben’s work, among other thinkers, implicates a view of a particular
form of language that is distinctive to us. Yet his meditation on the experience of
language, in other words, the fact that there is language, is not directed so much by the
idea of its limits—insofar as these limits are understood as historical limits—but rather by
its possibility, by the unchanging preconditions of language, which Agamben has termed
the factum loquendi. For this reason Agamben is inclined to think that language does not
have a destiny.
It is on this point that Deleuze (and Nancy) differs most from Foucault, who bases
his work on relationships and processes that only come into view historically. For,
according to Foucault, philosophy cannot be disentangled from these: on the contrary,
they are inherently related. Although Deleuze always reflects on philosophy from two
directions at once, this reflection seems, in the final instance, to take place in ahistorical
terms. For Deleuze, actual spatio-temporal things are merely actualizations of variations
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that persist outside of historical time, and the changing relations between them.41 In
contrast, Foucault thinks that the technology of Panopticon, for instance, was not merely
the actualization of ahistorical variations, but rather that it created a whole new power
network with its idea of control. In Foucault, the effort to think about this empirical
dimension of ontology must be understood as an attempt to take historical change as a
philosophical question, although the difference with regard to Deleuze is often hardly
distinctive. In any case, the question that Foucault asked was ‘‘does not ontology and
its interpretations—since they are intimately connected—inevitably change in the course
of history? Does not history deprive us of our continuities by breaking the thread
of transcendental teleologies?’’42
If Foucault’s problem was related to bringing out the ontological significance of
singular and isolated power relations, Deleuze’s neglect of these is clearly connected
to describing the ontology of transitory historical–political relationships. Deleuze seems
to think that, if history is nothing but the capturing of the unsuppressed and principal
process of life in transient and subordinate structures, these structures cannot appear as
ontologically significant. What is always fundamental are the forces that result in the
coming into existence of a given historical phenomenon in the first place, not this
phenomenon itself. Yet, in this way, the ontology of ephemeral events that are
meaningful for us becomes displaced. In this regard, Foucault appears as more sensitive
to the fact that history is not only an effect but also a process that constantly generates
its own conditions—a process, therefore, with a powerful ontological dimension.
Yet, whereas Foucault was a thinker of cultural institutions, Deleuze was originally
a philosopher of irreducible multiplicity, preoccupied more with the lines of flight than
with areas of stability. If Foucault perhaps failed to consider, in the end, the network-like
‘‘nature’’ of ontology as systematically as Deleuze did, tracing the mechanisms of thought
and practice in their historical configurations instead of perishable lines and rhizomes,
he nevertheless thought this network from the outset as a net (dispositif) laid between ‘‘the
historical’’ and ‘‘the philosophical.’’ To put it differently: if Deleuze always tightens
his net between the virtual and its actualizations, Foucault lays it between history and
philosophy. To my mind, it is this very field, problem, or idea of the network in
connection to issues that are historically relevant for us that, as a central development,
poses a challenge to thought today. For, if it is true that ontology is nothing external
 Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks 607

to life in itself, then the inexpressible realm of ontology has to be conceived of precisely
as historical. Moreover, it seems that today this conception is used increasingly in terms
of a network.

Conclusion
Insofar as the ontology of networks (and the networks of ontology) is not
determined outside of the realization of and thinking about networks but rather in this
very historical event in itself, then it can also be approached historically. But as we have
seen, the metaphor of networks operates strongly within philosophy as well, as this
ontology itself seems to have a network-like nature. This is because ontology is
determined, on the one hand, through historically influential ways and structures of
thinking and, on the other, through individual interpretations and theories that do not
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appear to share any obvious ground with the former; yet their ontological conditions
remain readable. This ‘‘double exposure’’ of ontology is evident in both Foucault and
Deleuze, as we have seen. Although it is clear that many interpretations and discursive
traditions can be traced back to some common historical horizon or ground, this is not
always possible: the ground or origin in general is always heterogeneous and must be
perceived in this plurality. Thus the ontology of networks becomes manifest also as
a network, the boundaries of which are realized in the mutual relationships between
the above-mentioned conditions of influential discursive practices pervading many social
institutions, on the one hand, and those remaining relatively isolated and unattached,
on the other. It is in between these two directions of looking at ontology, namely, from
the point of view of the (historical) ‘‘structure’’ of ontology, and from that of the fields
of singularities (the ontological dimension of which can be brought out), that the
boundaries of the network are articulated. To be more specific, they are articulated in and
through the mutual relationships, incessantly being reorganized, between the conditions
mentioned as they communicate with each other.
Furthermore, insofar as the ontology of networks itself resembles a network (the
metaphor of depth), it is network-like also in the sense that it does not constitute any
particular system: although the ontology of networks appears as chains, connections, and
series, which communicate with each other and which can be examined in the context of
the metaphor of depth, the space it occupies is not consistent or uniform. Instead, it is
heterogeneous and is constituted by the irreducible multiplicity of ontological chains and
conditions.43 Yet the network designates something—a whole—that at any given time
has boundaries, even though they do not have to be precisely determinable. It gathers the
chains and series in the same picture, as it were. It should still be kept in mind, however,
that a network does not draw its boundaries independently. As in the perspective of
Foucault’s dispositif, a certain thematic or historical relationship, in other words, a certain
community of fate, always puts up the network as a conceptual whole, and when this
relationship changes the whole network changes accordingly.
But if the conditions of communication and freedom are understood as
indistinguishable from life and history, is there not a danger of being driven exactly into
the kind of situation about which thinkers since Heidegger have been warning us? That is,
does not the thought that attempts to see these conditions as inherently connected
 608 Kai Eriksson

with life, with the history of life, risk ending up outside the sphere of philosophy, because
it is precisely the ontological difference that founds philosophy? Famously, Heidegger
considered philosophy to be based on the distinction between Being and beings. For him,
this was a demarcation that had to be actively maintained, and the process of maintaining it
was what philosophy was all about. After all, is it not the task of philosophy to keep this
difference in force and defend it against efforts to liken Being with this or that form or way
of life in which it finds its expression? However, thinking about language in its historical
connection, neither presupposes capturing the pure existence of language into a grammar
nor fixing freedom into a constitution. Similarly, the affirmation of social relations and
institutions does not mean a loss or elimination of the ontological difference. One may
mistakenly think that the ontological difference is lost, because the deep ontological
dimension is brought, as it were, to the same horizon with the political, in other words,
with the changeable confrontations and practices of life. Rather, the operation has the
opposite effect: now we may notice that not only the central institutions, the work of great
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thinkers, or established academic or social conceptions can be interpreted from the

ontological perspective but, in fact, ontology founds an area that transcends all theoretical,
social, or cultural notions. This is why it does not eliminate the ontological difference but
connects it to all that which has a manifestation. Ontology is thus brought closer to
everyday life: it is no longer about revealing a deep, concealed sphere of the truth, but about
affirming existence as it is.
It seems that the more ontology assumes a network-like shape, the more it also
becomes historically mediated by social and historical forces. This is so because a network
articulates questions that have become relevant in our time, precisely for reasons that
cannot be reduced to discursive dimensions only. Yet it is only between the very
historical change, on the one hand, and the prevailing multiplicity of ‘‘events,’’
‘‘concepts,’’ and ‘‘variations,’’ on the other, that the network can be woven.
Simultaneously, though, this weaving itself is nothing other than the giving birth to
new discourses and objects: to words and things in mutual determination.

Notes
1. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the
Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
2. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 1 of The Rise of the
Network Society (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 470.
3. Ibid.
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 78.
5. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966–84, trans. John Johnston (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1989), 139.
6. Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New
Press, 2000), 116.
7. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 126, 127.
8. Foucault, Power, 117.
9. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James
Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 145.
10. Foucault, Power, 123.
11. Ibid.
 Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ontology of Networks 609

12. The close relationship between Foucault and Heidegger has been suggested recently by Stuart
Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London:
Continuum, 2001); and by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds, Foucault and Heidegger:
Critical Encounters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
13. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1990), 92.
14. According to Deleuze, the dimension of power is for Foucault ‘‘invisible and unsayable.’’
See G. Deleuze, Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. and trans. Timothy Armstrong (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 160.
15. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed.
Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 98.
16. Ibid., 194–5.
17. Ibid., 198; see also Foucault, Foucault Live, 187.
18. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 196.
19. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 81.
20. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(London: The Athlone Press, 1987), viii, 2.
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21. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 31.
22. Brian Massumi has translated the terms, respectively, as ‘‘apparatus’’ and ‘‘assemblage’’ in
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), whereas Martin Joughin uses
‘‘arrangement’’ and ‘‘apparatus’’ in his translation of Negotiations.
23. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 189.
24. Deleuze, Negotiations, 86.
25. ‘‘These apparatuses,’’ according to Deleuze, ‘‘are composed of the following elements: lines
of visibility and enunciation, lines of force, lines of subjectification, lines of splitting, breakage,
fracture, all of which criss-cross and mingle together, some lines reproducing or giving rise to
others, by means of variations or even changes in the way they are grouped’’ (Deleuze, Michel
Foucault, 162).
26. Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Desire and Pleasure,’’ trans. Daniel Smith, in Foucault and His Interlocutors,
ed. and intro. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 184.
27. See ‘‘Introduction: Rhizome,’’ in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
28. Deleuze, Negotiations, 146–7.
29. James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 21.
30. Ibid., 8–9.
31. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 81.
32. Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 229.
33. According to Deleuze, ‘‘[h]istory is the archive, the drawing of what we are and what we are
ceasing to be, whilst the current is the sketch of what we are becoming.’’ ‘‘In each apparatus
we have to untangle the lines of the recent past and those of the near future: —that which
belongs to history and that which belongs to the process of becoming’’ (Deleuze, Michel
Foucault, 164).
34. Keith Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge,
1991), 201–2.
35. Éric Alliez, The Signature of the World: Or, What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy? trans.
Eliot Albert and Alberto Toscano (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 22.
36. Deleuze, Negotiations, 30.
37. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh
Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 111.
38. Pearson, Germinal Life, 202.
39. Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 102–5.
 610 Kai Eriksson

40. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 67–8.
41. Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 149.
42. Deleuze, Michel Foucault, 165.
43. Rodophe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1986), 175, 180.
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