Conclusion

The main uniting feature of the texts discussed in this book is their view of technology not as the embodiment of rigid systems of power but in terms of the potential that they open up. It is for this reason that the role of technology in Deleuze’s philosophy has provided such a useful lens through which to examine these technological fantasies. Colebrook has drawn out two conceptions of technology that are set in tension in Deleuze’s writing. On the one hand, technology is “any repeatable or regular practice that maximizes the efficiency of life” or “an already established set of relations allowing for the ongoing maximization of energy.”1 In other words, technology is the manifestation of habit and, as such, has the force of the normative. In this sense humanity itself is technology, a set of habitualized routines. But technology is also a moment of transformation, a moment when the human opens itself up to change and the inhuman. This is the potentiality that Deleuze saw in the technology of the cinema. As Colebrook puts it: “Cinema bears the potential to free thought and perception from technology through technology; the very machines that extend life allowing for the reduction of effort can also open up new problems and new creations.”2 But cinema is only “truly or essentially cinema,” in other words only fulfills the potentiality of its technology, when it is “pushed to exhaustion.”3