Mapping space in the video game
In Cinema 2, Deleuze notes that certain European films that emerged after World War II displayed a view of time similar to that of the labyrinthine model of time found in the writings of twentieth-century Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. In chapter 5, this type of cinematic construction of time is discussed in more detail. In relation to computer game this concept is also useful. The rhizome can also be considered a labyrinth, although this must be understood as an ever-expanding labyrinth without restrictive points of access or defined centre.As we saw in the introduction to Part One, a rhizome grows from its middle. As so much gaming is concerned with the traversing, investigation, mapping and controlling of space, this idea of the rhizome as labyrinth can also be applied to video games.
What is becoming?
For Deleuze, identity itself is always in motion: the identity of the individual subject, pressured from all sides by forces that will make him or her, articulate him/her , organise him/her; but also the collective subject, pushed together through environmental, governmental, or social forces, or coming together in a resistance to these.
Becomings are made up of a variety of these that act as markers, or compositional elements. Any essential identity, no matter how different from man, would simply be another molar one. True becomings are molecular, since they are made up of elements and characteristics that may at any time change and reform.
Minor Cinemas
Kafka, a Czech Jew living in Prague but writing in German, Kafka's work could be considered an example of minor literature. For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka took the major, or dominant language that spoke for the various countries in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and made this official or 'paper language' -- which was not spoken by the majority of Czechs -- speak in a minor way.
In A thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari note that to make a major language speak in a minor way is to make it stutter, stammer or even wail. Thus a minor language is not established in opposition to a major language. After all, Kafka didn't use the Czech language to oppose German. Instead a minor language, takes a major language, and, by deterritorialising it, forces it to become something else.
However, that 'minor' does not always equal 'minority'. While Kafka was a Czech Jew subject to a colonial situation, and in that sense in the minority, he was also a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie who spoke German as his first language.
To be minor is to take major voice, and speak it in a way that expresses your preferred identity. This political aspect of the minor is crucial, for minor practices(art, literature, language) have the potential to destabilise the normal conventions of the major voice of a society. To act in a minor way, then, is not to oppose a dominant political system, but to inhabit the system and change it from within.
In Cinema 2, Deleuze returned to the idea of the minor under a different name. Discussing what he now called 'modern political cinema'....Deleuze's work focuses on more globally marginalised filmmakers like Yilmaz Guney, Youssef Chahine,Glauber Rocha, Pierre Perrault ad Ousmane Sembene. The films of these directors contrast the output of the mainstream film industries in their countries of origin, as many of them have renounced commercial gain and attempted to use cinema to create new identities under difficult political circumstances.
Becoming art
For Deleuze and Guattari, art is one step removed from philosophy. Art is, as Gregg Lambert has suggested, a kind of 'non-philosophy', and approach that cannot be philosophy, but which ultimately has the capacity to enliven philosophy.
