Deleuze, Guattari and power

Power is an often implicit issue in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari as it evolves through several other concepts over a multi-decade timeframe. Deleuze’s friendship with Foucault inevitably affected the thinking of the three scholars. I engage briefly with similarities and differences of selected ideas, before concentrating on DeleuzoGuattarian concepts which more directly engage issues of power. Deleuze and Guattari refer to power as both pouvoir – power over – and puissance – power to. Pouvoir is associated with dominance, including concepts such as territorialization, striation, signifying regimes, order-words, control societies and faciality. Puissance is creative, with the political configured as generation, via lines of flight, nomads and war machines. I suggest ways in which planning practices might engage these concepts before emphasising the importance of relationality and the need for spatial planning researchers and practitioners to think from the outside in order to prevent continued domination of pouvoir and offer opportunities for creative puissance.