Psycho-Social Assemblages: Virtuality, Multiplicity & Intensity in the Evolving Public Library Sphere

The paper engages and extends Deleuze’s philosophical project of difference in Difference and Repetition and Deleuze and Guattari’s thematic-complex in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia in order to develop a social ontology that weaves the emergence of online spaces, differentiating information systems, the public sphere and emerging forms of social action. Supplanting the metaphysics of identity and representation with the actualization of the virtual, the paper mobilizes the conceptual framework of transcendental empiricism and assemblage theory to analyze a dynamically evolving social sphere that bifurcates between online and physical interaction and has transformed the subject, social relations, and their enveloping matrix of signifiers. Against this theoretical background, the paper takes public libraries as aberrant physical spaces that materialize social problems otherwise invisible or attenuated in public life. Increasingly spaces of spectacle, public libraries juxtapose the extrema of the social tapestry with the normal, a symptom of dynamic shifts within psycho-social assemblages caused by computational distribution, transmission, and amplification of information-affective flows. To explain this new terrain of social materiality, the paper develops the concept of the psycho-social as virtual-physical spaces that extremize the affective-affordance complex by integrating Deleuze’s notion of intensive fields, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desiring machines, and the Gibbsonian concept of affordance. The paper analyzes social breakdown in public library spaces through unstructured phenomenological analysis of the author’s first person testimony of Toronto Reference Library incidents, where incidents denote violations of rules of conduct as grounds for exclusion by a marginalized underclass spanning the homeless, drug addicted, mentally unstable, disturbed, destitute, and socially outcast. Belying system-symptomatic schizophrenic breakdowns of social cohesion, the explosive behaviour of the other, the deviant, the outcast reverberates through the collective field of intensity as a symptom of a virulent political economy exacerbated by control systems that order the body through production and direct affective-information flows into coercive computational affordances.