My title, of course, is an allusion to Althusser's famous meditation on the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ (ISA), which will inform the following investigation of Deleuze's (and Guattari’s) theory of the mechanism of control. As I have argued elsewhere, this allusion is not extraneous, since there is an internal and technical relationship between the two mechanisms (or dispositifs, employing Foucault's concept); therefore, Deleuze's programme to identify the sociopolitical mechanisms of control that are in the process of replacing the technical machines of disciplinary society can basically be understood as an updating of Althusser's earlier programme of ideological interpellation to forecast an emerging assemblage of power relations. Nevertheless, in the following investigation I will argue that this teleology cannot be applied in a wholesale manner to analyse the political and social transformations of contemporary neoliberal society, which is how Deleuze's early sketch has so often been employed, since it contains an element of science fiction that spoils any direct application to the concrete phenomenon.

In order to grasp this generic element, it seems fitting to begin our investigation with the following scenario: ‘Picture a man, one Mr. Leonard Mead, unemployed writer, who goes out for a stroll after dinner – ‘at 8 o’clock on a misty evening in November’ – in 2053 and is arrested for ‘just walking.’ In ‘7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture’ (which appears in A Thousand Plateaus six years before the ‘Postscript on Control Societies’) Deleuze and Guattari employ this plot from Ray Bradbury's short story ‘The Pedestrian’ (1951; see Bradbury 1953) to first describe what they call a ‘new machinic form of enslavement’ that was replacing the earlier technical forms of subjection (i.e., disciplinary techniques). The story portrays an individual who is out for a walk in the moonlit night, posed against the background of a Kafkaesque village of darkened homes, the only signs of life being the ghostly light of the television flickering in the windows of each enclosure, as if linking them together in a larger apparatus composed of both human and technical parts.

The concept of expression, or of “expressionism in philosophy”, first appears and is fully developed in Deleuze's longer treatise on Spinoza published in 1968, the same year as the publication of his systematic study, Difference and Repetition. Thus, both major works can be understood together as two different approaches to the idea of difference in the history of philosophy. The problem of expression in Spinoza's philosophy concerns, first of all, the interplay between the internal thought and external bodies, and how ideas come to express this relation between inside and outside as being internal to the power of thought. The problem that Deleuze first sets out to resolve through his reading of Spinoza is precisely what is present in a true idea that makes it adequate to or “expressive” of the thing's nature “as it is in itself ” (EPS: 15). The solution to the problem is found in Spinoza's radical principle of parallelism, in which the idea's expressive character is said to be immanent in things themselves, and it is the character of truth to express this immanence fully or perfectly. Although often ascribed to Spinoza's philosophy of parallelism, Deleuze derives a crucial part of this logic of expression from Stoic philosophy, and in particular, from the theory concerning the incorporeal nature of sense. However, the problem of expression is not restricted to Deleuze's commentaries on classical philosophers such as Spinoza, Leibniz, or Descartes.

In a short review on Pierre Bénichou's study of masochism from the early 1970s, Deleuze writes:

What does Deleuze mean when he names the ‘other sex’, not in anthropomorphic terms, but, following Marx, as the machinic dimension within sexuality itself, as the non-human within human sexuality?

In pursuing this reference by Deleuze to Marx's 1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, where the statement concerning the difference between ‘the human sex and the non-human sex’ appears, I will briefly turn to a series of lectures that Deleuze and Guattari were no doubt familiar with in the early 1970s when they conceived of the desiring-machine: Althusser's series of lectures later published in 1978 under the title ‘Marx dans ses limits’. There we find a striking discussion from a treatise of Lenin where the state is characterised as a ‘machine unlike any other social apparatus or assemblage’ (Althusser 1994: 450). Consequently, the state is distinguished from any number of other social forms found in the sphere of civil society: the association, the counsel, the league, the organisation, the political party, the church, and even the ‘organism’.

Late in his life – in 1988, after Foucault and in the midst of co-writing with Guattari What Is Philosophy? – Deleuze had a brief exchange of letters with Dionys Mascolo (the author of Le Communisme and Autour d'un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme), a correspondence which quickly turned to the subject of ‘the friend’ (philos). It is from this context that I would like to construct a genealogy of this concept in Deleuze's later writings, particularly in relation to Deleuze's assertion that the democratic ideal of friendship has been totally ‘corrupted’ (pourri), a term that Deleuze employs with greater frequency in his last works. According to one of the major arguments put forward in What Is Philosophy? the political idea of friendship, understood as the democratic consensus of friends or equals, as well as the instruments of speech and communication, have become corrupted by being completely permeated by money (for example, appearing today as the inter-subjective idealism of free markets). But what happens in this new situation to the possibility of the friend, a concept that originates in Occidental thought from the period of the Greeks, which already determines the intersubjective idealism of politics? And what of Communism?