To what extent can Foucault and Deleuze be used to analyse hip hop as a culture of resistance?

Introduction

In many ways the birth of hip hop can be related to the impetus behind the work of Deleuze and Foucault, two thinkers often classified together under the 'post-structuralist' rubric, yet explorations of their compatibility remain critically underdeveloped. The first part of this essay sets about to establish these origins, through an exploration of the frustrations felt by many African-American's as they attempted to negotiate a 'third way' in relation to the seeming totality of the structural problems faced, as well as the inadequacy of the two discourses of the civil-rights era - separation or integration – which seemed, by definition, unable to escape their relation to mainstream white values and norms.

The essay then relates this frustration to the attempts at resolving the paradox of resistance that at first appears to haunt a Foucauldian concept of power, arguing that the challenges posed to each are not dissimilar. In doing so, it sets the stage for a more theoretical analysis of hip hop as a culture of resistance and the introduction of a Deleuzian reading with which to 'solve' the problem of resistance.

The next section, entitled 'The Virtual', establishes Deleuze's distinction between the virtual and actual as the basis upon which to explore Deleuzian thought, offering this as a route out of this paradox. It draws upon the mathematical concepts of hyperspace and imaginary numbers to show how the virtual is incorporated into a Deleuzian ontology of difference, and that such a distinction necessarily relies on vitality and creation. It then directly compares this to approaches within hip hop, which attempted to re-imagine limitations and which valued experimentation, learning, creativity, multiplicity and becoming. Having explored concepts at the heart of Deleuze's ontology, the essay then investigates other related areas of Deleuzian thought such as desire, minor arts and assemblages, drawing particular attention to the collectivity of hip hop, its innovative use of language and how self-conscious (or even 'collective-conscious') relations of exteriority meant hip hop culture offered greater practicality as a resistance culture to those within it. The fourth section begins to draw all of these elements together, in which a radical learning, creativity and becoming, present in both hip hop and Deleuzian thought, can be drawn together into a Foucauldian conception of ethics, with particular attention paid to the relation of the inside-outside through the fold. It attempts to demonstrate another similarity to hip hop, in the relation of self to self and the formation of a fluid motionary ethics, detached from static, prescriptive, normative and moralistic aims.

In the concluding section, I show that despite many similarities which seem to validate the idea of 'hip hop as a culture of resistance' in a Foucauldian and Deleuzian sense (i.e. its relation to the unknown, the value of creativity and learning, its relations of exteriority), there remains a fundamental difference in the nature and conceptualisation of the outside/unknown/virtual. Within Deleuzian theory the virtual always remains immanent and thus through its ability to be actualised is not transcendent, however in the philosophies of hip hop analysed here, an unknowable entity exists and hence such philosophies often rest upon recourse to the transcendental.

An argument can be made that hip hop hardly plays into a Deleuzian-Foucauldian reading at all, due to its near obsession with origins and authenticity (Hess, 2007: 110; Neal, 2012) it's hyper-commericalised and commodified mainstream variant¹, while its notorious associations with racial supremacy and dogmatic religion can hardly be downplayed (Brake, 1985; Ogbar, 2007). Despite this, there is another reading of hip hop which rests upon the philosophies and approaches of early pioneers such as Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and KRS-One which struggles against this discourse. This paper continues in line with Foucault's genealogical method, in an attempt to 'emancipate historical knowledges from subjugation, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse’ (1988a: 85).

A brief word on the methodology, as perhaps some of the interpretations offered here run counter to more dogmatic readings of these thinkers. Far from any claim to veracity, the singular interpretation here traces its own unique path in relation to the subject matter at hand. It hopes to do so in the spirit of friendship and creativity, integral to Deleuze's own approach (Deleuze, 1995), and which aims to explore where these new applications may lead and the new ground it might open up. As such, it will inevitably trace its own 'diagonal line' drawn from this encounter between Deleuze, Foucault, hip hop and of course myself, as there is 'no other option' (ibid, 88). This multiplicity in writing is wonderfully elucidated at the beginning of the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, written with Felix Guatarri, in which they state, en masse, that ‘the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’ (1987: 1).

Ubiquitous Power and the Paradox of Resistance: Foucault and the Hip Hop Generation

The origins of hip hop are most often traced back to around 1973 in the South Bronx, when collective street and block parties would bring large sections of the community together around a sound-system (Ogg and Upshal, 1999). The term hip hop encompasses the four 'core' elements of graffiti art, break dancing, rapping and DJing (Kitwana, 2002), though it is most often understood as a 'culture', or as the title of a forthcoming hip hop documentary suggests, A Way of Life (2014). Given this much broader definition, it has come to be associated with its own 'verbal language, body language, attitude, style and fashion’ (Kitwana, 2002: 8).

The birth of hip hop coincided with the coming of age of a generation who had not directly experienced the civil rights era, and who despite apparent equality before the law, were confronted by a new plethora of issues. As supposed equality gave way to continuing conditions of impoverishment, compounded with a drugs epidemic and conscription in the Vietnam War, an appreciation for the more subtle, pervasive and hidden nature of power arose through the realisation of its everyday effects and nuanced operations. In effect, it became necessary to 'view politics in a different way' (Boyd, 2012: 441). Thus, an understanding of power not dissimilar to the Foucauldian concept outlined below arose, in which people had to look beyond the domain of the state to understand its flows and effects, in areas such as: the urban landscape and the design of the city (Nas Time is Illmatic, 2014), representation and imagery within the media, body language, gestures and even subjectivity (KRS-One, 2009, 2011a, 2011b). Hip hop is, as George writes, the 'product of schizophrenic, post-civil rights movement America' (George, 1998: xiv), and as such it anticipated how to use this schizophrenia to its advantage, which rather than seeking out a prescriptive message or code instead opened new possibilities through multiplicity and learning.

This understanding of power resonates with the description outlined by Foucault most explicitly in Discipline and Punish (1977). Power, he asserts, must no longer be seen as a repressive force wielded as a possession by some over others. Instead, it becomes a ubiquitous and productive relation, which 'induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse... a productive network which runs through the whole social body' (1988c: 119). The immense productive force of power is exemplified through the production of the subject, which cannot be conceived of as a mere point or location of power, but instead as a ‘vehicle of power’ (Foucault, 1988a: 98). Thus subjectivity is a relation of power, in which the subject ‘inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjugation’ (Foucault, 1977: 203).

The ubiquitous nature of power, however, evokes a much discussed paradox for resistance. It is charged that Foucauldian thought has relinquished the right to take ethical positions, having done away with notions of universality and truth, and that through the problematisation of the subject as a product of power, Foucault leaves no firm ground from which to challenge power. Foucauldian thought is said to be plagued by an ‘impossible attempt to stand nowhere' (Taylor, 1986: 99). Others have suggested that this lack of normative ground makes it impossible to distinguish between power and resistance (Grimshaw, 1993), and that ultimately the possibility of resistance is completely subsumed by the ubiquity of power (Fraser, 1989; Hartsock, 1990; Philips, 1983).

Despite this, Foucault remains committed to the possibility, even inevitability of resistance, insisting that:

To say that one can never be 'outside' power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what... there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised (Foucault, 1988d: 141 - 142).

Noting the ‘tone of Foucault’s portrayal suggests that these new forms of power/knowledge ought to be resisted’ (1999: 99), Rouse attempts to resolve the problem created as Foucault ‘resolutely rejects the idea that there is any ground or standpoint from which such a call to resistance could be legitimated’ (ibid). Commenting on Foucault’s own political struggles and activism, Rouse claims that through recourse to the specificity of these struggles, Foucault is able to avoid contradiction, claiming that they occurred within a 'particular' historical moment and as a ‘situated response’ (ibid, 112). Despite similar attempts to justify such positions of resistance, this response seems hardly adequate. A similar problem was posed to those communities in the Bronx at the beginning of the seventies: how to resist without recourse to the current relations of power, without remaining trapped within them? How to create a mode of being that doesn't pander to white validation or have to operate in complete opposition (and thus still be defined by it)? KRS-One explicitly makes this point, stating that hip hop attempted a new path away from this false dichotomy of integration versus separation, epitomised by the political stances of Martin Luther King and Malcom X respectively. Until hip hop, these two choices were seen to be the 'age-old African-American question' (Chang, 2005: 9). In order to resolve this theoretical paradox, and to help explicate the approach taken in hip hop, I would like to propose a Deleuzian reading of Foucault, which appeals to an immanent ‘outside’, in order for resistance to exist as more than a binary reciprocal relationship with power.

The Virtual

A Deleuzian reading of Foucault opens up the present to the sphere of virtual possibilities that lie latent yet real within reality. I use the term sphere of possibilities to refer to all possible outcomes from any given moment. This is of course a potentially infinite list, as Deleuze makes clear (1994; 1986), with infinite amounts of permutations of the way in which reality unfolds and folds. The sphere of possibilities includes all capabilities and possibilities that are always real, yet not always actual. This point is crucial to understanding the possibility for resistance that Deleuze opens up. In his work on Foucault, Deleuze makes clear that these permutations are of course drawn from the particular permutation of the present (and it is this that keeps them tied to immanence), in the sense that events unfold similar to a 'Markov chain' (1986: 71). However, the crucial point is that it would be inadequate to summarise from this Markov chain that resistance is always entangled within power relations, as the possibilities for resistance opened up by the sphere operate outside of, although alongside, the power relations represented in the 'diagram'² (Deleuze, 1986: 31). It is in this sense that resistance may be freed from its pure reciprocal relation with power, as it exists as a set of possibilities related to the current functional relations of power (the diagram) yet not completely defined by it as it exists outside of an actual reality, lying in the unknown virtual. This offers a new location for resistance as the unimaginable, the new and as those things yet to ‘become’. Thus resistance has a very real ability to affect the present, undoubtedly related to power (through the diagrammatic Markov chain), yet independent within a currently imperceptible and immanent 'higher' dimension. It is by tapping into this virtual yet actualisable ‘new dimension’ (Deleuze, 1986: 58) of the present, that Foucauldian resistance is saved: 'we must also leap into a different dimension to that of the stratum and its two forms' (ibid)³.

As this 'other dimension' provides the foundation of the argument of this paper, it is important to be conceptually clear as to what exactly is meant by this term, in order to begin to dispel the charge of ‘mysticism’ sometimes levied against Deleuze (Lovat and Semetsky, 2009), which some claim can be traced back through Deleuze's influences to Spinoza and Bergson (Goddard, 2001). In Hyperspace, Kaku (1994), summarises Edwin Abbot's 19th century classic Flatland (1984), with a discussion on how one might perceive of a higher dimension within the confines of our particular knowledges and subjectivities. In order to elaborate this point, Kaku uses the example of a two dimensional person living in two dimensional land. He explains that if an object were to enter from the third dimension into the second (e.g. to place a finger down onto the page in which this two dimensional being lives), it would be unexplainable within this being's own language and reality. To someone living in a two dimensional land, the finger would seem to just appear as they would have no conception, and are in fact unable to conceptualise of, the idea of down.

The genius of Deleuze is to recognise that though this person might not be able to conceive of down, she is able to conceive of the fact that she cannot conceive of everything, and it is in this point that we find utility in Deleuze’s description of the ‘new dimension’ which offers the opportunity for both Deleuze and Foucault (and hip hop's own struggle) to 'snatch it away from the void and pull it back from death' (Deleuze, 1986: 79)⁴. The latent yet real possibilities within reality, though one might not be able to conceptualise of exactly what they might be until they appear they are always able to become actualised. Furthermore one can realise the existence of the 'unknown', and incorporate this into a practice or culture, in order to realise alternate possibilities, ultimately leading to an ethics of how one might live (Foucault, 1994d).

In order to truly clarify this element of Deleuze’s work which opens up new possibilities for conceptualising resistance, I would like to turn to the concept of imaginary numbers in mathematics. This concept relies on a similar idea of creating a marker against the unknown and inconceivable, in order to factor it into our everyday operations. The multiplication of two minus numbers always results in a positive and thus:

√4 = ±2

As the square root of the number 4 is both positive and negative 2, a problem emerges when one attempts the square root of a minus number, as it does not have an answer within our conception of real numbers. In order to resolve this paradox, an imaginary number 'i' is introduced, in which:

i² = -1

Thus;

√-4 = 2i

Imaginary numbers are then utilised in complex equations, to perform complex calculations and are later cancelled out, leaving only a comprehensible useful solution.

The inclusion of the virtual as a philosophical tool not dissimilar to imaginary numbers plays an instrumental role in Deleuze's ontology of difference, as it is through the sphere of possibilities that the system is given momentum, into a perpetual state of becoming in which desiring-machines continually flow throughout the system forming new connections and assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984; 1988). The strata exist in relation to the un-actualised virtual, and are the limits or surfaces upon which matter is formed and functions formalised through a double articulation in which this matter is then encoded. Other codes and articulations can then be formed on the basis of these encodings leading to ever greater levels of complexity (Buchanan, 2004). A Body without Organs works on the absolute limit of the strata, on a plane of consistency (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984; 1988). It is finding this continual motion to life that has often led to the characterisation of Deleuze's oeuvre as a 'high tech brand of vitalism' (Braidotti, 2002: 73). It is imperative to note though, that these possibilities of the virtual occur on a plane of immanence, and thus despite the inclination to label this virtuality ‘a higher dimension’, this does not mean to imply a transcendental or even a mathematical one, and it is on this point that the fissure between Deleuze's thought and mysticism opens up.

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze (1994) is explicit about the superior position of learning as a result of these possibilities, which he opposes to knowledge that subsumes difference in favour of identity through/by/within form. Learning may then be thought of as a continual process of becoming, in which possibilities are realised and particular 'truths' are located within this sphere of virtual (and actual) possibilities. He deploys the analogy of learning to swim at sea, in which a multitude of outcomes may be possible e.g. drowning, splashing, swimming (1994: 165). As a 'body' moves through and interacts with the water, it locates a set of particular points which might loosely be called ‘truths’ mapped out by the process of learning: 'To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field' (ibid). It is those opportunities offered on the edge of knowledge, through a creative journey into the unknown that attracts Deleuze, in order to imagine what might be possible and what could become, as the following quotation shows:

We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other... To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow – or rather, to make it impossible (Deleuze, 1994: xxi).

A similar hyperactivity and radical learning can be found at the birth of hip hop, with its explosion of new musical forms, sounds, dances, movements and assemblages, which worked to transform the landscape and those within it. Early hip hoppers have been explicit about this form of radical learning. Hip hop pioneer and founder of the Zulu Nation, Afrika Bambataa, outlined a core component of hip hop culture as ‘doing the knowledge’ (Bambataa cited in Kitwana, 2005: xii), where knowledge no longer refers to the formed matter and formalised functions implied by Foucault (Deleuze, 1986: 73), but a radical learning, in which the boundaries are continually pushed. Kool Herc similarly attempted to dismiss arguments over the formal categorisation of what is and isn't hip hop by stating that certain elements were 'just another form. It’s about experimenting and being open' (Herc quoted in George, 2012: 49).

This tendency within hip hop to value learning and becoming is perhaps most explicitly outline by KRS-One. Described as one of hip hop's early giants, with a legacy of community oriented political activism and 'justice-based lyrics' (Rose, 2008: 109), he explains that hip hop's productive force was in its relationship to an unknown. Summarising the civil rights era and the political message of Martin Luther King as 'everything the white man get we want', he argues that 'hip hop didn't go there', that instead the sentiment was 'keep it, we don't want it' (KRS-One, 2013a) in an attempt to create something new. Rather than through recourse to white values and norms, hip hop attempted to create a line of flight, which sketched a route towards new forms of subjectivity and collectivity. KRS-One shows how this creative production and subsequent lines of flight were due to an 'unknowing':

There is knowing and there is not knowing... unknowing is an argument that says that what you don't know is also teaching you... It is because we did not know how to play musical instruments that we created cutting, mixing scratching... Had we had knowledge, we would have passed that, there would've been no need for it. It is because we did not know how to play instruments, we couldn't afford them, we didn't have access to them, we created or were forced to self-create (KRS-One, 2011b).

It was by speaking to the unknown, that hip hop was able to move outside the confines of the racial binaries, in order to affect a new generation’s attitudes to race (Light, 1999). By redefining race and so called 'race relations' in this way, hip hop was able to (immanently) transcend the old racial politics in America, without shedding its preoccupation with the relations of power to which it was still very much attached and a part of, yet not completely defined by. Though many early hip hoppers would define hip hop culture as ‘black’ culture, this ran concurrent with a shift in the terminology in which the term ‘black’ shifted nervously in line with the new forms of subjectivication and resistance that hip hop was defining. As Kitwana makes clear, the appeal of hip hop to a white audience showed a ‘fluidity between cultures’ (2005: xv) and testified to its pivotal role in formulating a ‘new racial politics’ (ibid).

Desire, Minor Art and Assemblages

Desire plays an important and productive role within Deleuzian theory, as it operates in relation to virtual possibilities and becoming as a productive force that seeks new connections and assemblages through creative exploration on a plane of immanence (1984; 1988). If Deleuze is considered a vitalist, this is because life strives to make new connections, and desire is the force behind this process. It is through desire that we are able to understand creativity and truth: 'Because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence' (Deleuze, 1989: 146 – 147). Or as Hardt explains it is 'the difference between the virtual and the actual requires that the process of actualisation be a creation' (Hardt 1993: 18). Thus for Deleuze, creativity plays a central role as it operates on the edge of the knowable, forming new connections and sketching out new possibilities. It is through the elevated status Deleuze gives to creativity that one is better placed to explore Deleuze's concept of minor arts, and to ultimately move towards an ethics that incorporates these principles.

The concept of a minor art draws upon the theory of minor literature elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1986), and applies this to art practice more generally (O'Sullivan, 2009). A minor art, O'Sullivan asserts, must satisfy three conditions:

1. The foregrounding of the affective and intensive quality of language... [it] stutters and stammers the major. It breaks with the operation of ‘order-words’. It ‘stops making sense’. 2. The always already political nature of such literature. A minor literature is always connected to the wider social milieu... 3. Its specifically collective character. A minor literature is always a collective enunciation (ibid: 247).

The affective and intensive quality of hip hop language is well documented, and is the most thoroughly explored of these three points (Alim, 2004; Morgan, 2001; Smitherman, 2001). Rap not only blurs the distinction between music and talk, it departs from ‘the regular stresses of English, redeploys them, making the sounds and words jump to a superimposed beat’ (Szwed, 1999: 7). In an interview with Nelson George, hip hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash describes the way in which Kid Creole and Melle Mel used to ‘toss a sentence back and forth. Kid would say, “I,” Mel would say, “was,” Kid would say, “walking,” Mel would say, “down”,' (Flash quoted in George, 2012: 51), highlighting the novel ways in which hip hop deployed language as well as defined a new collective character.

The most obvious example of hip hop 'stuttering and stammering' the major is the reclamation of the word 'nigger'⁵. The affective and intensive use of language has been deployed with such success that the word has been broken open, to the point that it 'stops making sense'. As this articulation is decoded and recoded, it is stripped of its racist connotations to the point of almost normalcy, irony and absurdity. As KRS-One puts it:

Word, what go around comes around I figure
Now we got white kids callin' themselves niggas

(MCs Act Like They Don't Know, 1995)

As well as the innovative use of language and the political nature of hip hop, a third emphasis is also placed on the collective feature of a minor art. The hip hop collective has been elucidated above, but it is useful here to draw on another Deleuzian concept to assess hip hop's utility as a culture of resistance: assemblages.

Deleuze and Guattari first proposed the concept of an assemblage in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), in which elements are joined together into an assemblage which is not reducible to the sum of its parts. This must be understood within a system of flows and vitality as outlined above, and in relation to an exteriority, which allows for momentum within this system. This concept of assemblages, developed by Manuel DeLanda (2006*)*, allows one to move beyond locating essentialist identities within forms (a problem conjured by the Image of thought), as they are instead defined by relations of exteriority and their emergent properties preclude the possibility of being a unified whole, thus offering radical possibilities for resistance. As Swiboda considers:

early hiphop culture or ‘wildstyle’, and its characteristics such as ‘bombing’ (graffiti) or the isolation of a musical passage (‘break’ or ‘breakdown’) by scratching vinyl records, or even the bodies of breakdancers whose moves are only legible in relation to the surfaces on which they dance. These inscriptions and their interacting surfaces at least partially constitute the machinic assemblage of early hiphop. To the extent that these bodies produce utterances or enunciations it is via the MC whose rappin’ skills ostensibly mark her out as an individual, and yet their function remains completely tied to the hiphop collective, comprising all the other aspects of the hiphop assemblage (Swiboda, 2010: 170).

The hip hop assemblage, understood within a vitalistic system of flows which seep into one another through processes of de/re/territorialisation, is thus a changing interaction between the urban landscape and those within it, the sound systems and the vibrating air pushed out of them, which is then coordinated with dancers in collective spaces. As the hip hop assemblage transformed by lines of flight into the virtual (DeLanda, 2002) or through creativity into the 'unknown' (KRS-One, 2011a, 2011b), new connections were continually being formed and assemblages reconfigured. For example, when the DJ began playing on two decks, originally to play the same record and thus extend the drum breaks so that people could dance for longer⁶, this required greater concentration and it has been suggested that in order to keep energy levels up an MC⁷ was required to hype the crowd, as the DJ was now preoccupied (Sample This, 2012). The introduction of the MC allowed the DJ more freedom to develop new skills such as scratching, thus, while it is often suggested that scratching was 'invented' by Grand Wizzard Theodore, it might be more accurately described as an emergent property of the hip hop assemblage.

DeLanda states that 'being part of a whole involves the exercise of a part's capacities but it is not a constitutive property of it. And given that an unexercised capacity does not affect what a component is, a part may be detached from the whole while preserving its identity' (2006: 10). Similarly the assemblage created by hip-hop not only tied individuals to a collectivised subjectivity with emergent properties greater than the sum of its parts, it also encompassed the exercise of new subjectivities within this collective (new emergent properties within individuals too), which also steered away from prescriptive or dogmatic images. This new sphere of possibilities opened up by a becoming and through an assemblage understood through its relations of exteriority, meant that 'Generation Hip Hop' have come to inhabit what Neal has called the 'explosion' of black identities as 'practical opportunities' (2002: 178), who 'still forge forward, like some vanguard on new black futures, embracing whatever identities allow them to most effectively succeed in the mainstream and survive the margins' (ibid, 194). This fluidity that allowed component parts (i.e. individuals) to be 'plugged in' or out to other machines is not only a useful paradigm, but a similar self-conception of the hip hop collective as an assemblage organised through relations of exteriority was of critical utility to those members who wanted/needed to transform their own subjectivities, yet who also need to have the ability to actively 'plug into' other areas of life. As Boyd puts it:

But you can't be in something but not be of it. And to me that's what this whole thing is about. You're in this culture and to some extent you're a part of it but not fully, and hip hop, in the sense of being, gives you another option (2012: 440).

This made for a practical tool in navigating various new social spheres (for example for those first African-American students on campus), as well as a multiplicity of identities viewed as opportunities (rather than inherent essential values).

Ethics

Given the pervasive nature of power, desiring-machines or a process of radical learning as the incorporation of the unknown/virtual into a philosophical practice is able to resuscitate possibilities of resistance. The nature of hip hop as a broad culture of resistance which extended through daily life chimes with the Foucauldian conceptions of ethics elaborated in his later writings, particularly on the ancient Greeks (Foucault, 1985; 1986). Though his work has been criticised for its supposed idealisation of Greek culture, particularly the apparent disregard for the status of women (Ramazanoglu, 1993; Afary and Anderson, 2005) as well as what has been described as Foucault’s more general disregard for ‘progressive or liberatory’ aspects of modernity (Pickett, 2006: 29), Foucault nevertheless presents a useful conception of ethics which retains the subject as a position within resistance, and which may be paralleled with what might be described as a similar approach to ethics within early hip hop culture, particularly in the latter’s attempt at an aesthetics of living.

This interest and approach to ethics is further evidenced in Foucault's preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, in which he explains the work as a 'book of ethics', which has 'become a lifestyle' imploring one to 'live counter to all forms of fascism' (1984: xiii). In a similar vein to the somewhat infamous Foucauldian statement that 'everything is political', hip hop attempted to turn this ubiquity into its resistance tool, into a lifestyle. If everything is political, resistance can be too and thus power can be resisted everywhere: on walls, through sounds, in fashion, through the use of the body and through subjectivity.

Despite subjectivity's position as a product of power, by mapping the complex typology of this 'inside', Deleuze was able to show how the inside's relation to the outside – the fold – retains the utility of subjectivity to levy challenges against the operation of power, subjectivity being an assemblage of various folds (e.g. memory, the body). Coupled with the concepts of multiplicity and becoming, a Deleuzian assessment of subjectivity might best be described as 'a kind of Nietzschean mastery over the swarm of one's being' (O'Sullivan, 2005: 103). Thus despite what some have incorrectly labelled a ‘return to the subject’ in Foucault's work, in which the 'the self must already exist in order to construct itself' (Dews, 1989: 40), Foucault’s concern was with how the self was able to relate to itself in order to rescue subjectivity from stagnation and the clutches of both power and the unknown: 'This would be like a new axis, different from the axes of both knowledge and power' (Deleuze, 1986: 79). It is in this sense of a new axis, encountering the outside within oneself, that the fold of subjectivity (differentiated from knowledge, power and the outside/thought) is able to create and resist. Thus, 'suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it' (Foucault, 1988b: 56).

The charge that Foucault's later writing marks a return to the subject not only neglects that a study on subjectivity does not undermine its historicity (a position which Foucault remained obviously tied to), but it also glosses over the nuance elaborated by Deleuze, in which thought is intimately related though not reducible to the outside, and it is this relation which one can have to oneself that forms the basis of Foucauldian ethics⁸. It is through the fold’s intimate and complex relationship that ‘technologies of the self’ are formed as the core of Foucauldian ethics as ‘the ways in which we relate ourselves to ourselves, contribute to the forms in which our subjectivity is constituted and experienced, as well as to the forms in which we govern our thought and conduct’ (Davidson, 1999: 119). Thus, it is by combining the concepts of governmentality and subjectivity that Foucault’s ethics is located as ‘the government of the self by the self in its articulation with relations to others’

(Foucault, 1994: 88). Formulating ethics in this way means that resistance is also possible. Relating the self’s relationship to itself and the outside is 'precisely how to write a history of ethics that will not collapse into a history of moral codes' (Davidson, 1999: 122) Thus when 50 Cent raps ‘build with the Gods and double knowledge of self'⁹ (We Up, 2013), it refers to the sense in which hip hop ethics requires similar techniques of the self.

Foucauldian ethics, like hip hop, is not concerned with how one should live, in a prescriptive moral sense, through the composition of truths (1994b: 295) but instead how one might live, driven by a curiosity for what might exist (1994d: 325). Foucault urges turning away from attempting to 'know one self' (which would rely on transcendental essentialist conceptions of self-hood), instead the questions posed are; ''what should one do with oneself? What work should be carried out on the self?' (Foucault, 1994a: 87). Rather than a truth-seeking endeavour, it is by turning the project of life into a project of art and creativity, that subjectivity could be manipulated to create new possibilities of being (or as Deleuze would have it, a constant becoming). It is in this that Foucault refers to an aesthetics of existence, and asks 'couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?' (Foucault, 1994c: 261).

In describing Foucault's care of the self, O'Sullivan shows how this new subjectivity 'cannot simply be read about, or directly accessed' (2008: 95) as it is a practice which cannot be communicated through words and discourse. The care of the self or ethics that guide hip hop similarly cannot be communicated, 'hip hop can not be taught by words, it's the feeling you get when a conversation like this is going down' (KRS-One, 2011b). In contrast to the civil rights movement, by focusing creatively on how one might live, hip hop culture was able to offer ways to create new possibilities that didn't rely on prescriptive answers and that valued multiplicity. As such, early hip hoppers might well be described as nomadic, moving and circulating within the hip hop assemblage, maximising the potentialities of how one might live rather than constraining thought and thus subjectivity. KRS-One notes that it is impossible to be a 'scholar' of hip hop as hip hop is a mode of being, a 'process of self' (2013, online). As such, for KRS-One there is 'no objective knowledge on hip hop' as hip hop is always in the business of creativity and production. KRS-One goes on to ascertain that hip hop asks whether we have the courage to realise what we could be and to answer the question 'how do you approach you?' (ibid)¹⁰.

Conclusion

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze criticises philosophical traditions for having neglected to address the Image of thought that is produced by the suppression of difference in favour of identity, form and essence (1994). Thought, Deleuze asserts, is a reaction to the world, and a particular singularity to the present situation, thus its current iteration exists as one possibility amongst many permutations. This detachment of thought from any transcendental values, a priori truths or essentialist conceptions parts from previous philosophies which remain tied to this Image (e.g. Kantian). By realising this Image of Thought and the problem it created through knowledge and form, we have seen how creative learning is proposed as a practice or ethics (in the Foucauldian sense), to move beyond essentialist and essentialising tendencies to new forms of becoming. Critical to this is the notion of a Deleuzian virtual which corresponds to what has been described within hip hop thought as the 'unknown'. However it is in the nature of the unknown that a critical divergence emerges between the hip hop studied here and the philosophies of Deleuze and Foucault.

For Deleuze, the virtual remains tied to immanence in that all permutations exist as a set of possibilities for the present and as such it can be distanced from a mystical and religious conception of a 'higher force'. Deleuzian thought is more accurately described as 'transcendental empiricism' (Deleuze, 1990; 1996; Bryant, 2008) or 'speculative realism' (O'Sullivan, 2012). Though hip hop also draws upon a creative practice of learning, newness or becoming in relation to an unknown, for many within hip hop such as KRS-One and Afrika Bambataa, this unknown still lies within a transcendental realm, as there are elements of the unknown/virtual which can never become actual. That is to say, it is still in relation to a 'God' in the traditional sense as something that exists beyond potential actualisations within the universe. Thus Deleuze’s virtual is an immanent virtual, not currently actual but not transcendental either. There is then a fundamental difference in where the momentum for radical learning and care for the self is found, though it may be accurate to say that Deleuzian thought remains somewhat elusive on this point. Though hip hop often recognised many of the same problems of power, knowledge and subjectivity, it still remains rooted in a transcendental answers (KRS-One, online; Zulu Nation, online).

Despite this fundamental difference, the strategies drawn upon and employed by hip hop to resuscitate resistance from the stagnation it faced, have had undeniable success in confronting power, twisting and contorting the diagram to its current format. Through an understanding that resistance could be formulated through a radical learning and venture into the unknown through the creative production of new connections, assemblages and subjectivities, hip hop was able to redefine thought and subjectivity for a new generation, which has had a profound impact. The analysis of hip hop as a case study and culture of resistance has also demonstrated the pragmatic and material possibility of a Foucauldian and Deleuzian resistance. As Tyler the Creator of OFWGKTA makes clear in a HOT 97 interview when being questioned by the interviewer as to why he, and the rest of OFWGKTA don't have a problem with white people using the word 'nigger', Tyler (who was twenty-years-old at the time of interview and hence a generation younger than his interviewers) responded: 'I guess people my age, we're not even thinking like that... when you think like that you keep the racism alive' (2013).

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