The 19th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference is devoted to multiplicity. The concept problematizes three things at once: the One, the many, and the multiple itself. It reaches Deleuze through Bergson and Riemann, whose manifold becomes, in Bergsonism, identified with the continuous, intensive multiplicity of time, in contrast to the numerical, extensive multiplicity of space. In Difference and Repetition the Idea itself is a multiplicity: a structure of differentials, differential relations, and singularities that neither determines essences nor unifies manifolds. Through Guattari’s intervention, multiplicity ceases to be a metaphysical distinction and becomes a question of composition, of relative and practical unification without totalization. When Deleuze and Guattari describe A Thousand Plateaus as a theory of multiplicities, they reinforce and deepen all of these aspects: a multiplicity, as a substantivized form that has severed all connections to the One, is defined by its outside, by the lines of flight along which it transforms and connects with other multiplicities.

And this is not just a purely conceptual question. Political formations that promise unity, purity, and restored sovereignty are on the rise again; the ecological crisis proceeds, among other things, through the extinction of variation; digital capitalism captures heterogeneity by modulating it, converting qualitative differences into quantitative differences. Nor does the problem dissolve once unity is replaced by pluralism or diversity. What makes a multiplicity consistent rather than merely many, what distinguishes molar aggregates from molecular becomings, and whether Deleuzian or Deleuzo-Guattarian multiplicity remains after all subordinate to a virtual One — an objection pressed since Badiou — are questions that remain open.

In the new materialisms and speculative process philosophies, multiplicity serves to undercut the notion of a homogeneous and passively conceived matter in favor of an irreducible manifold of processes of becoming. In ecological theory the same critique is turned against the monolithic concept of humanity in Anthropocene discourse, which restores the One under a different name. In the schizoanalytic project, the multiplicity produced by the flows of desire and the collective unconscious is brought forth against reductionist ideas that constrict the unconscious to a single principle, such as the symbolic name of the father. In theological debates, the question arises with Deleuze as to what becomes of the One, the divine under conditions of immanence and multiplicity. In Spinozist and post-Marxist approaches, among them Antonio Negri’s concept of the multitude, multiplicity functions as a counter-concept to sovereignty and to the unity of the political subject. Postcolonial and decolonial theory use it to break open universalist categories of the human in favor of a plurality of forms of being and knowing. And in the philosophy of technology and political philosophy it allows machinic forms of dividual, collective agency to be thought beyond the sovereign subject.

We are equally interested in multiplicity before and beside Deleuze and Guattari, for example in Lucretius, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Whitehead, or Simondon, and in trajectories that pass beyond them: Glissant’s relational poetics, Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalism, Stengers’ cosmopolitics, or the reworkings undertaken in feminist, queer, and disability theory. This also includes art, science, politics, and the clinic as forms of thought in their own right.

The title construction, Multi-pli-city, is intended to draw attention to other facets that are latent in the concept of multiplicity. In The Fold [Le pli], Leibniz’s multiple is not counted or assembled from parts but pleated, folded in many ways. The continuous has the fold, -pli-, not the point, as its smallest element. Folding, unfolding, and refolding give multiplicity a topological rather than a numerical or assembled measure. The third term names a site rather than a concept: the city, where multiplicities are composed, captured, as well as administered. Fundamentally ambivalent in A Thousand Plateaus as the striated space par excellence and the nucleus of unexpected smooth spaces, the city is also the object of Guattari’s own urban research, from the CERFI studies of collective equipments of power to his writings on architecture and urban ecology. Vienna, where camp and conference take place, is not a neutral setting for these questions. Rather, it challenges us to reflect on them on multiple levels: its imperial, colonial, Austrofascist and National Socialist past, the counter-project of “Red Vienna,” which reclaimed the city for its working classes through municipal housing, public welfare and education, and the neoliberal housing crisis of the 21st century, which puts this legacy under severe pressure.

In other words, the multiple, in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s formula, must be made. To make the multiple is to undo the operations by which unity is imposed and difference administered: identity, totality, representation, the people as One etc.

Through a variety of formats, the conference wants to ask how we can not only think but do multiplicity: in theory, art, politics, and collective practice.