Notes on Bogue, R. (2003) Deleuze on Literature.
London: Routledge
Dave Harris
[Brilliantly clear yet detailed. Obviously
it helps if you have read both Deleuze's own
commentaries on people like Proust or Kafka, and, ideally,
had a go at the originals as well]
Chapter one. Sickness, signs, and
sense
[An excellent and clear discussion of some of
the earlier works on Masoch and Nietzsche.
Particularly clear on the arguments in Logic of Sense, for
which much thanks]
One interest of Deleuze in literature is clear
from the Essays,
Critical and Clinical project: we find the
first appearance of a suggested connection in the book on masochism, but
hints of it also appear in the
work on Nietzsche. The discussion
shows what is distinctive about literature as
compared to other forms of writing.
Nietzsche is credited as offering total and
positive critique, examining the values underneath
truth and morality, unlike Kant. Nietzsche
both interprets sense and evaluates value, both
efforts turning on combinations of forces in
relation, and the corresponding will to power that
is possible. The sense of an object is
derived from the force that appropriates it, and
the history of the thing is a history of the
succession of forces that have taken possession of
it, leading to power or interpretation.
Sometimes these forces are masked. Overall,
a phenomenon must be taken as a sign or symptom of
a force, hence philosophy as a symptomatology or
'semielogical system'[the odd spelling
arising from the fact that semieology does not
just consider language, unlike semiology].
Thus Nietzsche shows that there are different
interpretations of what is good according to
whether this is the interpretation of the slave or
the master; the slave assumes a masked version of
the master's evaluations, deploying reactive
forces and so on. We have to judge whether
forces are active or reactive, noble or
base. The valuation additionally involves
the will to power, that which joins together and
gives qualitative dimensions to forces [active or
reactive], as a dynamic element, relating
different quantities of forces and producing
relations between the qualities. Dominant
and active forces combine to become affirmative,
dominated and reactive negative. Thus the
will to power decides the value of a thing.
However, the will to power is not a will over
another person – that is what slaves think.
To dominate forces means to impose particular
forms, to transform, to pursue Dionysian goals in
activity, release potential powers. Being
affected similarly is not just a form of
passivity, but a greater quality of potential
sensibility or sensation.
Thus bodies are always a multiplicity of forces
and each is related to multiple forces both active
and reactive: everything depends on marshaling the
affirmative elements. The nobility still
encounter superior forces, but do not develop
resentment, and can move on. Slaves can
never move on and contaminate everything with
reactive forces. The affirmative will
ultimately becomes 'an artistic sensibility' (12),
one that can transform joyously and
creatively. Mastery is not a matter of just
subjugation, but rather a 'a creative donation of
value'(13), an openness to being affected and
affecting others, acting and reacting instead of
just brooding. But the reactive forces have
triumphed, and bad conscience has prevented
masterly creativity. Philosophers must
diagnose these conditions and also prescribe the
cure, new possibilities for life, 'as an artist'.
Critique in particular should always be done from
the standpoint of the philosopher-artist, both
assessor and creator. Users, reception, is
ignored for both arts and language.
Affirmative interpretation and evaluation is the
goal, although this is not simple
yea-saying. Affirmative critique can also
involve a 'joyous destruction of all that is
negative', as 'pure affirmation'.
However, the role of art is not made explicit in
the book on Nietzsche, even though Nietzsche's
literary style is praised—the aphorism and the
poem. The first articulates sense, in the
form of a fragment, involving a double
interpretation. It helps to point to
different combinations of forces, like a poem,
which can be either affirmative or negative,
although both are usually implicit.
Philosophy is required to make these elements
explicit, through being able to 'ruminate' (14)
upon them. Literature is thus the first
level of interpretation and critique which needs
then to be submitted to philosophy.
In the book on masochism, arts and medicine are
joined more specifically, since the work of
Sacher-Masoch is both a literary work and a
clinical study, and Deleuze combines both literary
criticism, and medical [Freudian] analysis.
However, there is more emphasis on literary
creation, which appears in the denial that sadism
and masochism are simply inversely related:
instead, the work can be seen as examples of
anthropology, relating to an entire notion of 'man
culture and nature'(15), and they are capable of
artistic creativity in describing feelings and
thinking and using a new language. In this
way, they are able to comment on civilization as a
whole not just individual pathology [or some
compound Freudian syndrome]. This relates
them to Nietzsche, as symptomatologists.
The term symptomatology also unites the notion of
medical diagnosis through understanding or
interpreting patients' appearance and behavior,
and, in the best examples, an attempt to 'regroup
signs'(16) to produce new syndromes. Deleuze
argues that it is a technique that belongs to
literature as well. Indeed it is a literary
method used in medical diagnosis: in both cases,
signs have to be named and interpreted.
Also, the notion of the [Freudian] phantasy joins
both literary creation and medical symptoms [see Logic of Sense
on this]. However, there can be either
artistic or pathological work involved in the
phantasy. Literary approaches can draw upon
phantasies but also work on them as objects to
produce entire works. [More on the differences
between Sade and Masoch and their worlds
p17. Sade attempts to create a world of
primary nature, a cruel order, based on the
phantasy of the father as destroyer. Masoch
draws upon the three female figures etc. The
contract is crucial to Masoch to disavow reality,
p 18, which leads to mocking the law and ritual
etc].
Work on the fantasy unites literature and medical
diagnosis, but the work on literature specifically
is just suggested, say in the appendix to Masochism—we
must go from the figure to the problem, the
obsessive phantasy which discloses the problem,
which can then be grasped by a theoretical
structure. This theoretical or ideological
structure is what lends the phantasy value as a
generalization about human nature or the
world. Literature therefore attempts to
construct a double of the world, including
violence and excess. It would be wrong to
just focus on the sadomasochistic content:
rather it is the theoretical ideological
structures that are important, and they are
clearly divergent between Sade and Masoch, with
the latter valuing disavowal, suspense, waiting
and fetishism [discussed 20]. In Masoch, one
series involves the three types of women, and this
is represented in a phantasy which is to be turned
into reality, after denying the real. The
elements of the phantasy become motionless objects
or components of scenes, whereas sadism seeks
constant movement and repetition. Both are
really best understood as writers about
pornography rather than pornographers, inventing
new functions for porn's 'obscene commands'.
Both turn their fantasies into objects of their
work, 'material for artistic invention'(21),
creations of a double of the world. This
necessarily involves a diagnosis of the problems
of civilization and discussing creative
alternatives. Real structures are
transformed, ironically or humorously, using
apparently pornographic terms, but also showing
the limits of language -- Deleuze talks about
violence which does not speak. This is
possible because language is also doubled, with
the invention of new commands and
descriptions. Such language, Deleuze claims,
can act directly on the senses.
So, symptomatology is some kind of 'zero point',
where artists, philosophers, patients and
physicians meet. Patients can only report
disorders in a confused way, but writers can
articulate the world in such a way as to display a
coherence. Artistic thought is like
philosophy, but produced in different forms,
including scenes, dramas and actions and 'doubles
of the world and language'. Fiction needs to
guide psychoanalysis in these matters, for example
seeing the strange formalism of masochism as a
novelistic element [very close to Lacan
here?]. Literary thought will help us
distinguish 'true symptoms from false syndromes',
and individual pathologies worked on by
writers can reveal underlying conditions of
civilization and other possibilities for life:
their double of the world is both sickness, and a
creative disruption of the real.
In the 13th series of L of S, critique and
clinique are discussed in terms of Carroll,
Artaud, madness and childhood. The two
versions of jabberwocky are discussed.
'Poetry, nursery rhymes and mad ramblings must not
be confused' (22), however. Different
questions are addressed in each case. The
point is to analyze what Deleuze calls
'progressive and creative disorganization' in both
approaches, with critique focusing on how oh
language changes. The main problem is one of
relating surface to depth, and the linguistic
distinctions can teach us about neurosis and
schizophrenia. When it comes to Carroll,
Deleuze describes the 'enigmatic surface of
meaning' (23) in terms of Stoic notions of the
incorporeal: substantial organic bodies are the
main things that operate as calls and effect, and
surface features should be understood accordingly
as something incorporeal. Thus the greening
of the tree is a surface effect produced by the
self development of the body of the tree.
Deleuze goes on to derive the notion of Chronos
from this approach, the duration of a body in an
extended present. However, the time of the
event is different, and seems to refer to pasts
and future dimensions, despite their having no
real existence except being manifested in the
event -- this is Aion, indicated by the
infinitive, extending over past and future but not
having an actual present in the normal sense: it
is 'a time of pure becoming', relating to events
not bodies. This explains the irritating
example of the battle as an event, which cannot be
described by listing specific interactions between
warriors: the battle a 'emanates from the bodies,
hovers over them like a fog. It is produced
by the bodies as an effect, yet it preexists them
as the condition of their possible
encounters'(24).
So events are 'attributes of bodies', best thought
of as verbs, compared to the characteristics of
bodies which are adjectives relating to
nouns. However, language can depict events
particularly clearly since language is also
becoming. Thus the most important Stoic
incorporeal is the '"expressible", or "thing
meant"', a quality of the physical sound emitted
which has a 'surface effect of meaning'[clearly
used in that wacky stuff about how rocks express
themselves in ATP]. So words express and
give meaning to an attribute. The meaning is
both the surface of the sound and off the thing,
'a single surface of meaning - events', an
articulation, preserving the difference of bodies
and language for Deleuze, and what he calls 'sens,
sense or meaning'. As with events like
battles, meanings are both produced by words and
yet precede them. Sense exists as an overall
'sphere' in which speakers are located in order to
produce designations.
Meaning 'is also never fully present'(25), in that
one utterance needs to be interpreted by another,
and yet another in an infinite progress.
Meaning is like an event which inhabits past and
future but not the present. It includes
nonsense in the form of imaginary entities or
nonsense words. Good sense is a limited
version of sense 'in a single direction'[the word
sens means both sense and direction in
French]. Nonsense can also reverse temporal
sequences or confuse identities, offering a form
of becoming, or deliberate ambiguity as in the
size of Alice [her size changes in Aion but not
Chronos, says Bogue], a form of becoming 'in all
directions'. Thus Carroll can be seen as
illustrating the whole 'multi directional field of
sense within which good sense takes place together
with nonsense, so the latter can be seen as
generating the former, quite deliberately in
Carroll's case [where portmanteau words are used
to 'generate two divergent series of elements'—the
example is the snark --and thus act as aleatory
points, 'seemingly and both lines at once, yet
never at any single point at a given moment' (26).
This is the basis of any structure, producing the
domains of both sense and events. For the
latter, the aleatory point is the empty space, or
the 'figure for difference', representing a
continuing generative differentiation producing
actual determinations which diverge. Thus
jabberwocky displays divergent series of terms,
illustrated by nonsense words like brillig which
means the time of day when you begin by broiling
things, 4:00 PM. Further divergences arise
with Artaud, however [which are apparent in
French—discussed 27], and his version produces
further interactions between the words,
'profligate and unregulated mixtures,
interminglings and interpenetrations'. This
squares with the schizophrenic experience of words
as 'lacerating, persecuting objects that rip into
the flesh', '"passion - words"' connecting with
bodies seen as sieves or fragments.
Sometimes these can be totalised but not as an
organism, rather as a body without parts or BWO,
which communicates somehow directly through
breathing or fluid transmissions. This body
produces corresponding action words, not passive
like passion words, but representing a definite
'"language without articulation"', a series of
tonic values, breath words or cry words, 'sonic
amalgams'. This is a non-sense produced by
bodies. It is found in Artaud on
jabberwocky, which reveal passion words, action
words, 'terrifying body fragments and the glorious
body without organs, phonetic fragments and tonic
fusions' (28). It would be a mistake to see
Carroll as schizophrenic, from the point of view
of both psychiatry and literature. It all
turns on how surfaces are related to depths:
Carroll slides from good sense into nonsense in a
way that preserves the normal surfaces between
words and things, and nonsense is organized,
albeit differently from sense. Artaud's
disorganization is more radical, dissolving even
signs into phonetic fragments and tonic notes,
shattering and accreting sonic blocks. The
issue then is where '"nonsense changes its
figure"'.
Children can also play with the surface effects of
language, in their rhymes or nonsense phrases, and
writers can also experiment with language: yet
there is no '"grotesque Trinity"'. Writers
are more in control with their inventions, so
Carroll develops an entire logic of sense, with
clear philosophical roots. Even Artaud can
organize his 'cry words and breath words into a
theater of cruelty'(29). Authors' abilities
to diagnose the ills of civilization take
different modes. There is a neurotic novel,
in the family romance, but novelists can
also 'extract from surfaces a "pure event",
one that is depersonalized and then unfolded
through the characters and actions of a given work
of art'. This 'artistic autonomy and
impersonality' is what distinguishes them from
children and neurotics. This is also a
difference between Wolfson and Artaud for Deleuze,
with the latter achieving autonomy, and producing
cry breaths that are capable of taking on multiple
forms.
None of this appears in a AO or anywhere
subsequently, unless the designing machine and
bodies without organs are a common tree on
surfaces and depths and how they are
combined. There might also be a link to
assemblages and planes of consistency in
ATP. However, LofS ends with a
psychoanalytic account of the genesis of the
surface from the depths of the body, 'utilizing
the full panoply of Freudian and Lacanian
terminology'. However, this is later
rejected, in AO, and sense is seen as a matter of
surfaces exclusively, with Nietzsche replacing
Stoic ideas in terms of relations of force and the
will to power. The consequent 'emphasis on
forces and power as determinants of all semiotic
systems' (30). Similarly, the deep
connection between language and events is replaced
by the language of becomings, which, in ATP, 'can
exist outside language'. This deep
connection also leaves room for a theory of the
arts where each art engages the event in its own
'autonomous mode'.
So these earlier works clearly show the relation
between literary criticism and medical diagnosis,
but as Deleuze rejects psychoanalysis, this
specific connection is minimized. What
remains is a broader idea of the writer as an
interpreter of signs and a critic of
civilization. This appears in the work on
Proust and Kafka [up next].
Chapter two Proust's sign machine
The extended version of Deleuze's book [which I
have] concerns first the interpretation of signs,
and then the production of signs. In both
cases, the issue is how to to grasp multiple
aspects of the Whole that is time. The
aspects are not to be seen as explications of a
[philosophical] principle, but rather as an effect
of a multiple. We have to see the whole book
as an apprenticeship, first decoding signs, and
then grasping how signs work in art. The
whole work can be seen as 'a machine that produces
"unity affects" as well as changes in the reader'
(31). Time is the active subject.
The novel is not to be understood as an
exploration of involuntary memory and subjective
association, although there are such subjective
signs. Overall, signs are enigmatic,
hieroglyphs [so we must be Egyptians—see notes]. The
contents of signs are enfolded within them, so
that interpretation means unfolding, explication,
with the madeleine as the best example.
There are different source of signs however: (1)
worldly signs which turn on social conventions and
forms, or which convey meaning in particular
social circumstances. They are formal rather
than content rich. (2) signs of love, where
the loved one represents a whole mysterious world
or landscape from which the lover is necessarily
excluded, hence the room for 'jealousy and
disappointment' (33), and the inevitable deception
of love. (3) sensual signs like the
madeleine or the uneven paving stones, which
produce involuntary memories and the explication
of the world. These produce joy [not if you
are a depressive], and prompt or demand
interpretation. They disclose essences of
Combray or Venice, although these are
fleeting. (4) the signs of art dematerialize
essences [abstract them] and become autonomous.
Overall, the point is to see a progression towards
the fourth kind, a search for truth.
This is not always easy, and goodwill and
voluntary action is not enough. Intelligence
only produces logical truths from arbitrary
starting points. [Actual or proper] truth
can also involve chance encounters that selects
themes, both interpreting signs and explicating
them: it's not just subjects who do this, however
because signs are self developing. Truths
are also always temporal, truths of time.
Four structures of time, each with their own
truths, arise in the course of the
apprenticeship. First, there is '"Time that
passes"' (34), a part of lost time, the time of
alteration, aging and destruction. We see
this in the obvious signs of physical decline in
social figures and also in changing fashions; love
itself ages and seems set to destroy itself;
sensual signs can also exhibit decay [a strange
example where Marcel removes his boot and
remembers his dead grandmother]. Only the
signs of art can overcome time that passes.
Secondly, there is lost time, wasted time,
including that wasted in various indulgences,
although sobriety does not necessarily lead to
truth because that is still under the control of
the will and not contingency. Wasted time
can be even seen as necessary, a part of an
apprenticeship, so that everything provides
learning, exposure to signs. Thirdly there
is time regained, when the intelligence grasps [by
reflection? ] truths embedded in experience
[maybe, 35], extracting the truth of the sign 'and
hence the truth of time'. In this way, the
experiences of the writer can have the same role
as the experiment for scientists, except that
intelligence follows experience in the first case.
Intelligence can produce general laws, such as
those governing the career of a love affair, or
certain 'immaterial essences' revealed by
involuntary memories. The fourth kind of
time exists only in the work of art, time
regained, pure time, above all worldly and
sensuous signs. This is discovered right at
the end of the search.
The novel reveals all sorts of misunderstandings
of two main kinds. First, the sign is seen
as a simple indication of the truth, so that
sipping tea will reveal the essence of Combray [so
there's a bit of positivist practice in here?], or
that people can be interrogated to get to the
meaning of the code for social signs [so
ethnography is rebuked as well, rather as Bourdieu
does?]. Desire and love are also seen as
necessarily aimed at desirable objects.
Intelligence 'has an inherent tendency towards
objectivity' and shared truth. 'Traditional
discursive thought' together involves these
prejudices. However, signs never just simply
designate objects but have a remainder [I put in
that Adorno
term]. The first way to grasp this is
through 'a compensatory subjectivism' (36),
subjective associations. Involuntary
memories look as if they involve these, but
subjectivism always introduces an infinite number
of possibilities, and deny that any [transcending
or immanent] meanings are accessible through art
[close to a circular argument here—art must simply
offer this set of meanings as an agreed
principle].
The signs of art are immaterial, essences or
ideas, even if they are conveyed through material
objects like musical instruments. Essence
for Proust involves connecting differences.
Each point of view in art involves difference, but
this is not a function of the subject, rather that
something that already belongs to the world and
its differences: 'the subject and the world emerge
together through the unfolding of that
difference'. The essence of the world is
implicated in the subject, so every subject is
like a monad in Leibniz,
already containing the whole world, folded within
itself, and unfolded according to particular
perspectives of the monad. However, there is
no preestablished harmony of this kind for Proust,
and each subject expresses a really different
world, which can only be linked through art: art
enables new percepts to be developed [me again] so
that we can see that the world is multiple. In the
text, we see this with Swann realizing that his
familiar little phrase is part of a sonata, so a
new world opens to him. Every work of art
offers this possibility for Proust, and so does
observing the faces of adolescent girls seeing
them as elements of nature [early becoming-woman
for Guattari] .
Artistic time is also disclosed. Deleuze
tackles this through using the terms of Greek
philosophers involving complication (enveloping
the multiple in the one), outside normal
chronological time and representing the state of
time itself, 'time wrapped up within itself, a
pure form of time which subsequently unfolds
itself in the various dimensions of actual
temporal experience' (37-8). We see this in
the connection between artistic essence and time
regained. We have to interpret the physical
materials of artworks and the way they are
arranged, and this is style. This does not
just involve detailed interpretation of a single
episode, but pursuing the connection between two
different objects, for Proust. We think of
this as a unique connection in art as opposed to
the laws of causality in science. One
technique is to develop a metaphor, where style
itself can be the metaphor expressing a common
quality, the expression of an essence, liberated
from the normal contingencies of normal
time. Deleuze modifies this [because he
doesn't like metaphors] to mean a process of
metamorphosis [see what he did there?], and the
example turns on the paintings of Elstir, where
land becomes sea. For Deleuze, the
'"unstable opposition, the original
complication"'must be preserved and not hidden in
a metaphor.
In this sense, essence is always 'an ongoing power
of creation' (39), 'both an originary difference
and an individualizing force', incarnated [in a
determined way] in objects which are linked
in style, a repeating difference, self
differentiation. Both difference and
repetition can be seen as productive powers of
essences. Fundamental differences repeat
themselves across various milieux and among
diverse objects, so that we see that even
diversity can be understood as the play of
difference and repetition. Art has to render
matter in a way 'adequate to essence', which means
they must be transparent to essence, and linked by
an equally adequate style showing the powers of
difference and repetition. We have to
remember that style is not just the invention of
the artist, but '"the self differentiating
difference that unfolds itself and a world that
includes the subject as point of view"'.
Once Marcel has understood art he can then go back
to reinterpret sensual, amorous and worldly signs,
especially those of involuntary memory. The
joy he experiences in the last volume arises from
the revelation of the operations of time regained,
the reality of the past, similar to Bergson and the idea
of the past as a cone, the past as virtual and
thus real, recalling the past as a link back into
the virtual past. Deleuze says that Marcel
does this right at the end, discovering something
common to past and present and therefore essential
[the quotes from Proust's novel actually seem to
mention phrases such as real without being actual,
ideal without being abstract (40)]. [This
explains the vividness of senses in their recall
of the past] [the liberation from time bit means
that moments have been rescued from this past, and
some sort of pure time
experienced—phenomenologists would call this
through and through interconnectedness, of
course].
So the virtual past has been discovered, but so
have essences as differences, as above, which
explain the identity of two moments separated in
objective time, the taste of the madeleine both
now and then, the recovery of context that
ensues. So we have a tricky combination of
difference and identity in essences, as well as a
qualitative difference in that Combray as
presently recalled is an ideal version that never
actually existed, although 'ideal' in this sense
means essential, even true. Involuntary
memory therefore supplies an analog to art, but
art is more transparent and pliable,
[deterritorialized]. So involuntary memory
alone will not lead to regained time, since it
retains bits of materiality and contingency,
rather than just essence unfolding itself.
Art is more adequate to signs and their meaning,
freely chosen, and necessary, following the inner
necessity of the essence, not restricted to
subjectivity since the artist is part of the
world. Essence can take a singular form, a
singular point of view in a specific artist. This
also seems to be the case because sensual signs
are more general, shared between people, 'common
worlds' that are so predictable as almost to yield
laws. We see this in the patterns and series
displayed in the various love affairs, although
there are also subdivisions. Love
affairs even take the form of
'transsubjective series', links between the
affairs of Marcel and Swann, for example. At
its most general, we get discussion about sex
itself, the parallel worlds of the sodomites,
based on some 'primal hermaphroditism' [very
apologetic I thought]. So we have sequences
and links at different levels and the revelation
of an essence, possible only after affairs have
ended, leading to 'the joy of understanding'
[avoids blame and guilt?] (43). The pain of
love forces this search for meaning. The
appearance of this essence is uneven, and depends
a great deal on external conditions and subjective
contingencies, chance events—because subjective
relations are themselves like this.
Worldly signs also reveal generalities and thus
hint at essences, in this case the peculiar rules
of social manners, revealed in detail. These
worldly signs seem to be significant, especially
if they turn on political historical matters, but
they are ultimately 'signs of stupidity',
dominated by ritual and formalism. The
essence here appears in cliche and group
mentality, open to the observer, raw material for
the artist. The signs are interpreted in
their own right at first, but then reread
retrospectively, as part of the general
revaluation of signs as 'implicated essences'
(44). Different notions of time also become
apparent. Gradually, the signs of art emerge
and transform all the other signs, as implications
at various degrees of generality and
contingency. This provides the 'thematic
unity'of the work, the form of the novel, the
discovery of the unfolding of the sign [this time,
the development of the sign occurs at the same
time as its interpretation]. This is the
apprenticeship leading to the final truth of time
and its multiple guises, its material for an
artistic outlook leading to multiple worlds.
The second section of Deleuze's book turns on the
production of signs. This helps correct the
impression from the first section that the whole
novel is simply a kind of coming of age life story
narrative [bildungsroman], making sense
only at the end as the story unfolds.
However, this is not a smooth progression towards
an understanding, nor a simple worldview at the
end [so it's not simple realism then—but isn't the
ultimate truth of the novel that reality is
complex etc?]. There is no single semiotic,
and no simple unification, no notion of a single
world essence. Overall, this can be seen as
a rejection of an underlying logos:
'Proust's thought is an antilogos'
(46). There is no great Whole or truth to be
deciphered in the parts, no triumphant role for
intelligence [then a digression about whether
Proust has any links with Plato—it turns on the
role of the subjective in uncovering
objective essence, and argues that the point of
view in the novel is not that of an individual
subject but 'the principle of individuation',
belonging to art].
Modern literature revises classic notions of
objectivity and unity, denying any underlying
order in nature or ideas. Only art preserves
a certain coherence amid the chaos—initially, only
subjective associations, since there is no
external objectivity. Eventually, the
subject has to be abandoned as well as we
saw. Parts or fragments no longer get their
value simply as parts of totality, shown best in
the inability to relate fragments of time to some
total notion of time [so time regained is not a
totality?]: Deleuze says that time is best
understood in terms of fragments and parts of
different sizes and forms, working at different
rhythms and speeds [so Aion is more
fundamental than time regained?]. The
internal structure of the work provides its unity,
and elements providing unity are themselves only
parts, such as fragments of involuntary memory
which are anomalous, not standing for a
totality. This is seen in Proust describing
reminiscence as '"an anomalous associative
chain...only unified by a creative point of view"'
(48). Fragments act as do seed crystals,
changing the state of solutions, in a 'cascade of
individuations'. The yellow patch in a
Vermeer painting is one such seed crystal for
Bergotte [an epiphany transforming his view of the
value of art], and so is the little phrase for
Swann.
The disparities between these fragments is the
first step in understanding the novel, together
with 'two basic figures' that relate them—'boxes
and closed vessels', connecting contents and
containers, and parts and wholes
respectively. Signs are like closed boxes
with inner complications to be unfolded, and this
is the first stage of interpretation. But
analyzing the production of signs involves a lack
of common measure between contents and containers:
when the boxes are opened, disparate things are
found, like beings and names, and the meaning of
the madeleine is not simply contained in the
box. Essential meanings overflow subjective
associations and take on a life of their
own. Narrators themselves can be 'captured'
(49) by the worlds that are unfolded. A
nonpersonal point of view can arise as a result of
these overflowings. Deleuze wants to
describe this dramatically as '"the death of the
self"'. Music especially 'sustains a [new]
conflict of the parts' overflowing earlier
understandings. The sealed vessels refer to
the separation of phenomena that the artists can
see are really connected—the two 'ways'[of life
represented by the two aristocratic
families]. The parts do not communicate even
though they may be contiguous. They are
actually determined 'through a relation of non
communication' (50). The sealed vessels are
not stable wholes and can split into subworlds or
multiple selves [many Albertines], so their
identity is only 'statistical'. However
there can be communication of a particular kind –
the transversal connections between the two
'ways'[as in Swann's meandering between the
two?]. Transversals do not unify, but rather
emphasize difference [and the example is how the
train journey intensifies the difference
between departure and arrival].
Transversals therefore [always? ] maximize
intensity between differences.
When we study closed vessels, we extract them from
a network of transversals. We see this when
we awake and in effect choose a self and a world
from the multiple selves and worlds on offer in
sleep [I read this as Marcel struggling to regain
the exterior pose necessary for his survival in
challenging circumstances]. This choice is
apersonal, a 'pure act of interpretation'(51) [by
some disembodied interpreter, it seems].
Transversals are also chosen in the same
process. This apersonal stuff leads Deleuze
to argue that the subject of the novel is also
disembodied, choosing among Swann, the narrator,
or other characters.
So there is a 'force of incommensurability' or non
communication joining the various containers and
vessels, 'and both these forces of the forces of
time', non spatial distances, distances without
intervals in Deleuze's terms, thrown up by time
[as in involuntary memories?]: Time can also put
or alter intervals between the contiguous, as when
we forget connections, or revive others.
These associations define the transversal as
'a passage without interval that affirms a
difference'. Time itself is the system of
distances without intervals, 'the great
transversal', and thus the ultimate interpreter,
bringing together pieces which do not form a whole
in space or in normal time, and making connections
between all possible spaces and conventional
times.
When subjective associations break, and apersonal
points of view emerge, when transversal links are
revealed between closed vessels, a new truth
emerges independently of signs, but only emerging
from their interpretation. Interpretation
does not involve discovery nor pure creation, but
the production of an effect 'to make something
happen' (52). This productive quality means
that 'the modern work of art is a machine',
something that works, something that opposes
purely logical interpretation relating things back
to wholes, and that relies only on functioning
[asignifying to use a later terminology—hence the
[misleadingly 'pragmatic' stuff about how art is a
matter of usage not meaning]. Proust's novel
is a machine, working on signs to produce truth,
producing 'thought within thought', using
imagination and reflexivity in his terms, driven
by pain and suffering. After much
interpretation, apersonal points of view are
produced [Swann is able to put his passions into
context and into persepctive]. Certain
truths appear and these relate to time:
apparently, in the second part there are three
types of time, lost time, regained time of
essences and 'universal alteration', relating to
aging and death, and each is produced by a
machine. The first machine fragments objects
and produces heterogeneous boxes and vessels, the
equivalent of partial objects, and the eventual
'truth' that it is series and groups that produce
these. The second machine 'produces
resonances' as in in voluntary memory, where
isolated moments resonate, but also in art where
individual instruments resonate with each other in
duets. This is a form of 'vibratory
communication', and this second machine produces
its own fragments and '"the singular Essence, the
point of view superior to the two moments that
resonate' [some emergent quality as when one
listens simultaneously to two tunes in
harmony?].
The third machine 'produces the truths of
universal decay' that makes time palpable—at the
end of the novel, it all seems pointless and about
to obliterate everything that has gone
before. However, Proust recuperates by
thinking of the idea of deaths and the notion of
the dilation of time—he thinks about all the vast
periods that have elapsed 'before such a
revolution could be accomplished in the geology of
a face'(53). In such thoughts, the living
merge with the dead, death seems everywhere, but
also the elderly bridge whole epochs concealed
behind the slow passage of time. Also,
habits become visible [what seems normal is
contextualized?] So even the idea of death can
produce ideas and thoughts.
Proust has not only discovered these machines, for
Deleuze but has embedded them in the work,
especially with the second machine, which not only
describes sensuality and its ecstasies, but show
the workings of 'a properly literary machine',
seemingly working at full stretch to produce all
kinds of involuntary memories and also suggesting
their origin not in subjective memory but in art
itself. This is what art contributes to the
ecstatic experiences, 'an autonomous and self
determined production of resonances'(54), the
affect of a deliberate style which adds meaning to
that which is provided simply by the
unconscious. These machines produce effects
in readers as well: Proust hoped that we would all
be able to read our lives as he had done, gaining
a new viewpoint on their worlds, just as painters
provide.
The three machines are
now called 'a partial object machine, a resonance
machine, and a forced movement machine' (55) and
they do produce effects, but there is no essential
unity between them. They provide a
sufficient description while remaining broken and
fragmented. The apersonal point of view does
not unify all the other points of view [so not
realism then?], but appears alongside them.
Differences are not resolved, but rather
individuated [multiple points of view—of equal
weight?]. The style does not unify, since it
follows separate associative chains, unfolding
signs and generating effects. It is the
assemblage of fragments that provides the unity,
an effect of the machines not of some universal
principle. Proust has resisted the
temptation to bring together all the fragments in
a completed unity, as a kind of after effect, a
retrospective unification, the end of a process of
crystallization, although he seems to admire
authors like Balzac who do that. Instead,
there is a different kind of unity, one based
entirely on the structure of the work of art alone
[back to the stuff about chaos we saw
above]. The structure is the network of
transversals as above, that connects while
affirming difference. This convention is
found in other works as well, and maybe general to
all modern literature, Deleuze thinks [and he gets
very close to notions of intertextuality here,
suggesting links between writers and connections
with the public].
So the two parts offer different emphases,
corresponding to the activities of reader and
writer respectively. There is an insistence
that interpretation and unfolding 'simply follows
the sign's own explication of itself', and that,
although signs can impinge on interpreters, an
apersonal point of view is really what is on offer
in art, one that includes the interpreter
[anticipates interpretation?] Signs themselves are
the key here since they produce interpretation and
even produce the interpreter. Following an
apprenticeship in signs necessarily leads to the
vocation of the 'interpreter as artist', a
producer of signs. The machine introduced in
part two as a concept reminds us that this is not
just a matter of subjective meaning, nor an
attempt to uncover some deep privileged meaning of
the sign. We are reminded that it is not
significance but function that matters.
Nevertheless there are truths of signs, but these
are produced by machines. Even the apersonal
point of view is only something produced by a
machine, a production that shows the complexities
of differences and repetition. Art attempts
to grapple with fragmented chaos, but it offers no
fundamental salvation. Nor are we left with
mere formalism, since the work of art is not
independent from the world with which it
engages. Its function is to produce effects,
to produce an autonomous universe different from
the old world. It gains its unity from
multiplicity, adding something to the apersonal
point of view, making it into a seed crystal [this
seems to be one of those optional final unities
suggested as a last thought by some writers as
above—it's not clear if Deleuze is approving or
not]. The former is best described as
transversality, connecting things that are
incommensurable and noncommunicating, providing an
intensity to difference. Art is a response
to the world, a chaosmos, accepting that there is
chaos but developing 'the singular, individual
cosmos of the artist' by developing and
explicating multiplicity. [I'm still not
sure whether this is deeply insightful or horribly
evasive]
Chapter three Kafka's law machine
[Begins with discussion of AO]
Deleuze and Guattari further develop the notion of
the writing machine, focusing in particular on
expression. Transversal links are not so
important, however, and the emphasis is more on
the social and political effects turning on the
notion of minor languages. We also hear
echoes of desiring machines from the extended
discussion in AO. Again the emphasis is on
effects being produced, not attempts to uncover
external significance [especially Freudian
attempts].
Indeed, id, ego and superego [in AO? ] are
replaced by notions of desiring machines,
body-without-organs [BWO] and the nomadic subject
as components of desire in production, referring
to initial impulses to produce, then attempts to
inscribe, and then to consume or consummate [same
word in French apparently] respectively, as in the
example of the infant's mouth machine coupled to
its mother's breast machine, leading to effects on
the various machines in the intestinal body as
flows of nutrients are converted into energy
circuits. Desiring machines therefore occupy
whole 'chains or circuits through which flows
pass' (60). Since these machines in humans
are capable of different functions, like mouths,
there are also switching mechanisms, sometimes
involving contact with other circuits such as
olfactory circuits [a nopte connects this argument
to modern embryology --see DeLanda ]
The circuits are found on the body without organs
which represents 'a single map of coexisting [or
disjunctive] circuits'(61). We should note
that the circuits also extend beyond actual
empirical bodies, so that the infantile BWO
includes the mother's breast, odors, digestive
bacteria and so on [that is a new interpretation,
to me anyway -- it is an empirical multiplicity as
well?]. The BWO is not unified in the sense
that it contains disjunctions and heterogeneity so
that its role in production involves multiplicity:
if there is a totality it is one of those that
unites the parts without totalising or unifying
them [all this from AO]. The the BWO is
real, at the virtual level, both produced by the
desiring machines and also a condition of
possibility for their functioning, 'that great of
potential circuits that any given chain of
desiring machines might actualize at a specific
time' (62). Particular configurations of
desiring machines and BWO are the paranoiac
machine and the miraculating machine [not specific
to the case of Schreber then?]. However,
there are no regular fixed organizations, rather
'disjunctive synthesis', so in that sense there is
anti production as well, constant breaking down
and disconnection, and reconnection of desiring
machines in new multiple ways. The paranoiac
machine follows a rebellion against unity [with
outside objects?] as 'a persecutory order', the
miraculating machine attracts desiring machines to
the surface of the BWO [my rendition]. The
nomadic subject has no fixed identity, wanders
over the BWO, using elements produced by the
desiring machines, 'an errant point flashing here
and there along the various paths',
consuming. It is created by the 'celibate
machine'[don't remember this bit, but much more
below] which can produce '"a new humanity or a
glorious organism"' (63) [with ludicrous lyrical
stuff in support. It might refer to a state
of intensity without any kind of erotic
charge?]. The desiring machines operate with
affective intensities at different levels, unlike
the zero intensity of the BWO, offering degrees of
attraction and repulsion [which might be balanced
in the celibate machine?]. There is no
overall equilibrium, but a series of states
through which the subject passes.
AO defends the term machinic not as a
metaphor but through defining it as a 'system of
cuts': the 'portioning- cut', the 'detachment -
cut' and the 'remainder - neutral cut'. The
second produces the BWO, and the last one the
nomadic subject.
The first one describes how the machine
slices into a material flow, considered as 'a
single process', (63) producing material for the
machines connected to it via various 'relays and
processing stations'[ Bogue says one type of
process is the 'schiz-flow']. Matter is considered
as a continuous and infinite flow, and includes
energy, information and signs, not just ordinary
positivist matter. Cutting into it implies
ideal continuity [terms imply their opposites—but
does this mean that both are equally real?], and
indeed we can see cuts as 'a connective
synthesis'[seems to be some sort of idea that
separated flows further along a system can be seen
as emanating from a single flow? Typical problem
with intensive terms -- you never simply divide or
add them?, hence a connective synthesis as a
series of 'and...and...and' etc instead of
add..add..add]. The 'schiz flow' similarly
generates 'multiple elements operating within a
single, unlimited process' (64).
The second one offers disjunctive
synthesis -- a or b -- but since we must be
affirmative in our differentiation, no alternative
is excluded. Instead, they produce 'the
grid' of the BWO. They can be seen as
comprising the code of the machine to control its
various options. Options may be produced by
the impact of various 'associative chain[s]', of
odors or other sensations as above. A
specific block of functions and associated
circuits is produced, various '"detachable
segments, mobile stocks"' (65).
The third one leaves the remainder or residue,
adjacent to the machine, and this is the
nomadic subject, possessing no fixed identity but
acting as 'a nomadic flicker of intensity
traversing the grid' of the BWO. It is a
collection of parts produced by the various blocks
and partitions produced by the other cuts.
Bogue says that some sort of unity is still
implied, or rather a conjunction without a
principled unity, 'a summary moment'[but is it
emergent in some way? It might be
temporarily unified around the role of
consumption?].
The overall machine is a system of these cuts and
syntheses. Together they constitute a
multiplicity, 'heterogeneous entities that
function together without being reducible to a
totality or unity '(66). The machinic
concept comes to dominate the other components
outlined above, as both the BWO and the subject
can become 'partial' versions of desiring
machines, so machinic themselves [partial objects
are not the same as the BWO, but share an a
'mutual cofunctioning' and thus can be seen as a
single entity [with a bit of weaseling from AO
page 66-7 – the BWO becomes the "brute matter of
partial objects", while partial objects become
"direct powers of the body without organs",
appearing as intensities that produce the
real—clear as fucking mud as usual, and probably
resulting simply from some philosophical anxiety
about consistency]. Partial objects also
back to some external limit of the pure
multiplicity, and as elements like working parts
operated upon by the BWO, inseparably [for all
practical purposes, that is, but we seem to love
abandoned the fine distinctions beloved of
philosophy in other areas]. The nomadic
subject is 'simply the consumption and self
enjoyment (or auto-affection) of the states
through which this single machine passes', and in
this sense, it can be seen as a kind of designing
machine again, linked to the BWO in the ambiguous
way described above, implying its existence [and
picking up on the definitional notion of states of
the machine].
Are these real machines and not metaphors?
The language here attacks 'common sense
distinctions between entities'[which is a
different point]. The cuts are also
syntheses, but there is a more general problem
concerning how heterogeneous parts come to form
machines and assemblages of machines. In AO
we're told this arises from passive synthesis,
some indirect association, 'non conscious and
automatic'(67) [all by definition again].
There is no unified whole and therefore no
centralized determination, only 'open-ended, and
directed addition of a part to a part' (68).
Overlapping flows produce associative chains,
permutations of partial objects [permutation
is a another synthesizing activity, a bit like the
internal differentiation in Difference and
Repetition?]. It joins
overlapping and connective syntheses [in producing
reality?]. So machines are always
synthesizing, without completely absorbing their
parts. That is because '"Machine" is the
name for that which puts parts in nontotalizing
relation with one another'[so it is
definitional—we 'explain' synthesis by just
asserting that it must take place in machines by
definition]. Machines can machine themselves
[in infinite regress]. So defining it as a
real entity means it cannot be a metaphor
[!]. 'The cosmos consists of nothing but
flows and cuts' including various connections of
flows and machines. They must be real 'since
there is nothing in the real other than
machines'[!], and machines essentially do the
machining that we've described. [Pathetic!]
The celibate machine arises from the production of
the nomadic subject, itself arising from
'reconciling' repulsion and attraction between
partial objects. The term is borrowed from a
description of fantastic machines in various
literary sources, including Roussel, and Kafka (In
the Penal Colony). Apparently, a
certain Carrouges noticed similarities between
Kafka's machine and Duchamps' painting The
Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, and
spotted other analogous machines in other artistic
work, which led him to suggest there was a modern
myth '"of the celibate machine"' (69) referring to
machinism, terror, eroticism and religion or anti
religion. These are seen in Kafka's
execution machine [and the short story -- In
The Penal Colony -- is described
69-70]. There are 'copious religious
allusions' about divine judgement and its
secularization, technological terror, and 'a
latent voyeuristic sexuality'. The same
themes are found in Duchamp's description of his
painting [which apparently includes a panel called
the bachelor machine—further described on
71]. Both offer modern mythical accounts of
mechanical culture 'devoid of the sacred and
dominated by a sterile, voyeuristic
eroticism'. D and G two not entirely agree,
but like the term and it has influenced their work
on Kafka. Bogue thinks that Duchamp's
painting is 'a better example of desiring the
production' than those chosen in AO,
because it looked really indicates flows and cuts
[more on 72].
D and G combine Kafka and Duchamp in their account
of the celibate machine in AO, which lends
'humor, irony and absurdity' to Kafka, and 'social
and political ramifications' to Duchamp. The
term for bachelor in French means both an
unmarried male, or one who chooses to be celibate
[as in English], and this combines the erotic
desires of unmarried males with a machinic sexless
libido in Duchamp. When applied to a
machine, it also implies something
anticonjugal. This connects to the
discussion of incest in Kafka's Metamorphosis,
where incest with sisters takes a schizo form, not
the classic oedipal one. Both male and
female characters in Kafka represent
'anticonjugal antifamilial desire' (73). [So
it is this that makes them celibate? This is
why celibate machines are useful to avoid
Oedipus?]
The execution machine in the Penal Colony
is a good example, but there are others producing
celibate desire. The execution machine is
too isolated, abstracted from social context, and
thus easily misunderstood, say in oedipal
terms. In general, a writing machine must
synthesize flows of different kinds, as
above. They must avoid reterritorialization,
especially by becoming paranoid or fascist.
The '"schizorevolutionary"' pole case of machine
can follow lines of flight of desire, but the
paranoid type has dominated, in various epochs
like primitive, despotic and capitalist
stages. Psychoanalysis represents another
form of discipline. Kafka is seen as moving
towards a suitably flexible writing machine in his
letters, short stories and novels [and description
of each ensues, 75]. We see the gradual
emergence of the literary machine, first when the
letters stand for the love relation itself, when
Kafka splits into a double subject [enunciating
subject and subject of enunciation], and in the
interminability of the machine which makes it hard
for humans to break with these conceptions.
The short stories continue, pursuing possible
lines of flight, but also the blockages that
prevent them [for example the re-familiazation of
Gregor in Metamorphosis]. Some
possible lines of escape are noted in various
kinds of becoming, of human, or, conversely of
animal. Again these reach limits. At
best, 'the stories provide machinic indices rather
than fully constructed machines' (77), and
machines are not always well developed [one of
these indices concerns the two bouncing balls that
Deleuze and Guattari admire and keep citing – it
is in the story called Blumfeld, an Elderly
Bachelor, which, after introducing
the mysterious bouncing balls as some kind of
unwelcome transformation of his personal life,
goes on to describe Blumfeld's monotonous life in
a office plagued by two dozy assistants rather
like the ones in The Castle].
The novels produce a full account of lines of
flight and their functioning, like the
interminable machines in The Trial or The
Castle [remembering that the death of K in
the trial is interpreted away by D and G],
providing endless connections with 'specificity
and multiplicity' (78).
The Trial is the best example of an
abstract law machine [I agree -- The
Castle is a pale imitation]. There are
few technical machines, but constant elements of
the Law. Bogue admits that we cannot
interpret the actions of this machine in terms of
the notion of cuts in AO, and notes D and
G smuggling in a notion of a social machine,
referring to the pyramids via Mumford.
[Which is the notion taken up in DeLanda on war
machines]. The social machine produces
according to desire, it penetrates the whole of
society, with interchangeable personnel.
'The law is eroticized' (79) by the appearance of
women, and there is some masochistic eroticism in
the whipping scenes. Individuals appear in
different assemblages with characteristic
'discourses, codes and objects', as in the office
the studio or the cathedral. The connections
are open-ended and interminable. Is the
point just to show the absurdity of the law?
There is no explicit political critique, but
rather an 'immanent critique' (80), where
assemblages are identified beneath or behind
social relations, and are then dismantled.
The novel almost takes the form of the scientific
investigation.
This is effective politics. First of all
familiar social codes and institutions are
rewritten in the terms of the social machine, so
the conventional logic of the law is
undermined. Authority is similarly diffused
and inaccessible, and the whole thing is 'a
Byzantine mechanism of power, unrelated to norms
of justice and fairness' [nowhere near as good as
Marx nonetheless]. There's a culture of
guilt grounded in religious tradition. D and
G say there is more—that power is not inherently
centralized, nor is it something owned or lacked,
rather 'it is relational'[just like Foucault then,
as Bogue acknowledges]. Everyone is involved
[everyone really desires to be involved is the
point-- power is equated with desire].
Apparently, 'this is not to deny the existence of
genuine oppression' but to argue that oppressor
and oppressed are secondary products [but why is
it always the poor what gets the blame?]:
repression is in effect of the machine not the
other way about. There is a dismantling
through the analysis and the 'unpredictable
configurations' (81) that are produced.
These are paranoid options, although Kafka also
describes the law as 'a schizophrenic deployment',
connecting different components 'in unprescribed
relations' [but this makes repression worse? it
never leads to liberation.]. K himself can
be seen as the crucial switching mechanism between
these elements.
We see that paranoid and schizophrenic poles are
in operation simultaneously in social fields, and
that the law takes both forms, transcendent
paranoiac and schizo immanent [as in the diagrams
in the book]. The second one tends to
constantly dismantle the first, in the form of
'disruptive, mutant connections'[but this is a
pretty abstract dismantling, almost ending in
fatalism?]. We come to see the law actually
as 'a mega machine, which is constantly
constructing itself as a paranoiac hierarchical
Law, and at the same time dismantling itself
through a schiz law process' (82). Kafka's
description of the law like this is a dismantling
[feeble], but it is not just a simple reflection
of current realities, since Kafka is also
indicating diabolical powers of the future in
various major nations. D and G see these as
'virtual vectors of unfolding relations' that only
later get actualized, as examples of a general
function [sounds like Poulantzas on the state
now], which features its own lines of flight,
'tendencies, becomings, directions of movement'
(83).
Kafka is developing a 'diagrammatic machine' that
does not just represent present reality but hints
at a new type of reality. This is a
complicated model, says Bogue: every modern social
order has been produced by reconfiguring preceding
ones, combinations of de and reterritorialization
[only grasped backwards, once we know what's
happened? And always heading into more control
according to the schema of codes etc in AO].
General models, say of bureaucracies, 'serve a
pilot role' (84) here, and can point to 'paths of
deterritorialization that are simultaneously
reterritorialized' [classic example of political
vacillation]. Specific forms cannot be
determined in advance, and 'better' social orders
are equally possible [utopian]. There is, of
course, no notion of systematic theorizing of
revolution [nor of the forces that might produce
one outcome rather than the other] , rather a
growing sense of intolerability and analysis that
leads to 'an intensification of destabilizing,
deforming and decoding forces' [the
'accelerationist' reading]. Kafka thinks we
should head towards 'absolute, molecular
deterritorialization' (85) rather than pursue
conventional critique. There is no guarantee
that positive results will ensue, since desire can
be both 'good and bad', an inevitable mixture of
revolutionary and bureaucratic elements. We
can only hope that lines of flights will become
apparent, even modest or '"trembling"'ones,
ideally those that are '"asignifying"'. We can
even see the social machine as both transcribing
and dismantling itself, with the role of the
analyst to accelerate deterritorialization, and
thus uncover 'metamorphic tendencies'. This
is what Kafka does with his active dismantling,
his experimentation.
It is one thing to develop the machine in order to
manage a love affair, and another to engage in
political analysis, but D and G 'insist that there
is no opposition between life and art in Kafka'
(86), no attempt to compensate for life in
literature, no ivory tower, no refuge. There
are also 'multiple transverse connections' between
the short stories the letters and the
novels—becoming-dog appearing in both letters and
short stories, bureaucratic apparatuses in the
short stories and the novels. It is not just
that life influences art in the conventional
sense, rather that Kafka's writing machine is at
work in these different areas, within the whole
'extended social machine of which he is a
part'. Kafka is aware that all the activity
results from his experiments with '"a literary
machine of expression"', that networks connect
everything, just as in The Trial [I assume
the stuff about expression and minor literature
will be discussed in the next chapter]. In
this way, writing is a form of social action,
interrelated with social practice. This
notion replaces the model of base and
superstructure, or material reality versus mental
images of it. Kafka fully participates in
social life as he writes, in his own bureaucratic
organizations and with revolutionary movements.
While Proust can be seen as operating a functional
writing machine, Kafka operates with 'a tripartite
machine enmeshed within a world of machines'
(87). The machine operates as in AO,
synthesizing and managing flows and the overlaps
or permutations, fashioning 'circuits of which
they are a part'. Kafka extends the
operation of the machine to connections with
private lives and feelings as well, desire, even
if this operates discordantly. The Proustian
machine is a multiplicity, an unfinished network
linked by transversals, and this is even more
apparent in Kafka, openly appearing as a burrow,
interconnecting tunnels, a rhizome, 'a decentered
proliferation of points, any one of which may be
connected to any other' (88). The letters,
short stories and novels are 'the nodes of the
crabgrass rhizome, and the diaries "are the
rhizome itself"'. The writing machine is 'a
"rhizoming" machine and the rhizome it
forms'. As it develops, it becomes more
incomplete, encountering blocks as in the short
stories or letters, isolated as an abstract
machine as in the penal colony, interminable as in
the novels. The machine only exists to
machine, and this activity itself means it
'necessarily creates an open multiplicity'.
The point is to describe the writing machine not
interpret it, see how it functions, how it is
connected to social machines and to desire.
This is what makes it political.
There is also the issue of the particular language
developed by Kafka...
Chapter four minor literature
[A very clear discussion off Kafka and others,
linked this time to the material on linguistics in
ATP]
Kafkap is only one writer to offer minor
literature, but it is a well worked example.
Deleuze also extended the notion to the theater of
Carmelo Bene. The material on Kafka drawls
on Kafka's own diary entries, where he reflects on
social factors affecting literature, '"nothing
less than an essay on the sociology of
literature"', citing Robertson (92). In the
first place, literature can unify national
consciousness, and build morale in a hostile
environment, through things like specialist
journals and literary magazines. It can also
talk about relations between the generations
[literally between fathers and sons], and openly
discuss national faults. Such social
functions also increases respect for writers and
builds demand for their works. Literature of
this kind can act as a diary of a nation, and can
stimulate cultural vitality. Other features
include the absence of great literary figures, so
that no one is intimidated, or over-influenced,
and, similarly untalented hacks who imitate great
literature are not so common. Kafka a claims
this means that the canon is not so liable to
changes of taste [I think because great works are
often judged by their aura and reputation, which
can change]. Works of minor literature do
not go in and out of fashion, and so persist as a
kind of cultural whole. Defending minority
literature also becomes a political project, but
the politics are complicated, since there is no
coherent political agent—but then no marked
separation between the activities of literature
and politics either, so that political
implications can appear everywhere. There
are also no pressures to turn such literature into
mere propaganda. There's also a link between
the personal and the political, partly because
personal critique of writers and readers can also
inform literary effort [maybe—94], and these serve
to make literary discussion absorbing for
everyone. So a healthy and lively conflict
is found in minor literature, unregulated by great
masters, and 'intimately involved with the life of
the people'. Bogue says this is not just a
description of Czech and Jewish literature, but
also an ideal literary community to which Kafka
wanted to belong. Deleuze and Guattari
particularly emphasize these political
implications and public elements.
They also add additional characteristics. It
offers a strong element of deterritorialization,
and it also shows the effects of a collective
assemblage of enunciation. The first
characteristic is based on Wagenbach's commentary
on Kafka and literary Prague, which was peculiarly
mixed between German, Czech and Yiddish
elements. The result was partly to adversely
affect attempts to renew literary German, and to
contaminate German with Czech elements of
'pronunciation, syntax and vocabulary' (95),
cropping up as 'nonstandard turns of phrase.
[Like the entry in Wikipedia which I found
helpful] there are 'incorrect uses of
prepositions… The misuse of pronomial
verbs and the omission of [pronomial again?]
articles' (96), and a general impoverished
vocabulary, a gain partly borrowing from Czech
usage [the example is where the verb 'to give'is
used generally instead of specifics like 'to lay,
to set, to put, to remove']. Other
commentators have also notice these curious
linguistic characteristics, including excessive
use of terms such as 'similes, metaphors, oniric
symbols neologisms arabesques,
circumlocutions'. Kafka purified this sort
of language and made it far more correct and cold,
a purism and a literalism: Deleuze and Guattari
see this as a further form of deterritorialization
'through ascetic limitation'. Kafka himself
noticed this in his introductory talk on Yiddish,
which he noted was characterized by fluidity,
medley, the influence of dialect, although Yiddish
could not be translated precisely into German, but
had to be understood intuitively, drawing upon
powers within the community, 'a field of forces
that is less known than intuitively understood'
(97). This is a way of 'inhabiting language, and
minorities means of appropriating the majorities
of tongue and undermining its fixed structures',
for D and G, a minor use of language. It
goes together with a minority literary community,
and literature which uses it is thus 'the
convergence of linguistic experimentation and
political action'. It is this deviant use
that makes it minor, not a matter of numbers.
In ATP, we have a notion of language as a means of
action, dominated by performatives [encouragement
for action], designed to impose order through
coding the world. Language organizes reality
'according to a dominant social order' (98).
One effect is to induce '"incorporeal
transformations"'[which might have some connection
to Halliday and transformational grammar?], where
codification transforms things [by naming them, or
connecting them with particular actions].
These in turn imply 'socially sanctioned networks
of practices, institutions and material
entities'. These networks can be understood
as assemblages, 'collections of heterogeneous
actions and entities that somehow function
together'. There are two broad categories of
them: 'nondiscursive machinic assemblages of
bodies', linked together through actions and
passions, connecting at the bodily level; and
'discursive collective assemblages of
enunciation', involving acts, statements and
transformations, as above, of bodies. The
first produces entities, the second linguistic
statements. Collective assemblages of
enunciation indicate the whole context of
statements, the conventions of behaviour, and
notions of particular social codes and so on, but
also nondiscursive practices, like the division of
labour. So they're often intermingled
although they can be separable in theory. In
particular, they can be seen as relating to
expression [linguistic] and content [machinic],
and we have to understand this not in terms of
signifers and signifieds of course [but via
Hjelmslev –—planes of expression and content are
separate, and both can have form and substance:
this dethrones the importance of conventional
language and of structural linguistics].
There is no overall simple representation, and
language acts as an intervention when it expresses
and also attributes content [I don't think I had
realized this implication before, that language
decides on the plane of expression to use and the
plane of content to refer to? I had thought
of expression as something far more non
linguistic, rooted in the virtual].
Thus it is patterns of action that produce the
apparent constants and invariants in
language. There are virtual multiple "lines
of continuous variation" which become actualized
in assemblages [and then?] in 'specific concrete
instances' (99). The example turns on
different pronunciations of words, where the
pronunciations form 'a continuum of sounds, a line
of continuous variation, which has a virtual
existence': the correct pronunciation is
determined by the dominant social order.
Similarly, syntax lies on a line of variation,
with particular forms depending on 'regular
patterns of action', and so does semantics,
including what might appear as 'the stable
denotative core', with a permitted range of
nuances: each speech act or performance actualizes
a particular point on a continuum.
Together, these lines of continuous variation form
an abstract machine. The non discursive
patterrns of action are components of it as
well. Together, enunciative and machinic
assemblages actualize the abstract machine, and
the abstract machine is what provides the
connection between them. Nonactualized
possibilities remain immanent within assemblages,
and can actually appear as nonstandard
actualizations 'that destabilize norms and
rules' (100). This is what the nonstandard
bits of Prague German are doing, undermining
standard German and, by implication standard
'practices, institutions, entities and states of
affairs as well'. This is why
deterritorialized language is a political action
for D and G [classic
cultural politics, limited to a politics of
culture?].
They think this is what Kafka is doing, making
himself a former and is own language, emphasizing
the possibilities in his own language to develop a
'minor or intensive usage'. D and G provide
no actual examples, but they do refer to other
writers and how they deterritorialize language,
including Artaud as above. Apparently Celine
in Guignol's Band [I'm about to read this]
provides another example, using various short
exclamatory lines. They also cite ee
cummings in ATP, and stammering in Luca's poem
about passion [rendered here as ' Passione nez
passionem je/je t'ai je t'aime/je je jet jet'ai
jetez/je t'aime passionem je t'aime and eventually
a 'final sonic block'... JE T'AIME PASSIONMENT
-- in Essays
apparently]. Beckett also breaks
up words into components, sometimes interjecting
punctuation marks [also in Essays]
Some critics think that Kafka is far more sober
and purist, but he just uses different ways to
'induce disequilibrium, to activate from within
the language itself the lines of continuous
variation [which are] immanent'(102). Proust
also agrees that writers invent their own foreign
language: Deleuze [book
on Proust] says this is pursued
'through sobriety, creative subtraction'.
This is what Kafka does in '"a pitiless
rectification... Schizo politeness,
drunkenness from pure water"'. Its very
strangeness comes from this 'hypercorrectness',
although the technique is similar to the
overloading of individual words in Prague German
and its reduction of vocabulary, which 'pushes
each word a few steps closer toward an
inarticulate extreme, toward a vanishing point at
which all sense must be expressed in a single
sound'.
Minor languages also offer intensive usages of
language. They develop asignifying
techniques which might include using 'words as
asignifying bits of sound' (103).
Apparently, Kafka noticed this about the
connections between some of the consonants and
vowels in his writing. He also used a free
association technique of her name in a letter to
Milena. He does refer to 'strange
asignifying sounds' like buzzing or twittering [The
Burrow and Metamorphosis], but Bogue
thinks that it could be a category mistake to
confuse these sounds with their conventional
verbal representations [like the standard word
'twittering'].
However, D and G identify them in Kafka, and use
their examples to explain the difference between
metaphor and metamorphosis, and 'the relation
between sound and sense in the process of
"becoming - animal"'. Apparently, in Kafka,
the word is dominant and gives birth to the
image. D and G in investigating this
process, argue that any language involves '"the
deterritorialization of the mouth, tongue and
teeth"'[book on Kafka],
which makes sounds, breaking with animal functions
and reterritorializing around the interests of
making sense. Making sense both regulates
sound to designate words and, in '"figurative
sense"'controls images and metaphor as well.
Minor languages can undo this process of
reterritorialization, breaking the relation
between sound and word, which 'neutralizes sense'
(104), and make words into a 'an arbitrary sonic
vibration'. However, something remains from
the original sense, which means that this breaking
of the relation can become a line of flight
[maybe] [the example seems to imply that if we
linked together words with a dash, such as human -
insect , we would be indicating a line of flight
between the two, not a literal nor a figurative
meaning. {Why not a portmanteau word like
'humsect'? 'Cyborg' is a good one. I suppose we
are not far off the silly punctuation marks
developed by Sellars
and Gough? Perhaps none of these could be
used in a 'sober' literature?}]. By
neutralizing conventional sense, we are left with
'"a sequence of intensive states, a scale or a
circuit of pure intensities that one can traverse
in one direction or another"'[again quoting the
book on Kafka] [so conventional sense is replaced
by some state of intensity, some emotional or
attentional arousal?]
It is the passage [hinted at or alluded to?]
between these two states which is important, and
which becomes an intensive continuum, 'in which
words and things can no longer be differentiated',
and this is becoming [book
on Kafka], metamorphosis rather than
metaphor. Metaphor still depends on proper
or figurative sense, but indicating a break with
sense leaves only 'a distribution of [intensive]
states in the range of the word' [the feelings
aroused in the reader?]. [Pronunciations and
imports?] in minor languages also deterritorialize
the conventional link between a sound and an
object, so that the word becomes 'an arbitrary
sonic vibration'. Yet the original senses
still direct the line of flight [so we get some
clue about Gregor based on our conventional
understandings of human and insect?], but there is
no metaphorical sense to guide us, 'no longer a
literal or a figurative sense to the words',
rather a sequence of intensive states, produced by
the image, the passage, and these are not
collapsed into a metaphor, or the objects 'human'
or 'insect'. Again we see this by thinking
about sonics, '"language tonalites"' (105), the
noises of the special words used by the becoming -
animal [again I could only think of onomatapoeic
words like 'twittering' or possibly 'howling'].
This does not exactly fit the 'staid and rather
lucid narrative' of Metamorphosis, says
Bogue, and this forces D and G to see the work not
as complete, but as indicating 'a compositional
process' that results from constructing
metamorphoses. There is a parallel with the
paintings in Bacon, which often start with a
representation or image which is then distorted
deliberately by the addition of something like 'a
nonrational tactile blotch'. Bacon calls the
result the diagram and uses it to develop more
directions aimed at metamorphosis or mutation, so
that the painting increasingly becomes a matter of
'tendencies, vectors or movements, towards new
elements and states of affairs'. It is
possible to see these diagrams in the paintings,
and we can see the same 'sonic disturbance' in
Kafka, producing the same 'local catastrophe that
guides invention'. The diagram can only be
seen in things like the twittering or in the
'ascetic intensity' of the writing. The same
process can be found in The Trial, as the
process is unfold and as 'multiple speech- acts'
develop. In particular, the conventional
segregation of speech acts into things like
industrial or familial is destabilized. A
diagram is formed which shows how phrases such as
'"I swear!," "Guilty!"... "Under
arrest!"'suggest passages between these realms
(106), and show themselves as composite
structures, as when the bank includes a back-stage
torture chamber to flog the assistants. The
novel itself emerges from this diagram as
different parts are traced, and the machine only
appears in particular 'non sequiturs' and again
the 'ascetic simplicity of the narrative's
language'[presumably this is much more detectable
in the original. The only traces I can find
in my English translations are the strange matter
of fact way in which extraordinary events are
recorded, or the narrator describes his personal
relations].
The diagram also shows how word and thing [sound?]
can be joined in paradoxes and intensities [I
still don't get a bit about intensity—does it mean
emotional intensity or does it mean a value on
some intensive scale which cannot be precisely
measured, as in continuous variation etc?].
They reveal a virtual dimension of immanence in
language, showing unrealized 'lines of continuous
variation, vectors of intensities'. The
operations occur with matter rather than
substance, function not form, on both planes of
expression and content. But the new matter
remains unformed semiotically and
physically. Instead there is 'an immanent
Function- Matter' and this eventually finds forms
of expression and content, but not conventional
ones: the new configuration can be a genuine
invention.
The relation between expression and content is
also challenged in Kafka, seen in the essay on
stuttering [Essays].
The point is to make the language itself starter,
breaking conventional relations between forms of
expression and forms of content, the latter
including murmuring, stuttering, the vibrato and
reverberation [must go off and reread it]—the
example in Kafka seems to offer a reverberation
between twittering and the oscillations of
Gregor's body. The cited quote seems to
indicate that there is some direct effect produced
by these particular words [a kind of physical or
affective effect of onomatopeia?]. In great
writers, words become affective intensities
themselves, and cease to signify in the
conventional way. In Melville and Kafka and
this can come from descriptions of particular
sounds, echoes, confirmative reverberations
between words and physical actions as above.
They can also be some evoked 'atmospheric quality,
a milieu' (108), providing a directional force or
a mode of transmitting 'affective
reverberations'[so intensity does seem to refer to
affect here?]. It is down to style and to
the greatness of the writer, some 'adequation
between the peculiar strangeness of each writer's
use of his language and the objects
described'[inevitably circular in my view],
including the link again between the spare prose
and the transformations represented by it in Metamorphosis.
This enables affects to 'communicate with one
another, above and through the words'[a personal
impact, extended by philosophical analysis, and,
through the slippery pronoun, generalized to an
authoritative reading? A fancy French
alternative to the favorite game of English
critics of hunting the symbol or having a
Stendhalian emotional reaction, which only the
properly educated can detect, of course?].
There might be a contradiction between seeing
Kafka as a great writer, and also as offering
minor language, in which there are no great
writers, only a collective assemblage of
enunciation. D and G escape by saying that
it is not great writers so much that are missing
in minor literature, more authoritative writers
who establish canons. It is a matter of
whether dominant social codes are dismantled [how
much? in what direction?] . In capitalist
coding, individualism and the separation of the
personal from the political are crucial elements,
reflected in major literatures, or at least
offering a milieu for them [we are used to this
weaseling around Althusserianism by now], while in
minor literature, writing always connects with the
political [explicitly or says the critic?]: but a
great writer in minor language need not be a fully
autonomous individual figure.
All languages presume collective assemblages of
enunciation, and non discursive machines, which
are coordinated by an overall abstract machine,
so, technically, there can be no subjects only
collective assemblages. Language is a social
creation, a 'rather unexceptionable
observation'(109), and no writer can create 'ex
nihilo'. However writers can accept
themselves as depoliticized individuals in
conformity with a social order, or not, and
rejection involves a different relation to the
collective assemblage of enunciation. It may
be that a completely radical alternative
collective does not yet exist, so that the people
it addresses are yet to be. Literature
therefore assumes the role of producing an active
solidarity, expressing a different community, not
just describing it but helping to produce
it. This is done by dismantling conventional
assemblages and extracting alternatives from the
virtual assemblages. There may be hints of
diabolical powers to come or of revolutionary
forces.
Inventing something means that its shape cannot be
foreseen, because it is at the end of a process of
metamorphosis with an unpredictable outcome.
Critical writers therefore can have no
guarantees. In this sense, expression
precedes content. In major literature, it is
the other way about since the content is already
given, in coded forms. Since this
provides us already with the notion of good sense,
minor writers must 'suspend sense' (110).
One way to do this is to treat words 'as
asignifying sounds', and to replace standard
images, including metaphors, with passages of
intensity which blur the distinction between words
and things [still don't get it, although I can
think of much better examples like portmanteaux in
Carroll. Does retaining a political function
mean that sobriety is essential, and that nonsense
must be eschewed even if it is much better at
demolishing standard uses for words, or is this
specific to Kafka?]. We are breaking with
the existing order of things, even if we risk
worse alternatives in future [serious dangers of
adventurism here]
If is there is no revolutionary community,
marginal and solitary writers can become their
voice, but not as individual subjects. An
artistic singularity can therefore
function for a broader community even one that
does not yet exist. This is common enough to
become 'a defining characteristic of [proper]
literature' for D and G [there's also a reference
back to the notion of the bachelor machine, which
I assume is what is meant by a Célibataire].
Thus a connection between an actual singular
celibate and the virtual community comprises the
collective assemblage.
[there is a summary of the argument so far,
111-12]
Overall, the notion of minor literature involves
all three of: numerically small nations, the
literature of oppressed minorities, and the
'modernist avant-garde'. The categories do
not always coincide, as when small groups attempt
to create their own canon, new major
literatures. Numerically larger groups can
also form linguistic minorities if they deviate
from the norm [like women]. Linguistic
minorities might have their own ethnic tongue, or
speak a particular variant of the common
language. The last group interest D and G
most. The link between such minorities and
the avant-garde is rather flimsy, formed only by
an interest in experimentation. The reason
for the link here is more to 'invent possibilities
for future literary endeavor'[so it is not even
political, more like hijacking politics to inspire
artistic invention?]. It helps provide
modernism with a politics, denying that it
concerns itself merely with formalist innovation
[this works at the philosophical rather than the
real level? It is a classic justification of
cultural politics which will otherwise look
completely irrelevant]. D and G apparently
supported experimental writing among minorities,
and certainly opposed sentimental notions of
majorities, but overall 'their aim is to issue a
manifesto for new literature' (113).
Similarly, individual authors like Kafka
become [puppets for their ventriloquism], a source
of 'provocation' for theorizing. It is an
inevitably selective reading. It is not a
convincing account of Kafka's own experiments and
purposes. But their treatment has revived
elements in his writing, especially the critical
ones which are implicit; the emphasis on his humor
has helped challenge psychoanalytic readings
[because he introduces oedipal themes just as
'bait', say D and G]; the machinic analysis helps
counter the mystical appropriations of his
work. Their discussion of his style is 'the
most confusing aspect of their analysis' (114),
and they provide no concrete examples. They
like to include him in categories which include
quite different writers, so it seems as if they
'are merely willing Kafka into being the writer
they want him to be'. Yet discussing him
shows that 'ascetic, sober use' of language can
still produce 'a strangeness' [reminds me of the
cliches used to describe Arnold Wekser plays -- an
atmosphere of creeping menace etc -- rich material
for Pseuds' Corner] . They also usefully
address compositional practice which may not be
manifestly present in the actual work [but this
leaves room for even more weaseling]. They
have addressed the politics of language, and its
role in assemblages of enunciation, as in the
strange multiple connections between the sites in
which the action takes place, and how the
different speech acts reveal relations between
them. Bogue likes the examples of becoming
animal as extensions of Artaud's cri-souffles
experiments. He also likes the ways in which
the overall effect of the style is analyzed as
producing a 'an atmospheric medium' in which
particular cadences or dictions, forms and
contents are rendered 'strange and foreign'[seems
to me they need the Freudian concept of the
uncanny or unheimlich here].
Chapter five Kleist, Bene, and minor
theater
[I have struggled to grasp a lot of this, partly
because I cannot get hold of an English
translation of Superpositions, which contains the
script of Bene's stripped down version of Richard
III, or the Horrible Night of a Man of War,
and an essay by Deleuze. Nor have I yet read
Kleist's play Penthesilea, although
it is in the post, and I have read some of the
short stories by Kleist to which Bogue
refers. I recognize some of the references
to other work by Deleuze, and went back to my own
notes on Dialogues,
and the strange remarks on warriors and their
becomings in A 1000 Plateaus, especially Plateau 10. For
my own benefit, I have started with quotes from my
own notes. As you can see, I am a tiny bit
sceptical here and there.
Dialogues first:
Traitors are not
tricksters [elaborated quite a lot, page 41]. French
literature features lots of tricksters [this is
about the superiority of Anglo-American
literature] .
Shakespeare’s Richard III, shows treason,
however, a becoming [apparently, when he chooses
Anne, this displays ‘a woman-becoming’ (42)
[Parnet's
summary] Assemblages not words or ideas,
concepts or signifiers are the ‘minimum real
unit’ (51).
Assemblages produce utterances, which
are always collective and which refer to
‘populations multiplicities, territories,
becomings, affects, events’ (51). Proper
names do not designate subjects but the
relations between terms. Authors
might be subjects in the sense that they
enunciate, but writers are not. Writers
invent assemblages ‘starting from assemblages
which have invented him, he makes one
multiplicity pass into another’[!] (52). Assemblages
are not necessarily homogenous, but
cofunctioning, sympathetic or symbiotic. It
is ultimately an interaction of bodies, and
their accompanying populations. We’re
not talking necessarily about physical or
biological bodies.
The
author as enunciator can identify with
characters, with the idea they represent, or
act as an observer and critic. None
of these create worlds though. It’s
necessary to speak and write with the world or
with people, assembling encounters between
inner and outer worlds, being in the middle.
Distance
and identification are traps. It
is easy to get contaminated by neurotics who
want to reduce to their states, or scholars
who try to convince us of their scientific
observations.
Instead, we need to struggle to exert
sympathy and to write, on behalf of life, to
assemble.
This involves extraction of life forces
from madness or from addiction.
Then ATP:
The same
kind of homology explains the social relations
inside clans, like those between warriors and
young women (261) [discussed in more
detail later-- the ref is to a French study of
ancient Greece] - there is a homology between
young women refusing marriage and warriors
refusing to fight by disguising themselves as
women [not from cowardice, but from tactics,
it is later argued. A whole discussion about
the priority of becoming-woman ensues! From
this!]. ..We can
now explain the remark made earlier about
warriors disguising themselves as girls - not
a shameful matter, but the warrior's tactic to
pursue a line of flight by camouflage - 'the
warrior arises in the infinity of a line of
flight'[literary bullshit again]. Girls
who refused to marry are doing the same
thing. Again they do not resemble each
other nor are they equivalent. The
bisexuality and homosexuality of military
societies is also not imitative or structural,
but instead represents 'an essential anomie of
the man of war'. Warriors are also swept
up in the general furore of combat and become
- animal. But this is only possible once
they have developed as warriors, and this
follows the phase of becoming-women above
[specious bollox], the contagion spread by the
girl becoming-woman is inseparable from
becoming-animal in this case, occupying 'a
single "block"'. The contagion works the
other way too so that the girl 'becomes
warrior by contagion with the animal'.
Everything occupies 'an asymmetrical block of
becoming, an instantaneous zigzag' (307), in
'a double war machine'[a massive construction
based on very flimsy arguments].]
Superpositions is the
only work by Deleuze on drama, and indicates
further how literature can develop the project of
developing minor language. Deleuze sees
Richard III as above, a man of war and becoming
woman, and Bene has a similar treatment.
They met and became friends. Deleuze had
already commented upon Richard III as in the quote
from Dialogues above—the bit about being a
traitor indicates that Richard is not just out to
capture the state but to assemble a war machine,
and in this sense, it has a specific object, 'a
becoming'. His relationship with Anne is a
similar commitment to his becoming - woman.
Both of these themes are also found in Bene, and
may have influenced Deleuze's later treatment in ATP,
including the remarks on war machines, and setting
up the connection between 'war, betrayal and
becoming-woman'(117). Kleist also offers a
discussion of these concepts, and was influential
in the discussion of Shakespeare.
Deleuze got his idea originally from Penthesilia.
ATP argues that notions of war machines
against the state appear in all of Kleist's work,
developed in terms of anarchic and chaotic
tendencies on the one hand, and state regulation
and order on the other. The state has to
capture the war machine and domesticate it as a
military institution, but this is never
stable. Contradictions between war and state
are found in many early IndoEuropean myths.
Warriors have always been suspected of various
sins including treason against the social
order. The war machine is not primarily
aimed at waging war, rather at constructing and
occupying smooth space. It is an important
component of nomadism. It can be both
revolutionary and artistic. It acts as pure
exteriority, deterritorializing and then
'fashioning assemblages that follow and disclose
lines of flight'(118): these themes are found in
Kleist.
In Penthesilea, according to the critic
Carrière, much cited by Deleuze and Guattari, war
is a central dynamic. Kleist was himself a
military man, and he certainly writes a lot about
'war, violent struggle or insurrection'[the only
example I have read is The Betrothal in Santo
Domingo, set in the context of the slaves'
revolt against the French in Haiti-- hang on
though, The Marquise D'O is also set
amidst war]. There is a larger issue, how
war infects, disorganizes and deterritorializes,
'"the invasion of a multiplicity of bodies by
another multiplicity"' (119). War is an
affective encounter [!]. Kleist pursues
these affects rather than sentiments, 'non
personal atmospheric states that ignore the
distinction between exterior and interior, defy
rational control and disrupt logical time'.
The forces in conflict are themselves
multiplicities involving both 'actual external
bodies' and 'internal states of a given
individual'. Kleist makes central a figure
involving 'the point of intersection of two
infinite lines', two chains of events, where we
find both immobility and the traces of frightening
speeds [citing Carrière]. At such
immobile points of intersection, a certain grace
can be visible: this is explained in terms of a
Kleist essay on marionettes, where grace appears
from some kind of balance of the mechanical forces
of the puppets, something unconscious [something
close to muscle memory?], something threatened by
reflection and self-consciousness. [ I have
read this very short story -- the stuff about
immobile points and lines converging on a point
etc are all Kleist. The main spokesperson for all
the stuff about grace is a ballet dancer who wants
to critique forced, ungraceful ballet moves. The
point seems to be to trace a straight line in
choreography,and let limbs, human and
marionette, follow the natural shapes they
trace in movements -- curves as they follow their
moving centres of gravity. Turning all this into a
whole philosophy looks a bit forced itself
--talked up by Carriere?]. At the immobile points,
'unconscious yet mysterious forces, mechanical yet
divine' [divinely beautiful and natural, darling?]
(120) are released. The same might be said
of an affect, a combination of 'forces colliding
at maximum acceleration and the motionless,
catatonic seizure', often depicted in the
characters falling into trances or walking in
their sleep [can't say I've noticed this
particularly] . Affects and immobile points
of this kind represent a break in rational
consciousness and in chronological time, and in
this 'moment of a temporal disequilibrium, no
sense of self exists'[not dissimilar to Lyng's
'approaching the edge' in terms of undertaking
perilous adventure?].
War can produce a climate of affects like this,
and Penthesilia illustrates this.
[Description of the plot ensues. As the Amazons
appear on the battlefield, their queen,
Penthesilia, sets out to attract Achilles and this
releases the instability of Amazonian practices
involving the capturing of men and their
subsequent encouragement to mate. Carriere
sees the play as describing the movement from one
affect to another, with Penthesilia experiencing
the immobility of affective shock when she first
meets Achilles, followed by a response to seeing
him being attacked. Achilles correspondingly
falls in love even at considerable risk.
Desire grows between them. Achilles pursues
the lady instead of fighting with Agamemnon, and
Penthesilia also betrays the correct procedure for
capturing men. Together they produce a war
machine, and it all ends in tears: as Achilles
pursues becoming - woman, Penthesilia is pursuing
becoming - animal, joining in a pack with her
hunting docs to attack Achilles. In each
case, 'affects are junctures of transformation,
moments of metamorphosis' (123) and are very
risky, as when desire turns into
destruction. I'll add some personal comments
after I have read it].
For D and G, we have an analysis of war and its
relation to the war machine, its opposition to the
state, a force of metamorphosis that disrupts
social stability. This is why warriors are
traitors. War itself offers a process of
becoming-other to human subjects, 'between the
binary poles of stable oppositions'. The
general process is becoming - other, which can
take more specific forms. This process
'operates through affective intensities,
apersonal, nonrational junctures of force. at once
immobile and speeding out of control' (124).
New stable subjects are not formed. We
realize that stable forms are only appearances,
produced themselves by a particular '"conjunction
of lines on a plane of immanence"'[quoting ATP].
Affects can appear as exterior states, stripped
from human subjects where they take the form of
sentiments, and once released can achieve
considerable force and speed, so that 'love or
hatred are no longer sentiments but affects', and
these provide 'instances' of becomings.
Affects traverse the body. The forces
produced are always dangerous, but can be
constructive. Kleist speculates that the
state ultimately will triumph, so that these
dangerously creative forces will either be
domesticated as the military organ, or become
internal and suicidal.
Turning to Richard III, it is clear that
Richard is also a man of war, prepared to commit
treason against social order, and ready to pursue
anything that undermines that order, hence his
open pleasure in destruction. The
uncontrolled forces end in his destruction.
He is becoming - other, specifically becoming -
woman, and we can see this in the courtship of
Lady Anne. Critics have often noted that it
is an improbable encounter, but this precisely
indicates becoming other with its rejection of
expectations and good taste. Anne begins by
hating him yet ends by accepting him.
Physical deformity plays a major part, and Bogue
thinks this gives him grace at a point of
immobility, just as with Kleist and the
puppets. Again, Richard choosing a
particular woman is a clear sign of becoming
woman, just as with Achilles choosing Penthesilia
[he ignores reasons of state and chooses the lady
on the basis of a new appreciation of womanly
characteristics, or is this too literal?]: 'not an
imitation of the feminine but an engagement with
graceful, affective forces of metamorphosis'
(126).
Bene apparently addresses the same questions as
the key reading of the play. [Biography
ensues, 126-7]. He seems to have 'severely
truncated' the script, although he adds stage
directions to produce new actions and various
'strange goings-on'. This involves stripping
out many of the actors, adding two female
characters, and seeming to focus on physical
deformities [lots more details 128] in a 'sequence
of vignettes'. The added actions seem to
turn on death and deformity, and lots of women
undressing and dressing again. Richard
delivers the lines in a stammering manner and
often falls to the ground. He pulls out
various prosthetic limbs and attaches them to his
own body, which apparently arouses Lady Anne and
himself. Bene says the whole focus is on
difference and the feminine, the impossibility of
the unique, and 'the obscene' of the feminine in
history [more below]. The point of theatre
for him is to 'create a fact and liquidate an
anecdote' (130), and he wants to present facts
somehow directly and brutally to avoid the
mediation of conventional narratives. He is
against interpretation just as is Deleuze, and in
favor of immediacy, the non discursive and non
representable. Discourse and representations
only put ideas outside us so that we do not live
them. The conventional notion of the
individual subject needs to be criticized as
'imbecilic'(131), because it does not recognize
difference: unconscious difference is the basis of
the unique. Bene even cites Deleuze on
repetition as difference without concept.
His project is to liquidate anecdotes and preserve
immediacy, disrupting conventional narratives in
the form of 'an " eternal undramatization as
undoing"', fully recognizing the impasse for the
theatre that is involved. Wherever
communication exists it is corrupt and rapidly
becomes 'a circulation of clichés, received ideas
and tired values'[there seems to be an obvious
notion of challenging the audience to break with
convention, no doubt with liberating intentions,
and therefore subject to the usual critiques by Ranciere].
Richard becomes radically other, 'a deformed
monster', stumbling literally and physically over
the immediate, deliberately deforming his body
further and further, but, eventually achieving a
'genuine grace' after a break with nature.
Back to the obscene, defined as '"the excess of
desire... continual transgression"'
(132). There are links with Bataille and
Sade. Work is the main distraction from
eroticism or [excess] luxury and this is the curse
of the human tradition, dehumanizing
workers. Hence his slogan [sounds a bit like
a lyric from Niggaz With Attitude—'"Kill.
Massacre. Plunder. Steal. Give
play to your life... Never take a
job"'. The erotic challenges all fixed
social orders and relations. Living
luxuriously is also living tragically, risking
suicide, but also taking part in social
transformation [in culture alone, that is]: he
cites as evidence a cultural revolution after the
election of some communists to his local
community. Richard's progressive deformation is
also a form of excess, a disruption of norms, and,
as he relates to Anne, he develops 'an erotic
politics of self mutation, in which desire and
decoding are one' (133)[ a body-without-limbs!]
All the byplay with prosthetics and the undressing
women shows the connection 'between deformation
and desire', and there are hints of excess in the
construction of the 'artificial body'. Lady
Anne become debauched and there is violence as
well as eroticism. There are also utopian
moments of unity, representing the good side of
difference, in action not thought [serious
category mistake here in that the 'spontaneous'
and 'immediate' action on the stage is of course a
result of considered reflection and thought on the
part of the director.]
The stuff about history terms on a complex
relation between the obscene and history. On
the one hand, immediate utopian revolution can be
antihistorical. History is also governed by
comforting narratives so that anti history breaks
those and rational time in the immediate. At
the same time, history is depicted in the play,
[in terms of a kind of career for Richard].
However, politics somehow stands outside of
history since it is driven by desire, it is
obscene. Richard defies normal history in
his tactical pursuits of his political fortunes,
but in the end becomes excessively autonomous,
outside history and 'disconnected from desire and
the other'[becomes to believe in himself as
supreme?]. It is different when he stands
outside history for a moment with Lady Anne.
At the end, it is all 'self referential and
delusional'(135). He has escaped from
history too far, into a 'delirium and
isolation'. Overall then, lived history
involves 'concrete political action' and is not a
coherent narrative but is 'obscene, excessive, non
rational'[illustrated with more scenes from the
play, 136].
Overall, Bogue thinks that the utopian function of
the theater is being displayed. There is a
constant slippage between the characters and the
actors and their relations [including the
characters as actors]. Self understanding is
apparent when characters reveal themselves as
actors [reads like poor man's Goffman. And
hasn't Brecht done all this?]. They can then
explain to the audience [who won't know anything
about all this, the poor deluded plebs] .
The byplay with the prosthetics can be seen as
showing the audience that Richard is a constructed
unnatural body, as are kings generally. Such
displays also liberate on stage 'a body of
desire'. Bene is trying to show that theater
is actually impossible, that the immediate cannot
be presented. The point is to make
performance create the event, with the characters
acting and the actors discovering, liberating the
excess of desire. Bene adds some words to
the script to make this clear. What develops
is a kind of comment on characters going on at the
same time [as in the role distance of the
professional?] , and the presentation of
difference 'the disproportionate, the chaotic, the
dissimilar' (137), something that is both '
hyperpolitical' and 'metapolitical'. The
theater presents an artificial space like a
utopian island, but also 'an intensification of
the world' where erotic politics can be shown to
develop.
Deleuze is interested in Bene as 'a theater of
subtraction'[and he likes subtraction as a
philosophical and artistic technique]. Bene
also constructs additional characters, in a dual
process. This notion of fabrication and
constitution is at the heart of Bene's critical
experimentation. If we subtract first, we
can see what emerges and what new constructions
can be formed. In Richard III, we subtract
all the royal accoutrements leaving us with the
monster, the man of war. There is also a
sign of the crucial relation to women, which
affects Richard, as in his serial deformation, on
a '"line of continuous variation"'(138). We
see this war machine opposing the state, and it is
all the conventional elements of power that are
subtracted. Again, this can be seen as 'a
minor usage of major structures', involving
setting becomings against history, and active
lives against culture. There are specific
themes arising from theater as well, involving the
issue of representation on the stage.
Critiquing conventional representation is again a
critique of power. The conventions also have
to be subtracted, including any residual
structures in the text or in language, even
dialogue, because this '" transmits to speech
[parole] the elements of power, and makes them
circulate: it's your turn to speak, in
such-and-such codified conditions"'[quoting
Superpositions, 139]. What is left is new
'"light, sounds and gestures"', in which
everything can be grasped anew.
[Then some examples of what Bene actually does to
subtract—Bogue says that the new direction of
different actions provides an alternative
structure, and that dialog is interrupted 'through
various performance practices - stammerings,
screams and whispers;... electronic
distortion of their voices; overlapping deliveries
of exchanges; blockings, postures and actions that
contradict the texts implicit interlocutionary
relationships'(140) [sounds like a Godard film—Pravda
for example]. Dialogue is replaced by a
'kind of music of interactions'. Discussing
subtraction of the text, Deleuze means that
performance practice dominates over written
script, precisely to subvert the notion of a
faithful representation of an original: Bene gives
the performance 'relative autonomy'. He also
adds comments, directions and observations, which
are more than just stage directions, to create his
own text, treating Shakespeare as just 'a "simple
material for variation"'. The directions are
nontextual, yet they help to express '" the scale
of variables through which the statement passes,
as in a musical score"', producing operational
writing, like a score, 'neither literary nor
theatrical'(141). Apparently, Bene also
produced written accounts of these operators,
producing a further level of relative autonomy for
the writing.
There are links with the discussion of minor
language in Kafka. There is the same
argument that the apparent constants and
invariants of language 'are actually power
relations that a minor usage sets in continuous
variation'. However, in Superpositions,
we see that far more is involved than the
manipulation of words. Performance of
language becomes crucial. The stuttering
poem by Luca shows that we should ideally listen
to the poem, or attend a public reading by Luca
himself. There are other examples of how
context varies the meaning of semantic units
[hardly revolutionary—pretty banal in fact].
So the same statements of disgust screamed by a
woman rejecting a man, or child shrinking from
something ugly are 'different speech act[s]', and
each can be seen as an 'actualization of a virtual
line of continuous variation'. Some
actualizations will obviously be minor usages:
Bene shows the line of variation and the effects
of different modes of delivery, including
variations in tone or accent or posture.
Conventionally, all these are seen as para or
extra linguistic elements, but they're all
important components of a minor style, and they
have their own internal affects on other
components—the strange whispers or moans interfere
in other movements, as in Richard and stumbling.
Bene shows that there is no point in
distinguishing between variation of gestures and
variation of words. They produce a single
continuum, especially as the performance proceeds
in a way that makes this visible to the
spectators, '"the Idea become visible, sensible,
the political become erotic"'[Superpositions
again, 143]. The excess of desire disrupts
codes [the audience gets turned on enough to
forget the need to repress them?]. We see in
the variation of all the components, 'a
generalized becoming', similar to that produced in
music: indeed, Bene insists that the actors are
singing in his work, oscillating between speech
and singing. Similarly, the images provided
are musical in this sense, a composite
construction which 'is that of speeds and
intensities'. Components become
'metamorphosing movements'.
This metamorphosis finds a parallel in Richard's
deformities. Deleuze cites a 14th century
scholastic [!] referring to the geometry of speeds
and the distribution of intensities, or affects,
where diverse forms are developed in contrast to a
single form, the smooth progression of uniform
qualities. The work comes over into modern
notions of deformation as an undoing, and
transformation as a creative function of the new
sequence of metamorphosis: of the 14th century
term difformation includes both.
Overall, Deleuze has connected a critique of power
with a critique of representation, the
difformation of theatrical procedures and elements
with a critique of language itself, and an
emphasis on its performance. Linguistics
becomes 'a subset of pragmatics' (145), and
contexts of action are crucial for understanding
the meaning of words. This is why he 'seems
vague when discussing the narrowly linguistic
characteristics of a minor style'. Style
involves the continuous variation 'of all the
elements of language', and minor usages in
particular emphasize performance or
enactment. This is illustrated particularly
well by Bene's theater which makes all the
processes explicit.
[Bogue goes on to discuss whether this is a valid
reading of Bene, 145--9]. Deleuze obviously
sees the play through a lens [sic] provided by his
notion of a man of war. That in turn is
based on Kleist. War is not stressed so much
in Bene's play, but Bene is making clear his
'basic compatibility'(146) with Deleuze, even
though they use different languages.
Nevertheless, Deleuze's is 'only a partial
reading', focused particularly on a first part
only, and one critic has suggested that he has
misread the basic tragedy in Richard's self
mutilation as a result. He also thinks that
the power of the theater to unsettle power
relations is only ever temporary, despite
Deleuze's optimism. Bogue defends Deleuze a
bit, page 147, noting that Deleuze has warned us
that intensities may become dangerous, and black
holes develop from lines of flight and all
that. Bene's agreement on the temporary
affects of radical theater was apparently designed
to rebuke self congratulatory avant garde
posturing, and he rehearses the phrase about how
his theater is for a people that is necessarily
lacking, given the huge reproductive power of the
social order. Classically, he, like Deleuze,
argues that 'the only solution is to invent a new
people' [highly reminiscent of Hitler], by
critiquing the codes of power, a part of his
acknowledgment of the impossibility of the
theater, which must be attempted
nevertheless. But Deleuze says the point is
to produce a potentiality not represent an actual
conflict.
The work on Bene brings together Deleuze's work on
war machines and Kleist with minor languages and
Kafka. Bene also articulates the relation
between language and the non linguistic
world. More of such articulations ensue in
the next chapter.
Chapter six life, lines, visions,
auditions
Essays
argues that the issue is the relation between
literature and life, the outside. That
literature which does not connect in such a way as
to 'further the activities of life' (151) is
unhealthy. Writing has to invent a new
language within existing language, and produce a
process [machine?] to move from conventional to
unconventional. This also reconnects
literature to the outside world, including to non
linguistic elements [which will include the
visions and auditions as above].
In Dialogues,
Deleuze talks of the superiority of Anglo American
literature in terms of its ability to trace a line
of flight. He is influenced by DH Lawrence
on American literature [which includes a piece on
Whitman]. Melville, for example, wanted to
escape, to cross into another life, and this is
also a theme in Whitman, with the notion of the
open road. The point is to engage sympathy
with other beings, where sympathy involves
emotions like both love and hate. Deleuze
sees this as a matter of 'becoming and the line of
flight' (153), including contact with the nonhuman
life. The line of flight is like the open
road, offering a purified notion of self and an
open connection of sympathy, 'a general
affectivity' [in the usual sense of affect this
time?].
Deleuze talks about writing as fleeing, betraying,
becoming, tracing lines of flight. Here, and
line of flight is a line that converges on the
vanishing point on the horizon. Melville
literally crosses horizons in sea stories, for
example. Flight involves delirium, 'exactly
to go off the track' (154), following an uncharted
course, leaving behind conventional sense and
preexisting codes. This explains why it
always includes treason. Lines of flights
makes something flee, or leak, misdirecting or
derailing something. Betrayal of this kind
is difficult but it is the essence of creativity.
That which makes something flee is a creative
deformation, a becoming, something which 'passes
between two terms such that both are modified'
(154). It is not a matter of exchanging
terms, since becoming is continual, tending
towards 'becoming-imperceptible'. What is
left is a series of 'mere vectors, directions,
movements... Flows'. Writing means to
become a flow conjoining with other flows, to
become minoritarian. Conjoining flows means
making assemblages, 'collections of heterogeneous
elements', acting through '" sympathy,
symbiosis"'(155) [so sympathy is not sentimental
identification]. Assemblages arise in the
middle, on a line of encounter between an interior
and an exterior world, and writing involves
opening this encounter: as the writer becomes
imperceptible, effaces their identity, so the
outside becomes [more perceptible?]. There
are similar processes when writers connects
personal lives to their literary works. So,
'"the goal of writing is to carry life to the
state of a non personal power"'. Writers
realize that life is not something personal [all
this from Dialogues, second
chapter]. A general deterritorialization
ensues, which undoes codes and conventional
expressions and contents, producing '"a zigzag,
broken line of flight"'. Lines are
abstracted from persons 'and all other stable
entities' writing engages these abstract lines,
just as does painting or music [but with fewer
possibilities, as we shall see]
To write is to be delirious, to become, to form
assemblages and to deterritorialize. The
line of flight is the crucial element. Lines
are explored further in the [much neglected] plateau eight of ATP on
the novella. After discussing three
novellas, [more detail 157f] D and G finally
get to classifying lines, arguing that we are all
made of lines, and that lines of writing include
[these other] lines between them. A line of
flight tends to the horizon as above, but it
frequently goes off the track to break the
routines of daily life, which are other source of
lines [segmented or at best supple]. Lines
can be seen as flows 'traversing the body without
organs like a network of gradients' (156).
Collective assemblages are organized patterns of
lines, and they have within them immanent lines of
variation, beyond actualized forms and
shapes. They act like melodic lines or
refrains [another much neglected term in ATP
-- see Plateau
11]. All individuals have lines of
various kinds, such as '"geodesics, tropics,
zones"', which operate with different
rhythms.
So lines are always dynamic, vectors or
trajectories, some regular and predictable, others
erratic or zigzagging. The dynamic bits are
'always between points, in the middle'(157).
They are abstract in the sense of tracing the
'surges, flows and wakes' of stable things.
They connect components of assemblages, including
machines [to revert to the vocabulary of AO]
[Bogue's summary of Plateau 8 stresses the secret
and the discovery, which has the effect that 'the
present and future are experienced as already
past'[since the issue then is to ask what
happened]. The secret acts as '"an
unknowable or an imperceptible"' (158). The
lines of the novella are specific, and this
emerges through the examples. The heroine in
James lives a [molar] life of segmentarity, but
then encounters a line of supple segmentation at
the molecular level, having discovered a secret,
which encourages her to try new forms of
relationship. She even experiences a line of
flight when all her past obscurities and
securities are transformed. In Scott
Fitzgerald, the crack up is produced by molecular
lines that break routines and dissolve old
certainties, and the line of flight appears with
the possibility of a clean break with the past, 'a
qualitative rupture' (160), although there's a
danger in following that line of flight since it
leads to 'radical selfishness and the promise of
minimal social respectability'. In
Fleutiaux, again 'molar contours' are disrupted,
and only when a storm disrupts the system, can the
narrator find a possible liberation. Bogue
summarizes again the three lines, and suggests
that the hard segmentarity belongs to the molar
which can be disrupted by 'molecular
perturbations', so that we can then ask what
happened. The form of the secret then
emerges. A line of flight often opens
momentarily, sometimes as 'an instant of harsh
light beyond interpretation' (161), but this is
often recaptured. The three novellas also tell us
about the links between life and the work.
The three lines are seen as 'each immanent within
the others and equally present across the domains
of the personal, social, and political'
(162). There is an obvious preference for
the line of flight, which can be seen as primary:
it is certainly the line of creation, to be
engaged by writers].
We can see from Dialogues that minor
literature shows how all literature should
properly function, building on these universal
lines. In the work on Kafka, minor
literature is seen as political and collective,
but in Essays,
[from which the remaining discussion follows] the
main theme is on becoming, the invention of the
people to come, and stuttering. Deleuze also
talks about visions and auditions, as 'a fourth
aspect of literature' (163), and this is
relatively new and late. Language when it
breaks with convention also implies a certain
seeing and hearing, and this appears as a limit
for linguistic communication, a surface between
language and the outside, to use earlier
terms. Sounds and visions are expressed in
language but 'are themselves non linguistic',
rendered in language, but somehow behind it, hence
Beckett trying to bore holes in language to see
or hear what lay behind it [more
below]. Good literature deconstructs the
mother tongue, invents a new language within
language, and also creates visions and auditions
'" which no longer belong to any
language"'(164). Linguistic experimentation
eventually leads the discovery of and outside of
language.
Auditions and visions are actual Ideas, that
writers see and hear a '" in the gaps of
language"' (164). We have already discussed
sonic deformations in Kafka. Linguistic
stuttering as in Luca occurs when affects and
intensities 'impinge on phonemic and syntactical
elements' { still citing Essays ch. 1].
Forms of expression may be left intact, if the
form of content somehow gathers up the
disturbances required, and goes back to affect the
words [examples are not very clear here—a
reverberating silence and particular noises in
Melville's Pierre, or the old example
about twittering being 'confirmed' through bodily
tremors in Metamorphosis, the suspense—a
kind of pregnant silence?—in the boudoir for
Masoch]. These can strain language [because
they cannot be conventionally represented?], and
reach the limit of language, even if they are
eventually represented conventionally [for example
through onomatapoeia?]: at the limits, literature
reveals its links with painting and music, but
using words.
It is 'more helpful' (166) to examine visions, as
in Deleuze on TE Lawrence [essay on Seven Pillars...]
Apparently, Deleuze begins by 'paralleling' Goethe
on colors as in effect shadows of light, a
thickening that acts as an affect on human eyes to
produce the visible. This notion of an
initial blinding pure light, leading to indistinct
halos of black and whites, and then to the 'colors
and contours of distinct figures'can be found in
Lawrence on the desert, in his descriptions of
landscapes which follow the same kind of
progression, as in 'the genesis of seeing, the
stages of emergence of the visible' (167).
It is also the Idea which is being made visible
like this, and invisible force expanding into
different 'fundamental visibilities' [must be a
metaphor here, surely?]. Ideas take shape,
following movements, as entities: they are not
transcendent, but have real material existence
including political consequences. The Idea
behind the Arab revolt is also light, spreading
out into space, opening space, conveyed by
preaching, capable of deeply affecting the Arabs
in their nomadic movements.
Lawrence, like other great writers, is able to
'"shape aesthetic percepts as veritable
visions"'. Their descriptions of actual
landscapes include 'a visionary landscape'[Stap
me! Modern geographers would be delighted
with this]. This is usually seen as a
subjective element, at work within the
author. We can see in Lawrence in his
projection of his self image and that of his Arab
comrades as well. All the great figures of
history do this. It is a component of the
'"fabulatory function"'(168), and necessary to
inventing a people to come. Some
reservations about subjectivity ensue, since this
force is political, erotic and artistic [or in the
collective sense, 'non personal and the extent
that they are successfully projected,
autonomous'(169).
Abstract ideas can become material entities, as in
Lawrence again. Such entities '"pass into
the desert"'as a kind of doubling of the images,
thus possessing a visionary dimension.
However, once realized, these entities can react
back on Lawrence's style [weird stuff about its
granularity, its archaisms—can't say I ever
noticed]. Abstract ideas become emotions or
affects, potential powers, and they come to people
the desert, presenting obstacles to their
representation [maybe]. Lawrence's
particular style shows the general
possibilities. All the historical and
tangible objects described in Lawrence have these
inner visions projected onto them. This
results in lending entities an affective force,
and this eventually disturbs language, although
they can take on a force in their own right [I am
of course vulgarising the lovely words of Bogue
and Deleuze—hey, it's what I do].
These visions have a subjective disposition but
are not subjective, not belonging to discrete
selves, not just phantasies but Ideas. They
are always collective. They derive from the
real and have a real life of their own. The
mechanisms are explained in the essay on Little
Hans, which 'elaborates on the distinction between
subject - centered psychoanalytic phantasies and
impersonal, asubjective visions' (170).
[Good summary follows]. Freud reduces all
the elements to the castration complex, but for
Deleuze desire is invested in the world in the
form of '"qualities, substances, powers [puissances]
and events"' (171). We can draw a map of
Hans' milieu, all the different places and objects
like buildings or animals, and then trace his
projected movements, 'actual, anticipated,
dreamed, imagined, dreaded', to get to the
'affective circuits of his world', as a 'map of
desire'. The journies that are involved
combine, as above, the personal qualities and
powers with those of the milieu. We could
then construct a second map of intensities, 'or
movements in "intension"'. These maps show
different densities which fill spaces and underpin
['"subtend"' -- stretch beneath]
trajectories. This also charts affects, like
the lists of affects of the horses. 'A map
of intensities plots a distribution of
affects... powers of affecting and being
affected—that is, becomings'. The affects of
horses are particularly powerful, and thus Hans is
attempting a becoming - horse,, especially with
the significance of the trajectory from the house
to the warehouse, but all these intensive
becomings are detectable beneath the extensive
trajectories. Again it is necessary to stress that
we're not talking about links between the real and
the imaginary, external objects and internal
psychological states. The two maps 'are
inseparable' (172): voyages require an element of
the imaginary, and actual voyages are involved in
becoming. There is a single trajectory '"
with two faces"'.
Deleuze also uses the notion of the crystal to
show the relation between the virtual and the
real, the process of actualization. [Bogue
says this is the conventional terminology that
underpins the stuff about visions]. There
can be crystals of the unconscious. We also
know from the work on cinema that there can be
'cinematic time images in which the virtual and
the actual are seen simultaneously in the same
image'. We can also see the same figure in
the work on Proust, where present moments coexist
with bits of the virtual past. In the
cinema, the crystal proliferates virtual images,
'just as Bergson's virtual past extends from every
present moment into the entire field of the
past'. The crystal both shows the double
nature of an object, as actual and virtual, and
shows how they coalesce in a single image.
Normal consciousness fails to notice the virtual
moment, as do a normal perceptions of
landscapes. The virtual has to be extracted
and then put back into relation with the actual,
in a process whereby the two are used to inform
the other term [my gloss. I see this as a
process rather like abduction, a circling between
virtual and actual]. Once we are aware of
such crystals of the unconscious, we can see
'"trajectories of the libido"' (173).
Deleuze's actual example is the [brief] discussion
of an artistic project [in the same essay on
Hans], were a group of artists talk and existing
path around lake Geneva and 'intervened' in it, to
convert it into a work of art and make it signify
something, make us aware of what a path is.
In one example, glacial erratics were exposed to
make geological lines of force visible: these were
then put in some sort of poetic relation with
other features. We then see the combination
of different flows of force [reminds me of the
definition of the haecceity]. We can take
this as typical of any artwork intertwining real
and virtual paths, but the intention is not to
produce a formal structure, rather 'a double map
of extensive trajectories and intensive
becomings'. This is how we should understand
that particular artistic project, as a libidinal
map [talk up by critic]. Apparently, 'we
must assume' this, and how it connects with the
artist's other activities.
Back to Lawrence, and his journeys which are
clearly affective and erotic [in that they include
suppressed homosexual urges and secret sexual
satisfactions between the Arabs, but also they
seem driven by the personal likings for Arab
leaders more than by official by British
tactics]. The personnel combine in various
combinations of qualities and substances: we can
see 'a becoming-Arab of Lawrence' (175), and lots
of other becomings as well, including becoming -
camel and becoming - imperceptible. The
actual journeys are paths revealing lines of
metamorphosing force that have been
actualized. The landscapes become images,
revealing virtual landscapes 'immanent within each
landscape'. Individuals become 'loci of non
personal, non individuated forces'.
Landscape crystals are formed, as a timeless
image, 'both extracted from the actual landscape
and detached from any personal, psychological
world'.
The projection of such images 'is the process of
artistic creation'. Seven Pillars is
not just a diary or documentary [as TE says
himself] but a specific configuration of
journeys and becomings. This configuration
is extracted from the real and projected back into
it, producing something which is dependent
on the work itself, but which exceeds the
words. We can see the affect of various
invisible forces which become visible, just as
with the images of painters. The landscape
images 'communicate with the fabulative images of
a people-to-come' (176).
So [and this is getting seriously complex], sights
and sounds exist 'above words, between them', as a
kind of content of words. They are Ideas,
here seen as abstractions, in the sense above in
the discussion of Lawrence, emotions and affects,
invisible material forces. These are
produced by 'the "passage of life within
words"'. Literature can demonstrate
becomings, of people for example, of literary
characters which become, transcending all their
individual traits [the example is Ahab and Moby
Dick]. However, these are always collective,
never a private affair. They are produced by
delirium, pushing language to the limit when it
becomes threatened by silence.
The last essay is on Beckett and his technique of
linguistic stuttering. He adds interjections
to interrupt the surface of words, break them open
[and one example quoted by Deleuze is "folly
seeing all this—/this—/what is the word—/this
this—/this this here..."] (177) [note that here,
the dots and dashes are 'traits' in French].
There's also a series of short one or two word
sentences: " less best. No. Naught
best. Best worse. No..." The ideas to
argue that Beckett attempts to use these non
linguistic means to show the limits of
conventional language, by creating visual and
sonic images and through 'the exhaustion of
space'.
Beckett was increasingly unhappy with using words,
especially official English. He wanted to
bore holes in conventional language to see what
lurks behind it. He wants literature to
catch up with some of the practices developed in
music and painting, which are able to disrupt the
surfaces of sounds with silence. The point
is to reveal the meaning of the pauses between the
words and phrases. In Rembrandt and in
Beethoven, there is a technique of 'dehiscing' [I
had to look it up, it means the spilling out of
something when a container is pierced] which
exposes something "behind the pictorial
{representational?} pretext" [quoting Beckett this
time], an efflorescence. (178).
Apparently, in Rembrandt 'pictorial figures and
objects separate from one another' drawing
attention to the empty space between them.
This empty space is seen as an a 'entire expanse
beneath the surface of the painting, the
background depths from which the painting arises',
just as silence is the depth from which music
arises. This is a nonrepresentational, non
linguistic depth, but it should not be seen as
merely a nothing: it is a positive void, '"silence
in itself"'[quoting Deleuze this time, 179], 'the
virtual, the plenum of forces on the plane of
consistency'.
However, it is more difficult to tear apart the
surface of language, since words have so many
connotations and significations. It is
difficult to break away from clichés, as Deleuze
puts it in the work on Francis Bacon and to reveal
the underlying '" fact"'. Painters and
composers can undo narratives to create pure
images, working from specific cases [the example
is depicting the death of a particular young girl
in such a way as to represent "the indefinite [a
young girl dies] as pure intensity that pierces
the surface". It is much more difficult with
words which are stuck with the general or the
particular.
Beckett tries at least in the television plays, to
exhaust the possible, by offering all possible
combinations, for example, of movements of
characters costumes, lighting and other effects [a
great example in Essays,
rendered as a diagram of a Beckett play, rather
like the diagram of movements in his Film,
see Negotiations,
another abandonment of naturalism and the
sensori-motor schema]. Four actors 'traverse
all possible paths connecting the four corners of
the square' etc (180). They are 'stripped of
all preference, or purpose and all signification
such that they form a closed set of terms whose
permutations are finite'. We are meant to
infer that this is the same with language, so that
exhausting the possible can undo language,
'dissolving the glue of calculations,
significations, intentions, personal memories and
old habits that cement words together'.
Beckett constructs metalanguages to undo ordinary
language [ again quite unlike English notions of
creativity]. In the first kind, '"the
relations between objects are identical to those
between words"' [quoting Essays], so that
"combinatory relations replace syntactical
relations", referring only to nouns, appearing as
isolated words. At the second level, another
metalanguage refers to voices, 'linguistic
corpuscles'(181), with the intention to break the
flows and waves of narration pursued by the 'din
of incessant voices'. However, a paradox
appears because if we speak of these voices, we
run the risk of reinstating them, hence the need
for a third level of metalanguage referring to
'"immanent limits that are ceaselessly displaced,
hiatuses, holes or rips"', referring to something
outside language, which, for Deleuze, is a "Image,
visual or sonerous"'[I assume here that 'image' is
used in the Bergson
sense, something between illusion and
reality, a bit like a phenomenom, something
constructed in memory by duration]. This is
a pure image, something singular, not personal or
rational, something disconnected from normal
language and conventional representations,
something that exists to preserve some tension
that will '"loosen the grasp of words"', something
independent from logical memory. Such images
have high levels of energy, but tend to
'dissipate' by 'capturing' the possible [something
like exposing inexhaustible possibilities briefly
before recoiling from the task?: after all,
ordinary language only works by restricting
possibilities? ].
In this third language, we see not only images but
an 'any - space - whatever' [asw -- a big concept
in the cinema books] (182), and this can take the
form of an abstract geometrical square or circle,
an indefinite space in the play, and in this
space, possibilities of movement can be exhausted,
and also a 'visual and sonic images may arise,
explosive events tearing apart the surface of
words and dissipating into the background expanse
beneath'[even Bogue has to resort to incantatory
language here]. More concretely, Deleuze
rephrases the 'four means of exhausting the
possible' in Beckett as: (1) forming an exhaustive
series of things; (2) drying up flows of voices;
(3) '"extenuating the potentiality of space",
while (4) "dissipating the power [puissance]
of the image" [conventional images that is, not
the pure image?]. The first two appear in
dramas and radio plays, but the last two 'come to
the fore in the television plays'. [Quad,
movements inside a square, is the example, and is
described a bit more on 182—one interesting bit is
where 'a closeup of the actor's face in the mirror
above the pallet' becomes 'a floating
decontextualised smile of an indefinite yet
determinate visage-image' {pure bullshit I fear}
while 'incessantly repeated sound images from
Beethoven' fade away].
In another example [… but
the clouds…], there is another asw, this
time a circular area. A voice describes a
man's repeated movement from point to point and
also discusses 'the pure image that appears on the
screen from time to time, a closeup of a woman's
face "reduced as far as possible to eyes and
mouth"', citing Beckett]. Another play [Nacht
und Traume] has a dreamer in a dark empty
room while his dreaming self appears above the
dreamer, and a voice humming Schubert before
finally singing the leid of the same name.
So Beckett dispenses with words entirely, reduces
them to song lyrics, or places them in an
[abstracted, decontextualized] asw. These
sonic and visual images represent the outside of
language, and Beckett offers as 'a kind of
pedagogy of visions and auditions, the
dramatization of the complex and elusive
relationship of images to words'[and is therefore
open to the classic critique of pedagogic theater
in Ranciere]: words appear if at all as sonic
components, related to images in different
ways. The ideas to suggest 'at least for a
moment, that words and images emanate one from
another, words producing images, images summoning
up words'. (183) [more detail from the plays
183-4, accompanied with more luvvie commentary,
alas].
So Beckett 'works by subtraction, by paring away
the significations of words, the stories of
voices, the individualizing features of space, the
universal or particular aspects of images'
(184). Sometimes words do not even
appear. This 'ascetic' practice leads not to
nothingness but to purification, such as 'the
creation through elimination of a pure
[asw]'. Impersonality 'makes possible the
production of asubjective, anorganic, asignifying
intensities' (185). Asceticism produces
intensities, as in the example of getting drunk on
water, '"becoming - sober for a richer and richer
life"', subtracting 'subjective and conventional
associations', leaving the real, with
representations like words or voices becoming a
'part of a single intensive plane of consistency'.
[Seems to oppose 'delirium' though?]
Non linguistic visual and sonic images are made
possible through language, and act as a membrane
between language and its outside. Images are
produced by convergences of forces 'that explode
and dissipate as they appear'. They can act
as crystals of the unconscious, combining the
virtual and the actual in a way that doubles yet
divides, a form of coalescence [a bit vague here
compared to earlier discussions, I thought: the
power of the crystal image is that it shows a
state where the potential to
crystallize—immanence—is combined simultaneously
with an actual crystal, is what I got from the
above]. Although these images are
autonomous, 'they only come into existence through
artistic creation', following extraction from the
actual, and given an 'internal coherence' by the
art work itself, its [autonomous] becomings.
These extend 'through the artist and into the
world he or she inhabits'. We can map the
becomings of an artwork and it will reveal 'an
affective miieu, made up of qualities, substances,
powers and events'. Sometimes these lines
will be molar and segmented, sometimes as
something more molecular [Bogue doesn't seem to
like the term 'supple'], but ultimately a line of
flight 'opening toward an Outside'.
In 'commonsense terms'[sic] Deleuze is noticing
that sonic and aural images can sometimes take on
a 'solidity, vividness and autonomy' (186), as if
they had been produced by words as contents.
This could be a simple illusion, given 'the
complex relationship between language and sense
experience', which are not completely
harmonious. But Deleuze insists that these
are real objects, 'on the mutual surface between
words and things'. Commonsense distinctions,
like those between inside and outside or subject
and object must be abandoned, and therefore so
must commonsense explanations [apologetic, but a
cop out nevertheless?]. We can simply
reassert Deleuze's argument that 'visions and
auditions render visible and audible the invisible
and inaudible circuits of forces that are immanent
within the real'. We can describe the
circuits only in terms of velocity and affect,
trajectory and becoming, and Bogue suggests that
they form a 'plane of consistency'. If so
[and to reject this possibility would mean we have
to tear up Deleuze altogether?], on this plane, a
sound or sight could not be differentiated from a
word: 'here, there are only lines'. Artists
of all kinds experiment with these lines and
attempt to find different ways to manifest them in
actual constructions of vision, hearing and
words. However, writers are more limited
than the others and can only 'make sensible the
limits of language'.
Conclusion
Writers work within a 'broad domain of practices
and power relations' (187) which clearly affects
language. The sort of writers Deleuze likes
generate lines of flight as well. Any
constants in language result from structures of
power. At the virtual level, there are
'immanent lines of continuous variation' which can
be activated. Writing involves developing 'a
regime of signs... a discursive, collective
assemblage of enunciation and a non discursive
assemblage of social technological machines', the
two operating so that assemblages of enunciation
produce 'incorporeal transformations of things
through speech-actions'. Literary works
function rather than signify, acting as machines.
Deleuze admires the writers who 'experiment on the
real' (188) which involves a critique of power
relations. Kafka, for example, offers a
literary machine connected to larger social and
material machines so that 'no firm distinction
exists between [the] work and world'. It is
constructed like a burrow or open network
connecting heterogeneous spaces. These
connections are never finished. By contrast,
Proust's machine 'has a kind of unity', although
it contains many transversals. The 'unity -
effect' is an extra part 'like a seed crystal',
which can produce a 'cascade of
crystallizations'. The whole that is
inferred is a chaosmos, 'a chaos-become-cosmos
that issues from a dynamic, self differentiating
difference'. Proust goes through an
apprenticeship in signs, leading Deleuze to
discuss both interpretation and artistic
creation. The sign itself is 'dynamic self
differentiating difference', 'like a fertilized
ovum'. The process of division is unfolding
or explication of this dynamic difference, since
actualizations are folded differences. In
this way, signs, when explicated or interpreted,
reveal the primary difference. The cosmos of
signs so produced 'is like a city, which may be
viewed from many perspectives'.
Interpreting signs starts from a disequilibrium,
the hidden difference produced by the hieroglyph,
which hints at 'a world beyond itself'(189), like
the world of Combray implied in the
madeleine. But this is the essence of
Combray, not the actual past, and this essence is
'self differentiating difference'[I think this is
so by working backwards from Proust who says that
we must think of a thing, then a very different
thing, and then see what it is that relates
them]. This discovery 'initiates a process
of creation'[which seems to come close to social
constructions of reality]. This is why
interpretation and production of signs can be
linked. After some experiment, Marcel
realizes that producing artistic signs is the only
way to grasp the essence. There is no simple
'subject of expression of the self or a simple
objective recording of reality'. Instead,
the perspective develops is 'an apersonal
view'[ideologists have always claimed that their
particular views are in fact universal ones: the
stronger argument is that a view must be apersonal
because it is produced by a machine? But
then ideologists could claim that their views are
produced not by their personal selves but by a
machine?]. The reality disclosed by the view
has, 'in another sense' been created by the
view. Writers are always engaging the actual
world, but also creating a world, 'or rather they
are cocreating with the world' (190).
[This takes a particular form] in Nietzsche, who
is diagnosing the symptoms of disease and health
in civilization, but also evaluating or critiquing
it. And all [proper] writers do this, as in
the cases discussed. However, conventional
language also needs to be critiqued, hence
Proust's view that great works are written in a
foreign language, or in Deleuzian terms, that
language is made to stutter, or adopt a minor
usage. This involves experimentation with
sounds, syntax and semantics, and includes non
linguistic elements. Performance becomes
important as language becomes a form of
action. Again, each unit can be seen as 'an
actualization of a virtual continuum', and
actualizations take place in the context of
convention and power. [Because it represents
all of these elements], the theater 'may be seen
as the paradigmatic form of literary
creation'[Bogue's particular contribution?].
Deleuze admires writers who attempt to push
language beyond itself. Carroll on the
surface between words and things which can produce
'paradoxes of the incorporeal event'; Artaud on
the lacerations of the surface, and 'sonic blocks
ecstatically melding with the body without organs'
(191), like the cris-souffles, or animal
howls. Celine, Luca and Beckett [and ee
cummings] are also admired for breaking language
with exclamations [Celine], making 'amalgamations
of incompatible syntactic structures' [cummings --
see examples],
stuttering [Luca], or 'obsessive repetitions,
accretions, deletions and permutations
[Beckett]. Even more conventional writers
produce 'an atmospheric strangeness' through which
can pass 'auditions, hallucinatory sonic elements
at the edge of language', or visions in the case
of TE Lawrence. These lie below language,
and Deleuze insists they are real.
'From first to last, literature for Deleuze is a
matter of health'. Great writers both
criticize and create. They create lines of
flight and minor usages [what of their critique
though? How good is it, compared to say
Marxism?]. Literature can become sick when
'"words no longer open onto anything, one neither
hears nor sees anything through them"'
(192). Healthy literature 'carries words
from one end of the universe to the other',
follows zigzag paths, and reveals or invents 'an
anorganic life'[as in literary machine rather than
in the sentimental identification with forces in
the universe of contemporary anti
humanism?]. 'Writing is a becoming - other',
opening up 'forces of variation' within language
and 'lines of flight without'. [And here is
one for Gale and Wyatt: 'To write is to flee...to
be delirious, to leave the track, to betray, to
become, to conjoin flows, to form assemblages, to
deterritorialize... More than
anything... To trace a line of flight and
thereby engage the line of an an organic life, a
line-between toward health as new possibilities
for living'
back to Deleuze page
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